Towards Inventing New Personae in Poetry and Fiction
(for the Philippine Star, March 13, 2000)
by Alfred A. Yuson

(NOTE: The following is an abridged and slightly altered version of the 10th Irwin Chair Lecture delivered at the Ateneo University on March 8.)

 

IT IS the year 2000. Things are moving willy-nilly. Literature must keep pace, and turn pellmell. Writing always needs to break new ground, else it suffer the pitfalls of mere documentation, of history and repetition.
      This is especially true of poetry and fiction. What sets these genres apart from, say, criticism, philosophy, prayer, or legislature, is their ability to forge ahead without an Orphean look back. We sing the craft to enthrall gods and nature, to retrieve a lover, to impose our will on lesser immortals. We cannot tarry and look back all too often; that is the critic's or historian's role, not ours. The poet and the fictionist must invent ahead of his time: the fresh character, the new persona to employ as a medium, and with which to sound a richly imagined voice.
      There is one story and one story only, per Robert Graves, poet and scholar. And there is perhaps one poem alone, were it not for reinventions of voice.
      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.
      There is a limit to epiphanies born of the same familiar, eventually contemptible, sod.
      Either we celebrate the self and/or the family, or we toast the universe.

 

WE CANNOT keep on writing the Constitution over and over again, let alone revising it. There's PlayStation and Nintendo 64 to contend with if we are to offer vicarious experience or simple amusement. There's Eezy Dancing, the PBA, the NBA, HBO, Cinemax, Padi's Point, cheap sex or free quickies. There are controversies and Erap jokes, bombings and ambushes that keep us riveted to a national, if not global, landscape of debilitating conflict, of diurnal and nocturnal dilemmas -- a continuing quandary of the quotidian. And there are over 150 Pokemon creatures, and we are told we have to catch 'em all, buy 'em all.
      So what are we to do when we are alone by ourselves, in solo R&R? Are we to relive, so simply, all these slalom experiences as through terrible stop-and-go traffic? Do we 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? Or if we enjoyed a higher  sensing of charity, should we wish to teach them to mint their own coins, just as we should teach the hungry to catch fish rather than hand them the sardine can?
      I say we teach ourselves to catch new fish. It is the only way to keep ourselves entertained above the level of the current.
      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 since Fernando M. Maramag's "Moonlight on Manila Bay."
      But where do we go from here? For one, 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.
      In previous poems, I have essayed the persona and voice of human rights violators and fabled flesh traders. The poems were titled "Torturing A Savage" and "Trading In Mermaids," respectively. Perhaps they should lead to a series where the poet's persona perpetrates the vilest of perceived transgressions. I might call the collection "Treason," after a title poem celebrating that most heinous of crimes.

 

AT A RECENT gathering of writers in Cebu, the 16th Cornelio Faigao Memorial Writers Workshop held at the University of San Carlos Retreat House, I understand that certain works submitted by the "fellows" activated intense discussion.
      One short story, titled "Declassification," by Reynaldo Caturza, was described in an Internet-communicated digest of the proceedings as "(taking) the form of the persona playing 'Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego' on his computer, and free-associating all the while, with his insights into the game -- and the world in general -- ranging from Exodus 11:7 to suggestive movie titles, from gynecology to James Bond movies." This text is provided by Armand Gloriosa, a Cebu-based writer who functions under that pseudonym.
      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.
      Another work taken up, a poem by workshopper Noel Tuazon, titled "Bomba (Para sa mga Manyak)," reportedly "received a roasting from a feminist (Merlie Alunan) and an ex-seminarian (Jun Dumdum), but as can only be expected was defended by a Henry Miller acolyte (Cesar Aquino) ...
      "In the poem, the persona admits to enjoying dirty movies, regardless of the consequences to his pocket. His eyes bug out, he drools, he pants and moans at the sight of the luscious Ara Mina onscreen. In the last stanza, it is revealed that the persona is only letting out a head of steam that is meant for another woman, whom he has been apostrophizing all along.
      "Dumdum found the poem repulsive because it had a dehumanizing attitude, treating the loved one as an object of pleasure. It showed a very low level of appreciation for the other. He said that a poem about lust is fine, as long as it doesn't demean the other person, and is located in a deeper context, such as a relationship. Merlie Alunan opined that by demeaning the other, the male voice also demeans himself. Poetry must bring out the human in us, not the beast. One can write a poem that is utterly dehumanizing, but it would (or should?) deliberately force the reader to take a stand against it ... Jun Dumdum suggested that, for a distancing effect, the poet could use the third person, and thus the poem would succeed as satire. Marjorie Evasco took him up on it, and spoke of possibilities of gazing -- someone watching someone watching Ara Mina ..."

 

SADLY, the young poet who submitted his "Manyak" poems eventually acknowledged that "Bomba" was written as a form of "protest, and in fact is anti-pornography."
      I say sadly, for he need not have acceded to the demands for moral distancing. I may agree with the young poet that his poem can indeed be read as protest or as anti-pornography, however subtly that reading may get around the first-person voice. But I cannot agree with the proposed requirement of layering to cover up the sheer nakedness of a first-person voice, which may after all not be the personal voice of the author, but simply an imagined one, for whatever purpose or effect.
      Moral supremacy is not achieved through a hypocritical veiling of a direct voice; 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.
      What is wrong with assuming the voice of a sex maniac? Such individuals exist in our time and place. Shrouding these personae with layers of "gazing" only reflects a refusal to accept that they breathe the same air as we do.
      It warms my heart that these new characters -- computer gamers and porn addicts -- as well as fresh symbols, icons, ideas are finding their way into our contemporary creative writing. For 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.

 

IN AN Oxford lecture titled "The Redress of Poetry," 1995 Nobel Prize awardee for Literature Seamus Heaney cites Wallace Stevens's definition of "the nobility of poetry ... (as) a violence from within that protects us from a violence without." Heaney adds: "It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality."
      Further in this essay, Heaney writes: "Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well as a representation of things in the world. To put it in W.B. Yeats's terms, the will must not usurp the work of the imagination. And while this may seem something of a trusim, it is nevertheless worth repeating in a twentieth-century context of politically approved themes, post-colonial backlash and 'silence-breaking' writing of all kinds. In these circumstances, poetry is understandably pressed to give voice to much that has hitherto been denied expression in the ethnic, social, sexual and political life."
      I like to think that this is what I attempt in a recent long poem titled "Suite As Cycle: Captives of the City" -- of nine sections composed of double sonnets -- where the first-person voice narrates his daring and lustful transgressions in the face of ordinariness, convention, and the stifling prudery of political correctness.
      Consider then the persona's voice as one of an archetypal urban badass -- a city vigilante, a voyeur, a lecher, a kidnapper, a rapist. But imagine him too as a lover under duress only because he has to reflect the reality around him, if in his own perverse way. There is no shirking when one is confronted by reality, or for that matter, by valid and vital poetry.
      It'll probably take me 15 minutes to complete reading the poem. You may now either hang on to your seats, or start checking your cellphones for your latest text messages.

 

© 2000 Philippine Star

 

CLOSE WINDOW