The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide on man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.
Henry V, William Shakespeare
As of now there is a debate on the dangerously low volume of Singaporean students who choose to take Literature at the 'O'-levels. I have many ideas of my own but such similar sentiments have been articulated so well by others -- friends, colleagues, scholars, writers -- that there is very little left for me to say. In the prologue to Henry V, the audience is asked to ride the line of ambiguity that is the suspension of disbelief, and so doing conspire with the play to create worlds. Literature, the study of words, applies the critical spirit to this suspension of belief, and if correctly done it is the means by which this abstract new world ruptures into a painful awareness of one's own. It means to read the insidious craft of the wordsmith and reveal its unresolvable human preoccupations. Technical to the last, it binds deeply to the instinct of the reader, and challenges him to respond intelligently -- and honourably. It prioritises the voice and the story; it creates an awareness of historical identity. Text and life, each reflecting and illuminating the other, engender with these mere words a dangerous playground of questions, forcing the mind outwards at last into feeling the webwork of prejudices that have shaped them into who they are.
These are some reasons for why I see value in Literature. They are not, as one might say, safely 'vocational'. Neither are my sentiments 'pragmatic', not in the commercial sense of the word. But surely there must be some value in training children to see the world as the facet-ridden, equivocal place that it is, and furthermore to critically navigate the mazes of words that they will encounter even in areas as 'pragmatic' as politics and journalism. And, just as surely, to acknowledge how the vestiges of minds long dead remain in cultural consciousness because they professed vital truths on the vexed issue of living. In the words of Jeanette Winterson,
'To the bean counters and economic gurus, a poem looks like the most useless thing on earth. It is not a money machine, you can't sell it to Hollywood or use it for product placement. You can't say long it will take to make, or how long it will last, (how maddening in an economy that depends on throwaways, that a poem can last forever). The poem, by its very nature, questions the dominant values of our world, and as William Carlos Williams put it, 'it is hard to get the news from poems/ but men die miserably every day/ for lack of what is found there.''
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