The Challenge of national growth to the Filipino writer

Title

Creator

Tiempo, Edilberto K.

Language

English

Year

1960

Subject

Filipinos.

Authors.

Filipinos in literature.

Philippine literature.

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

Hear ye! hear ye! The Challenge of to the Filip I don’t think there is any ■ poet, essayist, or fiction wri ter who wouldn’t be pleased to know his work could produce a laudable course of action. In this afternoon’s discussion I shall attempt to present the point of view of a fiction writer and that of a student of literature, parti cularly in the field of criticism, poetry, and drama. I post the following as my thesis: If a li terary piece must contain propa ganda, such as Mr. Soliongco seems to suggest, then the pro pagandistic content of the work must possess an internal rela tionship with the other artistic elements of the work; the writ er’s effort must follow the con cept of necessity, or inevitabili ty, as Aristotle calls it; it must have intrinsic rather than ex trinsic conviction. I shall discuss the idea of necessity, or inevit ability/ more fully later. |U ote that I used the conditional if — if a literary work must contain propaganda If literature were nothing but propaganda, then probably we shouldn’t be meeting in this conference. We should be at editorial desks, or standing be fore pulpits or on soap boxes, or in government bureaus of infor mation. The danger of any ex tremism in assuming the func tional category is the resulting demand for literature with an overemphasis on utilitarianism or moralism which sacrifices everything else that is in the work. In our own lifetime we have seen two movements that stres sed the utilitarian function of literature. First, there were the literary humanists, whose fol lowers are still among us. They insist that modern literature has generally lacked centrality be28 Panorama National Growth ino Writer By Edilberto K. Tiempo cause it ignores the ethical core of human experience. The hu manists demand that literature be the handmaiden of whatever they assume to be the Supreme Good. There is nothing funda mentally wrong with that de mand, but the literary human ists so accentuate the moral and ethical content of literature and what results is didacticism. The other movement, popular in the thirties, was the leftist movement which flowed from the Marxian concept of the class struggle and which required the conscious utilization of litera ture as an instrument of revolu tionary action. In what may be come a lopsided stress to make literature an instrument to pro mote national growth, we may sound like Michael Gold» the most famous representative of left-wing writers in America, when he said: “One of the basic tasks of the writer is to stimu late and encourage and help the growth of proletarian literature ... We must realize that only this literature can answer these intellectual abstractions into which petty bourgeois people fall.” I may mention another school of thinking whose persuasion may not be too distant from the values we may be considering at this moment. I refer to the American muckrakers near the turn of the nineteenth century. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, The Octopus by Frank Norris are examples of this school. The intention was to use fiction to rake up America’s muck in the last decades of the nineteenth century, hoping that in the pro cess of aeration its various ele ments would be bleached clean. My reason for mentioning these movements is that in de December 1960 29 fining the function and scope of the creative writer — or any artists of the fine arts, especially in relation to his milieu, any prescriptive injunctions are arti ficial and can choke the growth of any artistic enterprises. I ca tegorically affirm that our Phil ippine writers concern them selves with the local — the na tional — scene, but doing so is only the initial step in the wri ter’s creative effort — if he is still concerned with art at all. What he does with his material is his most challenging, his most important task. In dealing with issues and events, the writer must be aware of certain dan gers. One of them is this: If the writer aims to present a system of ideas as ideas, he will end up not as a poet or fiction writer but as a theoretician or a pam phleteer. There’s nothing wrong with being a theorist or a pamphlete'er; we need them in the Philippines. But a novelist and a pamphleteer belong to two different irreconcilable catego ries. Literature, we must recog nize, is not so directly concern ed with finding answers to social problems that will be imme diately embodied in action; and, furthermore, novelists and poets are not equipped to substitute for political or economic lead ers. Their concern is not so much to act as recorders of life and events, for that is the func tion of the historian or the so ciologist. The writer’s chief concern is that of interpreter, of generalizer. Literature common ly follows in the wake of life and events, and the writer’s task is to give them synthesis, to give order and coherence. It is only as he creates universal form and coherence that the writer unconsciously assumes the role of legislator and pro phet because he speaks the truth that is above the petty wranglings of his time; because he speaks for all mankind. The writer’s acceptance of utilitarianism as a primary con sideration amounts to an expli cit disbelief in the autonomy of the writer’s art. “Art,” said Goe the. “is but form-giving.” Art is giving form to an idea. In ex plaining that incisive definition John Addington Symonds says, “There is not a work of art with out a theme, without motive, without a subject. Th-? presen tation of that theme, that mo tive, that subject, is the final end of art. The art is good or bar according as the subject has been well or ill presented.” It would indeed be conven ient to point to Rizal as a fine example for the Philippine wri ter. I am bracketing Del Pilar, Mabini, and Lopez Jaena with Rizal because the first three were unadulterated propagand30 Panorama ists. Rizal stands above his con temporaries as a writer. Setting him as an example for our gen eration of writers I heartily en dorse. In the words of William Dean Howells, the eminent cri tic and novelist/ Noli Me Tangere was the greatest novel writ ten in any language within a hundred years of its publication. Noli Me Tangere is great not because it is propagandistic, but because it is a brilliantly exec uted novel. I say this in spite of the fact that the novel has the characteristic flaws of nine teenth century novelists like Thackeray and Dickens. Since we are writers, in evaluating Rizal as a novelist I should like to bring out the criteria by which novelist and critic James T. Farrell evaluates Dostoevski. First, are we going to slam into his ideology, disprove it, which is easy), and then throw him into the discard? This approach remarks Farrell, oversimplifies our extra-literary functionalism. Second, shall we say that Dos toevski was all right for his time, that for his time he was or was not reactionary# that in any case he was a revolutionary in his younger days, was exiled to Si beria, and once was even on the verge of execution before a fir ing squad? This method, Far rell says, would stow Dostoevs ki away in a museum, and attri bute to his novels only the in terest we find in any historical curiosity. Third, shall we recog nize that his characterizations are among the most profound and incisive to be met with in any novelist? Using this ap proach, which is a universal ap proach, Farrell concludes, we assimilate Dostoevski’s values in and for our time. If we use these criteria for Noli Me Tangere, Rizal would emerge as a triumphant figure in our literary history. The strongest proof of that asser tion is this: that Rizal’s dreams for reforms are past history, but Noli Me Tangere still lives in Sisa and Dona Consolacion and Padre Damaso and the philoso pher Tasio. Rizal lives in the indignation with which he pre sented the errors of his day. It is this persistence value that makes Noli Me Tangere a living novel. While still on Rizal, 1 should like to comment on the so-call ed “genuine Filipino tradition” which stems back, so responsible people among us say, to the tra dition of the propaganda move ment, to the days of Balagtas, Del Pilar, Rizal and Lopez Jaena. Let us not forget that Balag tas, Del Pilar, Rizal and Lopez Jaena were using the tools of Anglo-European culture and tradition. The outstanding writer of them all, Rizal# used the same satirical approaches as Juvenal, Voltaire, and Jonathan Swift, and commits the same December 1960 31 fictional flaws as Hugo and Thackeray. It‘s a fine thing to be nationalistic, to be truly Fi lipino, but we will be losing our perspective if we denied the continuity of the Anglo-Euiopean tradition of our forbears and denied the extension of this tra dition through the Americans, in spite of Longfellow. Ameri can literature itself is a contin uation — and until the middle of the nineteenth cer.tury a weak echo of English literature. English literature itself, one of the greatest conglomerations in history, had its roots in and its directions from Continental Europe. From Beowulf through Bede * through Chaucer, through the Renaissance and Shake speare, through Dryden and the Neo-classical period, and then through the nineteenth century, Continental influences continu ally poured in to help shape English literature. Literature is complex in origin and growth. Our own Filipino balitao — and we may not find a better illustration of an indigenous art from than the balitao — is a mongrel product. It traces its history back to Pro vence in the Middle Ages, and from there through Spam. As a Filipino writer I have not the least embarrassment or apology for riding down on the stream of Anglo-European-American tra dition, since this Anglo-Europ ean-American tradition itself is a mongrel breed. I am proud of of it and blessed with it. The Philippines has been in a uni que position in Far Eastern his tory; to deny the impact of ex ternal influences upon cur own culture is to deny the facts of our history, of which we should all be proud. The writer — the Filipino writer — must begin with an idea, with a theme, with a sub ject. But granting his theme, whether it be propagandistic or anything else, the writer’s chief interest is to make that theme siginificant, and this he can do only through his art. If he w’ere not concerned with his art, with his manner of communicating his subject, no matter how sig nificant the theme, he has no business being a writer. Thus the statement of Mr. Emilio Aguilar Cruz that at this confer ence the delegates are ‘appar ently apathetic to the problems of craft,” if this were true, w'ould be a wilful evasion of our res ponsibility as creative writers or as students or patrons of li terature. I do firmly advocate the writ er’s involvement in his milieu because this gives him authen ticity, a solidity of specifica tion, as a contemporary critic calls it. And if a writer aims to propagate a course of action * in other words, if a writer’s work must embody propaganda, the work must contain that in 32 Panorama ternal consistency and that es sential external reference, it must follow the concept of art istic necessity, or it is no work of art. The propagandistic no velist’s fundamental weakness lies in his inability to apply the principle of necessity in an es sential and compelling manner. Inevitability must necessarily flow as events and implication from what has already been presented in the structure of events. If this principle is vio lated, then what emerges is the subjective imposition of the au thor’s plea for a course of ac tion, or whatever it is that he wants to present in the name of progress or morality. Regard ing this subjective imposition the poet and critic Shelley warns that the more exclusive the writer’s emphasis towards ethical or utilitarian demands, the farther it is from artistic realization. ONTENT is important in living literature, but this content must not be taken as synonymous with formal ideolo gy, generalized themes, and the explicitly stated ideas of a writ er. This content — whether of a public or private nature, whet her it is about exploding a na tional policy or about a char acter’s salvaging of his own pri vate failure — this content must be the shaping of life itself into literary form, or in the words of James T. Farrell, “a way of feeling and thinking and seeing life that the creative artist con veys to his audience — the structure of events, the quality of characterizations, the com plex impact of the work itself.” In evaluating Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, we do nor judge Shakespeare’s personal position in the conflict between the Ro man aristocracy and the ple beians (the bias in this play happens to be patrician), but the evaluation should be on the basis of the inevitability of Coriolanus’ decision, as he vin dictively stands with his con quering army before the help less city of Rome. In other words, the basic critical ques tion is: When he decides not to attack Rome, and by this de cision his own life is endanger ed the hands of his allies, the Volscians, has Shakespeare pre pared us for this final prostra tion of Coriolanus? Shakespeare, as in his other plays, has given us adequate foreshadowing for this scene, one of the most dra matic in all of Shakespeare, in fact in all literature. Through the artist’s craft we forget the issues of empire for the more vital problem of a man who must make a crucial decision upon which his life perilously hangs. As a summary of what I have said, I suggest that what ultimately counts is what the writer does with his material. December 1960 33 If this were not so, then we are relinquishing our primary responsibility, then we may even pretend to bear the name of creative writers. The main business of the creative writer is not preaching. By the tools of his art, his main concern towards his audience and to wards his material is that of bringing a shock of discovery, of recognition, of revelation, so that in his work the reader sees himself in new awareness and evaluates himself with a more quickened spirit, and is given a richer insight into life and into his fellow beings. Thus the successful writer transcends the incidents of his time and becomes a sage and prophet. The writer of the highest integ rity can rest his case on this. Artistic revelation is his final responsibility to himself and to his art. High-Power Camera An Japanese camera firm recently announced the entry of the world’s brightest lens system which it produced experimentally in the current Interna tional Camera Show at Cologne, West Germany. The lens system has four times the resolving power of the human eye in a standard lens of fifty millimeters made up of five groups of seven lenses each. If the system is used along with an ASA 2,000 high sensitive film, the camera can easily catch fast moving objects in the dark, its maker, the “Canon” firm, said. Canon cameras using this system of lenses will be put on sale sometime next year after some fur ther improvements, it was announced. * 34 Panorama

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