The Impact of Literature on its Readers’ Reading Habits

Abstract

Some experts claimed that most novels published by Balai Poestaka, a publishing house funded by the Dutch colonial government, were regarded as the pioneers of the Indonesian literature. Some novels published by other private publishers were regarded as illicit reading-materials so that they were not worth consuming by Indonesian readers. Those of Balai Poestaka, so to speak, enjoyed being canonized, whereas those of private publishers suffered from political discrimination. The ultimate reason was in relation to the political efforts of the Dutch colonial government in controlling the reading materials for and the reading habits of the indigenous people. It is, therefore, I argue in this paper that the people’s reading habits cannot be separated from literary works. After scrutinizing the history of the early Indonesian literature, I found out two distinctive kinds of literature, based on its contents and/or politically subversive intent/purpose, namely: the didactic literature and the l’art pour l’art literature. The literary school of Balai Poestaka had a strong belief that all kinds of literature worth publishing and launching to the general public should be didactic in characteristic in order that they were in line with its politically-subversive intent to control the indigenous people’s reading habits. The l’art pour l’art literature, no matter how it was creatively composed, was declined to being published by the Balai Poestaka’s editors. Thus, this fact inspires me to theoretically infer that any literature written for the consumption of both children and adult readers will not only improve but may also have serious impact on the reading habits of its target readers, let alone, if it is related to the building of a national literature, such as: the Indonesian literature. Keywords: reading habit, Indonesian literature, Balai Poestaka, didactic content, legitimacy, canonization, politically subversive intent.