Undoing the Canon: How Distant Reading Contributes to a Critical Model of Indonesian Literature

In this essay, I argue for an alternative approach to reading Indonesian literature, referred to as distant reading, which challenges canonical hierarchies and contributes to a more critical model of Indonesian literature. I develop the argument in three parts: I first introduce the concept of distant reading, then situate it in the context of Indonesian literature. Finally, I turn to my digital project, a growing, machine-readable corpus of Indonesian literary texts, largely drawn from online periodicals and archives, which I use to experiment with distant reading as a way of “undoing” the Indonesian canon.

My argument draws on the work of literary historian Franco Moretti (2000, 2007), who posits that reading is not a neutral but a contested practice. Specifically, what and how we read is based on underlying assumptions regarding the value of a literary text, that is, what ultimately makes a text worth reading. A key premise in Moretti’s work is that there has been a dominant and default way of reading literature: Going carefully through text by text, sentence by sentence, and word by word, focusing on details and trying to uncover layers of meaning within each individual text. By reading this closely, we can process only a tiny share of the available texts and, therefore, must select and justify what to read and what not to read. We commonly do this by invoking a text’s uniqueness or individuality, the supposed fact that it is, in one way or another, original or exceptional (e.g., in terms of form or language).

While many literary scholars may take this mode of reading for granted, Moretti argues that through close reading, we do not find exceptionality; we reproduce it. In other words, we construe standards of exceptionality based on the reading of a small fraction of published works. However, we should be cautious taking parts for the whole, as the literary field “cannot be understood by stitching together separate bits of knowledge about individual cases“ (Moretti 2007, 4). Hence, Moretti asserts that close reading can reproduce canonical logic, describing the perspective that treats a tiny selection of supposed rare and exceptional works as representative of the literary field as a whole. Moretti ironically describes this logic as the “slaughterhouse of literature,” as it excludes and delegitimizes a vast majority of published works deemed mundane or ordinary and therefore unworthy of being read (Moretti 2000).

In contrast, distant reading is an alternative approach to reading literature conceptualized by Moretti to challenge canonical bias. It assumes that the literary field “isn’t a sum of individual cases: it’s a collective system, that should be grasped as such, as a whole” (Moretti 2007, 4). This system is not determined by individual works, but markets, genres, and audiences shape the totality of literary production. By leaving out details of individual works, distant reading aims to gain insight into the underlying patterns, systems, and structures that organize the literary field. In more concrete terms, this involves examining large collections of texts through patterns, data, and models, often assisted by a computer. This more comprehensive view becomes possible through “a process of deliberate reduction and abstraction” (Moretti 2007, 1). Moretti does not claim that this approach is more neutral or objective. Rather, it is a methodological choice, a different way of “seeing” that attempts to shift the attention from the supposed exceptional to the “large mass of facts”, encompassing the raw and unfiltered totality of published literary works (Moretti 2007, 3). This reduction enables a systematic view of literary production, uncovering what Moretti (2000, 225-227) calls “the great unread”: the myriad published literary works marginalized by the disproportionate dominance of canonical works.

Moretti’s ideas are particularly relevant to the study of modern Indonesian literature. Scholars have emphasized the scattered and ephemeral nature of Indonesia’s modern literary system, which cannot be understood solely through the study of canonical works (Danerek 2005, 2013; Derks 1996; Heryanto 1985a, 1985b; Kratz 1988b, 1979). This nature is characterized by the wide geographical spread of the archipelago’s literary production, the distribution of works across diverse publication formats, and a range of literary forms that blur the “boundaries between literature and non-literature” (Teeuw 1988, iv). Within this system, printed books (or “high literature”) only constitutes a small fraction of literary production and consumption; most texts circulate as shorter forms in journals, magazines, newspapers, and periodicals. For a few decades now, scholars have been calling for a redefinition of the normative and elevated understanding of Indonesian literature, which prioritizes “high” and “real” literature and marginalizes what is deemed “low quality newspaper literature.” However, how the mode of reading contributes to this issue has thus far remained unaddressed (Heryanto 1985b; Derks 1996).

Chronological composite of selected issue covers of the Indonesian literary magazine Majalah Horison (1966–1990), compiled by the author from digitized reproductions available on Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Drawing on Moretti’s ideas, I argue that a close-reading approach focused on supposed exceptional works may never fully capture the dynamics of Indonesia’s literary system. Close reading certainly plays a critical role when it engages with popular, marginal, or minoritized texts. Still, it risks reproducing the very logic that elevates “high literature” and marginalizes “low literature” by maintaining criteria such as uniqueness and exceptionality. Therefore, a form of distant reading is necessary to capture the scattered and ephemeral nature of modern Indonesian literature and recenter “the great unread” as an object of critique. However, such an approach would require a large, systematic, and organized machine-readable collection of full texts, enabling scholars to use computational analysis to examine structures and patterns throughout Indonesia’s literary field and move beyond normative conceptions of “high literature.”

Excerpt from Appendix IV of Kratz’s bibliography showing the “[f]requency count of literary works (titles) and journals for authors with five and more recorded literary works”. Column 1 indicates “the number of titles per author”, column 2 the “number of journals used”, and column 3 the name of the author (Kratz 1988b, 894–901).

A pioneering contribution in this direction was Ulrich Kratz’s Bibliography of Indonesian Literature in Journals (1988b). It contains bibliographic data of almost 30,000 literary works (poems, short stories, and plays) published between 1922 and 1982 across 113 periodicals. The bibliography is like a printed, pre-digital database scholars can use to navigate Indonesia’s elusive literary field. It enables researchers to “trace and collect literary works which had previously been neglected because they were not regarded as part of the established canon“ (Salmon 1992, 383). Thus, the purpose of the bibliography is to complement “our view of Indonesian literature [which] generally has always been a partial one, due […] to its scattered distribution and the ephemeral nature of sources” (Kratz 1988b, 1). In its printed form, however, the bibliography cannot support full-text, machine-readable analysis of the kind required for computational distant reading.

Plot published by Kratz as part of a publication on the regional origins of Indonesian authors using the data from his bibliography (Kratz 1988a, 22; 1988b, 14–16).

The lack of machine-readable, full-text collections­–and the relevance of Moretti’s approach to modern Indonesian literature–inspired me to pick up Kratz’s documentation work almost 40 years later. What Kratz did manually by going through the records of various libraries, I try to do digitally. Nowadays, many Indonesian literary works published in print periodicals are also uploaded to the internet. I take advantage of this shift in the mode of production and publication toward digital platforms, which provides new opportunities for literary documentation. Since June 2022, I have been assembling a digital corpus—an extensive, structured collection of full-text documents—of modern Indonesian literature, with a particular focus on texts circulated in newspapers, magazines, and periodicals. In its current form, the corpus consists of about 10,000 full-text materials drawn from a range of websites, online archives, and platforms organized as machine-readable formats. I treat the corpus as a growing, experimental sampling of Indonesia’s “great unread,” designed to support large-scale analysis of patterns across individual works, authors, publication dates, and publishing venues.

The essential difference from Kratz’s work is that my collection includes full texts, enabling additional forms of distant reading that go beyond what bibliographic data alone can reveal. Thereby, I can discern structural features (narrative and plot-related), stylistic elements (lexical choices and formulaic language), semantic motifs (recurring topics), social structures (character networks), and spatial patterns (geographic distribution of settings) across the corpus. This mode of reading allows me to capture aspects of Indonesia’s literary system that are difficult to grasp from within the narrow frame of canonical close reading. This systematic view can contribute to a critical model of modern Indonesian literature that challenges the normative categories of high, low, and non-literature, thereby attending to dismissed forms, genres, and authors. In this sense, I consider my attempts at systematic documentation and distant reading to be a preliminary contribution to the previous calls by scholars to redefine modern Indonesian literature critically.

Ultimately, I position this corpus as a tool to challenge dominant and normative preconceptions about Indonesian literature, aiming to undo canonical biases regarding the value of literary texts. Undoing the canon does not imply abandoning close reading, qualitative evaluation, and historical judgement, but rather re-situating it within a broader view of how texts are produced, circulated, (re)presented, and forgotten. In doing so, the purpose of my corpus is to complement rather than replace other modes of reading. By arguing for the relevance of distant reading and the systematic documentation of Indonesian literary production, this essay sought to formulate the conceptual basis for a series of texts addressing methodological concerns and concrete applications of my corpus.

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References

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Danerek, Stefan. Tjerita and Novel Literary Discourse in Post New Order Indonesia. Department of East Asian Languages, Lund University, 2005.

Derks, Will. ‘“If Not to Anything Else”: Some Reflections on Modern Indonesian Literature’. Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land- En Volkenkunde 152, no. 3 (1996): 341–52. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27864773.

Heryanto, Ariel. ‘Berita, Cerita dan Derita’. Basis, no. Tahun Ke-34, No. 2 (1985): 68–74. https://arielheryanto.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/1985_thxxxiv-no2-peb_basis-berita-cerita-dan-derita-c.pdf.

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Kratz, Ernst Ulrich. A Bibliography of Indonesian Literature in Journals: Drama, Prose, Poetry. Gadjah Mada University Press, 1988b.

Moretti, Franco. ‘The Slaughterhouse of Literature’. MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2000): 207–27.

Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. Verso, 2007.

Salmon, Claudine. ‘Review of A Bibliography of Indonesian Literature in Journals: Drama, Prose, Poetry/Bibliografi Karya Sastra Indonesia Dalam Majalah: Drama, Prosa, Puisi, by Ernst Ulrich Kratz’. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 55, no. 2 (1992): 383–84. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0041977X00005243.

Teeuw, Andries. ‘Foreword’ in A Bibliography of Indonesian Literature in Journals: Drama, Prose, Poetry, by Ernst Ulrich Kratz, iii–v. Gadjah Mada University Press, 1988.