The element of surprise
July 11, 2005 | 12:00am
Begging your indulgence for this personal aside, I went to a most unusual reunion a couple of weeks ago with my classmates from Section 7-D of La Salle Green Hills, who graduated from grade school in 1966, before EDSA, before Unimart, before Tropical Hut. I hadn’t seen most of them in nearly 40 years, and I was amazed – I should admit saddened – by how you could be a grinning boy in button-fly khaki shorts one minute and a balding, gout-ridden man the next, wondering where all the brightness and the bravado went.
The immediate occasion for our get-together was the visit of Chito Bautista, who had come home with his wife from two decades in America to bury his mother. I hardly recognized him; a curly mop of shiny black hair had topped his pixie-ish face back when he was still "Ramoncito," and now he had shaved it all. It seemed fitting for his job, which involved some aspect of homeland security. I was glad to see him, to thank him after all these years for small but memorable kindnesses that he and his late dad had done for me. Though a La Sallite (not yet "La Sallian," as the fashion seems to be these days), I came from a poor family, and while I developed no abiding resentments against the rich (I honestly envied them), I appreciated every gesture of goodwill I received – a sandwich from Leo Legaspi, a visit by Cesar Santos (now an Opus Dei priest), a grand ride home in Chito’s black Impala, and most of all, the assurance they gave me of being their friend and equal.
We took great pride in being of that section. "D" may mean "dunce" in other contexts, but 7-D was a class that had been specially selected and accelerated one year. We paid for our smartness by being bullied, being generally younger and smaller than our sudden peers.
That Tuesday dinner, names I hadn’t spoken in 40 years resurfaced with marginally new faces: Jun Ymson, Toffee Reyes, Mike Bongco, and Conrad Ricafort, among others. (Oh, yes, let’s not forget cineaste Ed Cabagnot, whom I see too often for our mutual comfort.) Conrad, always among our most articulate fellows, was now the spokesman of the Opus Dei – a fine foil, I thought amused, to this stubborn skeptic – though we both agreed that any change at the top, while apparently vital, would bring little relief without deeper change below.
When we graduated in 1966 with President Ferdinand Marcos as our guest speaker, La Salle Green Hills was a remarkable place to be. Three sons of the three presidential candidates of 1965 – Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Diosdado Macapagal Jr., and our batchmate Roberto Manglapus – were all there, in different years. At that point I began to feel the distance grow, and I didn’t step on that campus for another 35 years, thinking that I had missed little.
But last week, when the La Salle community came out with its statement mincing no words to demand accountability from the President – something my own university today has yet to do – I felt proud to have been a La Sallite, once upon a vanished youth. Animo, amigos!
A 35-year-old woman (let’s call her Laura) – unmarried, perhaps a teacher or a former nun or both – has just learned to drive a car, and is carefully going up the flyover on Katipunan Avenue. On the radio, she listens to a newscast and catches a snippet about a 17-year-old girl who was killed with two other friends the previous night in a horrible car crash on EDSA after a drinking binge.
Where’s the story, and if you just had another page to add, what would Laura do?
The novice writer – or one who hasn’t thought outside the box – will most likely have Laura make the Sign of the Cross and thank her stars that she’s followed the straight and narrow path all her life, firming up her grip on the steering wheel and resolving to teach that lesson in, uh, values formation with even greater conviction.
But if you let your imagination wander freely and refuse to simply accept 35-year-old single women as stereotypes (better not, or you’ll never hear the end of it), then more interesting possibilities emerge. What if, for example, upon hearing the tragic news, Laura pauses, but instead of plodding onward with all the deliberation of a, well, a schoolteacher, she thinks of all the crazy thrills those young girls must have gone through in their brief lives, emotions and sensations she’s never felt, and the insurgent feeling wells up in her, filling her with a strange compulsion to go faster than she’s ever gone – to be, for a few seconds, utterly reckless but alive – and she speeds up and enjoys the rush until the sharp blare of a bus horn brings her abruptly back to her senses, and she lets out a small gasp as she returns to the middle lane, still thinking about those girls, and the long wide road ahead.
I brought up this fairly simple example because it illustrates just what I mean about timid and conventional writing. That timid writer might as well be Laura – someone who’s never tried anything radically different, someone you can count on to do the predictable thing, to choose the road well-taken.
It seems unjust, especially when you’re just starting out in creative writing, but I have to remind my students that they’re assuming an awful burden: That of coming up with something new, or something that looks new, taking off from Ezra Pound’s famous admonition for the brave young artists of his time to "Make it new!" You can’t just trot out the same old plot, the same old characters, and the same old themes – and expect your reader to appreciate your genius. If you haven’t read enough of what was written before you, especially the so-called classics (and I’m not going to argue here about what should or shouldn’t be a classic, or what should or shouldn’t go into the "canon" – maybe some other time), then you face the unhappy prospect of reinventing the wheel – with no reward to await your precious labor. It’s possible and even fun, of course, to do your own version or remake of a classic – just as NVM Gonzalez did with James Joyce’s deathless "Araby" in "The Bread of Salt" – but that’s more a test of mastery than blind imitation.
Stories often need some element of surprise – a little explosion on the way to the bathroom or the cemetery – to jar the reader (and the story itself) from complacency. Those surprises could be crucial to the development and revelation of character – who we truly are, and why we do what we do – which is the end-purpose of all fiction. I’ve argued that fictional or dramatic characters become truly interesting when they go out of character – when they do something we never expected them to do, but which, given the present circumstances, makes perfect sense. At that moment, both character and reader reach a powerful point of self-discovery – or rather, a kind of moulting, a coming out of one’s old skin.
By "surprise," I don’t mean entirely arbitrary twists and turns of plot (or, conversely, entirely contrived ones) where events are all too obviously coerced by the author, or by some God, toward some pre-planned destination. In the old days, this was called deus ex machina or "the god from the machine," which was literally some god-character lowered onstage by stage machinery to rescue the hero – as the gods do, for example, when everything seems lost for Euripides’ Medea. Today deus ex machina means any unrealistic resolution imposed by the author (the "god" of the story) on the work – which usually happens when the author can’t find a passably logical solution to the problems that he or she created. (Typically, this happens in bad novels and movies, when you’re down to the last 10 pages or last five minutes, and suddenly everything just gets tied up and falls into place ever so neatly – a savior appears, disaster is averted in the nick of time, and the world’s a happy place once more.) This isn’t the kind of surprise we’re looking for, because, ironically, deus ex machina has become so predictable that it’s lost nearly all of its wonder, except for the hopelessly naïve.
There’s another kind of surprise that the old writers favored – the "ironic twist" that became the hallmark of O. Henry’s stories, but which writers like Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekhov had mastered before him. (By the way, O. Henry – born William Sydney Porter – was a convicted embezzler, and took the name upon his release from prison. Like Chekhov and Edgar Allan Poe, he wrote not to impress the critics nor to win literary prizes but to feed his family. Maupassant was once shown a mummified hand by his poet-friend Swinburne, and the hand appeared in an early work… but that, literally, is another story.)
In classics like Maupassant’s "The Necklace" and Chekhov’s "The Lottery Ticket," terrible reversals happen. In the first story, a husband and wife spend 10 years in abject misery paying back a crushing debt they never should have owed; in the second, a fleeting glimpse of fabulous fortune leaves a marriage in tatters when their imaginary bubble bursts. In one of the strongest statements for turn-of-the-century American feminism, Kate Chopin has a young wife discover a sudden relief when she receives news of her husband’s accidental death, only to suffer a heart attack when the man reappears, having survived the accident after all.
These are very dramatic – even melodramatic – turns of fortune, and something in our modern sensibility resists such florid displays of passion. That doesn’t mean, however, that the imaginative writer can’t introduce some breathtaking fancy in what seems to be a plain if not pedestrian account of a Tuesday afternoon in an ordinary life (and it is, I contend, in dealing with ordinary lives – not in indulging in the exotic – where the writer’s mettle is truly tested).
Next week, in another installment, I’ll discuss some examples – drawn from our own writers – of this "element of surprise" I’ve been talking about, and we won’t even have to go to the Crab Nebula or to some mock-medieval castle to find it.
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