It was an interesting piece in that beyond being another survey of people’s reactions to a tragic event, it provided insights into how artists see the world and their function in it. Nothing defines people more quickly and more sharply than adversity, and anytime you lose 6,000 compatriots, practically before your very eyes, you’ll most certainly be asking yourself what it is you still might be living for.
You’d think that the writer–like most other ordinary citizens–would scream and rant at an outrage so flagrant and so vile. Perhaps they did, in a private moment or two; they wouldn’t even have needed to suffer a personal loss to empathize with the victims and their families, because nothing prepares you to feel for other people quite as well as writing about them and imagining their lives. But by the same token, nothing composes you–puts the pieces of you back together–better than writing. When we speak of "composition" as in "freshman composition," this is what we really mean: the act of writing composes not just the text but also its writer and his or her thoughts and being. To push that idea further, let’s remember Andre Malraux, to whom every work of art was a victory over chaos, a triumph over death.
And so it wasn’t too surprising to find novelists like John Updike and Rosellen Brown choosing to emphasize composure and quietude over, and against, the panic and the shrillness of radio and even TV reportage and commentary.
"In the hours after the terrorist attacks last week," wrote Smith, "many American novelists, whether engaged in themes far removed from the horrific events or not, asked themselves if what they do had turned irrelevant.
"A sampling of prominent authors this week showed that while many temporarily questioned their work, they ended up affirming to themselves the value and purpose of what they do.
"John Updike is writing a novel about the art world, and he said that when he heard about the disaster, the work and the entire subject seemed trivial. But then, he said, he realized that continuing to write was ‘my only haven.’ He could lose himself in it. And besides, being a novelist, Mr. Updike said, is ‘my contribution to the civil order.’
"Most of the writers said that even though the world now seemed changed forever, they did not feel compelled to abandon their traditional subject matter or the subject of ordinary life. Rosellen Brown, who in her most recent novel, Half a Heart, wrote about the impact of the civil rights movement on the domestic sphere years later, said,‘I don’t think people are going to lose interest in telling stories about how people live their lives.’ When the first plane hit the World Trade Center, she said, ‘ordinary people were going about their lives, putting cream in their coffee, picking up the phone to start the day; the ordinariness of those lives is what seizes us.’"
It’s this deceptive and many-layered "ordinariness" of things that I often have the hardest time convincing my students to considering writing about–instead of interplanetary wars, angst-ridden vampires, castles in the sky, and wisecracking turtles. Of course you can write about all these other things–I never force or foist subjects upon my students, although I might ask them to consider alternative ways of looking at and representing the world–but it’s all too often done at the expense of writing about the most difficult subject of all, which is what you see right before you, in the here and now. In a sense, it’s easier to imagine a galaxy far, far away than to deal with that scene across the street with the fat guy chewing on a toothpick and scratching his tummy. For me, the true test of the imagination isn’t how far it can go, but how close it can come to home.
American fictionists are very good at seizing on the most commonplace of moments and events, and then turning them into something quite extraordinary, like coaxing a rose or a frog out of a few folds of paper. It could be their temperament–the dogged individualism or privateness, sometimes the sullen reticence, of ordinary Americans intent on having everyone believe that all is well and normal, with themselves and with the world. This is why "ordinariness" can be such fertile ground for the American novelist, to whom every life is a roomful of stories, every face a door to untold mysteries, tragedies, and delights masquerading as nothing much.
We Filipinos, on the other hand, see ourselves as slaves and victims of larger forces–politics, injustice, religion, destiny, the weather, fortune. We like our novels writ large, set against a backdrop of history and revolution. Our dramas are never entirely private, and always have social causes; character is motivated as much by class as by caprice; the great–and star-crossed–love affair of our fantasies is that between rich and poor. Thus, our novels tend to be spacious canvases, landscapes peopled by familiar icons: corrupt politicians, sadistic colonels, libidinous clergymen, bright-eyed reformers, grim-faced rebels, immaculate virgins, social climbers, earthy but virtuous whores.
But wait–wasn’t all that, or much of it, in the Noli and Fili? Of course–and this has been the boon and bane, as I’ve often remarked, of our literature: that those of us presumptuous and ambitious enough to essay the novel should labor under the towering shadow of Rizal, whose literary achievement, to my mind, remains unequaled.
I’m speaking, then again, in broad generalizations, and I should add very quickly that some young new Filipino writers have extricated themselves from this bind without losing sight of our realities and concerns. A junior colleague–whose identity will remain a secret for now–has just finished a novel about the Pinoy Bridget Jones, managing the feat, she proudly says, without once resorting to the use of those most beloved of Filipino novelistic settings, fiestas and funerals.
That’s just too bad for me, whose long-running novel-in-progress ends–at least in my mind, where much of the novel remains–in a funeral. Not your regular, everyday funeral, I should add–but I’ve already said too much. For the past two years now, I’ve been pecking away at what I still insist is a comic novel–all right, a darkly comic novel–that thumbs its nose at all the supersized slings and industrial-strength arrows that someone seems to have reserved for us Filipinos.
Whatever the circumstances, we should really be writing more and bigger novels, which are the only things the literary world outside us takes seriously these days, apart from low-budget movies–not poems, not stories, not plays, but novels, and fat ones. Unfortunately, while a good novel (not to mention a Harry Potter) and its spin-offs might make millions for an American or British author, no novel ever made a Filipino a wealthy man or woman, although a novel may have caused an execution or two.
More on the Filipino novel–and on fiestas and funerals–later. Hoping to recharge my own batteries, I’m teaching a course this semester on writing the novel and the long story, from which course let me share with you these musings from John Gardner, taken from On Becoming a Novelist (New York: Harper & Row, 1983):
"The novelist is in a fundamentally different situation from the writer of short stories or the poet…. He has, unlike the poet or short story writer, the endurance and pace of a marathon runner… And he has, besides, the kind of ambition peculiar to novelists–a taste for the monumental. He may begin as a short story writer; most novelists do. But he quickly finds himself too narrowly caged: he needs more space, more characters, more world. So he writes his large book and, as I began by saying, if he wins, he wins handsomely. The trouble is (and this is the point I’ve been struggling toward), the novelist does not win nearly as often as do poets and writers of short stories. That is why needs to be a driven man, or at any rate directed by inner forces, not daily or monthly bursts of applause. A good poem takes a couple of days, maybe a week, to write. A good short story takes about the same. A novel may take years. All writers thrive on praise and publication; the writer is the writer who makes the huge, long-term investment, one that may or may not pay off.
"If you have prepared yourself well, there is nothing more anyone need tell you. If you have taken the time to write beautiful, rock-firm sentences, if you have mastered evocation of the vidid and continuous dream, if you are generous enough in your personal character to treat imaginary characters and readers fairly, if you have held on to your childhood virtues and have not settled for literary standards much lower than those of the fiction you admire, then the novel you write will eventually be, after the necessary labor of repeated revision, a novel to be proud of, one that almost certainly someone, sooner or later, will be glad to publish."
Let me end this week’s homily by reminding one and all of Writers’ Night this coming Thursday, Dec. 13, 6 p.m. at the Executive House in UP Diliman. Also, congratulations to my friend Charlson Ong and my former student Socorro Villanueva for winning the NVM Gonzalez Awards for the short story this year, given out last Saturday by NVM’s widow Narita. Let’s drink to that–vita brevis, ars longa (Life is short, but art lives long)!