---first uploaded November 21, 1999
---latest corrections/additions uploaded August 02, 2004
In late 1999, Vicente-Ignacio de Veyra talked with V.I.S. de Veyra, the author of the first Filipino online book of short fiction, Vexed. The following is a transcription of what transpired:
JV: You've told me once that Abstract Souls, the so-called "novella" in Vexed, takes after the American novelist Philip Roth. Would you care to name---for both the Roth-books non-reader and the Roth-books reader who's read too many Roth books---the Roth book you had in mind in this story?
VISV: I was referring to the Roth of My Life As A Man and, more importantly, The Professor of Desire as my angle of departure towards one Rothian obsession, viz., the conflict between the rogue and the incorruptible intellectual in every academic, academic-sort-of, and academic-in-each-of-us. But, finally, Abstract Souls, though started in 1983 (as my take on Filipinos' over-admiration of Marcosian, and on my own suspiciousness of my own, intellectualism) and more or less finished with the crucial emendations circa 1993, is really just my Bridges of Madison County (this was a 'popular' novel about an aborted love affair, written by a certain James Waller, made into a movie by the American filmmaker I admire, Mr. Clint Eastwood). I say that because this story is set in a mental surround, involving three pretentious Filipino academics, the extreme kind, and it's a mental surround inside a love triangle. The "I" persona here seems to tilt towards the rogue girl type in the story, but that's only if you're to let your heart rule while reading the ending. Because not really. He also has reasons, both intellectual and emotional reasons, for deciding to stay married to the through-and-through academic wife.
Now, Abstract is not a novella, words-count-wise, but it has that novella feel, so that I thought it would be an added pretension on the part of the narrator to put that as a subtitle. Technically, from my own standpoint as the writer, I'd also like to consider it as one---if not quantitatively, then at least by the necessity of certain lengths of immersion, as might be demanded on/by the average reader upon my narrator's pretentious language (by the way, this narrator is likewise apologetic about his pretense, isn't he, even while wallowing in it).
JV: In Abstract Souls, as in many of the stories in Vexed, you somehow castigate the corrupt academic even as you prefer to posit the narrator, and yourself as the writer (who might be aware of your readership), as still one with academia.
VISV: In the short short story Alone I seem to be hitting at bookstores' colonial presentations (two years after this story appeared in The Evening Paper, National Bookstore SM Megamall corrected the display 'flaw'), though finally it's an interrogative upon many facets of our studied culture, including intelligentsia culture. The intelligentsia culture, after all, has been responsible 50% of the time for all the colonial mentality, the commercialism, the ignorance, the lowbrow pleasures of the underprivileged and the nouveau-riche, not to mention the unconscious censorship by clique-prone shallow/corrupt authorities, among other problematics of Philippine society.
The only consolation can be found in this sketch, presented through the central character---and that is: he at least exists, he with his awareness of this colonial mentality, presupposing or implying the possibility of a peer. This is enough consolation, I think, given the piece's insistence on the truth that Filipino book readers (including Filipino writers) as a rule don't read fellow Filipinos' work (having been brainwashed for so long by the Big Brother factor to think that nothing local can be superior in value). To answer your question, then, I'd say that though my narrators are mostly academics-sort-of, they're also academic deviants, academic-intelligentsia-culture deviants, and are anti-academics only in that sense.
JV: I agree with the 50%. But in Archipelagic Short Stories Would Lead Us Nowhere, whose is the piece pointing to as the broken integrity, the government's or the culture's?
VISV: Again, the intelligentsia's. Particularly the political pundits'. We have here a narrator who, it's not clear, is either 1.) still with "the other side" serving as a spy, or 2.) only formerly of this other side and is now probably serving as the present side's spy, although the 'spy' in that subtitle might simply refer to that part in him that desires to still be partly of the other side, this in his wish to "better" everyone on this present side. This complexity, though latent and not required of all readers' notice, is there consistent with the whole piece's challenge towards a more comprehensive utopia. Yes, a utopia it is that's sought, one that might parallel the confidence of communism, beyond the confused directions of slogans like 'Philippines 2000' or 'Erap's Food Security 2000', and more honest!
The sections of this fiction piece point to our government's continuing feudal cum pro-corporation trickle-down economics that yet pretends to be 'socially aware'. In its own modest way, the piece serves as a tiny reminder of the many contradictions that continue to exist in present-day government policies, involving a balancing act in the few departments sincere with their service that are ultimately just looking ludicrous. Archipelagic is my modest portrait sketch of this ludicrity.
JV: Again and again, in stories like Who Cares For Markets, Pleasure/Film/What/Has, and At The Funeral, not to mention your upcoming novella A Corruption In The Garden, you take the socialist position for your narrator "I". Are you a Socialist?
VISV: To constructively criticize the status quo, I believe you have to present its crucial opposite, let's say for the sake of coming up with an argument that might be noticed or answered (intellectually answered, hopefully). Newspaper opinion writers, like Teddy Locsin, or Conrado de Quiros, do it.
I've taken this approach far enough in Who Cares For Markets, but more subtly in At The Funeral. The latter is the story of an unsung martyr whose story can't be confirmed or accessed to create a clear picture. It seems our subject here, then, is a sort of literary desaparecido, one beyond physical access (because, too, fictional). The issue of biography as fiction or fictionalizing truth is touched on obliquely, whether the writing is being done by the right or the left. Thus my inevitable commenting on events beyond our capacity to tell what might have happened, not to mention my implying a possible alternative---the courtesy of silence. In the beginning of the story you'd see Fernando, our hero/martyr-subject, with what appears to be his wife/girlfriend and daughter, looking for a letter (a truth-seeking venture!). We close the story with the hanging of the three, along with a reference to a planted evidence (an obfuscation, towards a later further dehumanization of the past struggles of these now-dead, struggles which in the absence of witnesses we can only guess the facts of). What I'd like the politically-involved reader to feel in this story, in this story, is the literary struggle over the subjects' physical conflicts.
And then, in Psychiatrist, I redirected this personal obsession with truth-seeking to fellow fiction writers, in regards gossipy or otherwise "social scientistic" characterizations in fiction art practice. . . . But to get back to your question, am I Socialist? For the sake of driving home a fictional point at its most lucid, and for the sake of pushing the politics of (beyond in) my fiction writing, I sometimes have to be.
JV: Apart from Psychiatrist, I believe Dionysus is another story for your fellow young writers.
VISV: The position of Dionysus' message would seem to many young writers today to be a conservative position. This is because a lot of writers today think it's trendy to write from one's guts. I believe, however, that we're now inhabiting a post-postmodernist cum post-poststructuralist landscape or environment. It's now quite a given that a plurality of cultural perspectives exists in a single city. It's also a given that feminist criticism or eco-criticism is as valid as Marxist criticism or what-have-you, and that anybody can read anything integral into any integral or scatter-brained work. We don't have to shout these anymore. These criticisms have sadly borne out in the Philippine islands, or perhaps in the USA or London also, writers who dip their hands on their so-called personal experiences or sheer flow of imagination with the hope that critics will take their writing products seriously as meaningful or somehow significant, since it is poststructuralist criticism's responsibility or trendy habit to explore all "efforts at producing art" as possible cultural products.
Certain of these produce do succeed with the critics, though some partly frustrate the offended genius of critical findings (leading certain star-struck reviewers to just drop adjectives of approval in the absence of an understanding of what just transpired in a work). . . . I think the reason why Gina Apostol's Bibliolepsy (UP Press, 1998) is a pleasure to read is because it's a meaningless continuum of memories, a pseudo-memoir whole, which however refers to its own remembering as a "labor of love," thus pleading that this demon of a past cum dream be taken as a significate insofar as it is related to a process of writing which is probably its most valid claim to sacredness. And we can give that to this novel, simply because it pleaded for that recurrently within, therefore receiving our understanding in the finale after a direction-less meandering which took us a whole book-worth of sheer interest-suspension. Otherwise, such a type of shitful personal confessions collected to become a mythical novel would have simply offended my anti-bourgeois (yes, that word still means something) or religious (Christian, Taoist, or whatever) sensibilities.
But despite my appreciation of that novel, I would have to confess I often write in a different mode. I often opt for meanings outside of the art. Or around and within the art. Not within the process or action of art-making. And the reason why I'm something that certain academic postmodernists at U.P. or La Salle might call a "pro-meaning" young oldie of an author is simple. Not because I'm a modernist conservative, but because I'm a bit of a Marxist (well, perhaps only in terms of targeting an audience). That is to say, I don't hope to write for critics of style; I pray to write for a people, even if these people be a handful of fellow private-sector employees or a bunch of fellow artists/writers in a pub only---my success with them notwithstanding, for now. Story writing for me, then, is often a tool for illustrating a point or for dramatizing certain beauties, not for celebrating art itself.
JV: Which of the stories in Vexed seek to dramatize beauty?
VISV: Well, Before Lunch is a poem-piece in the sense that it pictures for us a pretty scene and pretty goings-on. A picnic. But yet within this prettiness I remind the reader, by subtle means, of the serious, sad, or ugly. I refer to the food as "circular figures," making them appear to the reader's imagination like Catholic hosts. Then I allow myself to "accidentally" put in concepts like urban/rural (a touchy subject in this class-ridden society), getting bored with a girl, the name Albino on a character, the phrase "human beings," the seeming narrative promise of a drowning or a shark appearance, the idea of overpopulation and population control via others' demise, even implications of God-wrath, and so on. All this, in a supposedly simple-pretty description of a mundane weekend beach party.
The opposite of Before Lunch is Eating Eagles, where we have an oppressive environ, involving children taken in as guinea pigs in a government observation project. Into the description of the oppressive setup here, I sort of allowed myself to "accidentally" drop concepts of prettiness (as against beauty): innocence, pop objects, color play, and so on.
JV: Does Di-Pinamagatan have some same subtle agenda?
VISV: If you didn't feel anything, then there probably is none. Firstly, it's a social-criticism piece. If it has subtle messages in it, I haven't seen them. It is quite literal about my way of defining the Filipino political psyche.
Then again, perhaps I'm lying. For, after all, there are some literary questions begging for answers in that piece. For example, a reader may get nosy about what it was that led the surrenderee to give up his fight. Was it really due to his deafness or from a frustration with the type of available sympathy offered by a following, as the painter's false sympathy? Or is his deafness to be read as a realist element, as symbolic of leftist paranoia, or as a symbol for war's deafness to the calls of/for peace? And, finally, are the painter's ramblings, which comprise the entire text of the piece, to be read literally? Or as an ironic copy, therefore not as a stand-in for the Filipino contented psyche that I was talking about but more as a portrait of a real underground sympathy disguised in irony? I suppose that answers your question some.
JV: Okay. But assuming it is a definition of the Filipino political psyche, as you put it, how is it so? And in so short a piece!
VISV: Well, astrologically, the Philippines is a Gemini, if you regard the June 12 independence declaration at Kawit, Cavite as our birth date. Therefore, ours is a twin nation of peoples. Not in the sense that there are two contending groups but that there's ambiguity in everything and in everyone, seemingly. It also seems to be a negative type of Gemini force because it involves not empathies but contradictions. It's in every citizen, as it were. In Di-Pinamagatan you have a painter who seems to have a heart for the declining insurgency, but yet practices this sympathy with a bourgeois act and art, the painting of cadres for gallery exhibition and dealing. And he's aware of it! While seemingly unaware of its wrong-ness! His lightheadedness over this is another negative Gemini trait, though I don't have anything against Gemini's (I understand all astrological signs to all have negative traits).
Then again, perhaps you can say the same thing about me too---as this book's writer, with a predominant use of English as his tool. Unless, of course, you qualify me by allowing I may be addressing our intelligentsia progressives as my target readership.
JV: If Di-Pinamagatan is one piece with a relatively clear socio-political message, could Finding Books be another one?
VISV: Oh yes. Finding Books is a takeoff on Adolf Hitler's bastardization of an Oriental symbol towards this symbol's becoming the Nazi swastika. I don't know about my readers but was this what you read as the clear message?
JV: (laughing) Well, I'm not telling you.
VISV: The story's statement was telling us about how even the most virtuous of books, including the Bible, can be used as a tool for selfish ends. Semiotic art (or science) has amply demonstrated the extent of this classic possibility, Barthes most radically and amusingly.
JV: I'm not quite sure about the message in the title Out Of Season, even if I got the story. Has that Hemingway story "Out Of Season" got anything to do with this?
VISV: In a way, yes. My Out Of Season could also be called "Out Of Place." But firstly, it's the out-of-time concept working here. You have a married man still role-playing what seems like subconscious TV heroes. The story's really a jab at the average Filipino's ready embrace of Americanisms and American foul language, explored more deeply but from another angle in Bino Realuyo's novel Umbrella Country, with this embrace often not knowing what it can do to one's local surround when not used for appropriateness or adaptation.
So, you could say "out of season" because the last few decades are supposed to be the decades for nationalism. This piece is actually my attempt at a Raymond Carver story type. You could say I tried to put his characters in a Philippine setting, soon forgot the process, found what to me is a worse conflict.
JV: Another "off" title is Vexed. Where does that word---or even concept as mood---appear in that story?
VISV: It's Before Lunch all over again. The story is built up by humorous taped conversations set above or behind a tragic chain of events. The Philippine situation presented here would probably "vex" you, and you'd see that that is not even the right word to describe your feelings (or what you should feel). The whole tape transcription begins to look like a Hollywood-ish script, in the Ed Wood bad-filmmaking manner of doing it. Finally, the humor would then vex your serious sensibilities. . . . Otherwise, it would be an over-appreciation of the humor that might annoy one in seeing the presence of incredible tragedies, in which case the story would still work (though in another way).
Now, the reason why I chose this as my title for this book is simple. Every truth presented in this book vexes me sincerely. The language comes in, furthermore, to challenge my readers, say by way of understating or obliquely stating things (in the process of gabbing, glamorizing, man-of-letters-fashion). Otherwise, you could say it might be my way of riding the average Filipino's sensibility that doesn't want to take anything too seriously, calling its anger mere irritation. You don't have to believe that.
JV: Is Sincerely a fictional demonstration of your personal vexation or, uh, irritations, with existing culture?
VISV: Sincerely has not yet arrived at that. It is yet in the realization level. If there's irritation, it's with one's self, one's previous self at least, and with those in the present who admire this previous self.
All this looks contrived, however. That's because it seems I had to create a narrator who has realized the wrong-ness of a previous position so I can create a take on the masculinization of feminism. Of course my feminist awareness is explicit in many of my stories, but, yes, Sincerely is quite a sincere lecture against "over-feminism" which masculinized the female sex. Therefore I had to present a man, a sexist sort of, who has realized his need to be "soft" vis a vis powers within himself---realizing this need because he has suddenly seen these powers to be quite overvalued, overvalued because suddenly fallible. These powers, of course, include his wealth, his fame, and his name. Sincerely turned out as a sort of manifesto against the Tao of wrong feminism, and against machismo, and both movements' obsession with the yang element.
JV: Why was this book not published by a major publisher like Anvil or the U.P. Press?
VISV: Well, to be published by either you have of course to please in-house editors first, and then so-called outside Readers who have to read all these manuscripts for a meager fee. Besides the fact that there are not that many people in this country who "widely" appreciate fiction art (or poetry, for that matter) to be able to function the way good editors should, that is to say, stop acting like taste-making practitioners of their respective fiction-making esthetic hegemonies (styles) and start behaving like competent critics.
Besides that reality, or viewpoint, which many would read as pure sour-graping on my part, I also think my stories' individual weight are not as readily conspicuous as the messages (political, social, or esthetic) of the usual pieces that you see around that get published (by the few cliques-managed publications). And I don't mean to brag by that, since I'd grant accessibility as a virtue. Ironically, however, as one taking the tone of an anti-academic I seem to be more interested in an academic or academicized audience, an intelligentsia's instead of a majority's applause. Take Archipelagic Short Stories. At first glance, it's a mere composite of short shorts altogether portraying a certain Philippine condition of poverty and backwardness. But I would usually expect a deeper, post-Book Editor's reading, that might come to appreciate---as did Isagani Cruz (the critic) in a review of published stories of a month---my attempt in that story to appropriate a postmodernist writer's self-consciousness to service a "Social Realist" end.
True, Archipelagic is a story that may also be read as something designed for a wide readership. It is, after all, also my paean to Latin-American magic realism, a style of writing which---to me, and I think to many of its practitioners in the Latin world---was not at all a stylistic technique but a trendy method for soliciting the attention of a myths- and legends-ridden superstitious majority culture towards mostly political realities and lecturings (as an aside, let me say we must not forget that Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a Socialist and a close friend of Fidel Castro; nor that Mario Vargas Llosa ran for president, as a conservative). But as is my wont, I also designed symbolisms/ellipsisms into this story's structure for the academicized level of appreciation, regardless of whether there is still such a thing. But it seems Philippine book publishers today, mostly managed by academic hands, still have a wicked pretense of being pro-average citizen (whether it's the non-reading masses' man or the equally pretentious yuppie). That is their problem. It's a position entirely no different from the Communist who expects the unlettered poor to side with him.
JV: You mention magic realism in Archipelagic. But I remember passages in Finding Books that I thought were leading me into magic realism, but then you had to frustrate your readers. What was your point? And, do you think we should consider you as an experimenter with the many styles available today, or are you simply versatile?
VISV: (laughs) Well, first of all, if my intention with a magic realism in Archipelagic Stories was to try to take after the political motivations of Garcia Marquez over a superstitious (though educated) potential readership, then it had to reverse itself in Finding Books---for the simple reason that the latter story was directly bent on tackling, instead of cajoling, all forms of superstition and myth-making. This was the big difference. And this dictated my seeming satire on the use of magic realism in that latter piece.
Now, I think one can simply say that perhaps this kind of jumping from one "style" to another shows intention or point to be something that supercedes any form of stylistics in my kind of creativity culture. I think no way should trends be allowed to dictate present Philippine literary culture anymore, especially because our present literary culture constitutes our present Philippine culture. That is what I think, and I can only hope a lot of other creators alive today---and I can name a few who do---share my disgust. On the other hand, since any trend in the intellectual world is also grounded on somebody's rationale for starting it at all, I think we could at least try to emulate the habit, then, of being reasonable with our art. As Doreen Fernandez has done on our adaptations of others' food. Then we will jump from being a people vexed by our own selves to being a people, period. !
Copyright © 1999, 2000 V.I.S. de Veyra. All rights reserved. Readers are welcome to view, save, file and print out single copies of this webpage for their personal use. No reproduction, display, performance, multiple copy, transmission, or distribution of the work herein, or any excerpt, adaptation, abridgment or translation of same, may be made without written permission from the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this work will be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Address questions and reactions to
with the subject "Re: Vexed"
BACK TO V.I.S. DE VEYRA'S FICTION HOMEPAGE
LINKS TO THE OTHER SECTIONS IN
THIS SITE:
home | about V.I.S. de Veyra | site
epigram | why "war photos"? | de
Veyra's
poetry | the 4894 poetry journal | Jojo
de Veyra's
mp3 song samples | de Veyra's social
criticism | literary reviews | film
reviews | music reviews | ads
| sign
private guestbook | e-mail
Links to other sites on the Web
