ИСТИНА

The Indonesian writer Achdiat Karta Mihardja (1911–2010) is well known for his novel ‘The Atheist’ (1949), which topical themes and vivid portraits of the author’s contemporaries maintain the novel’s position as one of the most significant works of Indonesian literature. According to the story, under the influence of progressive thinking friends, the pious Muslim Hasan turns to Marxism. At first, Hasan defends his position of a religious person, but the plot focuses on his dramatically changing views. The turning point of the plot about the ‘new born’ atheist is an episode that formally resembles an Indonesian ghost story cerita hantu, a popular genre of Indonesian folklore. In oral tradition ghouls or ghosts (hantu) appear out of the nowhere and frighten their human counterpart. The story is considered a reliable message, due to the mythological credibility of the ghost-lore itself, the ancient genre, that assumes that all its events are true. In contrast to the one-dimensional folklore ghost story, the cerita hantu incorporated into ‘the Atheist’ differs significantly. The frame story is the night walk to the grave of Anwar-the-Anarchist and Hasan-the-doubting-Muslim, and the embedded narrative tells about the circumstances of a peasant’s wife death because of a ghost’s curse. The story within a story about a night visit to the grave of a deceased Jambrong, who has become a hantu, contains three narratives at once. The third layer of the episode – Hasan’s reminisces about his nannie’s ghost stories of hantu in disguise and believes that the malicious ghost is pretending to be Anwar. Hasan cannot stand it and runs away, the next morning he is ashamed of his cowardice and is not afraid anymore. Despite outward signs of adherence to the traditional genre of a ghost story, the episode deconstructs the mystical ‘spirit’ of the cerita hantu. The ghost itself never appears – Hasan is only afraid of his own fear. In the novel "The Atheist", the cerita hantu is a pure literary fiction, complicated in structure and endowed with different functions. At the same time, the ghost story is an independent unit of the narrative and a necessary link in moving the plot further to the main event in the life of Hasan – the loss of faith in Allah.