Literary Revolutions

Igot an unusual text message last week from a student, a few hours after our undergraduate Philippine Literature in English class. "I’m appalled," my student said, "that we haven’t had a revolution in Philippine literature in the past 20 years! Philippine literature is stagnating!"

It took me a few minutes before I could answer him, wanting to give his comment the consideration it deserved. First, I asked myself if his premises were right: Had there been, in fact, no revolution in Philippine literature over the past two decades? Was Philippine literature stagnating? Before I tell you what I texted him back, let me tell you what we’d been discussing that day in class.

I’d just given them a long, animated lecture (what the heck, it was a cold and wet afternoon, and I myself would’ve fallen asleep if I hadn’t opened my mouth) about the many connections and also the tensions between literature, journalism, and politics in this country’s history. We went over Rizal and his fellow propagandists, the "seditious" playwrights of the American regime, the poet-politicians who published their editorial commentary in verse, Jose Garcia Villa’s famous (and often misunderstood) battle cry of "art for art’s sake," Salvador P. Lopez’s equally sonorous essay on "Proletarian Literature," the language-besotted poets and fictionists of the 1960s, and the grim and determined social realists of the 1970s. And somewhere in between we managed to peek into modernism, Eliot, Pound, Picasso, Dada, Bauhaus design, Beat poetry, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh. (I told you, it was a long afternoon.)

The basic idea I wanted to get across was the fact that literature, like the other arts and often in consonance with them, moves in waves and cycles, with every generation seeking to supplant that which came before it (although "generation" here could mean something shorter or longer than a typical lifetime). And these waves or cycles can coexist, albeit uneasily; realism, naturalism, expressionism, and social realism may all have met or crossed paths at a certain place or time, just as minimalism and magic or marvelous realism rule different corners of the literary planet today.

Upheavals are good for art and literature, because they de-familiarize and refresh what inevitably becomes banal after decades of increasingly common usage. You can imagine, for example, traditional rhyme and meter in English poetry reaching an apex with the likes of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s thunderous "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854) and Edgar Allan Poe’s "Annabel Lee" (1849), but just a full generation later, T.S. Eliot was using a simpler, looser rhyme but much more complicated imagery with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915) preparatory to "The Waste Land" (1922), while Ezra Pound and his fellow Imagists were moving on to cleaner, leaner, unsentimental lines. Modernism had announced itself, with Pound admonishing his peers to "Make it new!"

I’m not about to repeat that lecture here, but I think my students got the point: Literary fashions come and go, some of them more revolutionary, or more influential, or more enduring than others. The impact of Marxism on literature and writing would create its own vortices; magic realism and minimalism would provide writers with radically different alternatives by which to depict their fictional worlds. For the contemporary writer, whether here or elsewhere, there’s never been a wider range of choices (although I should add quickly that writing well and meaningfully is more than a matter of shopping around for a pretty or earth-shaking literary style; you’d still have to fill that vessel with your own precious content).

So what did I tell my troubled student? Had he come too late for the literary revolution? Maybe. The last visible and rather noisy upheaval I could think of was the declaration of my generation of writers from the First Quarter Storm that writing had to serve the upliftment of the masses, in concert with a program of political action. (S. P. Lopez made more or less the same point 30 years earlier, but I don’t think he ever had a critical mass of writers behind him practicing what he preached, not to the extent that it happened in the ‘70s and ‘80s.)

There’ll be some vehement objections to what I’ll say next, but that revolution is largely spent, at least in English (in which it would never have flourished, anyway). The evolutionary alternatives are just much too attractive, especially for the young – sudden fiction, "chick lit", sci-fi and fantasy, genre fiction, graphic novels, and the like. I myself have come to the conclusion that writing well (whatever that means to me) is revolt enough against the numbing banality of things (I know, it’s an elitist and even reactionary attitude, but I can live with it, because I probably won’t be living that long.)

I texted my student back: "The burden of revolution is on the young and the truly brilliant." In other words, if you have it in you, go for it. But that’s a big if; I can’t imagine anything worse than a revolution led by dunces, some of whom may even have PhDs.

In the meanwhile, if you’re just looking for a worthy challenge, how about some literary housekeeping? Our graduate students are getting ever more clever "problematizing" this and that on their keyboards, but very few dare venture into the dusty stacks to perform such menial but vital chores as producing substantial literary biographies in the manner of an Edna Manlapaz or collections of folk and literary lore in the manner of a Damiana Eugenio. Do that and be my hero.