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criticism
Contemporary literary criticism in
the Philippines: preliminary notes*
by J.
Neil C. Garcia
What I will read to you this afternoon
comes out of my experience editing The Likhaan Book
of Philippine Criticism, a project of the Likhaan:
UP Creative Writing Center. As such, my remarks are
going to gravitate around the fact that for this book,
I have needed to profess my dual loves, to wear my two
hats—as poet and as literary critic—and
to do so in the least schizoid manner I could manage.
After giving my observations regarding the current state
of literary criticism in the country—both as it
is practiced in most collegiate classrooms, and as it
is textually produced, chiefly in the national center,
Manila—I shall provide a brief summary of the
best local criticism that has been written in English
in recent years. I shall accomplish this by classifying
the different critical essays that I selected in
The Likhaan Book, and by describing, rather briefly,
those particular works of criticism that may be said
to be more remarkable than the rest. It may not be a
completely irrelevant fact that most of them happen
to have been written by practicing writers. Admittedly,
my intention in this presentation is not so much a descriptive
as a polemical one. Just exactly what this polemic is
should become obvious early enough.
Over and again,
we've heard it preached: literary criticism, thanks
to Roland Barthes and the post-structuralists, need
not be literature's inimical or parasitic supplement,
inasmuch as both are instances of what has now been
routinely called text—a demonic production,
a stereographic plurality, an open-ended activity of
signification. [1] Thus, the creative text should
no longer be given interpretive primacy in the final
analysis, for what a critic reads into/writes about
it eventually becomes an inalienable part of it: an
intertext. And we have heard it said, in this
regard, that all texts are intertexts of some sort or
other.
While it
remains unclear whether this prescription to dismantle
the creative/critical binary has been followed seriously
in the West, certainly in the Philippines it would seem
to be how things are and most likely will always be:
over the years, our writers have demonstrated themselves
to be rather avid purveyors of literary criticism, either
of their own or other writers’ works.
In 1998,
I enjoyed the good fortune of editing The Likhaan
Book of Philippine Criticism, which was intended
to be a decennial anthology of the best essays of literary
criticism being written in English by Filipinos about
the various literatures of the Philippines. Of the fact
that a mutually inclusive relationship, if only by virtue
of provenance alone, obtains between creative writing
and the otherwise discrete activity of producing critiques
and literary analyses, this self-same book provides
eloquent proof. As it is, The Likhaan Book of Philippine
Criticism consists of twenty-three samples of “recent”
or “contemporary” Philippine literary criticism,
and it is part of a series of titles in Philippine literature
being put forth by the Likhaan, the Creative Writing
Center of the University of the Philippines, where I
serve as an associate for poetry. While the Likhaan,
as an institution, has always been known as a moving
force behind the sustained creation of literature in
this country, sponsoring yearly workshops for aspiring
writers in various languages and genres, it is only
with the publication of this critical anthology that
it may be said to officially acknowledge—at long
last!—its gleeful complicity with that amazing
open secret: writers, if only in this part of the textual
world, make for the best critics.
But there
is a good reason why this is so, in our case more poignantly
than in Europe or America: as with every other local
field of knowledge, literature’s boundaries are
immensely permeable to whatever surrounds it. Needless
to say, life in these islands has not been rationalized
to the same degree it has in the modern and/or postmodern
West: it remains possible—if not likely—that
anyone will have to practice more than one expertise,
traffic in more than one conversation, eke out more
than one kind of living, just to make ends meet hereabouts.
Local writers have been known to ghost-write propaganda
for the powers that be, to conduct classes in corporate
or business English, copy-write advertisements, hack-write
columns and feature articles for the dailies, “sell
their souls,” as it were, so why shouldn’t
they also crank out pages of occasional criticism? Indeed,
as far as we are concerned, writing about literature
may well be of a piece with writing literature—or
at least, the passion they require may well be one and
the same. (And our writers most probably arrived at
this wondrous piece of knowledge despite their ignorance
of post-structuralism and Barthes’s famous admonishing).
Moreover,
Filipino writers who do criticism on the side are invariably
also academics, as the dossiers of the contributors
to The Likhaan Book should indicate. In fact,
this anthology is a distinctly academic undertaking,
if not an academic undertaking of the metropolitan kind.
And in this respect, it bears mentioning, too, that
there exists a sharp disjuncture between the kind of
criticism these essays represent, and the practical,
“classroom criticism” being conducted by
literature teachers all over the country today.
Five years
ago, I participated as a fellow in the first national
writers workshop to be held in Iligan City. It was a
unique and enlightening experience, to say the least,
for other than the usual workshop, the event also brought
together a number of college and university teachers
of language and literature from all over the Visayas
and Mindanao.
Aside from
attending their own sessions on pedagogy, the teachers
were made to observe how older writers tore apart younger
writers’ manuscripts, for the ostensible purpose
of teaching them the intricacies of the sullen art.
At the end of each workshop, the teachers were allowed
to share their opinions and ask questions about the
works just discussed, which unexpectedly gave me and
my fellow writers invaluable insights into the state
of literary appreciation outside our immediate circles
of writers-teachers back in the national capital. I,
for one, came away from that workshop at once humbled
and disabused: the practical criticism that existed
in the country at large had very little resemblance
with what I had always thought to be the case, which
of course was what I believed to be desirable, for it
was how I wished my own works to be received.
As a writer,
it saddened me to realize that, in the main and even
under the best of circumstances, the literature I wrote
was being criticized in the classroom as being largely
a question of message or theme, the form of which was
of little consequence to its overall appreciation, and
moreover — horrors! — as a message that
needed to be evaluated as being either good or bad.
But let me say this, as well: I cast these foregoing
sentences in the past tense not because I think this
condition no longer obtains — indeed, as fecundated
by my readings in Philippine history, my thoughts on
the matter more and more convince me it can only ever
obtain
[2] - but that I no longer feel the same about
it. No longer sad or horrified, I mean.
For there
is another way of looking at this peculiar state of
literary affairs: while it is true that the “moral
criticism” being perpetrated in virtually all
Philippine schools is bound to overlook the specific
nature of texts of literature (as distinct from other
texts, for instance), recently I have come to see that
this may not be such a terrible thing, after all. Indeed,
hasn’t the search for the “literariness”
of literature been declared a form of misguided scientism
everywhere in Euro-American civilization? It would seem,
yet again, that despite the absence of the particular
historical conditions that brought about a certain cultural
practice in the West, our own culture has managed, surprisingly
enough, to evince its own distinct, yet comparable,
practice.
We already
know that most forms of contemporary criticism in the
West do not even pretend that reading and writing are
neutral, value-free acts. Post-colonial, feminist, anti-homophobic,
cultural materialist, new historicist, Marxist and other
current schools of literary and cultural theory are
avowedly politically committed and even confrontationally
so. How different can our local criticism be from such
newfangled criticisms when, just like them, it is acutely
cognizant of literature’s practical value, its
function within the culture that produces it, its nature
as a social discourse?
Of course
there is a vital difference, come to think: contemporary
Western criticism is the way it is—which is to
say, political—precisely because it used to be
otherwise. Thus, none of the many -isms that populate
the field of literary studies in Europe and America
these days is completely uninformed by formalism (the
high-point of which being the many variants of structuralism),
which is something that definitely cannot be said of
the practical criticism being advanced in most Philippine
classrooms. In the first place, the ethos that propels
the moral imperative in our culture’s dominant
reading practices is arguably different from the ethos
behind these contemporary western theories. Although
critical of the objectivist pretense attending much
of formalist thought, these theories otherwise deploy
the vast arsenal of formalist-derived categories painstakingly
evolved over the past century by the many specialists
in the field of literary studies.
Thus, there
is always some kind of formalism required of every criticism,
if it should ever wish itself to be literary. I am convinced
it is the extent of its sophistication that distinguishes
every such criticism, including our own, which happens
not to have really very much of it. Of course, all this
does not change the fact that our practical criticism
is already, despite its limited use of literary terminology,
irreparably functional anyway, subjecting the
text to a purposeful reading in order to advance certain
extra-literary imperatives, of which the moralist and
the nationalist are arguably the most common and “correct.”
It seems most
literature teachers in our country expect good literature
to proffer a didactic gift: their delvings into any
text should ideally turn up religious and/or nationalist
nuggets of wisdom, for which they feel immensely rewarded
and turn incredibly happy. (At least in Iligan they
did). Just now I realize that, unlike what I previously
thought, there is a certain kind of pleasure that inheres
even in such an unassuming critical strategy. Such a
pleasure, though obviously different from Barthesian
jouissance, [3] may yet be analogous with it in certain ways, for it is
a pleasure that inescapably accrues from a process of
interpretation, from one’s intimate experience
with words as they exist on the written page.
Yet again, we cannot so easily dismiss this admittedly
“crude” approach to reading literature,
for the very reason it has persisted all these years
is that it has proven itself adequate in the face of
what our society operatively is, and what it requires.
How else
can a criticism be if not socially adequate?
Allow me,
at this point in my paper, to confound my own previous
pronouncement: there isn’t such a sharp disjuncture,
after all, between the criticism the pieces in the anthology
I edited purvey, and the ubiquitous practiced criticism
I have been speaking of, except perhaps for the former’s
vaster knowledge and greater use of formalist terms
and categories.
Thus, on the
one hand, we can expect to encounter a nuanced vocabulary
in these essays that denotes increasingly complex literary
concepts, while, on the other, classroom criticism confines
itself to the barest minimum of such concepts. The purposefulness
of the critical enterprise in both endeavors is undeniably
the same, however: there are ends toward which the reading
directs itself in each and every essay in this book,
ends which must — just like the way a typical
literature teacher in our country probably rounds off
her discussion of a poem or a story — be made
to serve a meaning/purpose outside the mere enjoyment
of words as words.
In fact, the
pieces in The Likhaan Book of Philippine Criticism
were selected for a variety of reasons, some of which
cannot be spelled out — might it help if I put
it as a question, simply, of “taste”? —
although the most salient may well be this: ultimately,
they must be as zealous as the “moral-seeking”
teacher is with regard to literature’s practical
function. (And I am sure they are, despite the cool
and sober sophistication of their formalist language).
If only to satisfy this requisite I did not, my previously
avowed hubris notwithstanding, limit my choices to criticism
that had been penned by creative writers alone.
A second
consideration that guided my selection is this: in spite
of “cultural studies” and the blurring of
genres customary to much of contemporary criticism,
the object of attention of the chosen essay must still
be, or primarily include, a Philippine literary text
— whether or not it be in English. Hence, unlike
a recent important anthology of “translocal essays
on Filipino cultures,” [4] for this project I had to forego essays that, though intriguing
in their assumptions and ruminations about the textuality
of everyday life, did not pay respects to any particular
local works of drama, fiction or poetry.
I am aware
that this editorial decision to exclude non-literary
criticism shall be taken, finally, as this collection’s
greatest limitation, but as an editor of any anthology
should know, I had to be willing to sacrifice certain
usefulnesses in order to propagate and assure others.
Since there is a dearth of venues for literary criticism
in our country today — indeed, since there is
a dearth of literary criticism per se — I thought
it vital to devote this book’s energies to just
the rectifying of this sad situation. If I am not mistaken,
this may well be the first time that an anthology of
this sort is being put out in our country’s relatively
short literary history, and it is the Likhaan’s
wish — even as, after more than half-a-year of
tracking down articles and poring over manuscripts,
it may never again be mine — to pursue this project
on a more or less regular basis.
While a few
of them were solicited, the bulk of these essays came
from established inter- or multi-disciplinary journals
like Philippine Studies and Diliman Review,
as well as the lesser known publications of English
and literature departments of certain universities in
the metropolis. I have grouped them according to what
I perceive to be their “performative tasks”
— that is to say, what I think they are actually
trying to do, given their specific interpretive talents
and obsessions. In this part of my paper, I will describe,
in rather broad but hopefully vivid strokes, what I
perceive to be the main interpretive preoccupations
of contemporary literary criticism in the Philippines—to
my mind there are four—and will summarize some
of the studies that best exemplify each of these. In
the following exposition, my intention isn’t to
analyze, but merely to present and describe, in what
I would like to believe is an early or preliminary exploration
into this area of inquiry.
The first
critical project I have found is one which attempts
to carry out a kind of “survey” of certain
texts, if not certain aspects of Philippine literature.
As any Filipino academic will recall, the end of the
1990s saw a flurry of conferences, fora and publications
whose purpose was as fervidly nationalist as it was
nostalgic and/or evaluative—obviously serving
to complement if not discursively perform the Centennial
of the Filipino Revolution Against Spain. Not to be
caught napping, Philippine literary criticism enthusiastically
partook of this celebratory moment.
Poet and
short story writer, Gemino H. Abad, taking issue with
Bernad’s famous put-down — having to do
with how Philippine literature in English is “perpetually
inchoate” — maps out the topography of Philippine
poetry in English in his essay that forms the introduction
to the third volume of his well-known anthology series
on Philippine poetry in English. In his critical survey,
Abad discovers a wondrous and rich landscape covering
three distinct but overlapping terrains: romantic, new
critical, and post-structural. Citing specific poems
from each of these “phases,” Abad demonstrates
the specific concerns and skills that both distinguish
and unify these three movements in our poetry. In the
end, he avers that “the (Filipino) poet must...
liberate himself constantly from both his language and
his subject.”
Bilingual
poet Rofel G. Brion examines in another study the intriguing
“lessons” embedded in a number of recent
Filipino novels in English. Predictably enough, these
lessons link these novels with the tradition of other
forms of local literature (for instance, the Tagalog
novel), as well as other postcolonial literatures in
“english” (some critics would insist, in
englishes) being written/ read in the world today.
Didacticism, alienation, communal memory, myth-making,
and the conscious (or unconscious) appropriation and
sabotage of the English language are preoccupations
and themes common to all the novels Brion studies, and
he surmises, at the end of his preliminary and provisional
work, these same qualities may collectively adumbrate
a kind of “aesthetics.”
Playwright
and short story writer Isagani R. Cruz subjects the
works of criticism of three Filipino poets/ critics
to a comparative analysis, and uncovers an astonishing,
almost counter-intuitive fact: none of these poets/critics—namely:
Ricaredo Demetillo, Ophelia Dimalanta and Gemino Abad—remained
mired in the bliss of their New Critical ignorance for
long, inasmuch as their more recent ruminations on poetry
may be seen to already reveal a less Eurocentric, more
locally situated, post-colonial consciousness. In another
part of his essay, Cruz criticizes the universalist
theories of literature internalized by even our own
critics and writers, and argues about the need to view
these, like everything else, as constituting specific
forms of a limited and culture-bound ethno-knowledge.
Somewhat
coming from a different position, newly declared National
Artist, Edith L. Tiempo, tempers this relativist spirit
with a caveat in her paper on national unity from 1994:
there really are universal themes — “laughter,
wounds that never heal, the never-to-be in this life,
the endangered and dangerous environment of humankind”
— and it would do Filipino writers well to allow
these themes into their imaginative worlds, regardless
of what the nationalist imperative under which they
labor should decree.
The second
kind of critical essays is one that sets out to analyze
individual authors and/or texts. As in a great majority
of contemporary studies, the works falling under this
classification employ a number of textual strategies
and methodologies, the deconstructive (or a purported
though not necessarily credible “brand”
of it) being the most common, if not most commonly avowed.
In a study
that appeared in the inter-disciplinary journal, Mindanao
Forum, southern poet and short story writer Jaime
An Lim considers what has been said of Nick Joaquin’s
famous three-act play, “Portrait of the Artist
as Filipino,” and after undertaking his own fastidious
and impressive reading of the text concludes that its
form, contrary to the prevailing critical wisdom, is
“open”: the choice and treatment of characters,
the devices of irony and paradox, modes of presentation,
the oppositions of concepts and metaphors in this play
all undermine its apparent structural rigidity. Thus,
the form of “Portrait...” may be said to
echo most faithfully its theme: disintegration, things
falling apart, an Old World teetering on the brink and
finally falling into Chaos. But An Lim’s essay,
religious at heart, chooses to end on a note of hope,
as does Joaquin’s much-pondered text: the dream,
the memory of the artist shall keep the vision of art’s
glory ever shining and resplendent.
In a textured
study by food and theater critic, Doreen G. Fernandez,
the reader is taken on a guided tour of an actual extant
komedya, "Princesa Miramar at Prinsipe Leandro."
She discusses not only the text of this particular example
of local community theater, but also the nature of the
theater experience itself. In loving detail, she describes
the barrio of San Dionisio in Parañaque, whose members
participate in the staging of "Princesa Miramar..."
in rather real and immediate ways: while merely serving
as the outside context in which the play occurs, they
are yet free to "enter" it at will. Indeed, Fernandez
concludes that "Princesa Miramar..." occupies the nexus
of three concentric and interimplicating worlds: the
textual core, which is the story of Leandro and Miramar's
love; the interior layer of historical allusions and
aesthetic modes that have sedimented around the komedya
as a form of communal performance and literature;
and the exterior community of San Dionisio itself, committed
to the komedya as a form of devotion to their
beloved saint.
In an essay
written by Lolita Rodriguez Lacuesta that appeared in
Philippine Studies, we have a study, written
in English, about the works of a writer in Filipino,
in particular, Liwayway A. Arceo’s stories which
were written during her first decade as a published
writer. Lacuesta identifies the themes and techniques
present in these ninety-nine stories, and concludes
that despite her traditional concern with the theme
of love, Arceo is a literary modernist who eschewed
the blatant didacticism of Tagalog literature, as well
as infused freshness and individuality into her stories
and characters. It would also appear that even at an
early age — she started writing these stories
when she was barely out of her teens — Arceo already
possessed a kind of political, “proto-feminist”
consciousness.
And also,
there's a study written by a US-residing Filipino academic,
Jorshinelle T. Sonza, who looks at Eric Gamalinda's
third novel, The Empire of Memory, and assigns
to it a revolutionary project, a narrative transgressiveness
that seeks to discursively reinvent the Filipino nation
by allowing the contraries of empire — the ambivalences
of colonizer and colonized — to be caught within
“the deadlock of history,” thereby endowing
the “masses” with the agency to dismantle
this very same logic that has wickedly governed their
lives. Sonza concludes: with this novel, “Gamalinda
dismantles colonial narration, releases the people’s
story from its containment, and expands closure.”
The third
preoccupation I perceive to be endemic to Philippine
literary criticism of late is the feminist. I may be
wrong about this, but in terms of frequency and prevalence
alone, feminist and/.or quasi-feminist criticism has
become the most popular brand — if not "style"
— of local literary analysis nowadays.
Short story
writer and poet, Jhoanna Lynn. B. Cruz, writes about
Ruth Elynia Mabanglo’s poem-cycle, Mga Liham
ni Pinay, and faults it for not being cognizant
of the allure of phallocentrism, a problem which can
most acutely be seen in Mabanglo’s inability —
or unwillingness — to “deconstruct sexual
difference” in some if not all of the seven poems
in question. Thus, the female personae in these poems,
though arguably aware of their oppression, invariably
remain trapped in it. In any case, Cruz maintains that
Mabanglo remains important as a woman poet in the Philippines
— even though she leaves more to be desired as
far as her feminism is concerned — because, despite
her shortcomings, she occasionally succeeds in inverting
the usual order of privilege attending certain phallic
economies: public and private, rational and irrational,
proper and obscene.
Filipino-American
Ninotchka Rosca’s second novel, Twice Blessed,
is the subject of a critique written by short story
writer and De La Salle professor Connie J. Maraan. Maraan
sees reading this text as the perfect occasion for carrying
out both post-colonial and feminist investigations.
Going by this particular analysis, Rosca would seem
to believe that the contemporary Filipino woman suffers
from both colonial and patriarchal oppressions, and
yet, as a story-teller, she inevitably finds comfort
in the fact that history is an open-ended process, an
unfinished story, as it were, of change. Maraan proposes
the controversial thesis that Rosca’s own experience
informs such an insight, and that this novel is about
her life as a “twice oppressed” woman whose
own name — a strange concatenation of consonants
and vowels that troubles any confident assumptions about
her identity (is it even a woman’s name? might
she be Russian?) — betokens a kind of escape from
this double bind.
Cristina
Pantoja Hidalgo, seasoned fictionist and travel writer,
in a paper she delivered for her professorial chair
lecture at the UP Diliman, examines some stories written
by five Filipino women. In her study, Hidalgo concludes
that it is through their use of the young girl protagonist
that these particular writers — as well as, presumably,
other women writers coming from the same social background
as theirs — have explored otherwise improper “erotic”
and “egotistic” desires. This may be because
the female adolescent figure is technically, psychologically,
and socially more suited to facilitate these explorations
than either the girl-child or the adult woman. From
a close reading of stories by Kerima Polotan-Tuvera,
Aida Rivera Ford, Lina Espina-Moore, Rosario Cruz-Lucero
and Ninotchka Rosca, Hidalgo concludes that the dissident
and repressed fantasies of middle-class Filipino women
have found their legitimate expression — at least,
for these writers they have — in the wonderings
and wanderings of the young female ingenue.
Because of
the Centennial "fever" that inflamed (some would say,
"afflicted") local academia in the last decade, critical
re-readings of the novels by national hero Jose Rizal
were inevitable. Obviously, even if not especially to
such an enterprise, feminist critics had more than a
mouthful to contribute.
Dancing careful
and wide-eyed attendance on Rizal’s most theatrical
scene in his Noli Me Tangere - the one in which
the terrifying "muse of the guardia civil," Doña
Consolacion, orders the madwoman Sisa to dance at the
end of her whip - Albina Peczon Fernandez comes up with
a kind of bravura though somewhat attenuated performance
of her own in her symptomatic reading of "women and
the arts in and out of blank space." In a series of
quick and dizzyingly disingenuous steps, Fernandez argues
that Rizal had been keenly aware of the "woman question"
before and around the time he wrote his first novel,
and that he made use of the figure of art - embodied
in the novel, tropologically, as variants of music/song
- in order to connect as well as proffer answers to
the different yet interrelated oppressions experienced
by his disenfranchised female characters: Maria Clara,
Sisa, and Doña Consolacion.
An interesting
neo-Marxist feminist reading can be seen in the work
of Neferti Xina M. Tadiar who, in a piece specifically
submitted for the anthology, establishes a poetic and
insightful nexus among the operations of “time,
body and madness” in a short story written in
Filipino by Luna Sicat, which appeared in Forbidden
Fruit, the first (and so far, last) collection of
erotic writings by Filipino women. Writing in the hortatory
“we” of feminism, Tadiar enjoins the Filipina
reader to, like the nameless woman who makes love to
a feminine-coded embodiment of Time in Sicat’s
story, “bring (madness) into the world, make (it)
flow over the world, let it run, let it do to the world
what it will.” In the end, the bodies of women
will realize themselves more fully not just as continuities
in time, but as discrete yet interleaving moments of
space, as “surface areas beyond the modern corporeal
units (women) are forced to inhabit.”
The fourth
and last project carried out in recent literary criticism
may be distinguished by the varying degrees of and affinities
with historicism with which the critics infused their
respective analyses and readings. Personally, I find
these critiques to be the most challenging to read and,
in the end, the most rewarding as well: not only do
they implicate and interimplicate a variety of textual
approaches that we are mostly familiar with—like
deconstruction and “close reading”—they
are also the most satisfying in that they devote a great
deal of their interpretive energies to elucidating the
material and historical contexts within which both text
and criticism must necessarily occur. I find that historicism—which
can be Foucauldian, Marxist, post-feminist, antihomophobic,
postcolonial, subaltern, or any novel cross-hatchings
of these—provides what is currently the best critical
reading strategy that needs to be increasingly employed
by more Filipino literary scholars, for it is the most
thoughtful, context-sensitive and specifying criticism
to date.
A Filipino-American
poet, John David Blanco, comes up with a fresh and cogent
reading of Rizal — that is to say, a select handful
of his works, chiefest of which are the Noli and
his letters to a Jesuit priest, Fr. Pastells —
as well as of Rizal himself. In all "texts,"
Blanco perceives a "wondrous economy" characterized
by a series of re-turns (that is to say, exchanges):
a coming back to origins, a redemption, a payment of
a debt, a restitution. This economy is wondrous precisely
because it ends with the giving of a marvelous gift:
in Rizal's case, his gift of life (for which he had
to die), which is like "a treasure thrown into the sea,"
a mysterious bequest that we can choose to sell, forget,
or respect.
Short story
writer Caroline Hau has a critical study, “The
Mismanagement of Grief: Kidnapping the Chinese in the
Philippines” that first appeared in the new UP
journal, Public Policy. Hau's essay is a timely
and crucial intervention and exemplifies just how criticism
can be practically useful, can even spell the difference
between life and death: by examining the discourse surrounding
the horrendous spate of kidnappings directed at the
Chinese community in the Philippines, Hau proves that
the response of such Chinese Filipino entities as KAISA
(Kaisa Para sa Kaunlaran) and Filipino-Chinese fictionist
Charlson Ong are failures of criticism. After carrying
out perspicacious readings of a story by Ong, as well
as of the pronouncements of KAISA through its staunchest
proponent, Teresita Ang See, Hau argues that appealing
to citizenship - to the Filipinoness of the Chinese
Filipinos - cannot completely negate the popular conflation
of Chineseness and excessive wealth that propels these
incidents of kidnapping. To the degree that this appeal
is addressed to the state - hence, to the degree that
the Chinese Filipino response remains circumscribed
by statist ideology - it is bound to misapprehend the
fraternity with every other Filipino that it wishes
to achieve. Thus, the problem of Chinese-specific kidnapping
- as well as its solution - needs to be worked out within
the broader context of the Philippine class struggle.
In her study
of the Pangasinan zarzuela at the turn of the
century and during the opening years of the American
occupation, Priscelina Patajo Legasto uncovers and explicates
the ideological machinations of the anacbanua (the
local ruling elite or principalia) that used
this popular cultural form to consolidate its economic
influence, and thus perpetuate its ascendancy. It tried
to do this by typically demonizing the non-Pangasinan
and other peoples (Ilokanos, Chinese and Chinese mestizos
chiefly) who threatened its supremacy, at the same time
that it wrestled with the difficult question of the
national revolution.
In an essay
that must have been reincarnated at least thrice in
the last decade, sometime-fictionist E. San Juan Jr.
asks the obviously rhetorical though nonetheless vexing
question: Whose America is being reclaimed by Filipinos
writing in the United States? In the face of the unremitting
erasure and denigration of their culture and identity,
Filipino writers in America, San Juan contends, need
to cultivate a “critical transformative discourse”
that will seek to preserve the residual and resistant
aspects of their Filipino nationality. To this end,
Juan proposes a literary pantheon of sorts, with the
works of Carlos Bulosan as the primal pinnacle, the
fiction by Bienvenido Santos and NVM Gonzalez as exemplars
of how Filipinos have successfully negotiated the experience
of dislocation and exile, and Villa’s poetry as
“salvageable for counterhegemonic articulation.”
The exciting surge in recent Filipino writing in the
U.S., represented by such com-mercially successful authors
as Jessica Hagedorn, Marianne Villanueva, and Michelle
Skinner, also signifies a welcome development.
In another
interesting study-one that first came out in the Diliman
Review-Neferti Xina M. Tadiar provides a persuasively
argued critique of Jose Y. Dalisay Jr.'s novel, Killing
Time in a Warm Place. In her essay, Tadiar locates
at the heart of this text a secret, a “fantasy,”
whose unveiling is precisely what her essay attempts
to perform. She takes this novel as a symptom of the
unequal history of Philippine-American relations, and
it serves to display to the global market economy the
image/commodity of the alienation of its Filipino protagonist,
who identifies himself with the Other (America) only
because he knows — that is to say, he fantasizes
— that this Other owns everything in his world,
including even the revolution he used to believe in,
his own wished for redemption, his very soul. Thus,
the secret of this text is the form of its desire-fantasy:
a transnational novel meant to feed the scopic and self-affirming
demands of the global, late capitalist economy.
And so, a
cursory glance at the selected essays in this anthology
reveals to us some broadly obtaining characteristics
and concerns: based on who produces it and where it
is published, criticism written in English of
Philippine literature is solidly and almost exclusively
located in Metromanila; nearly all current schools of
Filipino literary thought about local literature and
literary appreciation purvey and evince a social dimension,
which is something they share with practical "classroom"
criticism, despite the paucity in the latter's store
of literary terminology, or its vastly impoverished
formalism; contemporary literary criticism in the Philippines
employs a variety of methods and textual strategies,
the deconstructive—or at least a putative though
not necessarily rigorous version of it—being the
most dominant, if not the most avowed; and lastly, the
best (because most attentive) instances of criticism,
at least insofar as the past six years and the selected
pieces in this anthology are concerned, have been penned
by creative writers themselves.
On the other
hand, if it should prove possible or necessary to endorse
a specific set of literary approaches, it is the post-feminist
and historicist studies that would seem to be the most
desirable to undertake, inasmuch as they lovingly attend
to issues that would seem to be most vitally important
to both the Filipino writing community, and well as
to its presumptively politicized public.
In conclusion,
I'd like to recur to an issue I raised earlier on in
this paper, one salient to the "name" under which I
find myself falling in this afternoon's panel after
all, which is the rather daunting and quizzical "Creative
Writing and Culture." The way I choose to handle this
now is by asking the related questions: What business
do creative writers have writing literary criticism,
and indeed, what business does a creative writing center
have putting out an anthology of literary criticism?
Perhaps the
best answer to both queries isn’t anything specially
complex or befuddling, but the haughtily interrogative:
More than anybody else, writers care for literature
— which is why they go through such great lengths
to produce it — so why shouldn’t they also
write about literature? Part of that caring,
I suppose, is assuring that literary texts assume an
increasingly powerful role in this world. (A self-important
delusion all writers cultivate, to be sure). Other than
helping young writers through the tortuous defiles of
their craft within the purview of a workshop, it would
seem that the second best thing a writing center¾in
a cultural setting such as ours—can do to help
literature along is precisely to sponsor more and more
books like this one. For if anything, The Likhaan
Book of Philippine Criticism proves that, over the
past decade, someone out there—or, seeing as how
nearly all the contributors to this book are writers
themselves, someone in here-has actually bothered
to read.
And let me
end with something befuddling, after all: only when
a text is read does it begin to be written.
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