THE ROLE OF INTELLECTUALS IN THE NOVEL NOTASI BY MORRA QUATRO: A STUDY OF ANTONIO GRAMSCI'S HEGEMONY

Abstract

This study aims to describe the roles of traditional intellectuals and organic intellectuals in Morra Quatro’s novel Notasi viewed from Antonio Gramsci’s hegemony perspective. It employs a descriptive qualitative method with a sociological literary criticism approach. The data consist of novel quotations representing hegemonic and counter-hegemonic practices during the 1998 Reformation era, grouped into two role categories in line with the problem formulations. Data were collected through literature study, repeated heuristic and hermeneutic reading, and note-taking of relevant passages, then analyzed using Miles and Huberman’s interactive model covering data reduction, analytical narrative display, and continuous conclusion drawing and verification. The results show that traditional intellectuals — represented by state bureaucrats, faculty leaders, student regiment commanders, and senior lecturers — perpetuate the New Order’s hegemony through five mutually reinforcing mechanisms: structural control over media access, suppression of movements through academic authority, internal campus surveillance and repression, ideological control over public discourse, and a combination of psychological manipulation and inter-institutional coordination of repression. Meanwhile, organic intellectuals from student activist circles build counter-hegemony through five structured gradual strategies: exposing the structural falsity of the regime’s bureaucracy, utilizing censorship-free alternative communication infrastructures, articulating clear and directed political demands, organizing collective action based on collective memory of struggle, and transforming the threat of repressive laws into a unifying tool for internal movement solidarity. The main finding reveals a sharp polarization between the two intellectual groups in the struggle for intellectual and moral leadership within the campus public sphere, where organic intellectuals gradually succeeded in transforming individual critical consciousness into an organized mass movement that later became one of the main pillars of the collapse of the New Order regime’s hegemony in May 1998. This study contributes to Indonesian literary sociology by demonstrating how fiction can precisely record the dynamics of the war of position between intellectual classes at a critical moment of political transition in the nation’s history.