Yet another post on Philippine novels in English

After reading Dean Alfar and Ian Casocot's recent blog posts about Philippine novels in English, I can't help but react by recalling some of those novels, and the academic setup wherein I read them. Had I not started pursuing my M.A. years ago, I probably wouldn't have read them.

When I first entered the M.A. CW program in UP, one of my pre-requisite classes was CL 151: Philippine Literature in English, under Butch Dalisay. My classmates and I were required to read Carlos Bulosan's America Is In the Heart and Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo's Recuerdo, but since copies of the former were no longer available, Butch substituted it with Stevan Javellana's wartime novel Without Seeing the Dawn. This particular novel basically chronicles how its protagonist, Ricardo Suerte, evolve from a simple farmer into a hardened guerilla. I remember how startled I was when I finished it in one weekend, but then again I shouldn't be: it was an easy read, evenly paced, very linear, and very cinematic. So cinematic, I think it would have worked better as a war movie.

On the other hand, Recuerdo is an epistolary novel, showing the one-sided e-mail exchanges between a Bangkok-based widow and her college-age daughter in Manila. In these exchanges the mother tells her daughter tales about the women in their family line, women whose husbands die young, leaving them to struggle and carry on. The novel is admittedly interesting, but even now I still feel the last chapter negated much of the book's effectiveness. Still, that didn't stop me for making it the subject of a critical paper that I later wrote for Carlos Ojeda Aureus in his CL 202: Literary Theory and Criticism class. It was later published in an FEU Arts and Sciences journal.

Fast forward a few semesters later, and my next encounter with Philippine novels happened when I took up CL 250: Philippine Literature in English under Jing Hidalgo. Her required reading list was staggering: more than a dozen novels to take up, with each student assigned to report on one of them. Not only that, each student was required to submit a final critical paper on two novels by a particular author. Throughout the semester I managed to read some of them, like F. Sionil Jose's passionate but preachy Mass, NVM Gonzalez's cyclically-structured A Season of Grace, Bienvenido N. Santos's heartrending The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor, Ninotchka Rosca's terrific State of War and Erwin Castillo's dramatic The Firewalkers. And of course, for some reason or another I wasn't able to finish, or even start reading the rest of the list: Nick Joaquin's Cave and Shadows, Kerima Polotan's The Hand of the Enemy, Edith L. Tiempo's His Native Coast, among others. For my paper, I chose Antonio Enriquez and his novels Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh and The Living and the Dead, but I failed to complete it because I used a flawed critical framework. The result? An INC (Incomplete) mark, which I had allowed to lapse.

The following schoolyear, I took up the subject again, and with Jing as my teacher once more. This time around, I got to read more recent novels like Butch Dalisay's somber Killing Time in a Warm Place, Alfred Yuson's wonderfully postmodern The Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café, Arlene J. Chai's Joy Luck Club-ish The Last Time I Saw Mother and Charlson Ong's tongue-in-cheek An Embarrassment of Riches. Like before, my classmates and I were required to submit a final paper. I finally did this time around, on F.H. Batacan's Smaller and Smaller Circles and Edith L. Tiempo's The Builder, focusing on the culprit by using an Orientalist framework. I got a good grade for it, but I unfortunately--and permanently--lost the soft copy of that paper when my previous hard disk crashed last month.

I learned a lot from Jing's lectures in class, but there was one that stood out in my mind. She once lectured how Gonzalez, Joaquin and Santos determined the course of post-war Filipino fiction in English by the way they wrote in the language. She thus explained: Gonzalez structured his English (or at least tried t0) to imitate the flavor and syntax of the local dialects; Joaquin wrote in the language as though he's writing in Spanish, capturing its cadences and rhythms; Santos followed the American model. As a result, they influenced succeeding generations of Filipino fictionists in English, claiming them as their literary or spiritual children. For example: Castillo, Rosca and Yuson are considered Joaquin's "children"; Enriquez treads the path cleared by Gonzalez; and Brillantes and Dalisay (and many of the younger fictionists writing today) belong to Santos's line.

I'm reminded of that particular lecture because it poses a few questions that I must answer once I begin writing my critical essay for my thesis: Am I more like Gonzalez, or Joaquin or Santos? Where do I place myself in the whole tradition of Philippine literature in English? I refuse to even think about them at length, for I'm not yet prepared to answer them. But I will, eventually. I'm quite sure about this, and I'm also sure that someday I'll get around to read my copies of Joaquin's Cave and Shadows, Rosca's Twice Blessed, and Yuson's Voyeurs and Savages (and probably Resil Mojares's Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel), now gathering sneeze-inducing dust in one of my book shelves.