One hundred years of ‘jolography’

A book we left unfinished reading last summer was Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Living to Tell the Tale, the Colombian writer’s memoir that easily is on the cutting edge of creative non-fiction, the genre that seems to have gathered a number of new adherents of late. Marquez is in his element in the autobiography told in the inimitable South American, magic realist style, details of which understandably became grist for his fiction: The younger sister who eats dirt; the interminable journeys through swampland of the Amazon river; even varied sensual adventures of the cathouse kind. Yet what prevents the memoir from drifting to merely being confessional fare is Marquez’s predilection for using tricks and devices of the novel, with enough detachment and levity to keep things chugging along at a steady pace.

Living to Tell the Tale even reads like most of his fiction, with long chunks of narrative paragraphs and the intermittent profound quote from a lead character as text breaker and transitional gear. Rarely do we get a glimpse into a writer’s roots, in this case Marquez’s hometown of Aracataca transposed into the fictional Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

There are twists in plot too worthy of his novels, such as the mayhem that followed the assassination of a political figure from the left, with bodies strewn on the streets felled by snipers on rooftops.

A dying man pleads to Gabo not to leave him in a desolate Colombian night, and here our reading of the memoir as non-fiction novel trails off, having lugged the volume along aboard two ships, in a vacation home down south, death in the extended family, among other adventures that cut close to the bone, yet we were still unable to finish it, the book finally taking a life of its own.

We understood the writer Garcia Marquez more and his process of writing, which cannot be very far from his life as a student and son and fledgling author who has always had trouble with spelling.

His first sexual experience is described in unforgettable, vintage Marquez style, likening his encounter with the woman in the redhouse to getting lost in the soup of a filly’s thighs – actually one who initiated his younger brother to the ways of the world.

This is not Marquez’s first foray into creative non-fiction, having come out before with Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, News of a Kidnapping, and The General in his Labyrinth, magic realist reconstructions of real events. Living to Tell the Tale though is unique as an autobiography because barely distinguishable from the author’s fiction when it comes down to it.

Parallels can perhaps be drawn with the poet Pablo Neruda’s own offbeat memoirs set in prose, an unpredictable change of pace.

On the whole Marquez’s work is lighter but no less viable than the dark broodings of a Kafka in his Letters to Felice, which read like piecemeal storm warnings of a tortured psyche.

Another book that caught our attention during the searing months, shortly before the monsoon season set in, was the Filipino poet Paolo Manalo’s first book, Jolography, a first prizewinner in the Palanca awards some years back.

Manalo, Free Press literary editor, is always enterprising and inventive with his language, short of reinventing verse as a literary form.

There are some detractors of his work, mainly those who feel that poetry should not rely on extensive footnotes, endnotes, references and asides, almost as if it were a term paper written on the run. But these guys forget that part of the joy of reading poetry – or much literature for that matter – is the novelty of it, with the promise of discovering something new or stray insight or kindred spirit lying in ambush at the turn of a page.

This Manalo does with aplomb – challenge the reader’s preconceived notion of poetry – and his audience cannot help but delight in the shared subtle subversions.

Of course, one can argue a similar thing has been done before, particularly the bagay poetry of the late National Artist Rolando Tinio in the 1960s, and given further spin by the siblings Eric and Diana Gamalinda in the ‘70s. But whereas the aforementioned experimented with Taglish and conversational verse, Manalo focuses on slang and transliterations and the argot’s varied nuances.

This later fact has led critics to disparage Jolography as dated, because the use of the term jologs – much like its predecessor jeprox – has a limited shelf life. Point well taken, though this too could work to the poet’s advantage and designed zeitgeist.

Jolography, or at least its concept, owes not so much to the bagay poets as to works like Puig’s Kiss of the Spiderwoman, where a sub-novel is told in footnotes at the bottom of the page.

Language, at any rate, and as far as Manalo’s work is concerned, can cut both ways, serving both as bridge and as agent of alienation.