The ruins of referentiality: Allegorical realism and traumatic fragments in Scorpion Orchid and The Search

ABSTRACT

This article uses Antony bin Thomas’s The Search (1978) a relatively unknown novel, to reappraise its well-studied contemporary, Lloyd Fernando’s Scorpion Orchid (1976). By drawing from Walter Benjamin’s literary theory of allegory, the article reads both texts’ socio-aesthetic of allegorical realism as a response to the mass trauma and nationalized cultural trauma of May 13, 1969. To emplot a tentatively optimistic trajectory towards interethnic reconciliation, each text recontextualizes traumatic memories of the watershed Chinese–Malay conflict of 1969, its sequelae, parallel antecedents, and other discursive events of the 1970s. Benjamin’s theorization of the ruin as an emblem for allegory is used to rethink each text’s reliance on rape as a vernacular metaphor for collective trauma and as a gendered modality of social coping. While acknowledging the conventionality of each novel’s emplotment of interethnic reconciliation, the article reconsiders the referentiality of two of Fernando’s most enigmatic characters: the transcultural prostitute Sally/Salmah and the messianic Tok Said.

KEYWORDS:

• Malaysian and Singaporean literature
• May 13, 1969
• postcolonial trauma
• Walter Benjamin
• allegorical realism
• Lloyd Fernando

Acknowledgements

This article draws from the author’s master’s thesis on the post-1969 anglophone Malaysian novel. He would like to thank Tania Roy and Bruce Lockhart for their guidance, and the anonymous Journal of Postcolonial Writing reviewers for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Cowan posits that the oeuvres of Dostoevsky, Hawthorne, Melville, and Faulkner are sites for the persistence of allegory in 19th and 20th century literature.

2. Antony bin Thomas’s novels, The Nightmare of Youth (1970) and The Search (1978), are out of print. T.J. Anthony worked as a lecturer in English at Singapore Polytechnic before becoming the principal of Vanto Academy in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia.

3. Fernando (1991) revealed how he subconsciously integrated memories of the Maria Hertogh riots and the Middle Road Strikes (a.k.a. the Hock Lee bus riots) while writing this scene.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Augustine Chay

Augustine Chay is a PhD student at the National University of Singapore. His research examines wartime literary production during the long Malayan Emergency (1948–60): a critical period of transition that was contemporaneous with the dawn of the the Cold War and the birth of the Federation of Malaya.