Nick Joaquin, literature & William Faulkner

From the 1940s through the 1960s writers who were struggling to find their own voices could not help but be enamored by the fiction of Nick Joaquin. By critical acclaim and public reception he was the most admired Filipino writer in English and his work was institutionalized in the literature curriculum of the country.

The quivering nostalgia of "May Day Eve," the passionate primitivism of "A Summer Solstice," the loss of things loved that could only be remembered and sung in "A Portrait of the Artist As Filipino," the memorable images of individuals clinging to their selves in a changing society in the other stories in Prose and Poems, and the excruciating search for identity in The Woman Who Had Two Navels inspired young writers to write like him.

Some of these writers did succeed, measured by their winning prizes in literary contests, but some of them stopped writing and shifted to journalism and other endeavors, the primary reason being that one can’t live on creative writing alone. Or did inspiration run out and imagination, vision, and craft could no longer create out of materials in a changing society? Or was it because they had been practicing the outmoded elitist art-for-art’s sake in which they had been imprisoned by chance and circumstance in a colonial society?

What makes Nick Joaquin’s stories powerful is his rendition of human experience that is remote and strange, far from reality and the immediate present, and imagined out of historical sources in a past irretrievable. He was by love of the past possessed, clinging to that sense of things that even he himself could only imagine in the present and the future of which he himself could not envision. The Marasigan painting, the portrait of the artist as Filipino, pictures Anchises carrying himself because there is no Aeneas to carry him away from the burning Troy. This statement applies to Joaquin’s own literary career as a writer who followed the dead-end road of art-for-art’s sake and had to shift to journalism. It indicates that the life he wrote about has no heirs and the traditional society he loved and lost and its desirable values are destroyed irretrievably.

Joaquin’s love of the Hispanic in literature is understandable, for it is Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel Lopez Cervantes de Saavedra that sired the modern novel, the novel being Spain’s greatest contribution to world literature. No less great are its novellas, plays, and poetry, particularly those of its golden age during the Spanish Renaissance. And its language is equal in music and power of expression only by Italian, its sister romance language.

As a struggling writer under the spell of the lingering quiver of Nick Joaquin’s fiction, I thought of him as the only Filipino writer worthy of the Nobel Prize. That he could stand on his own in comparison with other writers. His stories, original in materials, theme and execution enchanted, startling with his rendition of human experience with magical realism, which at that time was not yet named as such, antedating Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, and other Latin Americans. So that when it was time for me to write my thesis for the A.M. degree in 1962 I decided on "Yoknapatawpha and Intramuros: the Dialectics of William Faulkner and Nick Joaquin."

The members of my committee, interdepartmental from English, Spanish, German, Sociology, Anthropology, and the Comparative Literature Program, were impressed by Nick Joaquin’s fiction, and despite his slim output then approved my topic and later the thesis itself. They pointed out that in due time with a larger corpus of texts he could enter the mainstream of world literature. But then he shifted to journalism.

I wrote Nick Joaquin about my thesis, but he never replied. I requested a brother-in-law to interview him at the Philippines Free Press office. My brother-in-law wrote about Nick’s friendliness and warmth and that they drank beer at a nearby beer joint – at 3 p.m.! Not being a drinker, my brother-in-law was tipsy by the second bottle and had to excuse himself. He wrote that whenever he asked Nick about himself he would hum, sing, recite some verses, and talked about Nelsoo Eddy, Shirley Temple, Deanna Durbin, Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, Charlie Chaplin, and other pre-war actors and actresses, Frank Sinatra, the Marx brothers, and others. He later got the biographical data from Professor Sarah Joaquin who was at the time teaching at FEU and whom I listed as a possible resource person.

In contrast was the reception by William Faulkner, which was beyond my expectation. I was planning to interview Faulkner’s drinking buddies at the town square and bum around in his "postage-stamp size" fictional world of Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi if he did not reply to my letter. In his almost unreadable scrawl William Faulkner wrote that his wife Estele was excited about having a visitor from the Philippine Islands and is ready with her home-baked muffins and strawberry jam and Southern-brewed coffee. He did not say "Estele and I" because he shunned referring to himself in the first person, I learned later.

I did not know what to talk about in Faulkner’s presence and it was awkward to refer to my prepared notes for the interview. I told him that I had enough biographical data from printed sources. I lacked what he thought of the unfavorable criticism of his works by the New Critics who were in their heyday since the late 1920s and the New Criticism at the prestigious Kenyon School of Letters was having a strong impact on American writing. He said in his Southern drawl, which I had difficulty understanding, that he did not know the founding fathers whom I mentioned – John Crowe Ransom, Austin Warren, Kenneth Burke, Lionel Trilling, and Philip Rahv. He did not bother with critics and just kept on writing. Later I was to realize that his works could not be poured into the formalist mold of the New Criticism. As to his readings, every year he read the Bible, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky.

Being preoccupied with my thesis I just kept his note with my other notes and only much later did I realize that it was a valuable item in my memorabilia. It is among my files, and like all my other things will show up when my need for it is past and I’m not looking for it.

Throughout the decades that I was teaching at UP Diliman I did not bother to meet Nick Joaquin, partly because I was preoccupied with my teaching and my own writing. I was also adverse to going out of my way to meet famous people, especially if they were idiosyncratic. In 1979, when I won the grand prize in Literary Criticism in English in the 10th anniversary literary contest of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Roger Sikat, who was a judge in the playwriting contest, told me that Nick Joaquin said that my entry, "Originality as Vengeance in Philippine Literature," hit him between the eyes. He asked about me and Roger told him that we were colleagues at UP. I don’t think that he remembered me after that.

In 1980 two girls in my CL 101 class (Introduction to Comparative Literature) wanted to write their term papers on his stories and went to interview him. They recounted that as soon as the security guard showed them in, Nick Joaquin said, "Where have you been all my life, dahrlings? I have been so lonesome without you!" Which sent them giggling to no ends. When I asked them about his biographical data they had none. So I chided them jokingly that they did more flirting than interviewing. They protested and said that every time they asked him about himself and his works he would hum, sing, recite some verses, talk about some actors and actresses whom they did not know, or ask them about their hobbies, their favorite actors and actresses, movies, recipes, books, and anything else. They ended up getting his biography from printed sources.

I could have had asked Greg Brillantes or Pete Lacaba, or Virgie Moreno to introduce me to him, but what for? He abandoned literature and a good chance for a Filipino to win the Nobel Prize. But he was a humble man who did not hanker for recognition and herein lies his greatness. Unlike others he did not cultivate an international circle of friends who could help him win the prize.

Sometime in the 1970s Ricaredo Demetillo, one of our fine poets and sensitive critics, wrote an essay, "The Case for NVM Gonzalez," which was published in The Diliman Review. Ric contended that the art of NVM would last much longer than that of Nick Joaquin’s because his materials are more inexhaustible. To Ric, the craft, technique, and style of NVM were also more open and flexible. I defended Nick Joaquin in terms of virtuosity, that his materials might be limited, but that there was such a thing as variations on a theme and that the range of his imagination was shown in his retrieval of historical sources. Ric pointed out, however, that the vision and imagination of a writer were delimited by his materials. I also realized later that his art and craft were specific and particular to his materials and his style was so original and personal that it could not be imitated even by those who used the same materials. This is another facet of his greatness.

Nick Joaquin’s concept of literature, as he explained it in his acceptance speech of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts in 1996 to justify his shift to journalism, is narrow and distorted. This arose out of the theory/method of literature introduced through our colonial system of education. This is literature-for-literature’s sake, which views literature as providing only enjoyment, entertainment, contemplation, and reflection of the individual’s being and nothingness and is taken as the entirety of world literature. He contrasts this with the wider range of literature before specialization divided books into literature (fiction) and general reading (non-fiction). This art-for-art’s sake literature, he thought, could not portray the events, information, and facts that the contemporary intellect craves for.

In differentiating journalism from literature Nick Joaquin thought, like other art-for-art’s sake writers, that art-for-art’s sake writing is universal and that it is the only kind of literature, and that it is the entirety of world literature. He exhibits the individualist-universalist orientation of this type of literature. "…if communication is the business of journalism" that "of literature is expression – to be more specific, self-expression. And here the responsibility is only to one’s self."

Literature does not only express and communicate, it even awakens and moves to action toward change, revolutionizes, and liberates, not only individuals, but even societies. The cases in history are too many to be enumerated here.

Literature is connotative and its effects and affects are not immediate as it is imaginative and figurative in its rendition of reality into art, but it is rooted to reality, facts, and history. Journalism is denotative, factual, straight to the point, reportive. It is transient and changeling. It does not penetrate into the psychology and sociology of individuals and group relations, into the recesses of the human mind and the heart and human interrelationships. It is literature that completes our knowledge of humans and life. In fact, literature has more devices, crafts, styles, and means of portraying life and realities than journalism. What literature lacks in immediacy it makes up in permanence.

Nick Joaquin’s views and practice of journalism, however, were original and unique, peculiar with its literary dimension with his belief that "I could create a journalism as ‘creative’ as any poem or novel," antedating the New Journalism in the United States. There is no doubt that Nick Joaquin could create something creative out of any material, no matter how trivial. For he used fictional techniques in his reportage – point of view, craft, and style, and best of all letting the story or the material that he was reporting on tell itself. This narrative technique is fictional but did not damage the factuality and immediacy of the news being reported on or the biography being historicized. Such is his unique journalistic creativity.

There was no need for Nick Joaquin to shift to journalism if his purpose was to write about contemporary events that the contemporary intellect craved for. The subjects of his "creative journalism," the oral biographies and Nora Aunor were potential literary texts had he broken out of the prison cell of art-for-art’s sake. The great literary texts were actually stories of families and individuals – The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Mahabharata, The Ramayana, Genji Monogatari, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Don Quixote, Middlemarch, The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Sound and the Fury, Gone with the Wind, Cien Años de Soledad, The House of the Spirits, and Joyce Carol Oates’ Bellefleur. Biographies of families fictionalized into sagas bore into the psychology and sociology of individual family members and social relations, the way he did in his stories, could have made great literary texts.

Throughout human civilization, it has been the classics of literature that have survived the tempests and upheavals of development and progress. News and other information are carried away by the flood waters of events and the tides of change. The concerns and subject matter of journalism – information, news, etc. are all elements, aspects, constituents, factors, and facets of life. And life is the stuff of literature.

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Lucila V. Hosillos is a retired Professor of English and Comparative Literature, UP Diliman. She now resides in Iloilo City and heads the Ilonggo Language and Literature Foundation Inc., which is engaged in the preservation and development of the Hiligaynon/Ilonggo language, literature, culture, and history.