In school all of you are made to study Literature, which is
a pretty new subject to you, especially if you're in Sec One. If you look at your book
list, you’ll see that you actually have to buy story books, or fiction, and
study them in class. You teacher is the one who determines what makes up
literature, so the books on the list have the qualities of what she thinks good
literature must have. If you go to university to study literature, the books on
your course are what your professor (and possibly the majority of the English
department) thinks is literature, and that’s how a canon is formed.
Usually, a canon is something that a group of well read
people (usually with Ph.Ds) get together to determine what (serious) literature is and
what isn’t. Most of the time, they are right, and sometimes, they are not. In
university, I learned that this sexist bastard called Ian Watt wrote a book
called The Rise of the Novel, and he purposely excluded women writers who were
writing in the 18th Century because he thought men could only be
writers. Though he made observations that showed how the novel came to be
popular, he was also wrong because he was being a sexist prick. Now, the canon
is being modified to include more women writers like Aphra Behn, a playwright,
and so people are still modifying the canon (the serious books that one should
read according to well-read people) because it needs to cast as wide a net as
possible
So who makes up the canon in Singapore ? I’m going to argue that
Singapore Literature is insular in nature, because most Singapore
writers have been educated in NUS, and have had professors who have pushed them
in their literary endeavours to get them published. KK Seet and Kirpal Singh
are such people who have endorsed local writing, and local writers have had
mentorships with their professors or other more experienced writers. They
network and their work gets published, accepted and recognized by the
academics. This means that only one kind of literature – realist and patriotic
literature that gets accepted by all these professors gets published.
So far, I have shown you how a canon is formed, and the
limitations of a canon. One of the limitations of the Singapore
literary canon is that the older generation is less accepting of genre fiction.
Many believe that local literature should go hand in hand with a political
agenda – something George Orwell agrees with. They also believe that local
literature should be patriotic in nature, but I call it propaganda.
All right. So what do these people have against genre
fiction, and why is literary fiction so good?
First, let’s start off defining literary fiction. Most of
the time, literary fiction gets included in the canon because it tells you what
it’s like to live in a certain period of time. For example, Charlotte Bronte
(who wrote Jane Eyre) and Charles’ Dickens (who wrote Oliver Twist) are mostly
realist writers because they wrote about how crappy it was to live in London during the 1800s,
or Victorian times. These more realist works are considered to be literature
because they talk about large issues, and make keen observations of life. They
have also become classics over time, because you can always learn something
about life from these books.
In comes genre fiction. If you have read Lord of the Rings,
you have read genre fiction. If you have read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy, you have read genre fiction. Different types of genre fiction originated differently. For example, detective fiction was called pulp fiction
because it used to be published in pulp magazines. They usually contain tropes, which are elements of that genre. Many
science fiction books use time travel, and hence, time travel is a trope. When
used too often, these tropes became clichés, and it’s fair to say that time
travel is a staple or a cliché in Science Fiction because we encounter it so
many times.
Does that make genre fiction boring? No. While genre fiction
uses tropes, the writer uses his or her imagination to create a fantastic world
that is not quite like the real world. Fairies can exist, androids have
feelings, and the secret agent always has a trick that lets him complete the
mission. Genre fiction opens up possibilities of other worlds, other
playgrounds in which the reader can exist in, which is why it’s so appealing.
Sometimes, the boundary between serious literary fiction and
genre fiction is not as clear, though. In Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte uses a
telepathic connection to reunite Jane with Mr Rochester – a cop out ending, if
you ask me. Similarly, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K. Dick
can realistically portray a failing marriage as his protagonist tires of his
wife. Each ‘serious’ book may have fantastic elements and vice versa;
literature is fluid, and these categories are only created for peoples’
convenience when they browse through a bookstore.
So where do I stand? I stand with the orcs, the fairies, the
witches. I stand with the jetpacks, the cyborgs, and time travel. I dine with
the secret agent and go for drinks with the trickster. Even the literary
fiction I like has fantastic elements in it. Gabriel Garcia Marquez makes ice
look like it came from a spell book. Milan Kundera makes people fly into the
air and disappear. Why? Because the point of fiction to escape. I want
to get out of a classroom and into a hovercar. I don’t want to get out of the
classroom and go into another. I read genre fiction to imagine solutions to
problems, I read it because it makes me creative.
There is no right or wrong answer, of course. There are good
reasons for liking realist fiction because it allows you to see through
history, even though I maintain the idea that it is difficult to portray
anything realistically because memory distorts it. The books you will read will
shape you into the person you are, even though you don’t notice it. Little by
little, each book will influence you, teach you, guide you. And that is enough
reason to read fiction of any kind.
