Discussion on the Crisis in Literature

Abstract

It can be said that generally the rendering of religious conviction or ideology in literature was not a major theme of the extensive discussion on literature after 1950. At most it is one aspect of the general problem of that time: to discover the Indonesian identity, to give shape to the ideals of the revolution and to determine the Indonesian place in the modern world. The first years after 1945 were dominated entirely by the physical struggle for survival against the Dutch—but once that struggle had ended in provisional success, there arose the essentially greater problems connected with the question of what to do with freedom. No wonder then that very quickly the word crisis cropped up; a crisis in literature. That was the word on which many of the discussions were centred, and for good reason—one could make anything of it.⁸² Asrul Sani, intensely aware of the precariousness of the existence of the artist as such, early declared that crisis is the normal condition for the creation of literary work, and that no literature was conceivable which did not have to do with a situation of crisis.⁸³ As early as 1951 Takdir Alisjahbana declared that a too static way of thinking had caused an impasse and only a new dynamic in thought could get society and culture going again.⁸⁴ One gets the impression that for Rivai Apin the real situation of crisis arose through the death in April 1949 of Chairil Anwar, with whom he had such personal ties that a vacuum resulted.⁸⁵