Size and scope
December 17, 2001 | 12:00am
Last week’s piece on "Fiestas and funerals"–on writing the novel, really–drew spirited reactions from a couple of readers whom I don’t think I’ve met but who might as well be friends given the number of times we’ve corresponded by e-mail. Brian Brotarlo is in Iloilo and Jodie Reyes in New York (the latter taking his MFA in creative writing at Columbia).
"What’s with all the Rizal?" Brian asks. "If I wasn’t Filipino and I didn’t know the name and just picked up the Fili or Noli, I’d say it’s a rather good book. It’s political literature, though, at its purest. You have a cause and a hero, the struggle in between, at the end he fails. There’s that thing with Maria Clara and the gathering in Capitan Tiago’s house, which reminds me of adult parties when I was small. The detail, even the lighting, is authentic. But no great novel. You can’t even call it brilliant for its lack of originality. That, I think, is what Filipino writers lack."
Well, Brian, you’d hardly be alone in being underwhelmed by Rizal’s novels. The British novelist Timothy Mo, if I’m not mistaken, is no big fan of Rizal–and Mo is no stranger to the Philippines and its history, having lived here occasionally over the past couple of decades.
What, indeed, makes a novel or a work of art "brilliant" or "great"?
Consider the idea that the value of a novel–or of a painting, for that matter–is always more than the pleasure inherent in the text and in its felicities, stylistic and otherwise. Because of its scope and subject, a novel, unlike many stories and poems, almost always generates and implicates a social and historical context–in fact, more than one context: that of its writing (the circumstances under which the author wrote the novel), that of its subject (the time and place in which the events of the novel are set), and that of its reading (the circumstances under which we read the novel, including our personal circumstances–the reader’s age, education, economic status, politics, preferences, etc.). Any and all of these factors can affect what we make of a work of art.
It could be that the Noli and Fili are literarily unremarkable compared to the work of their more celebrated contemporaries–Hugo, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky–and to that of Faulkner and Garcia Marquez after them. But such comparisons, while perhaps inevitable, are always invidious, because they presume a kind of universal standard applicable to all novels at all times and places. But no such standard exists; every act of reading, viewing, or listening is specifically and socially conditioned, and we can relate to a work of art–whether it be by Picasso, Eliot, an Australian aboriginal musician, or Banana Yoshimoto–only insofar as we can make some sense of it, on our own terms.
I would think that it shouldn’t matter to us if the Spanish or the French don’t or won’t think much of Rizal; what matters is how we Filipinos, for whom these novels were written, receive him. Even the fact that the Americans appropriated Rizal as the poster boy of liberal reformism shouldn’t spoil our own critical appreciation of his work.
I’m no candle-lighting, icon-worshipping Rizalista, and I can’t quote chapter and verse from the Noli and Fili if my life or my Game Ka Na Ba million depended on it. In fact, my own early reading of Rizal was spoiled by a teacher–a former military man–who marched us through the books without any regard for context or nuance. But still I came away with an impression of a time, a place, and a crisis vividly captured and rendered–which is still more than I can say for many novels I’ve read since.
Brilliance to me is a technical achievement–a luminosity of form, virtuosity in the fingerwork. You can find this in, for example, John Gardner’s Grendel. Greatness is something transcendent–a piece’s ability to transcend time, space, and language. But didn’t I just say that no such universal measure of value exists? There lies, I think, the paradox and the magic of truly great works of art–that, produced for their time, they should still very much be a part of ours.
Jodie Reyes writes:
I enjoyed reading your latest column, although there was a passage that caused some inner alarm bells to ring. At the risk of quoting you out of context, here it is:
"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."
Maybe I react somewhat negatively to this because I have chosen poetry as my genre, but that’s not the whole story. I think what I question is the assumption that bigger is necessarily better. From the economic point of view, I totally agree with you. Publishers here want novels and book-length nonfiction works, not story or poetry collections.
But the artist in me says that only better is necessarily better. I think one should strive for excellence and originality in whatever genre he or she has chosen. And really work at it. I’d rather read a well-crafted poem than go through a 900-page novel only to be disappointed by the ending.
I am encouraged by some recent achievements by Filipino writers (albeit Filipino Americans) here in the US. Brian Ascalon Roley’s novel, American Son, was published by Norton this year and got a favorable review in the New York Times Book Review. But we have a few notable achievements in poetry as well: Eugene Gloria’s collection of poems, Drivers at the Short-Time Motel, a work I admire tremendously, was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa, a noted American poet, for the National Poetry Series in 1999 and was published last year by Penguin. And Rick Barot won the Morton Prize in Poetry this year for his book of poems, The Darker Fall, which will be published by Sarabande Books. I am probably missing out on a lot of other achievements, as is most of the literary world. But the point is, the novel is not the only way to go. It may be a tough road, as I expect it to be for myself, but in the end, we are the ones who should choose, not the literary marketplace, whatever that may be.
Your column actually reminded me of Cirilo Bautista’s introduction to Mike Maniquiz’s collection of poems, Revolver. I don’t have the book in front of me, but I do recall Cirilo praising Mike for being able to sustain his intensity and lyricism even when the poem was over a page long. That’s not a bad thing to say. But then Cirilo generalizes and says that the ability to write long poems is the mark of a true poet. It’s okay to write brief poems if you are a dabbler, he claims. But if you’re a real poet, you must be able to write longer things.
This is not to criticize Mike, but, with all due respect, I think prescriptions such as Cirilo’s are harmful because they preclude poets from exploring certain ideas that call for the brief utterance.
Would he consider Basho, the great Japanese master of the haiku, a dabbler? Very few works of literature can compare with the quiet intensity of such lines:
Bird of time in Kyoto, pining for Kyoto.
As a whole, Basho’s poetry can rightly stand side by side with something as huge as Milton’s Paradise Lost. Perhaps size does matter, after all. But I don’t think one has to build a single palace out of stone taken from a quarry; one can carve several intricate sculptures instead.
Well, Jodie, let me qualify what I said then: you’re right, I did mean "bigger is better" only in the commercial sense, and I agree with everything else you say about size and matter.
I had to make the point about Filipino writers needing a firmer grasp of the global literary market and a clearer sense of what it will take to break into it, because while we indeed have proven ourselves more than capable of writing excellent poems and short stories, we have yet to establish a tenable beachhead in the global literary scene, and–as many literary agents have told me–it’s the big novel, more than anything else, on which the troops will ride. The Fil-Ams are doing a great job indeed of breaking into the market from within, but I’m talking about getting there from here, which raises the bar considerably. (Let me qualify what I mean by "big" as well–not necessarily some humongous 700-page doorstop, although one of those every decade or so should help, but, say, a 250- to 300-page opus? Big enough by our standards. The presumption, of course, is that size encourages scope–a comprehensive and yet incisive vision, many interesting things happening, a satisfying read.)
Should the market lead our writing by the nose? Certainly not, but if you want to make a profession of your writing like some of us do, you’d just as surely have to think about it. This doesn’t mean trying to out-Clancy Tom Clancy or out-Steele Danielle Steele–I don’t think we could even if we wanted to–but the market for what used to be called (before PC times) "serious" literature is still a market nonetheless.
Something tells me we can’t afford to sit on our haunches waiting to be discovered by the West for our native charms. Let’s not even think of the West for the time being. We can begin right here by more vigorously introducing our writers and their work to students–through campus tours, café readings, and such, just to help sell the 1,000 copies that make up a standard print run for Filipino works of fiction and poetry.
"What’s with all the Rizal?" Brian asks. "If I wasn’t Filipino and I didn’t know the name and just picked up the Fili or Noli, I’d say it’s a rather good book. It’s political literature, though, at its purest. You have a cause and a hero, the struggle in between, at the end he fails. There’s that thing with Maria Clara and the gathering in Capitan Tiago’s house, which reminds me of adult parties when I was small. The detail, even the lighting, is authentic. But no great novel. You can’t even call it brilliant for its lack of originality. That, I think, is what Filipino writers lack."
Well, Brian, you’d hardly be alone in being underwhelmed by Rizal’s novels. The British novelist Timothy Mo, if I’m not mistaken, is no big fan of Rizal–and Mo is no stranger to the Philippines and its history, having lived here occasionally over the past couple of decades.
What, indeed, makes a novel or a work of art "brilliant" or "great"?
Consider the idea that the value of a novel–or of a painting, for that matter–is always more than the pleasure inherent in the text and in its felicities, stylistic and otherwise. Because of its scope and subject, a novel, unlike many stories and poems, almost always generates and implicates a social and historical context–in fact, more than one context: that of its writing (the circumstances under which the author wrote the novel), that of its subject (the time and place in which the events of the novel are set), and that of its reading (the circumstances under which we read the novel, including our personal circumstances–the reader’s age, education, economic status, politics, preferences, etc.). Any and all of these factors can affect what we make of a work of art.
It could be that the Noli and Fili are literarily unremarkable compared to the work of their more celebrated contemporaries–Hugo, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky–and to that of Faulkner and Garcia Marquez after them. But such comparisons, while perhaps inevitable, are always invidious, because they presume a kind of universal standard applicable to all novels at all times and places. But no such standard exists; every act of reading, viewing, or listening is specifically and socially conditioned, and we can relate to a work of art–whether it be by Picasso, Eliot, an Australian aboriginal musician, or Banana Yoshimoto–only insofar as we can make some sense of it, on our own terms.
I would think that it shouldn’t matter to us if the Spanish or the French don’t or won’t think much of Rizal; what matters is how we Filipinos, for whom these novels were written, receive him. Even the fact that the Americans appropriated Rizal as the poster boy of liberal reformism shouldn’t spoil our own critical appreciation of his work.
I’m no candle-lighting, icon-worshipping Rizalista, and I can’t quote chapter and verse from the Noli and Fili if my life or my Game Ka Na Ba million depended on it. In fact, my own early reading of Rizal was spoiled by a teacher–a former military man–who marched us through the books without any regard for context or nuance. But still I came away with an impression of a time, a place, and a crisis vividly captured and rendered–which is still more than I can say for many novels I’ve read since.
Brilliance to me is a technical achievement–a luminosity of form, virtuosity in the fingerwork. You can find this in, for example, John Gardner’s Grendel. Greatness is something transcendent–a piece’s ability to transcend time, space, and language. But didn’t I just say that no such universal measure of value exists? There lies, I think, the paradox and the magic of truly great works of art–that, produced for their time, they should still very much be a part of ours.
I enjoyed reading your latest column, although there was a passage that caused some inner alarm bells to ring. At the risk of quoting you out of context, here it is:
"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."
Maybe I react somewhat negatively to this because I have chosen poetry as my genre, but that’s not the whole story. I think what I question is the assumption that bigger is necessarily better. From the economic point of view, I totally agree with you. Publishers here want novels and book-length nonfiction works, not story or poetry collections.
But the artist in me says that only better is necessarily better. I think one should strive for excellence and originality in whatever genre he or she has chosen. And really work at it. I’d rather read a well-crafted poem than go through a 900-page novel only to be disappointed by the ending.
I am encouraged by some recent achievements by Filipino writers (albeit Filipino Americans) here in the US. Brian Ascalon Roley’s novel, American Son, was published by Norton this year and got a favorable review in the New York Times Book Review. But we have a few notable achievements in poetry as well: Eugene Gloria’s collection of poems, Drivers at the Short-Time Motel, a work I admire tremendously, was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa, a noted American poet, for the National Poetry Series in 1999 and was published last year by Penguin. And Rick Barot won the Morton Prize in Poetry this year for his book of poems, The Darker Fall, which will be published by Sarabande Books. I am probably missing out on a lot of other achievements, as is most of the literary world. But the point is, the novel is not the only way to go. It may be a tough road, as I expect it to be for myself, but in the end, we are the ones who should choose, not the literary marketplace, whatever that may be.
Your column actually reminded me of Cirilo Bautista’s introduction to Mike Maniquiz’s collection of poems, Revolver. I don’t have the book in front of me, but I do recall Cirilo praising Mike for being able to sustain his intensity and lyricism even when the poem was over a page long. That’s not a bad thing to say. But then Cirilo generalizes and says that the ability to write long poems is the mark of a true poet. It’s okay to write brief poems if you are a dabbler, he claims. But if you’re a real poet, you must be able to write longer things.
This is not to criticize Mike, but, with all due respect, I think prescriptions such as Cirilo’s are harmful because they preclude poets from exploring certain ideas that call for the brief utterance.
Would he consider Basho, the great Japanese master of the haiku, a dabbler? Very few works of literature can compare with the quiet intensity of such lines:
Bird of time in Kyoto, pining for Kyoto.
As a whole, Basho’s poetry can rightly stand side by side with something as huge as Milton’s Paradise Lost. Perhaps size does matter, after all. But I don’t think one has to build a single palace out of stone taken from a quarry; one can carve several intricate sculptures instead.
Well, Jodie, let me qualify what I said then: you’re right, I did mean "bigger is better" only in the commercial sense, and I agree with everything else you say about size and matter.
I had to make the point about Filipino writers needing a firmer grasp of the global literary market and a clearer sense of what it will take to break into it, because while we indeed have proven ourselves more than capable of writing excellent poems and short stories, we have yet to establish a tenable beachhead in the global literary scene, and–as many literary agents have told me–it’s the big novel, more than anything else, on which the troops will ride. The Fil-Ams are doing a great job indeed of breaking into the market from within, but I’m talking about getting there from here, which raises the bar considerably. (Let me qualify what I mean by "big" as well–not necessarily some humongous 700-page doorstop, although one of those every decade or so should help, but, say, a 250- to 300-page opus? Big enough by our standards. The presumption, of course, is that size encourages scope–a comprehensive and yet incisive vision, many interesting things happening, a satisfying read.)
Should the market lead our writing by the nose? Certainly not, but if you want to make a profession of your writing like some of us do, you’d just as surely have to think about it. This doesn’t mean trying to out-Clancy Tom Clancy or out-Steele Danielle Steele–I don’t think we could even if we wanted to–but the market for what used to be called (before PC times) "serious" literature is still a market nonetheless.
Something tells me we can’t afford to sit on our haunches waiting to be discovered by the West for our native charms. Let’s not even think of the West for the time being. We can begin right here by more vigorously introducing our writers and their work to students–through campus tours, café readings, and such, just to help sell the 1,000 copies that make up a standard print run for Filipino works of fiction and poetry.
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