Remembering the disappeared: A Ricoeurian-Gadamerian hermeneutic reading of Leila S. Chudori’s Laut Bercerita in the Indonesian post-reformasi context

This article offers an original hermeneutic reading of Leila S. Chudori’s modern Indonesian novel Laut Bercerita (Chudori, 2017), which narrates the abduction, torture, disappearance, and familial afterlife of pro-democracy activists around the end of Indonesia’s New Order. Existing scholarship has productively examined the novel through new historicism, sociology of literature, education, discourse analysis and representations of violence. This paper contributes a different argument: Laut Bercerita is not only a fictional representation of political repression but also a hermeneutic event that trains readers to interpret absence, testimonies, and historical responsibility. Drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s concepts of historically affected understanding and fusion of horizons and Paul Ricoeur’s theories of distanciation, the world of the text, narrative identity, and memory, the study applies a qualitative interpretive design to the Indonesian edition of the novel. The analysis identifies five interlocking interpretive structures: the sea as a counter-archive, torture as coercive state interpretation, the family table as everyday witness, Asmara Jati’s testimony as a bridge from private mourning to public memory, and the novel’s split temporal narration as an ethical refusal of closure. The findings suggest that the novel converts historical trauma into a demand for interpretation. In the Indonesian context, where enforced disappearances and debates over national history remain unresolved, Laut Bercerita positions literature as a civic medium through which readers encounter the disappeared not as victims of the past but as persistent claims on democratic memory.