Goenawan Mohamad, Ubud, Bali – Pramoedya Ananta Toer is no longer with us, but such is his stature that his absence constitutes an assignment. Today we have the memory of a hero and piles of his prose works to deal with – not knowing for sure whether the subject of our discourse should be the former or the latter.

After the outpouring of eulogies that followed his death on April 30, I have decided now, rather than to submit yet another hagiography, to delve instead into his works and his ideas, while remaining acutely aware that in Pramoedya's case it is not always easy to detach the writing from the writer.

Besides the obvious autobiographical elements in his earlier stories, there is another explanation for that: Pramoedya has always made himself a "presence" in his narrative. Describing his creative process when he wrote Keluarga Gerilya (Guerrilla's Family), one of his wartime novels, he writes: "The truth is that the protagonist in a tale is none other than the I of the writer, the sun poised centrally above everything that it illuminates" (from an essay in Indonesia, October 1983).

It comes as no surprise that reading him is like going to an exhibition of archeological finds where the author meets a select group of visitors at the door, takes them in, and guides them confidently through the hall.

While the visitors, (i.e. the readers), are trying to absorb the materiality of the pieces displayed, the author explains and comments. One can discern his impulse to dispel any sign of indifference, apathy, and aimlessness. In the process, the reader comes to know more about his perspective than about the details of the thing exhibited.

I remember one part of Mereka Yang Dilumpuhkan (Those Paralyzed), in which he describes his first encounter with the Bukit Duri Prison in Jakarta. It begins with an exclamation point, drawing the reader immediately into the text. A little further into the paragraph you learn that the narrator finds the jailhouse terrifying (nampak seram); in fact, he shudders at the sight.

But there is not even a sketchy description of the opaqueness of the wall, the forbidding barbed wire above it, the sinister green of the gate, or the magnitude of the building. There is no clue as to whether the prison stands on the empty outskirts of the city or stands tall amidst other government buildings. What he thrusts upon the reader is not the space itself, but his urgency to infer.

My impression is that Pramoedya hardly had time for geographical space. In his novels, landscape is invariably minimized, the urban areas reduced to small plots and living rooms. It may be Pramoedya's way of representing Java in its dreary density, but I would say it is indicative of his focus; the world for him is primarily the fate of humans.

Pramoedya's emphatic bond is with the people of Blora, his hometown, or with the guerrilla fighters in the northern part of West Java during the Indonesian revolutionary war; with the Jakarta poor of the 1950s or with the segregated natives struggling to survive under colonial rule.

In his narrative, the railroads, rivers, hills and lampposts, the sea, and the depths of the night invariably move centripetally towards the human subject, as if drawn by a magnetic force.

Which is to say, there is a strong humanist outlook in Pramoedya's personal beliefs, which shapes the way he tells stories. In fact, in one of the letters he wrote from the Buru prison camp you can read his enthusiasm for the philosophy of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, which to Pramoedya is "a continuation" of the humanist ideas of the Aufklrung (Enlightenment). To him it was an achievement worth celebrating.

The world has been built by mankind to the best of his ability. It is hypocritical to teach of his inability, his insignificance. Those who teach God's greatness by stressing human triviality surely stand against culture and civilization.

His is by no means an unusual perspective. Like many Indonesian intellectuals of his generation and before, Pramoedya shows a profound trust in modernity, despite the fact that one of its consequences was the European onslaught on other parts of the world.

Obviously he does not see in modernity the brutal legacy of the Enlightenment, as different writers and philosophers describe it in the wake of the two great wars of the 20th century. Although it is unlikely he would admit it, his view is closer to that of Takdir Alisyahbana, the founding member of the Poejangga Baroe (New Writers) of the 1930s, who consistently spoke for the need to embrace the bourgeois model of progress.

Like Alisyahbana, Pramoedya refuses to accept both Islam and the pre-modern way of dealing with the world. Unlike Alisyahbana's writings, however, Pramoedya's stories display his penchant for deriding Muslims of some religious ranks, like ustads (religious teachers) and hajis. He seems to find things related to Islam obnoxious.

There is even a discernible racial undertone in Pramoedya's portrayal of Indonesians of Arab origin. In one of the short stories in Cerita Dari Jakarta (Tales from Jakarta) you will meet a Muchammad who is a former money-lender, a man with a "belly bulging forward" and eyes that are "deep and piercing as if they want to destroy everything they spotted" who at fifty-one gets married again, this time to his sixteen-year-old niece.

In the story, the man, constantly referred to as "the Arab", pays a visit to an ustad. Almost immediately they begin talking "boisterously" about the Prophet and the Koran – to be followed by banter over their polygamous lives. Let me quote a fragment of the repartee, from Sumit Mandal's translation of Tales from Jakarta: "Ustad, you have four wives, right?" "Yes." "Well, you must feel sleepy every day." Everyone laughed except ustad 'Amir. Dauntlessly he righted himself in his seat, his eyes blinking like a beacon. Then he said in an authoritative voice: "Whosoever walks in the path of the Prophet will be safe." The Arab nodded his head mockingly...

The story, more a sketch than anything else, ends with no culminating point. There is no clue to what may have prompted the writer to compose it in the first place. But one thing is obvious: Pramoedya unabashedly adopts stereotypes in depicting Arabs and Muslims – a predisposition probably associated with his view of Islam as a force from outside.

Pramoedya hinted at such a perspective in one of his later works of historical fiction, Arus Balik (Return Course). It is a 700-page story of lost glory, of the last Indonesian Hindu empire that is no more, marked by its end as a great maritime power and the coming hegemony of countries "beyond the wind" (Atas Angin), in the wake of the aggression of new Muslim centers and Portuguese ambition in the 15th and 16th century.

However, it would be a mistake to see the work as a testament of mourning by a Javanese nationalist. Pramoedya is quite open in his disdain of "Java" and the myth of its identity (not without a touch of regret at having no more heroic epoch). "I am very much against Javanism," he declares in one of the interviews collected in Saya Terbakar Amarah Sendiri (I am Burned by My Own Anger).

In a note published as part of Nyanyi Sunyi Seorang Bisu (Silent Song of a Mute), he accuses wayang, the popular Javanese shadow play, of "bringing people to the consuming world of illusion that stops all kinds of action."

Only after the puppet master finishes his performance, Pramoedya argues, can man assert his role, and by using "a pair of hands and all the fingers" determine his (and not the gods'), position in the world.

To perpetuate the wayang-created imagination is to "dismiss one's consciousness, terminate one's capacity to reason and make oneself dumb". That is what happens to the Javanese, Pramoedya says, who live in a "corrupt state of mind", unable to choose a course of action to liberate themselves.

Pramoedya is by no means a stranger to all things Javanese. In 1948, when he was 23, during his imprisonment by the Dutch occupying force, he reached a terrible moment of despair. He decided to practice patiraga, a Javanese mystical method for spiritual concentration to, as it were, annihilate the body:

"Through patiraga the servant approaches the Lord: Here is my I, I give everything back to Thee; take it all, and destroy Thy servant this very instant if he is no more use to Life. So it was; I really intended, quite deliberately, to kill myself by patiraga."

But miraculously the result was a triumph of sorts. His account of the event is worth quoting at length:

"But the Lord did not take back everything that I surrendered to Him – all was restored to me again. What he gave me was a mountain, on top of which stood a four-pillared Greek temple crowned with a triangular pediment, and a full-blazing sun still higher up.

You can see it was no longer a question of reason, or of the flesh. What was as clear as that sun itself was: I was permitted to go on living, could still be of some use to Life. I felt utterly, immensely happy. All the... soldiers with their rifles and bayonets, the prison walls and the schedule that regulated my life – suddenly felt miles removed from the island of happiness on which I found myself. (Indonesia,)"

The metaphors and images are powerful and vivid – a mountain, a four-pillared Greek temple, "a full-blazing sun" – things only great mystics would tell you in confidence. And yet Pramoedya's interpretation of this extraordinary experience is at odds with the traditional mystical belief in the dissolution of the self.

It is true that Pramoedya calls "the island of happiness" – the exalted moment he found at the end of his patiraga practice – a mysticum, "an island where the servant merges with his Lord, an island where Time ceases, and where creative work is faith."

But his perspective is unmistakably Cartesian, marked by the immutable presence of a thinking subject. He believes that the mysticum is equal to kebebasan pribadi yang padat, a solid personal freedom, which "liberates the I from the world outside it, and which places the I... beyond reach of the power of Time". (While using Benedict Anderson's excellent English version of the text, I prefer my own translation for kebebasan pribadi yang padat. To me, padat means "massive" or "solid", instead of "condensed".)

In other words, to Pramoedya, creativity is based on the preponderance of the subject. As I quoted earlier, for him, the "I" is the sun "poised centrally above everything that it illuminates".

Undeniably, Pramoedya is a prose writer par excellence. In the long list of his works I find only four pieces of poetry, none of significant quality. My impression is that he was never a great lover of poetry; his writings suggest a casual indifference to it.

I believe this has something to do with his view of language. Language, he says, is a writers' tool. His emphasis is on the writer's control of it. As he puts it, "Tools remain equipment, what is decisive is always the I." For him, "Subservience to one's tools leads to confusion, destroys the element of awareness in one's work, obliterates the function of illumination."

This, as I have suggested on another occasion, is the opposite paradigm of what I call the Mallarmian mold that shapes modernist poetry. In Mallarme's verse, it is the signifier that calls the shots; in Pramoedya's prose, it is the signified that does so.

Whereas poetry's becoming is prompted by the shocks and surprises of verbal differences – as if it were the language, not the subject, that speaks – Pramoedya's prose is the work of a persistent kesedaran, the Indonesian word for both awareness and consciousness. For Pramoedya, writing without kesedaran is like doing things in a trance or being possessed by the devil (kesetanan).

It would be interesting to know how Pramoedya would assess Surrealist writings or the works of Joyce, Kafka, and other Modernists. His translation works and essays never mention them. What we learn is that his models are Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, Saroyan's Human Comedy, Idrus's writings, and the works of Maxim Gorki – the latter being an exemplar leading him to extol "Socialist Realism" as prescribed by the Stalinist Andrey Zhdanov.

A purposeful body of messages struggling proudly against their absence in the world – this is probably the way I would think of Pramoedya's works. If there is something Promethean about it, there is also a tension in the writing, because each story is a negotiation between the necessity of form and the "performative" compulsion. Pramoedya is a writer who believes that good things can be done with words.

In the end, history may have failed him. But history fails everybody. The wonderful thing about Pramoedya's works is that they never celebrate defeat. Deep inside them, the sun always rises.

[The writer is an author, poet and senior editor of Tempo weekly news magazine. This article was presented at the Ubud Literary Festival on Sept. 29, 2006.]