Fiction as allegiance.

And an allegation.
(paper presented at the UP centennial writers' conference/workshop
at UP Visayas-Tacloban College, Dec. 1-6, 2008)

The burden of representation
As an avid reader and an amateur critic of fiction, I have found that, inevitably, dealing with fiction entails getting to a certain level of inquiry that also, inevitably, leads to one of only two results. One is what Pierre Macherey has termed as the breaking down of the story before questions it is incapable of answering, the other is my breaking down as a reader before a story I am incapable of questioning.

This is hardly unusual. I know that I am not alone in this reading practice or experience. Instead of just asking who the characters are in a story, we ask, for instance: Whose story is this, really? Is it a good/fair/innovative way of rendering these people’s lives? Is this a sound depiction of the subject him/herself? Instead of asking what the story is all about, we ask: What, ultimately, is the story saying about stories, about history, about time? Is this a sensitive rendering of a society, a culture, a social relationship, an event, a phenomenon? Instead of merely asking what the writer wants to say, we ask: What does this say about the writer? Whose interests does the writer serve? Or, even, what does this story want from me as a reader?

These questions, of course, point to concerns that are usually considered as being well beyond the pale of craft, way outside the parameters of form. I cannot disagree more. For sure, these are questions that delve into issues of ideology, representation, language and subjectivity, questions that the creative writer, as it is stressed in workshops time and time again, need not burden herself with. But these are concerns I burden myself with only because I have found that they cannot be disassociated with issues of form. No less than an appreciation of all these other aspects is demanded by fiction itself; and by narratives, in general, primarily because of its very nature, its very form.

My preferred definition of fiction is that which takes into consideration its form and the conditions that give rise to, sustain, or break, the form. Variations of this definition appear in the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Macherey, even Haydn White. Resil Mojares’s work in The Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel also comes to mind. So do the women’s stories in the anthology Fern Garden, edited by Merlie Alunan. Moreover, the stories of Eric Gamalinda, Erwin Castillo, Nick Joaquin, Chari Lucero, Gina Apostol, among others, illustrate the definition further. Their stories celebrate the form, question the boundaries between the mimetic and the marvelous and, in the process, engage quite intensely with the stories’ material and historical conditions. I pay much attention to these aspects because what, as a reader, I demand from (and enjoy about) fiction, are no different from what I, as a writer of it, aspire for. Similarly, the things I am dissatisfied with in some works of fiction are the very same things I want to avoid in my own writing -- monologism, univocalism, and objectivism. Kind of like the traits of this government which I also cannot stand.

I do tend to agree with the idea that fiction is necessarily burdened with issues of representation – not only in the sense of Greek Classical representation as the reproduction of something, or the elaboration of a concept corresponding to a thing perceived; but also in the sense of political, everyday representation as in formal statements made to a higher authority. Representation as the communication of an opinion, or the registration of a protest! More and more, I am seduced by the idea of fiction as a claim, a contention and, sometimes, an allegation.

(I must say that I love the word allegation. Used appropriately, it can be an effective way of stating one’s belief by merely citing the plausible opposite. The exercise of alleging can be an immensely successful way of rendering the tyranny of truth as irrelevant or, at least, relative, conditional. Allegation is a very powerful legal fiction, so to speak.)

I remember a critic from New Zealand, enthusiastically presenting a paper on one of Jessica Hagedorn’s novels, in a literary conference in UP. The critic went on to praise the novel’s style and evocative language, only to be severely critiqued right after. The poor guy did not know what hit him. What more do you want, I’m sure he wanted to ask. Here I am, telling you that I love this novel, by a Filipino writer, about the Philippines, and you complain! What the critic did not anticipate was the ultra sensitivity of the audience – literature teachers, writers, and critics all – to issues of representation. The guy was severely berated for not having recognized that the reading he just offered had long been rendered inoperable, narrow-minded, and generally unsound. His only fault: to praise the book for the wrong claims; and to claim an understanding of the state of the nation, merely through the book. What really struck the audience’s nerve was that this one particular novel by a Fil-am writer was being read by a foreigner as a representation of the entire Philippines. On the contrary, readings of it in Comparative Literature classrooms have tended to treat the novel as being quite unabashedly intended for a foreign audience, and its postmodernist tendencies merely serve to mask the novel’s ideology. At some point, I remember thinking: Well, why the hell not? Why can’t one write for the audience one wants? Would it have made a difference if the author were not a Fil-American, if she were just a Filipino? Would it have made a difference if she wrote about America, instead of the Philippines, and applied the same techniques and strategies?

Apparently, yes, one can and does write for one’s ideal reader. However, one has to always account for one’s subject position, which is revealed by the mere choice of readership. And, nowadays, yes, it does make a difference who you’re writing as, what you’re writing about, and where you’re writing from.

I have my own reading of the novel, and I do tend to go with the postcolonial critique of ideology approach. I submit though that, to a certain extent, the engagement with critical theory – particularly of these kinds – can get out of hand, get in the way of pure reading pleasure. Not to mention how it can get in the way of pure fiction-writing pleasure.

Theory indeed gets in the way. But, isn’t it only right that it should? The complexity of the world we write of and the world we write in demands that it be rendered sensitively and, well, honestly. Whether one writes of a world of simple peasants in the distant Philippine past, or the underground world of punk-gothic individuals in dizzyingly fast-paced urban New Manila, one is still writing of the here and now. One has to, in a sense, theorize the world one writes in, through the fictionalized world one writes of.

All I mean is, there is no turning back, no reclaiming lost innocence, no feigning indifference. One can no longer unread what one has read. There are pressures and demands on the writing and reading of Philippine fiction, in English, at least, that cannot, and should not, be ignored.


Home as a syndrome
As a writer from the Visayas, who is based in Manila, for instance, I cannot help but react, sometimes violently, to pressures for a particular kind of representation in my fiction. I’m sure this is a familiar experience to many. For instance, in national writers workshops, it is almost always expected of us to turn out a story with a strong, local flavor, but rendered from an ironic perspective. I mean, if you merely translate into English a perfectly sensible and successful oral narrative in Waray, for instance, it would surely be considered too simplistic, unimaginative, a failure. But, really, what does local color mean? Does this mean including snippets of conversation, expletives and curses, in the local language for emotional color? Does it involve using Waray terms, written in italics, even for phrases that have an idiomatic equivalent in English? Does this mean writing about rural folks, in idyllic seaside settings, engaging in so-called native – therefore humorous, strange, or fantastic – practices? Because I am very much guilty of all that, of submitting to such pressures and demands. What’s even more unfortunate is that these are pressures I myself exert on my own writing, almost as a matter of course.

The truth is, it is only on occasions like this that I am forced to confront questions that sometimes do spoil the pleasure of writing fiction. Most of the time, I just write what I can, whenever I can. I still believe that a writer’s role is to write. I cannot use the excuse of engaging with theory as a reason for not being able to produce fiction. Neither do I see theory as an impetus to write fiction. I do not write fiction in order to illustrate a theory. I do not write fiction in order to save the country, to improve people’s lives, or to empower the marginalized. There are other activities, other kinds of writing, that I do that, to my mind, would more closely approach those objectives. As a fictionist, my first allegiance is to the story, to memory, to play. My fiction, moreover, aims to play with the concept of fiction itself, with the concept of allegiance even, as well as of memory and remembrance.

My stories have invariably been about home – home as a syndrome, a physiological disorder: a disruption of normal physical or mental functions; a disease or an abnormal condition. The body is in one place, but the heart is someplace else. The language that is used for speech is not the language of one’s secrets. This is the main affliction, an affliction whose symptoms are not always manifest, rather latent. In my stories, the characters are always engaged with and yet distanced from home; but they never really leave it, they bring it with them wherever they go. The struggle is to accept that home is a concept, and a floating, unstable one, too. The struggle is to broaden the concept in order to encompass one’s changing conditions, one’s mobile location, one’s shifting position. The struggle is to not make everyone notice that the character is not always there; that she is, in truth, some place else; that she has actually disappeared, has established her home in the deepest recesses of her mind, a place beyond anyone’s reach.

I remember how, as a child growing up always amidst some twenty other cousins, in a small family compound here in Tacloban, or in Barugo, or Matalom, or Cebu, during the summer, I was always trying to disappear, and it was quite easy to disappear. I did it several times. I simply slipped out of the group of cousins playing out in the yard, to go back up to the house, hide in the room, go through my mother’s bags, rifle through my father’s documents, open cabinets and drawers, climb atop kitchen counters, mix up and blend condiments, write and draw figures on walls, dress and make up the saints, all the while unnoticed and unmissed. This went on for quite some time until one afternoon, when I decided to hide behind the backdoor of my grandparents’ house in Tacloban, to blend with the brooms and mops and cobwebs and dust, for about twelve hours, they say. I stood there without making any movement or sound, watching the maids, some aunts and cousins, go in and out of the house. I remember how I maintained my position even when my cousins and, eventually, the adults started looking for me. I could clearly hear and see people combing the entire house, the entire compound, looking everywhere but behind the backdoor. I stood there even when I could see my mother starting to panic and to blame hapless househelps for my disappearance. I do not, however, for the life of me, remember why I did what I did, or what was going through my mind while I stood there, very, very, very still. Neither do I know what made me step out of the dark, privileged, corner behind the door, in order to blend, inevitably, with the rest of them.

Since then, I don’t think I have been able to hide and disappear without anyone noticing. I did not mind becoming more visible only because I eventually realized that that was actually the best way to obscurity; an obscurity which served my need to observe, to create worlds within a world, story after story.

My head was always filled with stories – real and fabricated, my own and others’, for good and for bad. I think it was my father who first had the inkling that I would one day venture into writing stories, if not jokes. I think the very first time I understood what it took to make people laugh was also the time I understood how language works. I remember that it was one of those evenings, after dinner, the adults were out in the veranda, smoking, having coffee, airing themselves out. I sat next to Tatay and said, in Waray: Let’s say your name is You and my name is Me. Now answer this question: Who is the crazy one between the two of us? Tatay laughed so hard, I was instantly pleased, even if I didn’t have the foggiest idea why he found it so funny. I wasn’t trying to be funny, I don’t even think the idea for what was apparently a joke, was my original. For a while there, I was a major hit. Everyone started telling and retelling my joke, it became deeply embarrassing, especially because I was the last to actually get it. When I finally did get it, I tried formulating similar quips, a few of which elicited a wan response, none of which quite achieved the same kind of sweeping success that the first joke elicited. Until today, I am still trying.

There is nothing special about the stories I write. There is nothing special about me as a writer of stories. Everyone in my family is either a storyteller or a politician, which is basically saying that they are all fictionists. A few of them actually became highly successful writers and many became spectacularly unsuccessful politicians. My point is simply to say that the simple question of why I write has an equally simple answer: given that there have only been two fates, I think I’d rather be a failed writer than a failed politician. As for why I write the way I do and for whom I write, I think it is clear to me now: I write to please those from whom my fiction is derived. This is my fiction, my audacious allegation. Whether or not I actually do please them, can be the subject of another forum, for another time.