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

Appendix One: Arthur Yap on the Short Story

69 a p p e n d i x o n e : a r t h u r y a p o n t h e s h o r t s t o r y This essay is from chapter 5 of Arthur Yap's , a brief critical survey of prose writings in Singapore and Malaysia (1970) Short Stories short stories have not attained the popularity that novels have. One reason is that, until recently, there have been few short story writers — or, to put in another way, there are many short stories but few short story writers proper. Most of these stories are undergraduate attempts. Hence, until one comes to the 60s, one is inclined more to talk of short stories than of short story writers. Another reason for the lack of popularity is that of the narrow scope offered. Writers could adapt historical facts for purposes of fiction, but this has been done often enough and yet it is in novels that one finds this. One example is Harun Aminurrashid’s A Malay among the Portuguese. Moreover, with the increasing tempo of life and the search for more concrete and salient features for representation, it is not often that writers look into events of the past. On the other hand, writers have, and are, attempting to represent our ways of life within the span of a short story. But in doing this, the difficulty is one of scope. Communist indoctrination, inter-racial marriage, the War and its aftermath, tradition and the insurgence of modernity are the key themes. In a novel, any one of these topics can be treated fully. A short story usually offers insufficient room. Consequently, it appears as an ad hoc piece of writing if it is written more to push a point rather than to let the story tell itself. This can also result in stilted presentation, especially when local expressions are not inherently incorporated. The 1950s, and particularly the 60s, see the emergence of a greater and more articulate attempt in making the short story more substantial in assimilating the locale and life here. This is seen also in Donald Moore’s The Sacrifice and other Stories (1957), a collection of competent stories, although the title-story itself runs in a rather facile manner on a popular theme – that of Chinese-educated students who become Communistminded through youthful zeal and a blind sense of loyalty to China. The advantage of this collection is that the writer is fluent. 70 a r t h u r y a p The lack of fluency is seen in some of the stories in The Compact, edited by Herman Hochstadt (1959), and Part One of Bunga Emas edited by T. Wignesan (1964). There are fifteen stories in The Compact and they are, variously, stories of unrequited love, such as Lloyd Fernando’s “Twixt cup and lip�; episodes, such as Balan Sundram’s “ASaturday Night�; stories of the attainment of adult awareness, such as Awang Kedua’s “A New Sensation�; and stories which are fabricated on a ‘heavy’ issue, such as Tan Hock Seng’s “The Compact�. Those in Bunga Emas are by S. Rajaratnam, Lee Kok Liang, Awang Kedua, Ooi Boon Seng and T. Wignesan. Many of the stories in both collections, though this is less true of these in Bunga Emas, suffer from an awkwardness in presentation. The presentation in Tan Hock Seng’s “The Compact� and “You Cannot Live�, for instance, is rather elephant-footed and is unable to sustain the line of argument. And unless the ideas are either startling or profound enough, it is unlikely that the story can be expected to be borne solely by the weight of the ideas alone. On the other hand, Awang Kedua’s “A New Sensation� and the stories by Lee Kok Liang are eloquent, and enlist the reader’s attention fully. This is due to a greater skill of presentation and in letting the story unfold itself, without having to become turgidly moralistic or to lapse into question-begging. Lee Kok Liang has also a collection of his short stories published under the title of Mutes in the Sun and other Stories (1964). There are eight satisfying stories, with the title-story occupying nearly half the book. Kok Liang manages a subtle ring of irony. Sometimes, there is also a tinge of the macabre, as in “Five Fingers�; but the attempt in this story is not successful as it gives a rather portentous affectation to...