Click here to read Vicente's Culture Book Reviews,
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Vicente Soria de
Veyra's
Literary Reviews (page 2*)
The following is warphoto's review of the Irwin Chair Lecture by the Filipino poet and fictionist Alfred Yuson. Yuson delivered the lecture March 8, 2000 at the Ateneo de Manila University; it was subsequently published March 13, 2000 by The Philippine Star. The following review appeared as a posting on the Flips discussion list, the mailing/discussion list composed of Filipino and Filipino-American writers. Here is an adaptation of what appeared on the list:
Flips, womyns, countrymen:
A Whiff Of Fresh Air!
by Vicente Soria de Veyra
Ladies, gentlemen -- in 1988, the Filipino poet and fictionist Alfred Yuson delivered at Silliman University a lecture titled "The Kinds of Fiction," pronouncing a celebration of the formal experimentation/explorations of a handful of Filipino fictionists, and this probably planted the tree on the bark of which Yuson would carve his name as a champion of (or a campaigner for) novelty and freshness in contemporary Philippine literature. Reviewing rustily (sophomorically) a journal where the lecture saw print, I wrote -- however -- that perhaps fiction products of the day weren't so much wanting in formal attractiveness, to benefit discussion among the literati, as in substance, with their respective (perhaps) uninteresting thoughts merely flitting into everyone's initial desire. After all, then as now, fiction done in even the usual Flaubertian mode are seen to perform better at the bookshop tills than the works of, say, a Toni Morrison in a Beloved. Although of course the capture of an audience may not have been Yuson's concern at the time, we can perhaps to ascertain that it is now ("we cannot hope to stem, let alone reverse, the tide of interest that is flowing towards the serial act of texting messages, and farther away from cogitation over narratives and poetic lyrics").
Yuson's recent lecture at the Ateneo University which he just posted on this discussion list, titled "Towards Inventing New Personae In Poetry and Fiction", may -- as far as I know -- be his second-stage oeuvre in this freshness campaign, and seems to suggest a third phase (I'm guessing).
Yuson's concern for the survival of written fiction and poetry in a society saturated with entertainments is universal among writers -- even, I believe, those who claim to be not so worried. Morrison herself and the Irish Nobel laureate poet Seamus Heaney are among the major names to have recently offered/reiterated to the public their assurances regarding these artforms' continuing validity or significance, even perhaps necessity. Yuson seems to ask this question again: is Art to equate itself with the role of mere entertainment now, away from being both entertainment and art, if only to be accessible? Or, is art really a mere hobby or exercise exerted daily or weekly or yearly by the writer to stretch his wrists' nerves, and therefore to be regarded as quite fun? And yet also, would it be something inferior to the Playstation in charm or for killing time? Like a late 19th-century painter suddenly fretting from the mass distribution of Eastman's camera, he defends the elements of his art by screaming out to his peers the possibilities these can offer, zones of orgasm the new art tools might not have the tongue to rub.
But not so fast. First, he also seems to ask: who are we? Are we writers (and/or readers) because we cannot be content with daily "slalom experiences," and are by our natures different -- different, if only by our inability to simply "look at and see the same young pauper's face through the glass, darkly, and toss out the same coin of conscience as we might have been taught"? If we are the writers of this mold, then the assumption is that we have no choice now but to forthwith or truly with some urgency "teach ourselves to catch new fish." For, apparently, "it is the only way to keep ourselves entertained above the level of the current."
Now, could this view of a certain kind of spirit be a truism to that very spirit, and therefore a possible insult to that spirit's awareness of itself? In short, who needs Yuson's lecturing on this? I believe, however, the gist of his lecture to be going not in the direction of self-crowning and chest-beating but towards the age-old tradition of intellectual camaraderie, reminding brothers and sisters in the camp not to forget themselves please, lest they continue to look like scouts taken over by ennui in the face of challenges and defeats in an ever-changing technological forest.
Yuson hastens to offer, "I suggest we write new stuff, we invent new positions, novel contortions, contradictions, conflagrations. I propose, if we are contemporary poets and storytellers, that we learn to wish fringe elements on our readers. Enough of the tried-and-true, enough of the same old concerns, themes and leitmotifs that have bedecked and belabored our reality, our entertainment, our fiction and our poetry."
This ostensible reiteration of an ideal writer present in one who is his own art's critic, his own art's debaser, debater, and negater, stands on the podium again like a whiff of fresh air in our universities' lecture stands. I say this because I can relate to Yuson's observation of a specious standstill in what could otherwise be another Golden Era. Consider, for example -- bear with me -- , the constant appearance in lecture halls of the word "hegemony," sung mainly (but not exclusively) by academic leftists and quasi-leftists who have forgotten the histories of frustration behind the concept, now unable by some vocabularial habit to rethink their positions with this very word which they have constantly used as a weapon. When using the word, they may continue to refer to some object of rage that is hard to either abstract or trace, unless referring to figures in government that make for good subjects. They are blinded by their academic rhetoric to be able to see the "hegemony" resting in their very persons, in their function as Editors and Readers -- for example -- given the authority by tradition to perfect the "hegemony" of university-based cliques in the field of literary judgment and promotion. Marxists or quasi-Marxists that they mostly are, they even forget to remember that the politics of publishing and printing used to be at the top of Marxist criticism's list of concerns. In another sphere, they understandably fail to notice the contentment of those fanning a literary following on the Net independent (more or less) of any local or university-based hegemony.
Now, this last paragraph doesn't seek to absolve Yuson of any such possible arrogance. I do not know the man well enough. But that he here preaches the virtue of the writer's constant repositioning of his un-omniscient soul is worthy of commendation in these times.
However, Yuson's formula may sound naive, as when he rallies for our liberty from the "same old concerns, themes and leitmotifs." More specifically, when he unabashedly announces, "Personally, I am sick of poems on sunsets, keening love, dismay at the social circus, anger over the entire gamut of our impotence before political authority. I am tired of stories of initiation, unreciprocated attention or desire, the conflict between tradition and modernity." After all, novelty and freshness keep up in, say, international cinema with overused or recurrent material. The movie Life Is Beautiful explored the possibility of retelling the (if you permit) overexposed story of the Holocaust mainly through the persona of one with a comic attitude. Whoever would have dared start writing a screenplay with such a handicap? The Hollywood epic Saving Private Ryan re-photographed World War II by delving into a more graphic representation of the horrors of war, painting tiny moments with tiny heroes -- instead of abstract panoramas in the usual Hollywood habit towards this subject -- for a small-mission gallery that stretched through a space of negative-three hours. A number of remakes have allowed post-modern and other late-20th century values into certain old tales from cinema itself, from literature, history, or journalism; historical figures have been re-introduced as possible models for our times, for our latest social battles. Conversely, Yuson's approval of the use of characters from our own times, our own reality (ridden with all sorts of perversions, Net games, etc.), may yet be laid into narrations that are simply reminiscent of a Camus or a Sartre. And a TV series like The Practice may indeed be counted on for fictional treatments of present-day issues, but treatments which however may have already been proven good by realists or comedy writers of old. Oh, not that these taking-after's are to be sneered at, no, but simply to say here that they're unqualified to claim for themselves the tag of novelty or of that other elusive modernist virtue, originality.
But even though Yuson declares, "Now this is what I'm driving at, the provision of mint-fresh characters to inhabit, and materials with which to clothe, a narrative or poem," I do not believe that is all he has in his sermon. I would like to think his third phase of promoting freshness to be manifest in the forward words "we can strive to be casual and incorporate all things we see and feel, enjoy or wish to enjoy -- our deepest, darkest fantasies as much as our shallowest desires -- and the heck with the convention of safe ground, of political correctness, of ideology, of the missionary position, of prevailing moral stasis." He is, in short, as involved with rethinking positions, angles, conditions, events, religions, moralities, and so on, in our times, turning thus his formulas into a full circle wherein all bows to a center of certain non-centerness. This, I hasten to add, is by itself a valid process for the resumption of intellectual progress. I believe, or choose to believe, Yuson to be as concerned about our very acknowledgment of the updates and upgrades of intellection, urging us to download these very sharewares as within our duty to keep (without fear of viruses) in the respective hard disks of our individual courage.
I do not know what prompts Yuson to campaign for new rethinking of all sorts, whether it has always been in his nature or not. Nor am I sure this is really what's at the center of his lecture's enthusiasm. But the very mention of a freedom from any prevailing moral stasis speaks of our generation's dissatisfaction with all the existing dogmas in our country -- political, cultural, aesthetic, etc. Robert Mundell, last year's Nobel Prize for Economics winner, whose explorations into the science of free global economics helped shape the policies of today, comes to mind. Socialists of yore (the sixties until recently) would have found it abhorrent to hear his name spoken, rendering a citizen worthy of a trial should he even think about it. Yet his field of study slowly influenced nations from Canada to Vietnam, thanks to the virtue of listening to changes. Such a type of update/upgrade we cannot afford to not know -- is what I think Yuson is saying here -- even if it should prove itself wrong or obsolete later on (the better that we know such "upgrades" if we are to think them wrong, that we may contribute our voice into the rally against it early, before any damage is done!).
Of course I could be wrong, swerving off the track Yuson would rather I spend more time in. Yet the validity and integrity of my reading of the poet's piece may find affirmation in the words "Moral supremacy is not achieved through a hypocritical veiling of a direct voice . . ."
And although he would confuse/frustrate me with the words directly following -- "neither is it morality that should be the issue in any poem or story, but the excellence of craft: the novelty of concept, the adroitness of execution" -- , a suspicion that this latter clause may be a look back to New Criticism days is in its turn frustrated by that preceding clause. For if this combine achieves anything, it is by finally molding the esthetic cum cultural philosophy, not necessarily in itself novel, that certain stories or poetic moments can actually sustain themselves, free of our boring little human bigoted interferences, to possibly freshly serve as stimuli challenges for our landscape's newly-democratized response or continually-challenged responsibility to be democratic.That will do for now. Until the earth revolves once more, necessitating our vocal intrusions into stimuli that verge on despair, calling -- it might seem -- for our sense-making of the circus (essaying and not) in this eternal curse to refresh things anew.
--ooo--
Read the full text of the Yuson lecture. Click here.
-----------------------------
*Litt Reviews page 1 still under construction
-- created March 28/2000
-- improvements uploaded August 2004
Click here to read de Veyra's Culture Book Reviews,
specifically of Elizabeth Reyes' Tropical Living: Contemporary Dream Houses in the Philippines and Doreen Fernandez and Edilberto Alegre's now-classic Sarap: Essays On Philippine Food.
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