This year’s awards night was graced by Senate President Franklin M. Drilon – one of the woefully few politicians in our legislature who can be accused of, and plead guilty to, being literate. To spend the evening with the writers, Drilon gave up a slot in the presidential party that left for an official visit to Beijing that same day – a good example, I thought, of the kind of prudence the President has been demanding of the people, but which she should first demand of our leadership, especially of the posse that trails her. But let’s not get started on this.
Another special guest at our table was Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas, whom I hadn’t seen in the 20 years she’s been with the University of Iowa (the last time we met, I think we were in Dumaguete disco called the Moonwalk, doing the Rock Lobster), but who left her mark on Philippine literature with her long, lyrical stories, her exquisite poetry, and her incisive essays, which have won for her a raft of distinguished awards here and abroad. Rowena was one of the writers I admired who kept winning the short story prize until I had my own brief spell of success in the early ’80s.
I told Rowena how I bring up her stories in my fiction writing class every now and then to show how stories can be long without being vacuous or boring. In her time and mine, a 25-page story was par for the course, and you didn’t feel like they were 25 pages, because there was always something interesting and worthwhile happening. Today many writing students seem terrified by the prospect of writing anything over 10 pages – more a practical but artificial limit imposed by magazines and contests (although the Palanca upper limit is still 25 pages). Isn’t it strange that people wrote a whole lot more when the pen was the only thing you could use, instead of a computer and its Internet connection?
I keep telling my students: Take your time, take your time. Don’t rush in rendering the scene. Even the physical description alone – done well – should already incline the reader toward a certain outlook, and should spare you from having to make a clumsy direct statement. Mistrust the obvious, and explore other story possibilities. Bring your characters to where they’ve never been, or will not likely be. Introduce a new character in the second to the last scene. Before you know it, you’ll have a fully fleshed out 25-page story, or maybe even the beginning of a novel.
I’m saying this with more than a twinge of guilt, since I’m afraid that I may even have contributed to the shrinking of the Filipino short story by teaching my students, throughout the ’90s, how to write subdued, pared down, quiet stories where nothing much seems to happen on the surface. My own recent training in the US at that time and my exposure to American minimalism impressed me with the power of understatement, of saying as much as possible with as little as possible. (Of course, even without my intercession, the better-read students would have found this out on their own.)
I’m going to go out on a limb here, but American writers are truly good with quietly dramatic scenes. We, on the other hand, seem to thrive on melodrama, on theatricality and sentimentality. (That’s not necessarily bad, if there’s a cultural reason, as I suspect there is, for the exaggeration of emotion.)
The result, in our recent prose fiction, has often been a rejection if not a fear of strong emotion, and a deliberate evasion of messy and difficult confrontations. Instead, in a sophomoric effort to sound cool, characters and voices are flattened, the drama is unnaturally muted, and surface technique passes for insight.
I wonder if it’s just another function of age and creeping conservatism, but I’ve come around to the personal conclusion that, henceforth, I should try to write stories that are not only technically polished or innovative – they won’t even have to be that – but moving and memorable, stories that are worth my time to write and yours to read, and that will leave the reader with an intermittent tremor in the bones.
The Palanca rules state that "In the futuristic fiction category, an entry must consist of at least 10 but not more 25 typewritten pages and should present a scenario of the future Filipino and the country." The objective is obviously to encourage creative speculation – think Jules Verne and space travel, and of whoever anticipated the Internet and its impact on human society – and to challenge not just the fancy but also the analytical powers and the grandness of vision of the writer.
Maybe I just haven’t read enough of the winners in this category (certainly not this year’s), but I’m still looking for a piece that will hit me right between the eyes and leave upon my brow the unmistakable impress of great literature.
As I’ve said before, I’m not against science fiction – I grew up on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoomian series, and was enthralled by 2001: A Space Odyssey; I thought Blade Runner and the Planet of the Apes and Aliens series (the first couple of them, anyway) were very well done. But it takes more than a few gizmos and a touch of dystopia to create a convincing and compelling view of the future, especially the Filipino future as opposed to the American future or the Chinese future.
Writers often evade this by creating a post-apocalyptic world where the concept of "nation" doesn’t mean a thing anymore – and perhaps that’s possible, but where’s the Filipino-ness then in the concerns or at least the sensibility of the piece? Is anything set in the future futuristic? Isn’t the past still our best window on the future? Tell me something new about the future that I haven’t heard or read about these past 30 years.
It seems to me that "the Filipino future" could be the special subject of a year’s essay competition – at which point we can leave it be, to resurface as may be necessary in the hundreds of stories, poems, plays, and essays that the Palancas yearly produce (this year, over 600 – 52 of them just in the full-length screenplay category whose judging I chaired).
Thankfully, Palanca Foundation director-general Sylvia Palanca Quirino – who has inherited the grand and unique tradition of sponsoring Philippine literature from her father and grandfather – has announced that she will soon be calling the Palanca Hall of Famers to a meeting to help her and the Palanca Foundation review the performance of the Palanca Awards – the categories, the rules, the judging, publishing, a Web presence, etc. – after 54 years, toward formulating recommendations that could yet improve something already fundamentally good and sound.
If you want to read some more about the Palancas and the lore that’s built up around them, take a gander at Alberto Florentino’s website (http://tinig.a4dableweb.com/bertflorentino/archives/000004.html), where he recalls, among others, that "In 1953, with my eyes on the (third) prize (P200), I submitted my first two short plays I wanted to win so I could replace my QWERTY portable typewriter with an Underwood table model. The judges of the first Palanca (for drama) were: Daisy H. Avellana, Sarah K. Joaquin and Jean Edades. They gave me the first prize (P500) for my first play with its working title, ‘Payday,’ which I quickly changed to The World Is an Apple. A critic (Morli Dharam, now aka Anthony Morli, of Queens NY) might have said I won P500 for that title. I say, I’ve seen some titles get more money in Hollywood.
"I was 23 when I attended the Palanca on Sept. 1, 1954, at the Manila Hotel to pick up my first Palanca check. When I opened the Manila Times the morning of Sept. 2, there on the front page was me and my first Palanca, together with Andy Cruz and Franz Arcellana with theirs. Except that, instead of my photo, there was my father’s photo wearing his graduation toga and cap.
"At that time my father was studying to be a radio announcer at FEU under Nick Agudo. Everybody in his class started congratulating my father who said it was not he but his typist, who won the Palanca. His typist happened to be his eldest son, his "Junior." In short, I (or me?)."
There were a couple of 20-year-old first-prize winners Wednesday night, and I can just imagine (because I can hardly remember from 30 years ago) the thrill of one’s first Palanca. I was especially happy for the former students of mine who won their first or second – Clarissa Estuar, Celeste Flores, Homer Novicio, Erwin Romulo, Joel Toledo and Socorro Villanueva – for whom I reserve my warmest congratulations.
Sylvia Palanca Quirino put it best in her sponsor’s remarks: "Of course, these awards are only as good as you make them. By that I mean that I will be the last to say that they should be the be-all and the end-all of your writing careers. For those who have won one or two, take them as encouragements, as springboards for even greater accomplishments in writing. For those who have won several or many, take them as reminders of the need to keep on writing, and writing well."