Frankly, Frankie

Let me apologize first of all for failing to send in a column last week. I was in New York City, where you’d expect to find an Internet workstation in every corner – but no. As I was surprised to discover during my three-week jaunt across America from California to Wisconsin and Michigan to New York and back, Internet cafes are few and far between in this mecca of high technology – maybe because nearly everyone has an Internet connection at home or at work.

I finally found what I was looking for on W. 42nd Street – sorry, guys, not Peepworld or one of those bump-and-grind (and more) joints I remember fondly from my first visit to the district as a young man – but a two-floor, 800-machine operation billing itself as the world’s largest Internet cafe, and I could believe it was. This "easyeverything" shop – an American extension of a highly popular British chain – had wall-to-wall computer screens all hooked up to what I could only imagine to be a server the size of Brooklyn. You could get online for about two dollars an hour, and there was a long queue of people waiting to get on a free machine.

There, I thought, was the future, lived today, America at its cutting-edge best. I had come to the States on the trail of a new technotoy – the latest Macintosh iBook laptop – and found it in New York in a fourth-floor walk-up shop run by hippies on E. 23rd Street. Just two blocks away, and just a few days later, I would pore over the stalls of Manhattan’s weekend antiques market, looking at vintage fountain pens. At Duffy Square, overlooking the knots of people lining up for discount tickets to Broadway shows, a giant Nissin’s Ramen Cup-of-Noodles cup reminded you to take your noodles and your pleasures on the run.

What a wonderful town New York truly was, but I’ll spare you the snapshots – at least for now.

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I got an interesting letter that day by e-mail from Brian Botario who wanted to know what I thought of a critic’s comments made recently in another publication about newly named National Artist for Literature F. Sionil Jose’s writing. Lito Zulueta had written that Jose’s prose breathed "the air and spirit of his region, distinguished by its parched earth, its hardy people, its coruscating enigma," while most other Filipino writers in English "obscure(d) or even banish(ed) their roots in ‘elegant’ prose that is as polished as anything written by E.B. White or Catherine Cookson, but is otherwise as lifeless – and geography-lost – as anything written by literary parrots and apes. In contrast, Jose writes again and again in a fashion true to his roots and soul."

Brian generally agrees with this estimate, lamenting the observation that other authors (in Brian’s words, now) "don’t get beyond the grammar book and their college exegesis – the obsession with literary devices, basic structure, and ‘felicitous’ sentences."

This brings us back to some very old and contentious issues in writing – whom should we write for, what should we write about, and in what way? (And lurking behind these questions is another, perhaps more problematic, one: what kind of person should a writer be?) In our literature, these concerns have found a way of settling on the shoulders of F. Sionil Jose – the most prolific and widely published of our novelists, and, some would argue with a passion, our best one and our strongest candidate for the Nobel Prize.

Just as passionately, of course, others would say and have said that Jose has indeed written a lot – a lot of bad novels, that is, sloppily executed and poorly edited. It’s the old battle, at least on the surface and to put it simplistically, between the propagandists and the aesthetes, complicated by the fact that, in a literary culture where avuncular figures such as Franz Arcellana, Nick Joaquin, and the late Bienvenido Santos and NVM Gonzalez are held by their juniors in high esteem and deep affection, Frankie Jose comes across as being inordinately feisty and combative, given to such invidious remarks as "Don’t worry about form!"

All would agree, however, that Jose’s position is a unique if unenviable one – the proverbial prophet ignored or snubbed in his own country, but lionized abroad, or at least in Southeast Asia, where they only know two Filipino literary Joses – Rizal and F. Sionil. Fiction writer Charlson Ong put it best when he described Frankie Jose’s literary life as "a well-managed career," for indeed no other Filipino writer seems to have put so much deliberation and effort into the professional and promotional aspects of his work, especially those parts that come after the writing of the manuscript (something that Jose has apparently no trouble doing, unlike most of us). He has cultivated an extensive and impressive network of international contacts in literature, publishing, and journalism, and while others have traditionally turned to the West for inspiration and support, Jose has taken pains to build a name for himself in and around Asia, where his work is ensconced in many a literature syllabus, standing and speaking for the rest of us.

But it all begins and ends with the work – a solid body of novels and stories without which Frankie Jose wouldn’t have gotten the time of day from Random House. Here Jose’s strength derives from his material: the raw realities of Filipino life and politics, which no other Filipino novelist in English has dealt with in so sustained a manner. He’s pressed all the right buttons as far as subject is concerned: the land, the poverty, the oppression, the women. In other words, he’s dealt with our society as a novelist should, with the kind of scope and breadth the novel demands. He’s not the only one to have essayed this task, but how many of us have produced more than one or two novels of any heft? And no matter how skillful we Filipinos may have come to be at playing with English and nuancing the short story, it’s still the novel that commands international attention and respect – no judgment there, folks, just a fact of publishing life. You don’t write a novel, you don’t get published by Random House or Alfred Knopf or Penguin – if those things matter to you (and let’s be honest now, don’t they?).

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Do I like the way F. Sionil Jose writes? Frankly, Frankie, no. I’ve said as much over the years on various occasions, and I’m hardly the only one of this opinion – not that it matters to Mr. Jose. I’m sorry, Brian, but no matter how weighty the subject, I can’t stand poorly constructed sentences, longwinded speeches, two-dimensional characterization, and heavyhanded symbolism ("Salvador de la Raza"? Gimme a break.) It isn’t that I’m free of these faults myself; but just as I expect the President of the Republic to be a better person all around than I am, I should expect our National Artists and putative Nobel Prize candidates to be far better writers than me and my peanut-popping ilk. (Let me say, on the other hand, that other writers and critics I respect, such as Bien Lumbera, find Jose’s work "profoundly moving" and that I myself have been charmed by such Jose stories as "Waywaya" and impressed by his first novel, The Pretenders. It wouldn’t be right, either, to put Frankie’s critics down as mere synecdoche-smitten aesthetes with no sense of place or history; we just haven’t written as much. I always seek, in my own and my students’ work, some "Filipino element," whether the story takes place in Bicutan or Boston.)

That’s called carping, by the way, and it’s different when a writer carps about a fellow writer’s writing than when a lay reader writes in to complain about a lousy novel. The difference lies not only in that we should theoretically know more about what we’re carping about (very often, we don’t!), but also in the responsibility we impose upon ourselves to do something personally about the problem. If we don’t like the way Frankie Jose writes his novels, well, then maybe we ourselves should write what we suppose are better ones – something always, alas, easier said than done. Like I’ve often said over my seventh beer, we can carp all day about F. Sionil Jose’s prose, but in the end he’ll still go to bed and rest his head on a pillow of about a dozen fat books.

Perhaps now it can be said that a number of us – Jose fans and less-than-fans alike – found ourselves a couple of months ago on the committee that mulled over at one level the selection of this year’s National Artists for Literature. Inevitably, Jose’s name appeared on top of the short list, as it has for a good many years now. So what did I have to say? Pretty much everything I’ve said here – concluding with the statement that, considering Jose’s production and his contributions to raising the profile of Filipino fiction elsewhere on the planet, if he were to be formally nominated to become a National Artist, I would not object. It was a position echoed by one or two others around the table, and then yet others vouched for his merits with more conviction and enthusiasm, and there being no objections, no vote needed to be taken, and so Frankie Jose finally had his day.

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I’ll deal with more mail as the opportunity arises. Meanwhile, continue sending me e-mail at penmanila@yahoo.com...