Kasyf Phenomenon in the Defocalization of Rationality: A Magical Realist Perspective on Gus Mus’s Gus Jakfar

Abstract

Gus Jakfar won the best short story in Kompas daily in 2004. This short story by Gus Mus tells of the story of a character named Gus Jakfar who has the privilege of forseeing other people’s fate just by looking at ‘signs’ (kasyf). Later, Gus Jakfar stopped seeing signs after his trip to meet Kiai Tawakkal. The phenomenon of seeing precognitive signs cannot be rationally understood by modern knowledge. The study of Gus Jakfar in the present article adopts magical realism from Wendy B. Faris’ perspective as a theoretical framework to examine kasyf as a defocalization narrative in short stories. The method of this study is descriptive analysis. The evidence to support the analysis includes words, phrases and sentences in the short story that are relevant to magical realist perspective, particularly in relation to the five elements of magical realism and defocalization. The analysis and description are carried out after collecting pieces of evidence from the short story. The analysis in this study shows that Gus Jakfar has the five characteristics of magical realism in it. From the five characteristics reflected in the text, there is an element called kasyf that is found to be an attempt of defocalization which is presented by the author using a mirroring technique. Kasyf in this short story is depicted from three perspectives. Although modern rationality has influenced people's identities, the pesantren tradition has not been abandoned. In this context, the kasyf phenomenon is understood as an alternative source of magical knowledge beyond the modern rational knowledge.