City as Memory in Five Bells and the Root of All Evil

Membaca sebuah kota melalui teks menunjukkan bahwa kota sering digambarkan sebagai sesuatu yang rumit (Cohen dkk., 1997). Tulisan ini bertujuan untuk menganalisis representasi kota rumit Sydney dan Jakarta dalam karya sastra perempuan, dalam hubungannya dengan gender dan budaya. Diskusi ini memakai analisis teks untuk mengungkap pesan-pesan dalam novel Jones yang berjudul Five Bells dan novel Anggraeni yang berjudul The Root of All Evil. Memakai konsep chronotope yang dimunculkan oleh Bakhtin, penulis menemukan bahwa kedua novel menunjukkan kota-kota yang resah melalui lensa ingatan para individunya. Kerumitan ini terlihat dalam identitas individual dan dalam ide-ide masyarakat patriarkal dan kota yang maskulin

Women's perceptions of the city are mostly infl uenced by their experiences of gender treatments and the culture of urban society in the city. The city itself is considered as masculine in the way that the city conceives power and development that often "disadvantage" its female residents (Allentuck, 2005, p. 1). In a sense that the city provides more opportunities to people than the country, the idea of its masculinity complicates women's life in the city. This paper seeks to explore how the city is read in women's literary works, particularly women writers from Australia and Indonesia, in which each narrates a different metropolis city; Sydney and Jakarta. In these novels, the writers unfold women's experiences of the city through the characters' past experiences, which are shown in the lens of memory.
Though memory has been commonly represented in literature as a property of the individual, memory is also inherently connected with social aspects. Regarding this awareness, Cattell and Climo assert that "memory is the foundation of self and society" (2002, p. 1), providing a way of identifying individuals as groups. The notion of self-identifi cation is emphasised by Anthony Wall who proposes, "we are VOLUME 12, NOMOR 2, Desember 2015: 251-268 because we remember. We exist … because of our memories" (1990, p. 58). People negotiate their memories with their present self-perception and social practices.
However, this negotiation involves "the dialectics of remembering and forgetting" (Cattell & Climo, 2002, p. 1) so that communities or relationships with others might infl uence one's restructuring of memory, either voluntarily or involuntarily.
Bakhtin proposes that literary works often portray historical events of the nation or humankind, such as war, in ways that parallel an individual's personal life or lifesequences, such as birth, marriage and death (1981, p. 216). He terms this connection as chronotope, that is, a spatial and temporal organisation. According to Bakhtin, literary genres develop strategies to represent reality, and in doing so represent time that "becomes artistically visible", and space that "becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history" (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 84) but also what one forgets. An analysis of time and place in the text are essential to recognise an individual's response to, and others' infl uence on, the development of self-perception. In this discussion, Bakhtin's concept is useful for exploring the representation of spatial or cultural, and temporal or historical, issues of city life. In narrative practices, everyday places and spaces take on symbolic perspectives and meanings because, memory, in particular, sustains meanings. Meanwhile, the spatiotemporal analysis does not limit the meanings of physical spaces but connects the texts with the events, which shape the context of the story.

METHODOLOGY
This paper seeks the representations of a city by exploring literary works of two women writers. The central preoccupation of this study is looking at their reading the city through the lens of memory of their characters. This paper focuses on the writers' examination of their female narrators' experiences of living in a city.
The Asian-Australian women writers are Australian-born Gail Jones and Indonesian-born Dewi Anggraeni. They are selected based on the proximity of their country origin to show the contrasts of their cultural perceptions of the city. Both writers reside in Australia. Anggraeni (Roughley, 2007, p. 58) in which this relationship is inseparable from the temporal dimensions of the narrative.
Dewi Anggraeni was born in Jakarta and now lives in Melbourne. As a novelist and a journalist, she has published fi ve English-language novels, one bilingual collection of short stories, and two nonfi ction books. Her novels mostly cover issues of Indonesian mythical worlds and how these affect Indonesian women who are in relationships with Australian men. Her critical thoughts on Indonesian issues related to women are elaborated in her non-fi ction publications, in which she is particularly concerned with domestic workers and Indonesian-Chinese women.
Her poetry, short stories and essays relating to women, Indonesia and cross-cultural experiences between Indonesians and foreigners have been available in a wide range of anthologies. With this background, it is of signifi cance to analyse one of her novels in relation to themes of memory and the city, compared to Gail Jones's Five Bells.

Jones's Five Bells
The theme of memory is particularly strong in Jones's most recent and fi fth novel Five Bells. She constructs the novel, to use Bakhtin's chronotope of memory VOLUME 12, NOMOR 2, Desember 2015: 251-268 "by means of analepsis (fl ashback)" (Vice, 1997, p. 223  Although it is not stated outright, by the end of the novel James appears to drown himself in the same setting as Joe's death occurred. Possibly drunk, Joe was reported to have jumped off the North Shore ferry at night (Klassen, 2007). In Jones's novel, James boards a ferry and he "slipped over the edge These sounds epitomize Bakhtin's sense of place, "the locus for cyclical everyday time" (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 247). The city is "a place of noise" (Williams, 1975, p. 1) as city life is refl ected through the sounds of the transportation: the train, the boat and the bus, even the ambulance; buildings: the walls and their facilities, such as escalators; and modernity: the laptops and mobile phones. Jones suggests that this is a common place, where "the population is in movement" (p. 8). The city is a place where technology is in use, as well as where an accident or crisis may always happen.

Sightings of the Opera House
As the characters have their own past experiences and personalities, Jones "visualizes and portrays personality as another, as someone else's personality, without making it lyrical or merging it with her own voice" (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 12 The recollection of her late father, Charlie, returns to Ellie when she sees the light in the Harbour, which reminds her of his old-fashioned electrical good store. She has grown up to learning that her mother, Lil, is "the active" one and has "a sense of ease and authority" (p. 133).
Meanwhile, Charlie is submissive to his wife and has "a feminising trait" (p. 133).
However, her parents raise her in happy and supportive circumstances that make her "grow up secure and strong" (p. 134  (Benjamin, 1968, p. 186  A one-day novel might not be adequate to illustrate the transformation of one's self.
However, Five Bells, with its analepsic structure, is able to convey the protagonists' past life and how this personal history is refl ected in the present day, and even "projects them into the future" (Wall, 1990, p. 51

Anggraeni's The Root of All Evil
The Root of All Evil is Anggraeni's fi rst novel, which is narrated in the fi rst person by Komala, an Indonesian woman, who is married to an Australian doctor, Drew Minogue. They reside in Melbourne with their two children, David and Millena. She is a writer, known both in Indonesia and in Australia, under a different name, Layla Minogue. After a call from an old friend, Narsih, Komala is obliged to return to her hometown to attend to her sick father in Jakarta, Indonesia, leaving her family in Melbourne. Having been away from Jakarta for nine years disturbs her homecoming, since the city and the people, including her family, have changed beyond her expectations. Anggraeni unfolds Komala's changing perception of the city and her parents through revisiting Komala's past memories and contrasting them with her new perspectives of looking at events. Therefore, there are two signifi cant elements of the city presented in this novel. The representation of the capital city, Jakarta, serves not only as simply a physical setting of the events but also has an infl uential function in constructing Komala's self perception and incorporating gendered views through the subsequent actions happening to other characters.

Family Relationship
Anggraeni describes, metaphorically, Komala's need for adjustment in her homecoming. This is illustrated in a typical tropical welcome for people who have just arrived from a four-season country: one's body soaked with perspiration because of high humidity. This happens during Komala's arrival in Jakarta as she comments, "my body had not adjusted to the humid climate" (Anggraeni, 1987, p. 8). Not only does her body need to adapt to Jakarta, but her relationship with her parents also needs to be amended. In her 1974 essay, Michelle Rosaldo, a feminist and an anthropologist, argued that in patriarchal societies, "women are given a social role and defi nition by virtue either of their age or of their relationship to men" (Rosaldo, 1974, p. 29). Critiques of those issues are what Anggraeni attempts to raise in her novel, particularly in the motherchild relationship. Anggraeni criticises a typically patriarchal family that devalues a mother. Komala's mother, who is from the "country", is a housewife and is dependent wholly on her husband's work for fi nancing household expenses. Rosaldo has asserted, "only when she is old and free of the responsibility of children, when she is dissociated from child rearing and also from sexuality, can a woman build up the respect that comes with authority" (p. 28). However, it does not operate in Komala's mother's case because the situation does not change when her children have married. Anggraeni seems to suggest that this is because of the mother's lack of education and her inability to understand others. Therefore, she tends to be pre-occupied with self-reproach for "not being educated enough to gain respect from her children" (pp. 4, 50, 51, 53). Komala fi nds that her mother "always" misses the point of what her children and her husband have to say (pp. 16, 134).
However, the mother embodies a woman who negotiates her place in the house by employing masculine traits: controlling others' emotions, as having "the amazing ability to make anyone uncomfortable" (p. 50), being "fairly stern" (p. 17) and as Komala remembers, "there was always an undertone of force on my mother's part" (p. 17). By this, Anggraeni explores the construction of Komala's identity as a woman by contesting it with her 'demigod' father and 'less divine' mother.

The Complexities of Jakarta
In a developing country, like Indonesia, urbanism has its own complexities. Unlike Jones's Five Bells, which examines individuals' psychological problems, Anggraeni's novel explores Indonesians as having much more complex factors to deal with, not only psychological, but also "economic and social factors" (Aveling, 1988, p. 44). The novel attempts to show "the sufferings of the downtrodden women of this country" (137) because "everybody is after money" (p. 104) and women commonly become the victims in negotiating the societal acceptance. People's personal needs to be part of establishment have changed the city from its former order and beauty to a place of insecurity and chaos. In turn, as Anggraeni describes it, the city is also changing its dwellers' self-perception. For example, Komala encounters a callous waiter shooing some beggars out of the restaurant "to please his boss under the illusion of securing his job" (p. 65). For some people, living in a city where jobs are limited is not easy. Komala observes that many people around her are "grabbing at straws of false security, not able to care about the number of people they knocked over and trampled" (p. 65). She concludes that the city leads people "to identify with the establishment as soon as they get so much as the shadow of it" (p. 62). However, her old friend, Narsih, who has been experiencing this changed Jakarta longer than Komala, cynically responds, "Because when you are not the establishment you're on your own. No one thinks about you, let alone helps you … Therefore, you make believe you're one of them … It gives you a sense of 'false' security" (p. 62).
The city that seems to be offering dreams to some people leaves others in hardship. Those who are unable to fi nd decent jobs must struggle to fi nd any way of earning a few more coins, including committing crimes or selling themselves.
Anggraeni uses Komala's street and family problems to exemplify these issues. Day and night on the street are allegorically pictured as part of city life as observed by Mira, the father's nurse: "they sell food during the day and evening ... but during the night they sell themselves" (p. 30). Though Mira, who has a respectable job, comments that "some women have no self-respect" (p. 30), ironically, she is paid by the money from boarders whose occupations are not considered 'respectable'. Komala's mother is required to lease the bedrooms to pay for the father's expensive medical treatment.
One of the boarders, Julia, is a beautician who appears to do more than "house calls" (p. 26). Another boarder is Hamdani, who is a student at the Academy of Languages.
In order to protect his sister, Tati, who works as a hostess, he has no other choice than working as a cashier at the Tarantula nightclub, that is, not a reputable place to work. Anggraeni points out that when people are in great need of money, they can easily exchange their pride and respect for it. This circumstance brings new and different feelings of the city to Komala, as when she describes that, "despite its traps and vices, Jakarta still attracted women from other regions, who fl ocked to the capital city by the thousands, like the suicidal fl ight of insects to light" (p. 76).

"Women are the root of all evil"
According to Bakhtin, space and time are "the primary categories of perception and the forms of the most immediate reality" (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 85). Anggraeni seems to support this notion, in illustrating that the city has changed in culture and social formation in just nine years. Therefore, it is necessary for is "a kind of exercise for women aimed at increasing their ability to please their husbands sexually" (p. 21). Running the centre of that kind of exercise becomes a lucrative business in Jakarta as the women learn to keep their husband satisfi ed. Narsih cynically comments, It's pathetic how those women, fi ghting middle age bulge and pushing forty, go to those 'happiness exercise' classes, hoping to keep their husbands from nightclub and steam bath hostesses and unscrupulous gold diggers. They should just accept that if they can afford those classes, then that means their husbands are rich enough to fall prey to gold diggers (p. 22).
Anggraeni's critic of women's position in urban system is particularly strong in Tati And what gets me is, weak as they are, they still manage to control us" (p. 65).
Narsih's husband, Nelson, betrays her with a series of love affairs. She tolerates the affairs with "decreasing pain" (p. 63).
Because of Nelson's beating her, Narsih helps her husband's girlfriend, takes her to an abortionist, pays for the medication and even takes care of her for sometime after the abortion (p. 63). She considers her conduct is "necessary to save her husband's skin" (p. 63). Despite Nelson's disloyalty and violence, Narsih does not leave him, because she needs him for "the status of a married woman" (p. 64). Anggraeni emphasises that Indonesian society at large, and particularly married women, "don't like divorcees" because "they think divorcees, especially the young ones, are a VOLUME 12, NOMOR 2, Desember 2015: 251-268 threat to their security. It's not a groundless fear either. Men get turned on by divorcees. They think they're fair game, all fun and no risk" (p. 64). Narsih's business of selling jewelleries deals with "allegedly respectable married women" so she cannot afford to be divorced (p. 64). In Nurse Mira's case, her husband is in jail because of his affair with another woman (p. 32), as a result, she has to leave her children with her mother in a different city so she can work in Jakarta.
Not only do nurse Mira and Narsih become the victim of a husband's affair with another woman, but Komala's mother also has to endure her husband's infi delity.
The family has protected Komala from knowing of his affair, as she regards her father as "a principled, conscientious man.
The man she had been so proud of, the demigod" (p. 129). This infi delity causes her father's health to deteriorate and, eventually, leads to his death on the day after he has confessed the whole story to Komala. I began to get a clearer picture of life in Jakarta now. Its pressure on women. If you are single and not suitably employed, you will have to wait around for a man to offer you security in the form of marriage. Once married, you have to summon all your wits and energy to keep your man happy and occupied, so that he will not be tempted by other "loose" women, who are only after his money, which you also need. If you're not good enough he dumps you, then you become a "loose" woman. Then when you have experienced being dumped, you become wiser and realise your precarious position, your disposability. So you dig for gold, and you dig hard. Every opportunity could be your last (p. 76).
Anggraeni's novel revises the myth of "women are the root of all evil" and criticises the knowledge that being men's victims does not drive women to turn against men, but that "women … turn against each other" (p. 131). The city, with its attraction and demands, is the cause of the problems. The men who are responsible for "the maintenance of the economic" (Rosaldo, 1974, p. 5)  she does not belong to the city, or, the culture any more. In a patriarchal system, it seems the infl uential forces of the city are beyond the ordinary dwellers' power to resist. Both writers use a similar strategy to criticise the concept of masculinity in a way that the male protagonists deal with a sense of powerlessness, mentally and physically. The city has offered many opportunities to them, but they let themselves remain trapped in their own failings. This representation serves as a reminder that, as citizens of the complicated city, they have the individual power to make choices available within the city's dehumanising forces.