The Canon

One book I forgot to mention having read recently on my hospital bed was Eagleton's Literary Theory. I was, in fact, a fair way into it prior to arrival (I think I'd got to Chapter 4) but it was good to finally put it to rest from cover to cover, as it were. Mind you. it's taken me over twenty years to do so. The central chapters, the structuralist sort of stuff, I found heavy but fitfully rewarding (a tad too abstract for my concrete brain) but the last chapters are hot stuff, full of good sense - and a bit of useful silliness. Still it's the opening chapters I'd recommend for the bracing demolition job of English Studies and the great canon of literature in general. In fact, the demolition of lit in itself.

The funny is though that despite the good sense of all this I've noticed, in this part of the world, something of a yearning for said canon by some of the brightest and best of students with a literary bent. I suppose it's a bit like it being a lot more useful rebelling against an enemy, or friend, you know well, than just casting around in the dark. A small group of scholars I helped a couple of years back with some Wordsworth & Shelley & the like quite clearly wanted to do this stuff rather than, say, No Other City, an anthology of modern Singaporean poetry. (Personally I really like the stuff in No Other City, and Ferd, by the way, delivered a spot-on lecture about it this morning that might well have converted my guys.)

And I'm also aware that I'm lucky enough to sort of know my way around the canon. Just in terms of poetry for 'O' level I happened to do three segments from the hoary old Rhyme & Reason - but that meant at least a nodding familiarity with Donne, Yeats, Pope, Shakespeare, Keats, Wordsworth, Hopkins - gosh. Only short pieces, but they stuck. Then for 'A' level Jack provided Palgrave's Golden Treasury, and we were in there all the time.

Just this morning I found myself back in Resolution and Independence having woken before the dawn prayer, from the old smoky bedside anthology.

Of course the danger, the very real danger, is that this begins to sound like the rattling of some kind of cultural superiority medals, and even if I don't mean it that way (do I?) if others see it that way then to all intents and purposes that's what it is. The thing to do is to remember all you don't know. (Bit contradictory that, but please let it go.) A few years back I had the good fortune to have a natter or two with local big-shot lawyer and fine writer Philip Jeyaretnam and I remember him remarking to me about all the good novels coming out of Vietnam. Embarrassingly I've been here over twenty years, fairly close to the doorstep, actually crossed the threshold, taught a number of (extraordinarily pleasant, I don't know why this is) Vietnamese students and still haven't read a single novel translated from the language. Mind you, it was my scholar, Tong, who was most keen of all to get to those Daffodils.

So I remain 'conflicted' as they tend to say nowadays, and I must say I rather like the place.