Chosen by others

I suspected, as I was typing it, that last week’s piece on F. Sionil Jose would provoke a little firestorm, and sure enough I got a load of mail–much of it, I must say, supportive of Mr. Jose, and chiding me gently for being too persnickety about Frankie’s faults. The general drift seemed to be that a lot of people out there appreciated Jose’s fiction. Well, good for them, I say, and good for Frankie, too, if not for all of the rest of us in this keyboard-pecking fraternity.

Like someone said, when the tide comes in, all the ships in the harbor rise. The fact is, whatever happens to Frankie Jose in Manila, New York, or Sweden can only be good for all Filipino writers, his fans and detractors alike. Every reader of his is a potential reader of ours, and even this controversy that’s been swirling for years around his head like a wreath of flies arouses popular interest in what would otherwise remain a boring academic exercise. Literary controversies are also useful because they often reveal something interesting–less about the works or the writers in question than about ourselves, where we come from, and what we value.

If you enjoy Frankie Jose’s fiction, please do–and I say that with no irony whatsoever, having no intention of taking any of your pleasure away from you. That doesn’t mean your standards are any lower or higher than mine, just different. But humor me as well with my displeasure, which is frankly and fiercely premised more on personal predisposition than on the sound science that much of literary criticism today pretends or aspires to be. (In this space, let the contemporary critic now enter a comment about PenMan’s "subject position.")

I certainly don’t have to like Jose’s work just because nearly everyone else does; "to like" is different from "to appreciate," which I think I do, to some extent–as a teacher, I appreciate the purpose and the import of F. Sionil Jose’s work (what I’ve read of it, anyway); as a reader reading another writer, I’m left very unhappy, and wanting more. But that’s just me, and it doesn’t have to be you.

Neither should I like a work because some critic–august or upstart–says I have to. People read for different reasons and look for all kinds of different things in what they read–and this is why authors, for their part, provide a melange of genres, subjects, treatments, and styles (not to forget philosophies and ideologies). And thank God they do, or we’d all be staring at the same wall, pondering the same cracks, admiring the same butterflies, and squashing the same bugs.

I don’t read fiction for political correctness; Lord knows I get enough of that in school. I don’t read novels just to be told what I already know, or know enough to expect. I’m not thrilled by the merely familiar, and if I want to be lectured on what’s wrong with Philippine society and the economy I’d much rather sit in the back rows of those symposia organized by the Philippine Economic Society or some such gathering of experts.

I read stories to be charmed, surprised, amazed, disturbed in ways I never thought I would be, whether through plot, characterization, the sheer force of language, or a combination of all these. A reviewer I read a few weeks ago put it much better than I could: "We don’t go to the short story for simple reality. We go to sense our secrets suggested. The short story writer, like the poet, must restrain language and intensify experience until it is almost unbearably loaded with significance." He was looking, he said, for the "uneasy magic, mysterious motivation, and confounding inevitability that characterize truly great stories."

That said, let’s go take a look at what others have had to say about this issue (before I return, next week, to more preposterous preoccupations; I was actually writing this piece on a chihuahua named Hades when all the e-mail came in). Let me reprint, with very minor edits to save space, a letter from Charlie Veric, a former student of mine who now teaches at the Ateneo:

Dear Butch,

Let me go to the heart of things: I find your assessment of F. Sionil Jose unkind and historically famished. It seems it has always been a season of Jose-bashing in perfumed literary coteries outside of the University of Sto. Tomas.

All this violence directed at Jose, indeed, is the complete opposite of what southern mandarin Resil Mojares thinks of Jose. Mojares’ critical intelligence generously makes Jose the other Jose Rizal of the past millenium. For Mojares, Jose’s contribution in the creation of a national cultural imagination that forms the so-called body of Filipino nation is simply indispensable.

Pardon me but there is so much snobbery in your statement so characteristic of a literature teacher in a provincial Catholic high school. Say for example this one: "I can’t stand poorly constructed sentences, longwinded speeches, two-dimensional characterization, and heavy handed symbolism." No scholar, however, would damn foundational writers in English like Manuel Arguilla for their poorly constructed sentences. In the short fiction "Midsummer," Arguilla writes: "He placed the dripping bucket on a flat stone. The bull drank. ‘Son of lightning!’ he said..." One says "son of lightning!" these days and one becomes a joke, not a canonical writer.

As I read your fine-letter attacks against Jose, I hear the echo of Villa’s bones rattling in his grave. I can’t help but be haunted by the ghost of Villa whose hope’s whiteness has faded into forgetting. But history, thanks very much, has a way of rewarding those who respect history itself. Who can ignore the fact that the most incorrigible Filipino aesthete – Villa himself– now lives after his death only to sustain, alas, the nostalgia of head-banging writers like Hagedorn. In American academia, for example, it is Bulosan who is now read not only as literature but also as a fine example of literature acting as a kind of memory of a displaced people. Bulosan himself had nothing really good to say about Villa. As Bulosan said in one of his letters, Villa "deserves a line or two, but nothing more, since to me he does not represent the growth of our literature. Rather, he is a phenomenon, an artist who expresses a declining culture after it has reached its height.."

But you are correct to point out that Jose’s reputation abroad, i.e., Southeast Asia, lies delicately in his body of work. "A pillow," you say, "of about a dozen fat books." You attribute Jose’s so-called dubious reputation to his professional and promotional networking. This, I’m sorry to say, is very naive. Who does not promote himself? Every writer who publishes his work promotes his work and, eventually, sells his authorship if not his own self. More importantly, no student of literature in the Philippines can ignore the contribution of Jose in re-establishing our literary and cultural affinity with Asia in general and Southeast Asia in particular. Without a doubt, the journal Solidarity that Jose edits is one of the most active fora covering issues that shape our daily life and the future of our writing as children of Southeast Asian geography.

But of course, let me clarify that I do not defend "Jose" we know as the rabid anti-Chinese and anti-communist old man of letters. I am arguing for "Jose" the novelist who has a clear vision of the contradictions that persist like a bad dream in our country.

Lastly, I submit this question in all humility: do we have to thank you for not objecting to Jose’s nomination and eventual declaration as National Artist of this sad republic that we all suffer from and suffer through in order to achieve our country? Thank you very much for finally articulating your position regarding how to write in this country of daily revolutions.

Eternally your student,

Charlie Samuya Veric :)

Well, Charlie, what can I say? Maybe just a few things, to keep this brief and lively:

1. I thought I was being kind–very kind. You haven’t seen unkind, which I’m not inclined to demonstrate, either. When I was starting out in PR as a brash twentysomething, I had the audacity to remind my old boss Gerry Sicat that some people in the media were being "unkind" to us. "The point," Dr. Sicat told me and taught me forevermore, "is not to be kind, but to be fair."

2. "Son of lightning!" isn’t a poorly constructed sentence, but an idiom you might call quaint, if typical of a prewar English finding its way in the Philippine countryside, at which no one did better than Arguilla. "Midsummer" is one of the best and best-written Filipino short stories ever, in my book.

3. I admire and teach Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, but face it, Villa just creams him in insight and influence as a poet. Don’t let poor-boy romanticism get in the way of your judgment; don’t ask the historians about poetry, ask the poets.

4. "[Which writer] does not promote himself?" Alas, far too many. We’re talking here about the business, Charlie, not theory. And here we all have a lot to learn from Mr. Jose.

5. Do you have to thank me for Frankie Jose’s National Artist award? Devilishly, I wish–but no. I would’ve been terribly outvoted on that panel, anyway, and so, faced with a choice between a long and short meeting with the same certain outcome, I chose the latter. That’s kindness.

Speaking of former students, I’m indebted to another one, Maan Tobias, a very talented young writer of fiction who just passed the bar exams (congrats!), for this quotation from André Maurois, used by Maan as her e-mail signature: "In literature, as in love, we are astonished by what is chosen by others." Amen!