Noon at Five O'Clock: The Short Stories of Arthur Yap

Foreword

xi f o r e w o r d being a writer is not quite the same thing as being a poet, a dramatist, or a fictionist. When the creative impulse can sidestep genre and elide convention, writing declares itself attentive to the naked interface between language and perception where words and experiences try to shape one another in a context relatively—though of course never completely— bare of preconceptions. The resulting tension, if sustained rather than domesticated, retains a sense of newness untamed by tradition. That is how Arthur Yap wrote, at least at the times—rare enough—when neither paint nor poetry seemed apt or sufficient. The Welsh writer Robert Graves once remarked that a cool web of language winds us in. Words help us forget how hot the day is; they protect our eyes from the dazzle of how red roses can be. Words, words, words, Hamlet exclaimed, only half-feigning disgust and madness. When language becomes soiled currency, and telling stories becomes just another way of telling lies to ourselves, then there is need for something else. It is indeed a need for experimental writing, provided we buy into the conviction that for some writers, all writing is an experiment. That something, which abides in the continuous present tense of an experiment, is often misunderstood as novelty, or given more pretentious names such as originality or truth-telling. That something—of which Yap’s work partakes—may be better understood if we think of the time, place, and act of writing as arriving continually at different intersections between silence and speech, between the need to say a lot and the need not to say anything much, the desire to pose life as a question to which all our arts and devices propose responses in the form of answers. This is an old idea, and it may even sound like an odd idea. It occurs in many times and places: the German writers Novalis and Walter Benjamin; the Irish poet Paul Muldoon. We can assimilate Yap’s work to the idea of writing as a kind of problem-solving. We will then read the prose collected here as if it were a series of speculative attempts to formulate questions whose nature we are to guess from reading the prose, as if it were the seen answers to questions that remain unseen, as if it were a set of provisional solutions to problems whose nature we can only guess at from the contours, tone, and direction of the prose in our hands. It is not the answers that should interest us as much as the questions they imply. Yap approached depth by keeping his eye close to surfaces. He heard xii inner voices by listening attentively, almost like a mimic, to the nuances of the spoken voice, its idioms and idiolects, the gaps and silences woven into the warp and woof of ordinariness. That much is shared between his poems and the prose collected here. Where these attempts differ from his poems is in how they work at what the English poet John Dryden called the “other harmony of prose”. It would be a truism, but a tame rather than a brave one, to say that Yap was among the most remarkable writers to have used English in the last half century, not just in Singapore, but in all the regions and peoples that go under the umbrella notion of “Asia”. He used language—not just English, but certainly English—as if it was a second language, as it was. He made speech sound awkward and difficult. His writing was like a report of the evidence for how words and thoughts, or words and feelings do not always come into the world of utterance harmoniously, or at ease with one another. Not being native to the shapes and sounds of English gives his work a form of estrangement that is salutary and tonic, if we think of all the many writers—from all over the world—who now use English with a fluency, ease and volubility that becomes self-defeating because it has no sense of tension, unease, disquiet, or discomfort. Yap’s writing pulls us up short. It is sparing and bare, like Samuel Beckett’s. It is dry like a good martini. It is laconic, like a good joke, all the more delectable for not being too obvious. Above all, it appears or seems—like Arthur himself—shy, reticent, diffident, self-deprecatory, unassuming. But that should...