Why is this whole
play set in a dream?
KuoPao Kun opens
the play with ‘I don’t know why, but it keeps coming back to me. This dream.
Every time I get frustrated, it comes back to me.’ At the end of the play, he
wakes up: ‘As for me, the funeral somehow stuck in my mind and it would often
come back to me. In a dream. Especially when I’m frustrated.’ Seeing as to how
the events that Kuo describes in Coffin
are rooted in a place that seems familiar to us (as opposed to an overtly
fantasy world), it seems jarring that he makes this whole play a dream.
On my
first reading, I considered it a strategy that Kuo employed to keep the play
out of the reaches of the censor. Seeing as to how he had only been released
from imprisonment in 1980, and Coffin
was first staged in 1984, this seems rather plausible. ‘It’s just a dream,
what! Why are you thinking this is Singapore?’ he’d say.
On further probing,
another possible reading is that this is not a dream but a nightmare – his
nightmare that the same fate may befall him. The main character hints at this
at the end: ‘Now, with them all in the same size and the same shape, would my
sons and daughters, and my grandsons and granddaughters after them, be able to
find me out and recognize me?’
Either way, I think he shapes the play such that
the audience loses sight of this dream context as the play progresses, and instead latches on to the Singaporean context as the
different characters are fleshed out. Kuo brings the dream back only at the end, to remind them and to conclude the play.
The shaping of
the situation and character through language
I divide this section by character:
1. The main
character’s narration:
‘You see, my folks started drifting apart when they first got married, one after the other. Grandfather was very cross at first, about the breaking up of the extended family.’
Kuo expresses the
thought process of the character through the fragmentation of his speech, such
as in the second line of the above quote. As a written statement, ‘The breaking
up of the extended family made Grandfather very cross’ would be more
appropriate. Instead, Kuo reverses the order to highlight how his Grandfather’s
reaction was what he remembered most.
The main
character also repeats ‘You see’ several times as a part of his speech to his
audience, as a speech habit that Kuo shapes for him. As a result, the lines
seem less ‘scripted’ and more spontaneous, as if his telling this story was a
spur-of-the-moment decision.
2. The main
character’s speech:
‘OK, forget it. Hurry up and dig the hole bigger.’
In his speech to
the funeral parlour man, the main character code-switches from a more formal
syntax into a more Singlish one: ‘dig the hole bigger’ is used in place of ‘dig
a bigger hole’. In this, Kuo illustrates something that many Singaporeans do
intuitively, almost unconsciously, and as they transition from a more formal
situation into a casual one.
3. Funeral parlour
man:
‘I know, sir, […] Change into a smaller coffin. We have a wide range of coffins. We have very big ones too, although not so big as this one, but which could fit the standard holes. We even have teak-wood ones. Very lasting…’
Here Kuo illustrates
the stereotype of the salesman who has memorized his pitch, which he uses to
characterize the worker who does his job by rote. In the dialogue that Kuo
writes, we can almost imagine the character’s eyes becoming unfocused as he
says this, and we may be reminded of some of the service staff in Singapore.
4. Officer-in-charge:
‘There will only be this one exception and no such requests will be entertained ever again. One man, one grave, one plot!’
In ‘One man, one
grave, one plot’, the officer condenses his speech into a slogan. Kuo might be
using him to evoke the stereotype of the politician: someone who delivers ideas
in a forceful and memorable manner.
I think Kuo is
trying to use these characters as a means of illustrating some of the
stereotypical characters we see in Singaporean society. He makes them funny and
sometimes absurd, inducing the audience to laugh at these characters and in
turn at themselves.
