Thumboo, E. “Developing a distinctive style in local writing: Notes and Speculations” in Developing Creative Writing in Singapore, eds Nalla Tan and Chandran Nair. Singapore: Woodrose Publications, 1977:19-29.
Edwin Thumboo [1933- ] isa a Singaporean poet and academic who is regarded
as one of the pioneers of English literature in Singapore.
Thumboo graduated in English from the University of Malaya 1956. (...)
His own collections of poetry include Rib of Earth (1956), Ulysees by the Merlion (1979) and A Third Map (1993) (...)
Wikipedia
DEVELOPING A DISTINCTIVE STYLE IN LOCAL WRITING:
Notes and Speculations
'Style' is among that fraternity of over active terms which includes 'tone', 'form', 'idiom', 'texture' and 'diction'. The fraternity has grown with the shift from a mainly historical, philological study of literature to the close scrutiny of texts - especially intense verbal analysis - which marks contemporary criticism. As critical procedures multiply and are elaborated the language of criticism expands. Paradoxically, under the weight of these expansions, the kind of broad judgement implied when we talk of 'style' has split itself into a series of connected interests, each subsumed under terms of the kind listed above. But 'style' remains a word for all seasons, occasionally employed with precision but more usually in a loose and general way. It is popular, occurring frequently in discussions of topics as diverse as art, architecture, cooking, foot ball, dance, fashion, that is, almost every thing we do. The notion of style is very close to our everyday life. Whenever we apply the word, we disclose our expectations and pro claim our approval. When we recognise some thing as having 'style', we are making a comfortable judgement, feel absolved from supporting the opinion with strenuous argument.
'Style' as applied to a literary work has its own history. In ancient Greece, it belonged more to rhetoric than literature, Rhetoric, the art of effective presentation, advocated clearly distinguished methods each appropriate to the occasion: disputation, ceremonial utterances, legal presentations and so forth, each with its own vocabulary, figures of speech, sequence of arguments, all opera ting under comprehensive rules prescribing how one set about a particular task. Aristotle's Rhetoric, Quintilian's Institute of Oratory are the chief of many treatises on the subject. Many of these rules or prescriptions became incorporated into the prose and the poetry of the Middle Ages in Europe. The weight and extent of their influence can be glimpsed from how Kyd (1557?-95?) in his play The Spanish Tragedy and Bacon (1561-1626) in his Essays, works very dissimilar, employ selected rhetorical devices, in a fashion that shows their abiding force. But we note that by the time of Pope, and even before, these rules - what was retained of them - had a poetic rather than a rhetorical thrust. Each literary genre rested on an appropriate 'style' for which there existed ample classical precedence:
Those Rules of old discover'd, not
devis'd,
Are Nature still, but Nature methodiz'd.
Hear how learn'd Greece her useful rules
indites,
When to repress, and when indulge our
flights:
High on Parnasus' top her sons she
show'd,
And pointed out those arduous paths
they trod;
Held from afar, aloft, the' immortal prize,
And urg'd the rest by equal steps to rise.
Just precepts thus from great examples
giv'n.
She drew from them what they deriv'd
from Heav'n.
Pope: 'An Essay on Criticism', 1. 88-89
Style depended on external pre-determined considerations relating to the subject-matter and the genre. Satire, for instance, was 'high or 'low'. One spoke of 'Homeric', 'Senecan' 'Ciceronian', 'Virgilian', 'Baroque', 'Augustan' styles, of 'grand', 'middle' or 'low' styles It was in Romantic and Post-Romantic writing that 'style' became firmly identified with the writer's personality, revealed by a language intimately linked to inner processes, to the imagination. The critical writings of Coleridge (1772.1834), Shelley (1792-1822) and the letters of Keats (1795-1821) are grounded in principles and practices assuming the importance of the individual consciousness, the individual vision. The notion of organic form, amounts to a conviction that the theme of a work is closely bound up with its mode of expression - that its ingredients, its parts are cemented together by language - has gained wide currency since the time .of Coleridge. While there lingered in the nineteenth century the view that each genre has a proper 'style', the boundaries of 'style' in this sense were beginning to dissolve. We are predisposed to view a literary work as an organic unity and, while interested in its 'style', have ceased to insist in any fundamental way, on the language-genre connection. We accept without qualms prose. poetry and poetic-prose. How would we c1assify Khalil Gibran? Poet, philosopher, mystic, propagandist, essayist, escapist? The question has less point than it used to.
'Style' is a matter of detail, the verbal details which, ultimately, give shape to a work and proclaim its character while concurrent ly charting the writer's characteristic treatment. It is nothing less than what the writer considers his best words in the best order for the purpose in hand. He selects from the language, unconsciously - that is habitual preferences for certain words, constructions et cetera - and consciously, attentive to certain principles of composition, his working conception of the relationship between genre, subject and language, and his attitude to and designs upon his audience. We see 'style' as being an essential part of meaning, of the way an experience has been made in ward by the writer and how this inwardness, the specific map of the writer's under standing, is externalised.
These brief comments stress in part the relationship between the writer and society, assist us to identify the factors in his search for a style. In noting that broad question of what additional issues confront a. writer using a foreign or second language, will be considered subsequently, as a preface to the examination of examples drawn from Singapore writers.
A writer's style serves his preoccupations which in turn are decided by his temperament, the subjects he finds engaging, his beliefs and the pressures exerted upon him by his milieu. Each of these aspects represent an influence of differing importance. Some are projected from the outside; others arise from his very being. The balance between them, the way his inclinations and skills mesh and merge are intrinsic to and both fashion and regulate his creative centre. This centre we recognise but cannot claim with confidence to understand either its mechanism or the sources of its impulses. An incident or remark seemingly casual or trivial to us can inspire others to a short-story or poem. We only know what enters this country of the mind, what emerges but not how it is transformed.
It is possible, indeed desirable to remember the diversity of overt influences working on the writer. Those mentioned earlier ought to be elaborated. A vital one is dramatised by the situation of a poet in South Vietnam in the mid-Sixties
I live in Saigon the year round without a
warm coat
Witnessing my people searching for food
around the foreigner-operated rub-
bish dump
I am standing pensively at the Bay Hien
Crossroads
Watching kids growing on bread scattered
on the earth
And the older boy presenting his brother
with a piece of chocolate picked up
from the roadside
I cannot contain my anger …….
Thephong, from 'Under the Poet's Eyes
Can he escape the bitterness and despair? Hardly. In Malaysia and Singapore, the pioneering writers similarly felt compelled to engage with social, political and cultural questions, almost inevitably, considering the historical phase in which they wrote. A writer is very much caught up in the flux, the tensions, the expectations and disappointments of his society. Solzhenitsyn, Naipaul, Patrick White, Mulk Raj Anand and Philip Roth all enforce their relevance through this connection. In as much as a writer chooses his subject, the subject chooses him.
To a considerable degree, the choice of a subject implies certain constraints. Within the tragic mode - Sophocles' and Shakespeare's are instances - the froth and the gaiety of comedy have no place. What laughter does erupt is severely qualified, ironic, uncaring, pitched in language with an edge not habitual to it. But the perimeters of tragedy are wide, with ample elbow-room to give resonance to vision as the writer searches the language for the best way to gain effects, to arrive at the fertile sublimity of tragedy. Yet whatever he comes up with must not jar or disturb his tragic vision for when his judgement falters tragedy turns to bathos, the sublime collapses into the ridiculous.
Broadly speaking, what the writer can or cannot do is pre-empted by the genre he chooses. Tile poet has the greatest scope for manipulation and manoeuvre. He writes as he pleases, creating, establishing his aptness, his persuasiveness out of his own insights and verbal gifts. The verbal means vary from the highly allusive, symbolic, interrogatory mode of Blake's 'Tiger' to the direct simplicity of Robert Frost. At the other extreme, the dramatist is by and large confined to the world of his characters. That may prove extensive but is governed by dramatic conventions. Whether he writes of saints or sinners, or both, he must equip each with a suitable history, language and personality. If he locates his play in the slums of Chinatown or Serangoon Road set, say, in 1955, the linguistic range within which he can work up his characters has obvious limitations.
Choosing subject and theme is less complicated than acquiring and developing the necessary verbal and structural resources. These range from lexical and s minutiae to the distinctive advantages and limitations of various genres. Out of his own experience of literature, out of intimate contact with the great works available language, works which helped to e and extend the creative traditions language, he would gather an understanding and a version of what has been achieved, and what, in his view, remains to be done.
But for those who write in a language belonging through a long history of association to their society and who there using a second tongue, there exists another set of challenges. The acquisition of more arduous, the period of experimentation and tentativeness longer before feeling at home in the language. Each language has its distinctive character acquired over to meet the particular demands of a certain life-style in a certain society. Those up within it are therefore familiar with the genres of the language, its history and contemporary relevance, the cumulative and the celebrations of that society that have left their mark on the language. There is therefore a powerful community between the language, its literary evolution, its mores, its social, religious and other inheritances and those who are born into and brought up in it. The alliance is rich and complex. Nor does the complexity stand still. Changes in life lead to changes in the language, maintaining without interruption a symbiotic intimacy. Out of this matrix the writer draws his language. Because those he addresses share the same linguistic inheritance, his principal task is how to write well about what he feels is important. But those who live in a multi-racial society, whose sensibilities and psyches have been formed initially in other cultures and other languages and who then come to a language like English, the position is radically different.
First the mastery of its denotative life; then the connotative. To create in language you ought to know its larger life, the permutations of word, image, symbol. But in amassing this connotative grasp there is necessityfor constitutional adjustment. Inherent values and attitudes in the language need modifying, readjustment even. If it is 105°F in the shade, you ought to give your friend a cool, not warm welcome. The Negro has to assert that black is beautiful to overcome the immemorial implication of black being associated with evil. The equation accounts for the power of the night-evil leitmotiv in Macbeth for instance. Configurations formed by other equations of words exist. They do not always fit a second culture, a second environment. Where necessary, symbols, metaphors need to be discarded or re-aligned.
On the positive side we ought to put into English, into the adopted language, the metaphorical richness relevant to the facts of local life. It is not enough to elude Uncomfortable associations; it has to be topped- up. Elements grafted range from images, metaphors having local colour, to translations of idioms from other languages. Chinua Achebe's novels offer ample evidence of how Igbo proverbs in English broaden and re-define in specific instances the metaphorical reach and diversity of the language. R.K. Narayan shrewdly dresses English in Indian clothes, and makes it move with a detectable South Indian rhythm.
But whatever the innovations, they should not take the new writing away from the main creative tradition of English. Their main function is to create sufficient variations by shifting the focus of word, phrase, by experimenting with form etc. to give scope to our sensibility.
Literary beginnings in a second language are Invariably slow, untidy and uncertain. In retrospect, what actually got written looks disproportionate to the energies put in mainly because the problems - including non literary ones - which pioneering writers faced cannot be readily gauged. They achieved little durable work. But this work has an historical interest, mainly related to the search for a viable medium. Our writing in English consists more of poetry than prose, more prose than drama. The imbalance is being corrected, a healthy development. In the meantime poetry remains the most solid body of writing and best documents the search for style.
Goh Sin Tub's poems, written in the late Forties and early Fifties, employ language calculated to shock his readers out of their complacency. The complacency was fostered by the view that the proper style was 'poetic', soft, flowery, informed by regular rhythms, delivered in regular stanzas. A subject like love which lends itself so easily to sentimentality, is handled as follows:
With how sad steps, O moon -
But beware,
The moon-beams ooze
Like ulcer-pus along the grooves
Of lovers' brains
Maggot breed
Eat
And weave silk-webs
Till the brain is none.
He felt the decay
Snatched up sword
And cut off his head.
'Third Moon'
The language seeks to dislodge habitual responses. The poem is about the delirium of love, how it can distort our judgement. He succeeds but one wonders if 'ulcer-pus', 'Maggot breed' and the abrupt, dramatic conclusion are not over-done. What we wish for is that tact, that balance which ensures the newness of the language is in fact appropriate.
Sin Tub and his contemporaries were the pioneers. Their poems made those who followed conscious of the importance to discover for themselves a language that mediated between what they sought to ex press and how it was best expressed. Oliver Seet's poetry, which I believe has yet to be fully appreciated, is valuable both for the general issues he raised and his attention to this problem. His mid-Fifties poems force fully project an impression of intense personal wrestle with words to uncover and pat tern his reflections on fundamental issues. For Oliver, meaning and significance reside in image and metaphor, the phrase that is compact. Hence the directions of his search for a style. And the instruction comes mainly from the study of the classics and modern English poets. Imitation and other forms of indebtedness are shed as confidence grows. Oliver's 'In The Beginning' has verbal and rhythmic echoes of Eliot and Shakespeare
Here am I
sophomore in a lion city
in a sothic year
plagued by wet dreams of summer
frothing at the basis
with suds of ecstasy, immortal longings bottled
- counting sheep in a sorite
built upon a hair
Oliver Seet, 'In The Beginning'
These echoes - the one from Antony and Cleopatra carries an additional load of meaning - are there partly because at that stage Oliver was perhaps unable to muster from his own resources a rhythm and phrasing superior to those he borrowed. The opening of Eliot's 'Gerontion' reads as follows:
Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain,
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain……….
The rhythmic patterns are similar and recall to the reader the situation in Eliot's poem, setting up valuable contrasts and comparisons, part of a verbal arrangement depicting how - in Oliver's poem - anticipations of youth are frustrated by the consequential. In Oliver's poetry we find such attempts to fix immediate problems and themes in the context of their background. The danger of questionable politics, of new ideologies, is sounded in 'He who lives by the Hammer'. What he means by 'hammer' and 'sickle', we identify without difficulty. The collation of significances through a verbal pattern is deliberate: 'Keenness', 'sickle', 'retribution', 'dark alley, 'long knives' and 'red nirvana' reveal the insistence with which he exploits the potency of existing symbols. Another instance is 'Because belief like yours is insular', where we find 'kris' used with a current as well as a historical range of reference.
The shadow of a kris lurks at the corner-
stone
waiting the deadly slither of the flaw.
Hang Jebat learned too late
the kris was double-edged.
Complementing this method of tapping meaning in existing symbols is the us adjectives: 'soulless rosaries of rout 'landlord king', 'unfeeling patrons of sky', 'measureless mirrors', 'musselled shores'. Their modifying subtlety or vigour; as the case may be is characteristic of Oliver's writing; they are chosen to supply thrust, to assemble the shades of meanings he seeks. Though some of his formulations do not get across as rapidly as we wish, they are none the less intrinsic to his search for an individual voice.
A poet's view of his vocation has a bearing in how he sets about his task. The writer's conception of his role, notably his relations with readers, are matters which exert considerable influence. Robert G said some thirty years ago that he wrote poems for poets, that to do otherwise is wasteful. He is an exception; poets asumme that the prime purpose is to communicate and, within limits, pitch their writing on a level accessible to the general reader In his preface to The Liberation of Lim Thean Soo suggests loosening the language of poetry a step to aid readers. Much can be said on behalf of this view, though serious reservations exist because it affects the whole mode of expression, the very procedures of a poem. The poem as intensely knit verbal organisation makes large demands on the reader, perhaps puts him off because he is unable to enter the poem sufficiently. The poetry and criticism of the last fifty years emphasises the density of meaning - in the full sense - as paramount. There are grounds for modifying the view in a multi-lingual context, to a proper place for the poetry of statement, provided the emphasis is on the poetry and not the statement. The style in Robert Yeo's 'Coming Home Baby' is conversational, relaxed, shot through with ruminuation, with wry-humour.
I have come back/I have not returned.
MacArthur returns
The prodigal son returns
Alan Yeo returned
but being just, me,
well
I only come back.
Only the first son
of a middle-class insurance clerk who depended on his salary:
his only source of income.
In any case, I had to come back.
Bonded to the Govt. what. Also
I want to - come back, I mean.
The poetry of statement, direct in its ad dress, ensures that we rapidly grasp what is being said. The poet secures our deeper attention through gradual accretion of mean big and significance. Distinctions are made - 'come back/not returned', historical allusion rapidly enlisted, all with a tightly controlled proportion. His return to Singapore is depicted in a context that enables him to move into and across history, autobiography, people, places and accompanied by comment, low-keyed but all the more pun gent for that. As we move into the poem, what appears on the surface relaxed, light hearted, conversational and confidential, re turns again and again to fundamental states of feeling about our - Singapore's - past and present.
I have picked these examples, but they are sufficient to indicate the contrast in style between Goh Sin Tub, Oliver Sect, and Robert Yeo. They show each poet setting about discovering, evolving for himself a characteristic mode of utterance. The same impulses can be seen at work in Arthur Yap, Chandran Nair, Wong May, Lee Tzu Pheng, Sng Boh Khhim, Yeo Bock Cheng, Geraldine Hong and the crop of young poets now making the scene. Those familiar with their poems will recall the range of styles which will be looked at during the workshops. But because of this range it is difficult at the present time to chart one that is distinctly Singaporean. Moreover, the poets are constantly experimenting and extending their own resources and we can expect their sub sequent work to have greater maturity, and to evince new directions. But even when each has produced an achieved, distinctive body of work and we are able to recognise confidently that this is by Arthur Yap, this by Chung Yee Chong and so on, the sense of a Singapore style is likely to prove elusive. Unless idiom has extensive local colour and draws on a strong and pervasive local dialect of English - a tendency we should resist - the poetry would turn increasingly international in flavour. Contemporary poetry in English has entered a phase where the style, the vocabulary, the urban preoccupations are international. This conclusion is constantly reinforced by what we read in poetry journals. This is perhaps why we do not have contemporary poets comparable in status to either Yeats or Eliot. It is not easy to say whether a poet is Australian, West Indian, British, Filipino, African or Indian. Poets tend to establish an individual rather than a national identity. Poems in Wong May's second collection, Report, are difficult to place on purely stylistic grounds. And the difficulty will always be there, un less there are specific elements that give it a local habitation and a name.
The position is obviously different with drama and fiction: there are characters and settings to identify time and place with a certainty that even the most symbolic and abstract works in either genre cannot fully transcend.
But drama - and fiction - in Singapore faces special problems because it draws substance from not only a complex society but one undergoing rapid and tremendous change. This is perhaps why so little of it gets written. Jim Chor Pee and Robert Yeo have written and produced plays, but I take Goh Poh Seng's because he is also poet and novelist, a fact that makes his work a useful example. Poh Seng's third play, When Smiles Are Done (1965) is his most successful. Its multi-racial cast and theme will give some idea of the dramatic situation Poh Seng creates. Wong Chong Kit has an Indian friend Raju who is in Jove with Jenny, Chong Kit's sister. They wish to marry. Mrs. Wong, their mother, objects. Chong Kit himself is having an affair with Mary, a bargirl. A challenging undertaking whose main difficulty is how to handle a sensitive subject in an acceptable and credible fashion. That Poh Seng succeeds to the extent he does is because of a bold honesty: his characters confront the issues they face squarely and are direct in the way they cope with their thoughts and feelings, But how the characters develop and shape themselves in our minds, as they interrelate, depend on their language. They differ in background, in expectation, social status. The English each speaks is non-standard.
Variations in English arising from differences in levels of education and social background and first language interference becomes pertinent at this point where the dramatist's language meets his audience. These variations tend to be associated with types within our society. For instance, in homes where English is not spoken as the first language, parents speak a version of the language more imperfect than that managed by their children who are likely to have received formal instruction in it. Moreover, in a setting of changing values, social expectations and behaviour, in which the sense of communal identity is beginning to erode, there is further separation between the old and young. The kind of conflict is best exemplified in Mrs. Wong's disapproval of the relationship between Jenny and Raju. In such circumstances even before he decides how his characters will speak, the playwright has to sort out his characters, decide how they will conduct themselves, be deployed and brought into relationships. These are matters not only for the dramatists, novelists, short story writers; anyone who deals with characters must contend with them. Where society is caught up in rapid change, a kind of pre-thinking to shape material seems unavoidable. For a society and its culture is defined by the types we come to recognise in them. These types can range from king to pauper; they are essential even in egalitarian societies if we are to have ways of identifying the full stretch of that society. What I have in mind here are figures less elaborate, more tentative and greater in number Jung's Psychological Types or Vance Palmer's twenty-five Australians in National Portraits. And the types ought not to belong solely to the upper levels of society. Witness Hogarth's revealing panorama of vigorous - at times questionable - life in eighteenth century London. Types, refined and elaborated, sum up a society. Chaucer's pilgrims are a case in point.
The situation in Singapore, given linguistic, ethnic, cultural and social profile already complicated enough, is further acerbated by rapid change. Possible permutations and combinations are endless. In the course of time there will emerge types, subtle, refined, overlapping but each distinctive enough to justify a separate classification. The process has its own dynamics, its own pace, but can be aided. One source of aid is literature, especially the attempts to deal with these types, to examine them as individual characters in plays and novels. undertaking is not easy; writing of them in English poses unusual stylistic problems. For the diversity of characters implies a diversity of language, and the diversity is further complicated by drawing characters from different communal background. These characters and types when speaking English, use it in a way distinctive to themselves. This is noticeable in the following passage from the play.
| Mrs. Wong: | What time is it, what time is it. What a question! Long time to get up, that's what time it is. Come get up. You want to lie down all day? I got a lot to do also and I can't make the bed. What if people come? |
| Chong Kit: | So what? Let them come. Why make big fuss? If they friend, they no mind anything. If they no friend, they enemy, what we care for? |
| Mrs. Wong: | What we care: We got to make appearance, good appearance. Of course you no care. You are young, you no care. You got no responsibility. You no care about show. You are young. |
| Chong Kit: | That's right. I don't respectability. |
Mrs. Wong is the bothered, grumbling mother some of us would recognise. Chong Kit's abruptness and lack of respect for elders, is symptomatic of social change: he sounds like the boy next door, perhaps an earlier version of ourselves. But his language is at times fractured, at others tidy, standard. Here is the crux of what the dramatist has to do. Not only must he allot and season each character with a suitable language, he has to seek consistency. The difficulty Poh Seng faces is connected with the fact that despite claims by those who have looked at so-called Singapore English we do not have one. Ray Tongue collected examples and sorted them in his Singapore Malaysian English. These departures from standard forms are consequences of poor grammar et cetera. While they sort into categories they are neither extensive nor predictable.
In If We Dream Too Long, Poh Seng attempted to capture the speed, rhythms, the vocabulary, the syntax of an English spoken here. What he gives in the novel is plausible.
The next morning, Kwang Meng woke up with a hangover. The daylight, the household stirring outside his bedroom, seemed unreal. He had to make a big effort to get up. At breakfast, his mother scolded him. 'You better stop wasting yourself, and your money, on drink. What for you want to drink so much? You want to end up a drunkard?' He did not reply, being in no mood to argue. He did not touch his breakfast. Just drank the black coffee. 'You better pull yourself together, Meng.' He nodded and left.
In the above passage, the sentence 'What for you want to drink so much?' is but one form; others equally plausible, include: Why you drink so much? / Why you drink much? / What for drink so much? / What for you drink so much? Why you must drink so much?
The ear is tuned to one or more versions, but not to all. What the writer takes to be representative may not be the one his reader thinks is 'current'. Our discomfort is strengthened, not subdued by the mother's opening sentence which reads smoothly. It is on this level of detail that the problem exists and where it has to be tackled.
The linguistic dilemma faced by the writer, by the characters he creates is sum med up in this episode from Lim Thean Soo's Destination Singapore:
The fishermen glared at him with hostile suspicion, as if he were a harbinger of trouble. They were not pleased to be interrupted in their conversation. The man hailed them with an uplifted hand but they did not respond. Instead, they reacted with stony silence and gross indifference. This made the man more agitated. He addressed them in several dialects and in Mandarin. No reply each time. He asked them whether they had come across a sailing junk called the Sea Plough. 'Look,' he pleaded. I'll reward you well. I beg you to tell me. Please!' One f the squatting figures spoke in unpolished Mandarin. 'Are you crazy? Didn't you hear about the commotion in the city? Don't attract the Japs to our hamlet. If they don't slaughter us, we'll kill you first instead. Get lost. Leave us in peace!'
At least three basic, interrelated considerations exist: the linguistic relationship between the writer and his work, the characters in a work, the work and its readers. In such circumstances, the search for a style really is a search for effective means of communication. The kind of refinements we find in poetry occur occasionally in the pages of a novel. Here is a passage from Poh Seng's work in progress:
Sometimes Kian Teck used to drive by of an evening, and saw through the window of his car, unintentionally and not for long, the weathered headstones arranged like tableau in a dream, superimposed for a moment upon the hubbub of his life. Pale whitenesses amongst the tall grass, motionless against the shifting hours. They are proffered to his eye and mind, al most a secret imposition, done in all quietness, entering like water, and its incoming renders, unsought, the tangle of time. They stood, idioms beyond his knowledge.
In this the handling of character has gradually moved to a stage where the description moves inward so that what the novelist describes amounts to nothing less than a process in his characters' mind. Description becomes the means to externalise mood, state of mind and possesses a resonance crucial to our understanding of the character. Poh Seng is poet as well as novelist and the richness of his idiom has much to do with the denotative energies of his language. The penultimate sentence of the quotation of his sentence provides an example.
Here it seems worthwhile entering a minor defence on behalf of those attemp ting to write novels in English. Somerset Maugham is reputed to have said in 1948 to Malcolm MacDonald that he wished he was revisiting Southeast Asia because it offered a wealth of material. The material obviously available to Maughan would be drawn into the orbit of his style, seen from his point of view, which is essentially the outsider's. For someone writing within the society there is a much more immense area, a galaxy of characters, of issues, of types to contend with. In such circumstances, apart from the acquisition of technique and the capacity to structure, there is this larger question of what language one has to evolve to suit the range of novelistic needs.
Poh Seng's If We Dream Too Long is the first Singapore novel. It is a remarkable achievement in the circumstances. Since its appearance we have had more prose. Francis Thomas' Memoirs of a Migrant (1972), Tan Kok Seng's Son of Singapore (1972), Michael Soh's Son of a Mother (1973), N.I. Low's Chinese Jetsam on Tropic Shore (1974), The Patriarch (1975) by Yeap Joo Kim and Ruth Ho's Rainbow Round my Shoulder (1975). Each contributes in its own way to the growth of local prose tradition. Apart from Tan Kok Seng's the English is fairly orthodox though the range varies from Francis Thomas' standard English to the curiously mixed but suggestive style of N.I. Low.
I would like to look at passages from Chinese Jetsam on a Tropic Shore and Tan Kok Seng's Son of Singapore to show the kind of linguistic variations which arises from the writer's background and which in turn influences the way he handles his material.
N. I. Low is equally at home with both Chinese and English. His Chinese appear to be a mixture of Mandarin and the vernacular. Its influence on him - and in him - is manifest both in the way he perceives things and how this perception gets expressed. His English inheritance is derived from the formal study of the language and its literature; its domination is apparent from quotations from various English classics and, behind them, a sense of the European tradition. These two streams meet in the writing so that within the fairly short time in the passage we find them rubbing shoulders.
This was not the only time when I resented other people using my mother as a beast of burden. She was no fool. She must have known that she was taken advantage of. But she never showed any resentment. She digested it in her own sad heart.
My father had the pride of a hidalgo of the bluest blood. He was a giver, not a taker and grasper. He made friends easily. He was a man's man.
Whenever my father's scheme misfired, as they so often did, it was always my mother who had to pay the piper. Patiently, doggedly, she would set about picking up the broken pieces of our fortunes. Never, never once, did she complain to me, who was closest to her, about my father. She suffered in silence. I have every reason to be proud of my ugly mother, who never had a day's respite from crushing, grinding poverty. She remained uncrushed, unbroken, going about her duties, mild and serene. At this late day, when I am twice as old as she when she died. I salute her shade. I hail her as a grand dame of nature's wide empire, a woman constant in adversity,
The portions italicized bear out what I mean.
Tan Kok Seng's English is self taught. Its chief virtue is that it conveys the roots of his feelings. In his trilogy the English has been tidied up but still reflects the flavour of his personality. The point I want to make is that we occasionally detect behind his English the strong presence of his vernacular, Teochew, and it is this that contributes distinctively to his style, for instance.
'Lucky they didn't understand what you said,' he roared. 'if they had, your father and mother would have been killed.' He was terribly angry as he said this. Ah Nam's mother went up to the father. 'He's only a little boy,' she said. 'He knows nothing.' And turning to Ah Nam himself, she said: 'Remember next time, little boy, have ears, but have no mouth, And don't show heavenly courage. Under stand?' in any ordinary day Ah Nam got slapped by his father and berated by his mother, and every time he cried. This time he didn't cry. Silent, he gripped his mother's thigh in terror.
That little boys have ears but no mouth is a literal translation from the Teochew. What Kok Seng has done - and this he does fairly consistently - is domesticate the Teochew adage in English, confident that the literal carries its own force, allowing the reader to work out its implications rapidly.
Discussion of style in drama and fiction can proceed through a literary examination of a comprehensive selection of individual usages, instances of which are noted above. A complementary approach would be the analysis of grammatical features. Either way describes the writer's style. But when we conic to judge it, to note strengths and deficiencies, we face that large problem posed by the complexity of material, the sum total of permutations and combinations of' characters, values, social and other en counters to he expected in a multi-racial society.
English as a language cuts across cultures. Those who write in it come from all cultural streams. As a creative medium, it is the most multi-racial, multi-cultural.
A very heavy burden is therefore placed on those who use it. For, while it leads to perspectives that take in material that cut across communal boundaries, the writer using English perhaps faces more problems than those using any of the other languages. We are constantly reminded of the richness of the materials available! What ought to he mentioned is that this very richness proves taxing at the beginnings of a local creative tradition. Let us illustrate the problem. A novel in Tamil or Malay will have as its characters Indians or Malays and possesses a dominating homogeneity. The focus on issues, the aesthetic assumptions. the traditions of feeling all have a texture and consistency in accord with the background of the characters and the assumptions and outlook of the novelist, be he Indian or Malay: There is an organising focus.
The novelist using English is not '- as yet- in such a fortunate position. There are few securities for him. Even if he deals with a slice of life as Goh Poh Seng does in If We Dream Too Long, the characters are people who have in varying degrees been displaced into a language and displaced so differently that we cannot immediately accept a particular instance as being general. We feel that there are alternatives and therefore feel less than comfortable. For such richness involves not merely questions of how to cope with it but the careful and intelligent application of literary structure. Technicalities remain important: they do not help sort out, sift and prepare material for translation into the forms of art, into characters who are individual - yet of a type. It is here that the problems remain massive. What is involved can he suggested by questions such as how does one set about drawing up the characters in a novel or play, who to include, who to exclude? For the characters have a dual status. Apart from being individuals they are also members of a community and when you bring them into relationship across cultures you can the challenges they pose in order to an acceptable balance that is both as well as socially and culturally acceptable.
The stylistic and structural answer to the problems outlined, is more and more writing. The discoveries of individual writers on how to cope with this or that will add to the general fund of insight. Succeeding writers will start with that much additional advantage, and make their contributions. In time the writing will have enough sinews, spirit, nerve and muscle to allow a systemic inspection of its style.
THUMBOO, E.
https://courses.nus.educ.sg/course ellthumb/site/doc/8.html
THUMBOO, E.
https://courses.nus.educ.sg/course ellthumb/site/doc/8.html
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