ABSTRACT
One of the most immediately striking features of the late controversial Singapore writer Gopal Baratham's fiction is the way memory functions, or to be more accurate, malfunctions: tenaciously adhesive but always potentially deceptive. A clinical understanding, perhaps deriving from his profession as neurosurgeon and the technological modernity implied thereby, combines with a syncretic cultural and religious vision, including most prominently Buddhist, Catholic, and Hindu elements. This chapter examines how Baratham transposes such explorations of states of individual consciousness onto a collective narrative of Singapore. Throughout his three novels, four collections of short stories and one non-fictional work published over a span of fifteen years between 1981 and 1996, Baratham seems to pride himself on adopting controversial stances towards politics, religion, and sexuality. In Baratham's first novel, Sayang, the manufacture of new drugs by the renegade chemist Klaus Holle represents not bohemian subversion but technological advance; addiction to narcotics simply extends an existing logic of consumerism.
