Joel Pablo Salud reads from his paper at the forum on “Uses of Literature” by the Philippine Center for International PEN.
BY JOEL PABLO SALUD
Paper submitted to the panel, “The Uses of Literature”
for the Philippine Center for International PEN,
June 30, 2012, Solidaridad Bookshop,
Padre Faura, Manila
You will ask: why does your poetry
not speak to us of sleep, of the leaves,
of the great volcanoes of your native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets,
come and see the blood in the streets,
come and see the blood in the streets!
Pablo Neruda
España en el Corazón: Himno a las Glorias del Pueblo en la Guerra
(Spain in our Hearts: Hymns to the Glories of the People at War)
Close to roughly half a century ago, two of the Philippines’ formidable pens—the late Salvador Ponce Lopez and Jose Garcia Villa—painted two different portraits of the Filipino writer. One was splashed with mud and blood; the other, awash under the quiet comfort of “sound and color, fancy and imagination.” One seemed to be scarcely touching the heavens with his intimate, painful glimpses of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno; the other, carves a foretaste of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “sweet thoughts in a dream.” Thus the appearance of two images of a savior: the former with tattered feet while the latter walked on water.
The question when and why the line was drawn pointed to a movement in America and Europe that espoused “L’art pour l’art” (art for art’s sake). Proponents argued—Edgar Allan Poe, in particular—that “the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty… Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience, it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth” (The Poetic Principle by Edgar Allan Poe).
On a more recent time Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov, notwithstanding his denial of this bohemian philosophy, gave this startling commentary on literature’s contribution to society:
“A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don’t give a damn for the group, the community, the masses and so forth. Although I do not care for the slogan ‘art for art’s sake’… there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art” (Interview with Vladimir Nabokov by Alvin Toffler, Playboy, Jan. 1964, reprinted in Strong Opinions, Vintage International, Jan. 1990).
Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa himself mentioned in his essay, “The Fictions of Borges” the soothing excitement that drew him, quite “adulterously,” from the dirt-stained hands of his “mentor” Jean Paul Sartre to the melody of “labyrinths, tigers, mirrors and knives” of the mesmeric Jorge Luis Borges.
“In a clinically pure way, he [Borges] stood for everything Sartre had taught me to hate: the artist retreating from the world around him to take refuge in a world of intellect, erudition and fantasy; the writer looking down on politics, history, and day-to-day reality while shamelessly displaying his scepticism and wry disdain for everything that was not literature; the intellectual who not only allowed himself to treat ironically the dogmas and utopias of the left but who took his own iconoclasm to the extreme… And breezily justifying this move by claiming that gentlemen prefer lost causes” (“The Fictions of Borges,” Wellsprings, Harvard University Press 2008, p.27).
National Artist for Literature Jose Garcia Villa has been known to espouse no less. Quoted by E. San Juan Jr. in his Kritika Kultura paper, “Jose Garcia Villa: Vicissitudes of Neocolonial Art-Fetishism and the ‘Beautiful Soul’ of the Filipino Exile,” Garcia Villa claimed:
“A single motive underlies all my work and defines all my intentions as a serious artist: the search for the metaphysical meaning of Man’s life in the universe—the finding of man’s selfhood and identity in the mystery of Creation” (Jose Garcia Villa, 1955).
SP Lopez’s winning essay, Literature and Society, on the other hand, had impressed the idea that literature with social content was the literature worth killing trees for. The so-called “proletarian trend” was, in E. San Juan’s assessment, as quoted by Rafael Acuña, “an indispensable landmark from which we can measure the distance we have traversed in the depth, scope, and precision of our ‘critical theorizing.’” It was then that the “proletarian cause” had found a voice in SP Lopez, which singularly, may I add, moved toward what seemed as a highly-evolved critique and portrayal of Philippine letters.
Clearly, from Acuña’s The World, The Text, and SP Lopez, it wasJose Garcia Villa’s “art for art’s sake” that compelled SP Lopez to pen his prize-winning piece. “Art for art’s sake” had stemmed from a group of famous writers that included Théophile Gautier, Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde. The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, seemed to have embraced the same poetic philosophy when he wrote:
“I should say I wanted to write poetry in the beginning because I had fallen in love with words… Before I could read them for myself I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone. What the words stood for, symbolized, or meant was of very secondary importance—what mattered was the very sound of them as I heard them for the first time on the lips of the remote and quite incomprehensible grown-ups who seemed, for some reason, to be living in my world.” (“On the Words in Poetry” from Early Prose Writings by Thomas, Dylan in Dictionary of Poetic Terms (2003) Myers, Jack and Wukasch, Don University of North Texas Press).
Edgar Allan Poe had a more poignant description of this bohemian principle that dated back to the middle of the 17th– and 19th-century, credited to the poet and critic Théophile Gautier. Poe wrote in The Poetic Principle in 1870:
“We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem’s sake […] and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force: — but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem’s sake.”
SP Lopez took this stance to task, and other “youthful” enchantments like it, saying:
“Whoever uses speech merely to evoke beauty of sound or beauty of imagination is not exploiting the gift of speech for all that it is worth; he is exploiting it only in those qualities that are inherent in the word but external to the mind and soul of men. When a writer uses words purely for their music or purely as an instrument of fancy, he may claim that he is a devotee of pure art, since he insists on using words only in their strictly primitive qualities. In point of fact he is really a decadent aesthete who stubbornly confuses painting with literature and refuses to place words in the employ of man and his civilization” (Literature and Society, SP Lopez)
National Artist F. Sionil Jose’s invitation to join the panel led me to re-read part of Lopez’s Literature and Society. After half a century, the table seemed to have been turned. The argument this time places proletarian literature on the chopping block of “ethical” and “moral” reflection.
Three years ago I invited on Facebook a hundred poets, fictionists and journalists to contribute one poem each on the Maguindanao Massacre. The opposition we faced thereafter was totally unexpected. A fairly young renowned Filipino poet took his stand against the call, citing Theodor W. Adorno’s assumed prohibition from a little known piece of critique—“To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
The young poet insinuated that suffering on the level of a bloody massacre cannot be ethically or morally represented by words. The full quote from Adorno’s An Essay on Cultural Criticism and Society, however, has yet to lay claim to that exegesis:
“The critique of culture is confronted with the last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric [emphasis, mine], and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today.” (Prisms, MIT Press, 1955. Reprinted in London in 1967).
Very little attention was given to the first part of the essay, which, if taken wholly, could’ve solidified the needed context to the whole. This Dr. Frederik van Gelder, Institut fuer Sozialforschung of Frankfurt University, aptly explained:
“The sentence is part of the conclusion to an essay, and reading it on its own may be as fruitless as attempting to understand the last act of Hamlet without having first seen the rest of the play.”
The debate over why literature should or should not cross the line of “unspeakable” incidents—the Maguindanao Massacre, or in Adorno’s case, the Holocaust—went unbroken for nearly two weeks. The fiery discussions revolved around actual “representation” of what was “unspeakable.” Anna Richardson of the University of Manchester qualified her stance against the aforesaid quote from Adorno:
“The question thus arises: if no form of representation is adequate to convey the extreme pain and suffering experienced by the Holocaust survivor… is it morally and/or ethically correct to attempt representation at all? As a corollary to this question, who precisely should make that decision?”
The uncanny logic, which some have misconstrued as Adorno’s “prohibition,” seemed to bar any and all attempts by so-called writers “committed” to writing social content to advance their cause. But Adorno himself had the mind to say:
“Suffering […] also demands the continued existence of the very art it forbids” (“The Ethical Limitations of Holocaust Literary Representation,” p.1).
At the end, this particular young poet surrendered with a gentle salutation. Others in his camp, however, refused defeat. Months later, National Artist for Literature Bienvenido Lumbera delivered a poem in remembrance of the massacre. The call to submissions produced what is yet the unpublished Anthology of Rage.
If anything, the exchanges raised the question of whether literature must keep to its Ivory Tower or plant its feet on the blood-spattered ground, wrestling with more heinous realities like poverty, oppression, tyranny, war, repression, corruption, religious intolerance, crime and the like.
SP Lopez was clear: he felt that “any writer of importance” would, sooner or later, find his niche in the very social content he or she had shunned in youthful writing by pursuing “truth instead of phrases.”
Multi-awarded playwright Bonifacio P. Ilagan, in his paper submitted to this very panel in 2006, took the idea further, citing the life and death of poet Emman Lacaba:
“If writing were to express human freedom, it must be able to say what was precisely forbidden by the power-wielders. Literature must be unhampered by such restrictions as the Presidential Proclamation 1017 or any manifestation of the so-called ‘calibrated pre-emptive response’” (Human Freedom: Beyond Literature, 2006, The Philippine Center for International PEN).
Not all associate patriotism with the “divine literary call,” however. Elmer A. Ordoñez’s Nick Joaquin and his Contemporaries (May 2004), mentioned Franz Arcellana, who, after the Second World War, regretted author Manuel Arguilla’s involvement in socio-political affairs. Ordoñez quoted Arcellana: “He should have left patriotism to others. We have too many patriots. We don’t have too many writers.” Arguilla fell in the hands of the Japanese occupying forces as a guerrilla officer.
The question, therefore, I wish to posit before the panel, which in the same token I shall in modesty try to answer, is this: must a line define patriot from poet, hero from herald? When did the poet become the antithesis of a patriot? Isn’t society better off having each as one of two sturdy limbs to support our collective consciousness?
The struggles of our conscience point us to a final goal: love of family, the breast of nature, the enjoyment of beauty through sonnets of blooms and skies and prairies. And what is nature’s grandeur but a sterling reminder that without the struggle for freedom, all splendour comes to nothing?
Freedom encompasses all, not merely a brave few. The freedom through and by which writers lend their critique of society’s ills should likewise offer the same sense of sovereignty to poets writing about “twists and turns of familiar tales / songs cramping their tunes in the throat / their lips tingling on the tongue” (Merlie M. Alunan, “Stranger Under My Skin,” Tales of the Spider Woman, UST Publishing House, 2010).
It was all the rage for Dylan Thomas to write of floating fields “gliding windless through the hand folded flakes” of one Winter’s Tale, as well as, “Do not go gentle into that good night / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
Like Thomas, many writers bravely took on the experiment of being one and the other. French-Algerian novelist Albert Camus hailed the seeing of beauty even in the most dire of circumstances during his trip to the Florentine countryside: “But sadness in this country is never anything but a commentary on beauty” (“The Desert,” Lyrical and Critical Essays, 1970).
Writings of “sound and color, fancy and imagination,”—so-called abstractions young writers write to find their seminal voice—ought to jog our memory to the purpose of our grown-up struggles to remain free. Liberty hardly qualifies as an end to its own revolutions. It must, while in the thick of protest, take us back to the innocence of youthful visions—the majesty of mountains, the hushed sprawl of a lake, the flaw in a wave, the dark, amber eyes of a neighbourly playmate, a beautiful beloved, a son or daughter.
To be more precise, the nature of thought and erudition—or what Prof. Gémino Abad described as that “thunder” in our blood “from lost insurrections*”—was evermore the essence of what fuelled José Rizal’s writings on nature and the nature of conquest. Between the writing of his two novels, he had much of family and his native Calamba to recall in his Reminiscences. As a warrior-poet, Rizal was beholden to none, yet hardly estranged to all (*Prof. Gémino Abad, “The Light in One’s Blood,” In Ordinary Time, UP Press, 2004).
What Lopez and Garcia Villa had all along perceived as the “Great Divide”—severing the Byron of “cloudless climes and starry skies” from the Neruda of the “dry and bloody planet of heroes”—reveals nothing but the distance of a whisper. The journalist and storyteller, poet and philosopher, psalmist and scholar—these are the curators of heaven and earth, war and peace, the real and the fantastic. Writers must speak of bougainvilleas as well as the bartolina, death and dama de noches, elegies and enchantments. These form the crux of our lives not only as Filipinos but as a free people fighting for the will to live.
In a country thick with the fog of frivolities and sweet sense of kabayanihan, content is not the problem as it is the question if writers are writing at all. “Committed” literature, therefore, to any who’d dare climb the mount of the burning bush, means commitment to literature. Neither kind of writers should be slaves to lesser gods.
It is any poet’s abiding honor to take the reins of freedom with his pen. But as Prof. Gémino Abad had aptly written: “To be a knight-errant, level first with enchantment.”
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