Situating the Philippines in the Postcolonial Landscape

Situating the Philippines in the Postcolonial Landscape:

Narrative Strategies of Filipino Novels in English (1946-1980)

Marie Rose B. Arong

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

School of Arts and Media Faculty of Arts and Sciences

May 2017

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Surname or Family name: Arong

First name: Marie Rose Other name/s:

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: PhD

School: Arts and Media Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences

Title: Situating the Philippines in the postcolonial landscape: narrative strategies of Filipino novels in English (1946-1980)

The Philippines’ double-colonization at the hands of Spain (1565-1898) then America (1898-1946) has produced a distinctive type of postcolonial writing in English. Despite this unique postcolonial situation, there is a lack of substantial and sustained critical work assessing Philippine literature in postcolonial studies. In order to address this neglect, this thesis shows how a culturally specific formalist approach provides new opportunities to interrogate the distinctive postcolonial themes and issues raised in six Filipino novels: Bienvenido Santos' You Lovely People (1955), N.V.M. Gonzalez's The Bamboo Dancers (1960), N.V.M. Gonzalez's A Season of Grace (1956), Nick Joaquin's The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961), Kerima Polotan's The Hand of the Enemy (1962), and Edith Tiempo's His Native Coast (1979).

The period in which these novels were published (between the 1950s and the 1970s) has usually been considered by scholars such as Soledad Reyes (1994) and Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo (2008) as the turning point of Philippine writing in English because of the authors’ innovative use of narrative techniques. However, despite all these observations, there is a lack of substantial and sustained critical work assessing the implications of these technical strategies, specifically in postcolonial studies. This thesis argues that the thematic concerns of the novels need to be related more productively to their formal innovations. It suggests that a contextual examination of the various narrative strategies and techniques deployed in the novels can help shed light on the authors’ respective projects of engaging with the consequences of both the American-endorsed narrative of Philippine modernity and development and the nationalists’ quest for the authentic Filipino. This thesis, thus, demonstrates the relationship between narrative structure and the modes of interrogation (or resistance, such as the case of Joaquin's novel) of postcolonial issues in the Filipino novels in English.

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Contents Thesis/dissertation sheet 1 Title page 2 Copyright and Authenticity statement 3 Originality statement 4 Table of contents 5 Acknowledgements 7

Introduction—Understanding the Absence of Philippine Literature in Postcolonial Studies 8 “One Grievous, Irrevocable Error:” A Short History of Philippine-U.S. Relations 11 The “Invisibility of the Philippines” in Global Postcolonial Studies 14 Global Postcolonial Literary Studies 19 Narrative Strategies in Postcolonial Filipino Novels in English 22

Chapter One—Toward a Native Clearing: A Case for Narratology in the Study of Postcolonial Filipino Novels in/from English 26 Philippine Literary Studies: A Tale of Two Masters 28 Formalism v.s. Marxism in Philippine Literary Criticism 31 Philippine Literary Studies Intersects with Postcolonial Literary Studies 35 Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel: A Case for Narratology 38 Narratology: From Classical to the Postclassical Approaches 40 Postcolonial Theory and Narratology: Early Works in Postcolonial Narratology 41

Chapter Two—Narrative Complexity: The Narrators in N.V.M. Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers and Santos’ You Lovely People 48 A Native Consciousness in Voice and Focalization 51 “He doesn’t write. He only sculptures:” Ambivalence in the Narrator of N.V.M. Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers 55 The Hurt Narrator(s) in Santos’ You Lovely People 69

Chapter Three—Subtle Subversion: Covert Narration in Polotan’s The Hand of the Enemy and Tiempo’s His Native Coast 80 The Transformation of Maria Clara into the Ideal Filipina 84 “Rearranging” Narrative Authority through Covert Narration 88 Kerima Polotan’s Smaller Upheavals: The Covert Narrator in The Hand of the Enemy 90 Edith Tiempo’s Substitute for Authenticity:

The Covert Narrator in His Native Coast 101

Chapter Four—Narrating Temporal Interventions in N.V.M. Gonzalez’s A Season of Grace and Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels 110 Modernity and Tradition: A Philippine Postcolonial Context 113 Time, Memory, and Narrative in the Philippine Novelistic Tradition 116 History, No Longer Fuzzy: Weaving the Kaingin into the Temporality of A Season of Grace 118 Reimagining a Postcolonial Philippines: Temporal Frenzy in Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels 130

Chapter Five—Conquering the Frontier: Various Forms of the Native Clearing of English in Filipino Postcolonial Novels 144 Standard Philippine English or Philippine english? 147 Language and Narration 149 Translation as the Foundation for Native Clearing in Santos' You Lovely People and N.V.M. Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers 152 "Imposing" the Filipino on the English Language in N.V.M. Gonzalez’s A Season of Grace and Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels 159 A Language of Her Own: Becoming More at Home with English in Polotan’s The Hand of the Enemy and Tiempo's His Native Coast 169

Conclusion 176 Avenues for Future Research 180

Reference List 182

Acknowledgements

This thesis would not have been possible without the help of invaluable people and to them all, I owe a debt of gratitude:

The University of New South Wales for their generous scholarship and my Philippine institution, the University of the Philippines Cebu, for endorsing my PhD leave and thesis grant.

My supervisor, Paul Dawson, whose vast narratological “toolbox” helped focalize my arguments. My co-supervisor, Bill Ashcroft, whose post-colonial expertise amplified my appreciation of Philippine literature.

My friends, Daniel Hempel, Maddie Wilson, Tanya Thaweeskulchai, Naoko Mochizuki, Wendyl Luna, and Rowan Payton, whose comforting presence kept me sane in Sydney.

Special thanks to Gemma and Mario Tuccia (also, Rexi and Coco) for welcoming me into their home from day 1.

Daghang salamat.

Introduction—Understanding the Absence of Philippine Literature in Postcolonial Studies

It is as if future U.S. Filipino visibility requires no less than U.S. American self-recognition that the U.S.-Philippine colonial encounter proved central to the strategic formulations and transformations of 20th-century American imperial modernity and nationality; or that the politics of recognition pursued by Filipino Americans is fatally entwined with an effective unrecognizeability of the U.S. Empire. [Emphases added] (Campomanes 1995, p. 160)

In postcolonial literary studies, the concept of the center and the margins has been crucial to understanding relations between colonizer and colonized. But even in its own field, certain countries such as India occupy a center because of the global reach of their literature while countries such as the Philippines remain on the margins of scholarly discourse. In “A Native Clearing Revisited: Positioning Philippine Literature,” Chelva Kanaganayakam notes that compared to India, Philippine literature has not been studied sufficiently and argues “the need for recognizing writing from the Philippines as a distinctive and important segment of postcolonial writing in English” [emphasis added] (2012, p. 383). Kanaganayakam’s observation that Philippine postcolonial literature is of a distinctive type may be attributed to the Philippines’ double-colonization in the hands of Spain (1565-1898) then America (1898-1946); some would argue triple, if you count the Japanese occupation during World War II (1942-1945), although the relatively short time the Japanese stayed did not have the same wide influence on Filipino culture as the Spanish or American colonization did. Other than the distinctiveness of the Philippine postcolonial situation for its double-colonization, Kanaganayakam’s call for recognition of postcolonial writing in English from the Philippines is even more significant considering the emergence of the Filipino novel in English. Resil Mojares cites Zoilo M. Galang’s A Child of Sorrow, published in 1921, as the first Filipino novel written in English (1999, p. 332). The publication year of this novel is significant because this was only two decades after the Americans established public education with English as the medium of instruction. According to Majid, “in

none of the former British colonies in Asia, Africa and the West Indies was an English novel produced so shortly after the arrival of the language” (in Mojares 1999, p. 361). Furthermore, Mojares notes that the subsequent publication of twenty-two more novels by 1941 “is unprecedented beside the parallel progress of literary English in the British Colonies in other parts of the world” (1999, p. 332).

This thesis, then, intends to address the gap in postcolonial studies recognized by Kanaganayakam:

It does not matter to writers or readers in the Philippines whether they gain admission to the house of postcolonial writing; they are quite self- sufficient. But it certainly makes a difference to us whose interests are comparative and who wish to be as inclusive as possible in our approach to postcolonial studies. By neglecting Philippine writing, we are ignoring a wholly different historical dimension that does not exist elsewhere. [Emphases added] (2012, pp. 385-386)

Besides the neglect of Philippine literature in English, Kanaganayakam here also hints at the notion of canonicity in postcolonial studies, a point that I will return to later. It must be noted that this absence or lack of representation of the Philippines has been questioned before but in another field, American studies. Filipino scholars such as E. San Juan Jr., Vicente Rafael, and Oscar Campomanes to name a few, as well as progressive U.S. historians like Amy Kaplan, have been writing about this forgetting of America’s only Asian colonial territory around the same time that postcolonial studies became an institutional powerhouse in the U.S. with the publication of the notable works of Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak. Oscar Campomanes (1992, 1993, 1995) has written extensively about this “forgetting” of the Philippines in American history. In his article, “The Institutional Invisibility of American Imperialism, the Philippines, and Filipino Americans,” Campomanes notes:

To understand the absence of the Philippines in American history, one faces the immense task of charting the intense ideological contestation

that developed in the United States around the Philippine question at the point of colonial conquest, and the active rewriting of American historical records from then on that articulated and rearticulated the verities of “American exceptionalism.” As Amy Kaplan suggestively notes, “The invisibility of the Philippines in American history has everything to do with the invisibility of American imperialism to itself.” (1992, p. 53)

Despite the considerable number of recent publications investigating American exceptionalism in U.S. history and culture and by extension the invisibility of the Philippines in American studies, this has not translated to a similar interest in the Philippines in postcolonial studies. In fact, as Kanaganayakam observes, “The reasons for this chronic neglect [of Philippine literature] by postcolonial studies are unclear” (2012, p. 3810). Philippine literature in English is still, to borrow Nick Joaquin’s words, “a veritable terra incognita” (2004, p. 40) in postcolonial literary studies.

For the remainder of this introduction, I will try to map the reasons for the absence or the lack of sustained discussion in postcolonial studies of Philippine literature in English. I begin with a short discussion of the history of Philippine- U.S. relations and how this is linked to what Campomanes calls, "the institutional invisibility of the Philippines” (1993, p. 8) in American studies. I then provide a brief examination of the reasons for the absence of Filipino literature in postcolonial studies. I continue with a discussion of the current concerns of postcolonial studies, specifically the debate over the plethora of publications concerned with the extra-literary aspects of the postcolonial literary works and the scarcity of studies that deal with the literary aspects of the texts. Finally, I outline the narrative strategies and the corresponding postcolonial issues or themes that this thesis will examine in every chapter. I hope to demonstrate in this thesis how a culturally specific formalist approach can shed light on how the novels published between the 1950s and the 1970s wrestled with the narrative of Philippine modernity and development as sanctioned by its former colonizer and later, the retrieval of an authentic Filipino history as encouraged by the Filipino nationalists. Using this approach, this thesis seeks to show how these

Filipino authors attempted to de-authorize or at least interrogate these hegemonic constructions in their novels.

“One Grievous, Irrevocable Error:” A Short History of Philippine-U.S. Relations

In 1901, Mark Twain’s satire, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” addressed the repeatedly hidden truth of the violent beginnings of American colonial rule in the Philippines (this is glaringly obvious in the absence of any mention in most American public school textbooks). Published during the final stages of the Philippine-American war (1899-1902), Twain would be one of only a few Americans who publicly acknowledged that the American incursion into Philippine affairs was a “grievous…irrevocable error.” The history of Philippine- U.S. relations is shrouded in darkness because only a few Americans, like Twain, recognized its role in crystallizing America as the new empire. It would take several years after formal independence in 1946 for alternative histories to be written, mostly by nationalist Filipino historians such as Teodoro Agoncillo and Renato Constantino. It is an ongoing project of recuperation amongst contemporary Filipino historians, one that continues to be painstakingly slow because of the limited resources that ironically come from former colonial patrons (the U.S. funding comes from various sources like the Rockefeller, Fulbright, Ford Foundation grants) and the diminishing significance of Philippine studies in U.S. institutions.

What started out as an intervention on behalf of Cuba turned into the Spanish- American war of 1898. The Philippines was not spared by the duplicitous nature of U.S. international relations. In 1896, Andres Bonifacio and his revolutionary group called the Katipunan (KKK) or formally Kataas-taasan, Kagalang-galang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan (Supreme and Most Honorable Society of the Children of the Nation) led an attack against the Spanish army, in what is now known as the Philippine Revolution. Due to several factors, including their lack of machinery, limited training, and factions arising within the group, the Katipunan failed to overthrow the Spanish government. On top of its failure to attain independence for the Philippines, the revolution also marked significant

deaths: the execution of Jose Rizal (who would later be recognized as the Filipino national hero) was caused by accusations of inciting the revolution and even Bonifacio’s execution at the hands of General Emilio Aguinaldo’s faction. At the height of the Spanish-American war, the Americans sought to fortify their attack by seeking another frontier, another Spanish colony, that of the Philippines. But it was more than just targeting another one of Spain’s assets; the Philippines then was a key stepping stone to the Chinese market. In a way, the Spanish-American War of 1898 would define the next century for the new empire’s international affairs.

The history of Philippine-U.S. relations is also one initiated by a false promise made by the Americans to the exiled revolutionary government of General Emilio Aguinaldo, also President of the first Philippine republic. In early 1898, just a few months after the exiled government was established in Hong Kong, an American delegation met with Aguinaldo, first in Hong Kong then in Singapore, and made several promises, most notably the proclamation of independence as soon as Aguinaldo returned to the Philippines to continue the fight against Spain and, with American’s help, to defeat the Spanish army in the Philippines. What transpired, instead, was U.S. President William McKinley’s call for the “benevolent assimilation” of the Philippines. Historian Vicente Rafael writes of this moment in Philippine-U.S. history: “The allegory of benevolent assimilation effaces the violence of conquest by constructing colonial rule as the most precious gift that ‘the most civilized people’ can render to those still caught in a state of barbarous disorder” (1993, p. 185). It is precisely this violence that Twain lampoons in his essay.

If the Spanish-American war of 1898 marked America’s entry into the business of colonial territory acquisition, the Philippine-American war that began the following year would seal America’s position as a ruthless imperial power that would use the guise of democracy and civilization in her quest for supremacy. Meg Wesling’s (2011) illuminating work, Empire’s Proxy: American Literature and U.S. imperialism in the Philippines, traces how the Americans used English (both the language and literature) as its main instrument in its civilizing mission. Wesling follows Amy Kaplan, San Juan Jr. (1996), and Rafael (2000) in

assigning culpability to the ironically “humane” study of English in converting the uncivilized Filipinos into America’s “little brown brothers,” the patronizing term for the Filipinos used by the first Governor-General of the Philippines, William Howard Taft. But, as Wesling observes,

What was extraordinary about the colonial apparatus in the Philippines was precisely that the assimilation of Filipinos into the American national body was neither imagined nor desired. Filipinos, like other Asians, were considered racially ineligible to naturalize in the United States; as ‘nationals’ of the United States, they were not citizens. [Emphases added] (2011, p. 66)

Wesling is correct in pointing out the problematic nature of America’s ambivalent attitude—of wanting to make Filipinos little brown Americans but not accepting them as racially eligible citizens—towards its only Asian colony which, as an aside, also renders Wesling’s own statement lacking. Because unlike the other Asians, presumably the Indians, Japanese, and Chinese, who were “ineligible to naturalize” as citizens, only the Philippines entered into a formal, colonial relationship with the U.S. This erroneous account by U.S. historians, including Wesling, of the “territorial Filipinos” being racially ineligible to become U.S. citizens is another instance of American forgetting. What has become obvious regarding the United States' continuing denial of the rights of its former and only Asian colony is that the U.S. Supreme court can simply manufacture glaringly racist decisions in order to serve its own needs and to protect the racial (Anglo-Saxon) purity of the nation. Campomanes links this decision to “the rabidly anti-annexationist Southern senators…who were fearful about adding another ‘race problem’ to the ‘Negro Problem’ of the body politic” (1995, p. 165). In order to achieve this, they came up with the baffling legal phrase of “nationals but not citizens” and an even more bewildering term of “unincorporated territory.” Campomanes briefly discusses the manifest ambivalence of these terms, that is, territorial Filipinos “were deemed simultaneously absorbable and ‘unassimilable’” (1995, p. 165).

In fact, this notion of the “simultaneously absorbable and ‘unassimilable’” continued two decades after the Downes v. Bidwell (1901) case where the U.S. Supreme Court manufactured the term “unincorporated territory.” A quick examination of the Department of Public Instruction’s (1924) study guides for teaching Filipino students the English language shows the following titles: Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha and Evangeline, Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address,” and other representative works of Anglo-Saxon authors. As Wesling exposes in America’s Proxy, the enterprise of American literary study did not just begin in the hallowed walls of Harvard and Yale; it rose concomitantly in the classrooms of tropical Manila. Wesling’s observations regarding the relationship between the establishment of American literary study and the project of “benevolent assimilation” are comparable to the pronouncements made by Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back (1989, pp. 2-3) regarding the rise of the study of English and the spread of the British Empire. But the similarities end here because, as Campomanes questions somewhat rhetorically: “One wonders why English departments in the United States have never owned up Philippine literature in English as, historically, a part of American literary studies the way ‘Commonwealth literature’ (at least) was acknowledged as a part of British literature studies” (1993, p. 60).

The “Invisibility of the Philippines” in Global Postcolonial Studies

In his article, “The New Empire’s Forgetful and Forgotten Citizens: Unrepresentability and Unassimilability in Filipino-American Postcolonialities,” Campomanes suggests that the invisibility of the Philippines in postcolonial studies can be traced to what he calls the “politics of recognition” (1995, p. 160). Firstly, according to Campomanes, the recognition of the U.S. as “the originary model of postcoloniality after its celebrated Revolution against the British Crown” (1995, p. 155) most notably in the seminal work, Empire Writes Back (1989), and secondly, the failure to recognize and systematically examine U.S. imperialism “in studies of colonialism and their residual forms of aftermaths” (1995, p. 161) undermine any attempts by scholars to account for the absence of the Philippines in global postcolonial studies. There is little

question that the main reason for the obvious absence of the Philippines in American historiography during this period was the failure of a majority of American historians to recognize that their proud history as a nation grounded in the idea of democracy and personal liberty has been tainted by their imperial expansion to countries like the Philippines. However, the same cannot be said in the case of the absence of the Philippines in postcolonial studies because I think there are more factors involved in the marginalization of Philippine literature in this area.

In this section, I want to describe the possible factors that led to the neglect of Philippine literature in English by postcolonial studies. I am not suggesting that the insights put forward by Campomanes in his article have no merit; rather I want to examine why even after more than two decades since he and other progressive U.S. scholars exposed this problem in American historiography only a few scholars like Kanaganayakam, and besides those who work in the Philippine studies area, have recognized and continue to problematize this neglect. Turning to the insights gleaned from book history studies, a relatively unexplored terrain in Philippine studies best represented by Patricia Jurilla’s groundbreaking work Tagalog Bestsellers of the Twentieth Century: A History of the Book in the Philippines (2008), I suggest that besides the clearly reduced role of U.S. imperialism in postcolonial studies when the field was slowly taking shape, there are two more factors to consider: first, the role of the local and U.S./international literary publishing industry; and second, the role of the local and U.S./international reception of literary books. Although I will only cover the first factor in detail, it is worth noting that the second factor can be further categorized into public reception such as book reviews or critical reception such as those now normally published as journal articles. I have chosen to “lump” this factor as one because the limited attention given to Philippine literature in English meant that book reviews sometimes doubled as works under critical reception especially the ones written about the books to be discussed in this thesis (Bienvenido Santos’s You Lovely People, N.V.M Gonzalez’s A Season of Grace and The Bamboo Dancers, Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels, Kerima Polotan’s The Hand of the Enemy, and Edith Tiempo’s His Native Coast). Perhaps, a future research into this area will prove this wrong but

for now, evidence points to this kind of conflation when it comes to the reception of these books.

“Canonicity in postcolonial studies is a complex topic,” notes Kanaganayakam, “but it can hardly be denied that the canon has shaped what we choose to foreground” (2012, p. 386). In Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001) and Sarah Brouillette’s Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007) both authors suggest that the “postcolonial exotic” creates a conflicting image of the postcolonial project, for the writer or novel is, on the one hand, a work of resistance and, on the other, is packaged or, in Huggan’s term, “staged” as marginal or minority work. The issues put forward by Huggan and Brouillette highlight the current atmosphere of globalization that has shaped what is or is not “allowed” into the selection of a postcolonial “canon.” In fact, if one looks at the works which have entered the “canon” of postcolonial studies, those of Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe, and V.S. Naipaul stand out. It is not so much the actual works or the authors that I am interested in examining, rather how the publishing industry in their parts of the world (India for Rushdie, Africa, specifically Nigeria, for Achebe, and the Caribbean, specifically the Trinidad and Tobago, for Naipaul) compare to the Philippines. The publishing industry practices in India, Africa, and the Caribbean represent what was sorely lacking in the Philippines: the interest of a (former) colonial patron. I want to suggest that the direct involvement of London-based publishing houses in the publication of works by authors from India, Africa, and the Caribbean helped establish the visibility of the authors from these parts of the world in global literary studies which subsequently translated to their admission to British literary studies under the label “Commonwealth literature.” Contrast that to the near-total lack of interest by U.S.-based publishing houses in the works of Filipino authors. In order to show this disparity, I briefly discuss the case of the African publishing industry.

In her article, “In Pursuit of Publishing: Heinemann’s African Writers Series” Gail Low (2002) looks at the African Writers Series published by Heinemann Education Books in London. According to Low, despite the rise of decolonization in the British colonies, “educational and cultural links were being

actively cultivated between Britain and the newly (or soon-to-be) independent colonies through the work of the British Council” (2002, p. 32). Although a similar program was in place between the U.S. and the Philippines which saw writers such as N.V.M. Gonzalez, Santos, and the Tiempos gain admission to U.S. universities (initially as students and then eventually as university lecturers), this did not translate to their immediate admission to a place in U.S. fiction. It was only later, with the emergence of ethnic studies in the U.S., that some Filipino writers were lumped under the umbrella term, Asian-American fiction, a point which I examine in chapter 2.

In fact, with the exception of a U.S. edition of N.V.M. Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers (1961) by Alan Swallow and Sons, none of the novels by any of the premier Filipino authors in English, specifically the novels to be discussed in this thesis, was ever published by U.S. publishing houses. Indeed, as Kanaganayakam observes, “in comparison to, say, Indian authors who choose mainstream publishers in the West, writers from the Philippines have remained consistently local” [emphases added] (2012, p. 385). It is not so much that Filipino authors chose local publishers but that it was their only option. It does beg the question, why were these Filipino writers never recognized in the U.S.? Low reveals an interesting point in her article when she notes:

Diana Athill’s recent memoirs of the period, stet, evoke the general mood of idealism and commerce that characterized post-war publishing at the end of Empire. She remarks that a certain liberal guilt at Britain’s imperial past, combined with a curiosity and interest about other countries, made the publishing, academic, and literary establishment favourable to writers from newly independent nations. (2002, p. 32)

The frank admission by Athill, editor for André Deutsch which published V.S. Naipaul’s most popular postcolonial novels, regarding the “liberal guilt at Britain’s imperial past” takes us back to Campomanes’ trepidation about the future visibility of Filipinos in the discourse about empire because it “requires no less than U.S. American self-recognition” (1995, p. 160) of their own imperial past. The British recognition of their shameful imperial past together with the

desire of publishing houses to expand their business venture precipitated not only this interest in the works of the writers from their former colonies but also the investment in a transnational publishing infrastructure. The same cannot be said about the Philippine-U.S. case.

In the Philippines, the post-war publishing of literary books or any books for that matter was derailed by economics and it was also an exclusively local endeavor. According to Jurilla the publication of literary books was hampered by the “high cost of printing” (2008, p. 67-68) and made worse by the expenses related to “book distribution” in a country of more than seven thousand islands. In the 1960s, notes Jurilla, “the print-run sizes of literary titles” were only between “1,000 to 3,000” (2008, p. 67). Only a few books ever sold out the first print-run and rarer still were those that had more than one print-run. Additionally, the exact figures regarding the number of copies published and sold are not reliable considering it was common practice to “understat[e] print runs and sales figures in order to limit or reduce the author’s returns” (Jurilla 2008, p. 63). The salient point is that fewer books sold meant fewer titles were being published and fewer titles being published also meant fewer books were being reviewed and even fewer still were those considered as having any “literary value.” Thus, only a handful of titles have been considered for a sustained critical attention. But if you look at the number of books published and the number of copies sold by authors from the former British colonies, a staggering picture of imbalance emerges. In his article, “Chinua Achebe, the African Writers Series and the Establishment of African Literature,” James Currey notes that “more than thirty titles” out of the two hundred and seventy titles in the African Writers Series published by Heinemann Education Books sold more than “100,000 copies” (2003, p. 578 & p. 585). What this stark contrast suggests is that there is a large disparity between the African book publishing industry and that of the Philippines because of the transnational nature (that is, the establishment of local branches by British publishing houses) in the former and an entirely local, clearly underfunded enterprise in the latter. This in turn shaped the emergence of African literature in global literary studies and that of the anemic global reception of Philippine literature. There is little question regarding the magnitude of the role that book reviewers and scholars

and even broadcasters (Low 2002, p. 25) played in the dissemination of the literary books published by authors from former British colonies as shown in the emergence of “Commonwealth literature.” On the other hand, there is also little question regarding the shortage of interest in Philippine literature by postcolonial studies as already pointed out by scholars such as Campomanes and Kanaganayakam. This thesis is therefore a modest proposal that seeks to account for the absence of Philippine literature in postcolonial studies.

Global Postcolonial Literary Studies

Jurilla (2010) lists 177 Filipino novels in English published between 1921-2000. Despite the significant number of novels published, literary theory and criticism has not had a parallel growth according to Filipino critic Isagani Cruz (1994, p. 63). He attributes this lack of a Philippine literary critical tradition to “the internalization of hegemonic universalization of culturally imperialistic, pretheoretical (even anti-theoretical), quasi-formalistic, mechanically reflectionist, white patriarchy” (1994, p. 63) by some Filipino scholars. This kind of rhetoric from I. R. Cruz is common in his scholarly works partly due to: (1) his belief that literary theory began not with Plato or Aristotle, but in “ancient Chinese criticism” (1994, p. 59); (2) his frustration with the underrepresentation in global literary scholarship of Asian authors like Filipinos, which has prevented literary theory from being “deeuropeanized and truly universalized” (1994, p. 64); and (3) his dissatisfaction with some Filipino scholars who succumbed to the “formalist heresy,” specifically the use of “Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry” (1990b, p. 69). Even though early Philippine literary scholarship readily adopted American New Criticism with “Understanding Poetry” (I. R. Cruz 1990b, p. 69) becoming the textbook of choice, subsequent scholarship worked to eliminate or at least replace it with a more socially-oriented reading of Filipino literary works. The current Philippine literary scholarship still echoes this struggle of methods as it grapples with how to translate literary and cultural theories that have come out of the hegemonic powers to address the Philippine situation.

I. R. Cruz’s ambivalent engagement with postcolonialism informs part of this thesis’ push for renewed interest in the study of narratological elements in Filipino postcolonial writing in English. In his critical work between 1980-2000, particularly around the time most of the key texts in postcolonial studies were published such as Ashcroft, et al’s The Empire Writes Back (1989), Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1994), and Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1994), I. R. Cruz questions the Eurocentric foundations of postcolonial studies and offers a possible “local” version. I. R. Cruz notes that Western literary theory “is impoverished” (1990a, p. 53) because it rarely studies non-Western literary texts nor is it aware of non-Western theories. In effect, any Philippine literary theory that takes after Western literary theory “shares this poverty” (I. R. Cruz 1990a, p. 53). By poverty I. R. Cruz refers to the inability of Western literary theory to account for the distinctive quality of Philippine literature. I. R. Cruz notes how formalism “impoverishes” the interpretation of the text because of its neglect of the historical and socio-cultural aspects of most Philippine literary works.

If I. R. Cruz takes issue regarding the lack of contextual consideration in a “formalist” reading of Filipino literary texts, Eli Park Sorensen paints a different picture of global postcolonial studies: how the literary or “questions of form, style, and rhetoric” (2010, p. 9) are undermined by its preference for the “extra- literary” or the socio-political underpinnings of the literary text. Both Modern Fiction Studies (2010, Vol. 56:4) and New Literary History (2012, Vol. 43; 1 & 2) mark the twenty odd years since postcolonial studies gained prominence in literature departments across American and European universities with special volumes. These two special volumes bring to light the recent arguments that have come out of postcolonial studies. Alfred Lopez and Robert Marzec’s “Postcolonial Studies at the Twenty-Five Year Mark” (2010) serves as introduction to the MFS volume. They discuss how the term “postcolonial,” originally used to refer to countries of the former Commonwealth has been expanded to include other postcolonial societies outside the Commonwealth. For Lopez & Marzec this has led a contradictory phenomenon: that of its “potential to enrich and energize the field” (2010, p. 681) but also the loss of “cultural and historical specificity” (Lopez & Marzec 2010, p. 678). Other

postcolonial scholars such as Neil Lazarus, Nicolas Harrison, Graham Huggan, and Sorensen also share the latter sentiment.

In New Literary History, Vol. 1, Robert Young (2012) also joins this push to make postcolonial studies significant to globalization. His title is a reply to the discussion in the journal of the Modern Language Association of American (PMLA) entitled “The End of Postcolonial Theory?” Young argues that contrary to the argument regarding the supposed demise of postcolonial studies, it has not happened because “its objectives have always involved a wide-ranging political project—to reconstruct Western knowledge formations, reorient ethical norms, turn the power structures of the world upside down, refashion the world from below” (2012, p. 20). Ato Quayson in Vol. 2 notes that this conflation of the term postcolonial/postcolonialism shows a movement away from “the examination of literary and aesthetic products as such and toward the exploration of their discursive contexts and conditions of production” (2012, p. 362). Quayson’s observation of “the exploration of conditions of production” is one of the more prominent trends in postcolonial studies famously explored by Huggan (2001) and Brouillette (2007).

Quayson’s misgivings about the conflation of postcolonial/postcolonialism highlight another shift in postcolonial studies: the need to bring the focus back to the text and its literary aspects. In Postcolonial Studies and the Literary: Theory, Interpretation and the Novel, Sorensen discusses how some postcolonial critics rarely address the literary and focus more on the “extra- literary.” His project veers away from other postcolonial critics like Lazarus whose work also focuses on the literary form since he thinks their work, as much as they signal the renewed significance of the literary, might again create “institutionalized formulas that legitimate certain correspondences between modernist literary techniques and a vocabulary of political concepts” (Sorensen 2010, pp. xi-xii). His issue with this “formula” mirrors Huggan and Brouillette’s earlier observations of how certain writers enter the postcolonial “canon” because their works fit a certain mold, which in Sorensen’s opinion is the “modernist ethos” because it works with a “poststructuralist-, postmodernist-, and Marxist-oriented” reading (Sorensen 2010, p. x). This thesis, then, hopes to

expand this re-focus of the literary in the analysis of Philippine literature in English. But unlike Sorensen who is far more concerned with problematizing the position of modernist texts over realist texts in postcolonial studies, I am proposing that a culturally specific formalist approach can also help shed light on the relationship between narrative structure and modes of interrogation (or resistance, such as the case of Joaquin's novel) of postcolonial issues in the Filipino novels in English.

Narrative Strategies in Postcolonial Filipino Novels in English

This thesis will cover the novels from the following authors: Bienvenido Santos, N.V.M. Gonzalez, Kerima Polotan, Edith Tiempo, and Nick Joaquin. Their novels offer an interesting insight into the postcolonial situation of a nation trying to find footing after being colonized for more than three hundred years, first by Spain then by America. These novels have received ambivalent critical reception over the years since their publication, a point that I will return to repeatedly in this thesis. On the one hand, the postcolonial status of these novels has been questioned by some scholars like Priscelina Patajo-Legasto because as Western-oriented literary works their stories “perpetuate Western myths of identity formation and national development” (2004, p. 50); on the other hand, and more significantly, the period these novels came out (between the 1950s and the 1970s) has usually been considered the turning point of Philippine writing in English. Soledad Reyes has remarked that writers of this period experimented with “the most advanced technical innovations” (1994, p. 220). Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo, too, has commented that “experimenting with technical strategies is another very important characteristic of Philippine fiction in English” (2008, p. 9) during this time. But despite all these bold observations, there is a lack of substantial and sustained critical work assessing the implication of these technical strategies.

Reyes and Pantoja-Hildago’s claims of formal experimentations found in these novels and Patajo-Legasto’s label of Western-oriented themes constitute the main concerns of this study: if these novels have been “experimenting with technical strategies” or portrayed “advanced technical innovations,” what are

these narrative strategies and techniques? More importantly, if these novels are said to explore Western-oriented themes, how do we account for their deployment of narrative strategies peculiar to the Filipino postcolonial situation? Or are we supposed to look at these innovations as mere developments in a fairly young form in Philippine literary history? Or can we also look at these novels by situating them in their socio-historical context and examining how they have deployed various narrative strategies and techniques to demonstrate their authors’ respective projects of engaging with the consequences of both the American-endorsed narrative of Philippine modernity and development and the nationalists’ quest for the authentic Filipino?

In order to situate the strategies deployed in early postcolonial Filipino novels in English it is important to briefly discuss the features of colonial writing. The dominant colonial and racist stereotype of the Filipino, especially during the American occupation, was that of being a “savage” or belonging to “wild tribes.” The U.S. government used this notion of the uncivilized Filipino to justify their “benevolent assimilation” project in the Philippines, specifically the imposition of the American language (English) through the gift of free public education for all. The American-sanctioned narrative also attempted to paint the Hispanic aspect of Philippine history as significantly inferior compared to the American tradition that created the myth of the U.S. as the bearer of Philippine modernity and development. The novels that I have chosen to study in this thesis have tried to interrogate this notion of the other through the deployment of various narrative strategies. Before I analyze these novels in chapters 2 to 5, I will first discuss in chapter 1 the key debates and issues that shaped Philippine literary criticism in the early 1930s up until its intersection with postcolonial studies in the 1990s. In particular, I focus on the two leading schools of thought that emerged in Philippine letters. I will connect this with a discussion of Resil Mojares’ monumental study of the development of the Filipino narrative tradition from its pre-colonial forms to the novel. I will then look at the evolution of narratology from its strictly formalist-structuralist traditions referred to as “classical” to the “postclassical” versions, such as feminist and postcolonial narratology, and how this provides the space for my own investigation of postcolonial Filipino novels.

The next two chapters of this thesis will explore the deployment of narratorial roles of the novels. In chapter 2, I examine how N.V.M. Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers (1960) and Santos’s You Lovely People (1955), through the years, have been critically received as either presenting an assimilationist view of the Filipino experience of American traditions or an anti-American view through the use of dramatic irony. I argue that this ambivalence has a performative aspect to it due to the use of the first-person narrator. One of the main issues with previous analyses has been the tendency to rely heavily on the biographical profile of the authors. On the one hand, the argument goes, they left the Philippines because they subscribe to American traditions; on the other hand, their experience and encounters with other marginalized Filipinos in the U.S. have made them the spokesperson for their causes. My main concern in this chapter is to account for the ambivalence created by the situation that these writers have found themselves in: as expatriate Filipino writers in the U.S. I work with the classic narratological distinction between the experiencing self and the narrating self in order to examine the complexity created by this narrative situation.

In chapter 3, I cover a different narrative situation, this time with third-person narrators. In Polotan’s The Hand of the Enemy (1962) and Tiempo’s His Native Coast (1979), I look at how the previous reception of both their novels were shaped by the double standards set against women, a characteristic of the Maria Clara syndrome. It is important to note that both Polotan and Tiempo are female writers and the issues of gender, especially the stereotypes of the Filipina as “convent-bred, religious, charitable, demure, chaste and strictly located in the domestic sphere” (Roces 2006, p. 25), factor into the narrative structure. On the surface, these novels project the effect of conforming to the conventions of their milieu. I examine the novels’ use of point of view in particular the access to the characters’ minds and how this has been used to formally portray their subtle narrative subversion. I will argue that through these narrative strategies, these novels problematize the colonial/nationalist stereotype of the Filipino woman as Maria Clara.

My focus in chapter 4 is the analysis of the narrative’s representation of time. In N.V.M. Gonzalez’s A Season of Grace (1956) and Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961), I will look at what role the representation of time plays in their interrogation of modernity and tradition. In N.V.M. Gonzalez’s case, I will examine the function of the cyclical nature and the recurring pattern of the kaingin (swidden farming) on the events and action in the novel. In Joaquin’s case, I will examine how his handling of time conjures disorientation in the narrative. A significant portion of the analysis is “The Chinese Moon” (chapter 4 of the novel), where the time shifts allow the narrative to juxtapose the present with the past. However, the repeating juxtaposition of past and present in Connie’s frenzied hallucinations of her death lends to the blending of the present time with imagined futures. I want to suggest that these temporal experimentations by both authors form part of their respective projects of historical re-vision.

In the next chapter, language is the central focus. Taking my cue from the categories suggested by Marion Gymnich (2002) that look at the linguistic relationship between narrators and characters, I will examine in chapter 5 how these five writers interpret the notion of the native clearing of the colonial language in their novels as well as the possible implications behind their use of either standard or non-standard language in the narrator’s discourse or in the characters’ dialogue or in both. I hope to demonstrate that the linguistic configurations in these narratives are shaped by the same conditions that influenced the authors' deployment of other strategies such as voice, focalization, and temporality: how the ambivalence inherent in the Philippine- U.S. neocolonial situation is portrayed in the first-person narrators of Santos' You Lovely People and Gonzalez's The Bamboo Dancers, how the historical re- visions of N.V.M. Gonzalez and Joaquin are demonstrated in the temporal experimentations in A Season of Grace and The Woman Who Had Two Navels, respectively, and how the colonial/patriarchal marginalization of the Filipina is reflected in the covert third-person narrators in Polotan's The Hand of the Enemy and Tiempo's His Native Coast.

Chapter One—Toward a Native Clearing: A Case for Narratology in the Study of Postcolonial Filipino Novels in/from English

It may be that English, over almost fifty years of the American colonial period in the Philippines and even long after our political independence in 1946, has through our educational system shaped in various ways, at various depths, our mind and sensibility. And yet, all along, over the past century, our writers have in turn colonized English because its use in our literature has been chiefly toward a native clearing within the adopted language where its words are found again to establish and affirm a Filipino sense of their world. If at first our writers wrote in English, later they wrought from it (Abad 2008, p. 4).

Jose Rizal’s Noli mi Tangere (1887) and El Filibusterismo (1891), considered the first truly Filipino novels by most scholars, have also become the golden standard for most Filipino writers, even to this day. Because of its revered status not only in Philippine literary tradition but also in Philippine history, Filipino novels have had to live up to being “not only a mirror of reality, but an active agent of change” (I. R. Cruz 1990, p. 66). This influence has translated to the apprehension that the majority of the contemporary Filipino literary critics share towards “formalist” methods of analysis. For them, a formalist method does not serve the real goals of literature and its corresponding literary criticism. The method fails to address the nuances, the “Filipino-ness,” of the literary work or it impoverishes the analysis of the literary work because of its terminology derived from case studies of Western origins. This position somewhat echoes one side of the debate that dominated Philippine letters during the 1960s- 1980s: whether to use English or the national language Pilipino (also called Filipino, a supposed hybrid of various languages in the Philippines, but Tagalog-based nonetheless). In prose writing, English was considered less “nationalistic” than its Tagalog counterpart. In poetry, English was the hallmark of the “formalist” (American) tradition whereas Tagalog was better at capturing the “soul” of the Filipino. At the core of this debate is the idea that anything foreign is not appropriate for rendering the true Filipino. But as Abad’s

observation, cited at the beginning of this chapter suggests, Filipino writers have “colonized English” because they have used it “toward a native clearing within the adopted language” (2008, p. 4). It is this idea of a native clearing of narratology, of its formalist-structuralist image, that I imagine in my investigation of the narrative strategies deployed in postcolonial Filipino novels.

This thesis intends to put forward the merits of taking a closer look at the narrative strategies in postcolonial Filipino novels in English. I want to suggest that doing so does not impoverish the analysis and eventual understanding of these novels. Instead of simply associating the study of form with its Western origins and the skepticism that goes with it, I hope to demonstrate that a culturally specific formalist approach can also shed light on how the novels published between the 1950s and the 1970s wrestled with the narrative of Philippine modernity and development as sanctioned by its former colonizer and later, with the retrieval of an authentic Filipino history as encouraged by the Filipino nationalists. Using this approach, I will examine in the subsequent chapters how the Filipino authors attempted to interrogate these hegemonic constructions in their novels.

Before I analyze these novels, I will begin by discussing the key debates and issues that shaped Philippine literary criticism in the early 1930s up until its intersection with postcolonial studies in the 1990s. In particular, I focus on the two leading schools of thought that emerged in Philippine letters. On the one hand, when Marxist or even “practical” critics in the Philippines hardly looked at form because they considered it peripheral to content, they failed to sufficiently consider that authors had to deploy narrative strategies to convey the content. On the other hand, when New Critics in the Philippines chose to look at content as subordinate to form, they also overlooked the influence of the context of the work in the deployment of the narrative strategies and techniques. I will connect this with a discussion of Filipino literary historian Resil Mojares’s monumental study of the development of the Filipino narrative tradition from its pre-colonial forms to the novel. I will then look at the evolution of narratology from its strictly formalist and structuralist traditions referred to as “classical” to the

“postclassical” versions, such as feminist and postcolonial narratology, and how this provides the space for my own investigation of postcolonial Filipino novels.

Philippine Literary Studies: A Tale of Two Masters

The question most pressing at this point is when and how literary criticism for Philippine literature in English materialized as a professional practice. Filipino fiction writer and literary critic Edilberto Tiempo locates the emergence of “a modicum” (1995, p. 5) of Philippine literary criticism in the early 1930s. Herbert Schneider has also referred to the period between 1930-1944 as the “period of emergence of Philippine letters” (1967a, p. 575). This timeframe coincides with the period of the supposed transition to independence, which was marked by the end of the U.S. territorial administration of the Philippines (1901-1935) and the start of the Commonwealth period (1935-1946). The promise of independence after the Commonwealth period also meant a renewal of the nationalist sentiment so the focus of writers was the creation of a “national literature.” According to Schneider, “At the beginning of the Period of Emergence, Philippine literature meant a literature depicting typical Filipino life” (1967a, p. 578) which made stories about barrio or provincial life popular because those were the stories which supposedly represented the “Malayan” spirit. By 1939, the Philippine Writers’ League of the University of the Philippines was organized. The most notable member, Salvador P. Lopez, is said to have penned the group’s declaration:

It has been universally recognized that man is a political animal, whatever else he may be. The writer, therefore, who works upon the belief that man is a mere fancier of beautiful works and golden phrases, has missed the essential element in man. He works in a vacuum and, therefore, works in vain. All writers worthy of the name are, whether they are conscious of it or not, workers in the building up of culture. Since economic injustice and political oppression are the enemies of culture, it becomes the clear duty of the writer to lend his arm to the struggle against injustice and oppression in every form in order to preserve those cultural values which

generations of writers before him have built up with slow and painful effort (1940, pp. 117-118).

The group’s declaration is in stark contrast to the goals of an earlier group called the Writers’ Club of the University of the Philippines, formed in 1927 while the Philippines was still under the American Insular government. Members of this club such as Jose Garcia Villa lived by the code that “Art shall not be a means to an end, but an end in itself” (cited in Lopez 1940, p. 147). Villa, the group’s most famous and important member, started out as a short story writer but in his quest for art he abandoned prose altogether. He would later leave Manila for New York and join the likes of e.e. cummings. Despite his departure in 1929, Villa remained an influential figure in the Philippine literary scene with his highly anticipated annual selections of the best Philippine short stories (1927-1940) and poetry (1931, 1938-1940). What Villa says of poetry is indicative of his stance towards literature as a whole, “Poetry is—first of all— expertness in language and form, not in meaning; and the true meaning of a poem is its Expressive Force rather than its content—the language of poetry being a mode of action, a transmitter of energy rather than of information” (1962, flap).

Schneider has said of Villa: “I do not think Villa was ever interested in writing Philippine literature. He was too much of an individualist. Thus, the problems he dealt with were restricted to individuals” (1967b, p. 596). This sentiment is palpable across most of the commentary about Villa’s work in the decades after he left the Philippines and even when he virtually disappeared from the American literary scene after the 1960s. But there has been a recovery of sorts of Villa’s image with the publication of his critical works (Villa 2002) and a collection of his poetry (Villa 2008). In recent years the reception of his works has shifted towards the retrieval of Hispanic transcolonial traces (Park 2013). Nevertheless, Villa would always be the face of the American incursion into Philippine letters.

So, the Lopez movement that emerged was in direct opposition to Villa’s and also coincided with a popular trend in American literature, that of proletarian

literature. Schneider observes that when Lopez’s views became more Marxist he “no longer saw the writer as simply taking part in the struggle against social injustice—he must champion the cause of the proletariat, and interpret the experience of the working class in the world that has been rendered doubly dynamic by its struggles” (1967a, p. 583). The Great Depression in America that ushered in proletarian writing seemed to fit well with Lopez’s push for stories of social protest in the Philippines. The onset of the Pacific War also meant the interruption in the development of a local literary critical tradition. The end of the war and the eventual declaration of “formal” independence in 1946 further strengthened the impetus for nationalism in Philippine letters. Despite finally acquiring formal independence after nearly half a century of American rule, Filipinos continued to be dictated by their former colonizers not only in socio- political affairs but in the standards set for literature. The works of Miguel Bernad and the American critic Leonard Casper were usually framed within American literary conventions. Around this time, the precursor works of the American New Criticism, such as I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism (1929) and T. S. Elliot’s The Function of Criticism (1933), finally gained ground in American literary criticism in the 1940s up to the 1970s.

In the Philippines, this school of thought would gain its popularity between the 1950s to the 1970s. According to E.K. Tiempo, the “New Critics were protesting against some forces that refused to look at literature as it really is" and felt "that literature should not be evaluated in general terms that are not directly related to the work itself” (1970, p. 79). E.K. Tiempo sometimes takes on an acerbic tone towards what he considers the “impressionistic attitude” in Philippine literary criticism that has resulted in “overrating” writers such as Manuel Arguilla who wrote in the proletarian tradition (1995, p. 11). Writing against this type of criticism, E.K. Tiempo notes “that a work ‘moves me’ is a legitimate, indeed essential, element, but to make it as the major criterion in evaluation is valid only when the artistic necessities are met. More important: the critic must show why it moves” (1995, p. 11). The state of Philippine literary criticism at the time that New Criticism appeared did leave much to be desired. Mojares laments that most of the works in “literary criticism” that were produced were “non- criticism” or “ponderous nonsense” (1969, p. 2). What he means is that critics

either filled the pages with compliments for the writer or condemned them for their lack of morals instead of discussing the short stories or novels, and if they did discuss the author’s works, the analysis was rarely supported by textual evidence. However, the sociopolitical situation that motivated the writers of the post-war era to write their stories created a very diverse kind of postcolonial writing. I refer to these writers as the early postcolonial Filipino writers in English (Bienvenido Santos, N.V.M. Gonzalez, Kerima Polotan, Edith Tiempo, and Nick Joaquin). Despite the promise of E.K. Tiempo’s “textual, analytical approach” and perhaps because of his insistence in making context “subsidiary” to it (1970, p. 90), New Criticism failed, to use Lanser’s words, “to recognize that aesthetic structure, like all content, is constrained and determined by ideology” (1981, p. 94).

Formalism v.s. Marxism in Philippine Literary Criticism

Two Filipino scholars have looked at this debate between the formalist and Marxist schools of thought in Philippine literary criticism: the U.S.-based critic E. San Juan Jr. and the eminent scholar of the Tagalog novel as well as Philippine popular fiction, Soledad Reyes. San Juan is one of a few Filipino scholars based in the U.S. who consistently writes about the U.S.-Philippine relations. In The Philippine Temptation: Dialectics of Philippine-U.S. Literary Relations, San Juan investigates what other scholars had for so long failed to study: “how ‘humane letters’ were used for over half a century to ‘Americanize’ and pacify the only U.S. colony in Asia” (1996, p. 24). In his study of the Philippine-U.S. literary relations, San Juan echoes progressive American historians who attribute the “‘institutional invisibility’ of Philippine studies” in the U.S. to “the absence of any serious discussion of U.S. ‘imperialism’ or American ‘exceptionalism’ in the academy, as well as in the public sphere” (1996, p. 12). In chapter 2 of his book San Juan—in his often-superfluous prose—notes that the uptake of American New Criticism by some scholars, such as the U.S.- educated Tiempos (Edilberto and his wife Edith) and Demetillo or the American exchange scholar Casper, was a continuation of the American project of benevolent assimilation at the beginning of the American occupation of the Philippines. San Juan equates the Filipino New Critic’s focus on form and craft

as a kind of silence towards the atrocities by the U.S.-backed Marcos regime. For him, as these critics continued to praise or criticize literary works by Filipinos based on Anglo-American conventions, they also continued to be blind to social realities. Later in his discussion, San Juan lumps the New Critics with the writers in English. He writes:

the ‘English’ practitioners have, as a group, never represented the nation in the process of emergence, much less the people constituted as the victims of U.S. domination and exploitation. And I would also argue that the authentic organic intellectuals who sought to organize the spontaneous national-popular energies and infuse them with conscienticizing purpose rooted in the notion of justice in an egalitarian community are the vernacular writers . . . committed novelists and dramatists. (San Juan 1996, p. 73)

I will return to this point made by San Juan later in my discussion of Patajo- Legasto’s “reterritorializing Philippine literary studies,” but at this juncture it is important to note that San Juan’s predisposition to associate the production of literature and the literary criticism that followed it with the political and historical forces that informed it coincides with the Marxist school of thought that existed alongside the formalist school of thought, albeit in the periphery especially in its use in the university lectures and scholarly output.

Although San Juan sticks to a historical-materialist inquiry of this period in Philippine letters, in particular his analysis of the import, rise, and eventual demise of New Criticism in the Philippines, Reyes (1987) turns a critical eye on the two major schools of thought: on the one hand, the Lopez tradition and its replacement Marxist criticism; on the other hand, the Villa tradition or formalist criticism. Reyes’ work on popular literature specifically the Tagalog romance shapes her assessment of the two schools of thought. Between the 1960s and the 1970s, when critical writing about Philippine literature in English was the norm in literary studies, Reyes (1984) was mostly concerned with giving popular fiction its rightful place in Philippine literary studies. Reyes links the “triumph” of formalism in the 1960s with its demonstration of “intellectual rigor that the other

approaches could not approximate” (1987, p. 88). As I noted earlier, the few critical works that came out during this time focused instead on the moral/religious aspects of the story or the emotions derived from such a reading. Similar to San Juan, Reyes also recognizes the bias in literary criticism for Philippine literature in English during this period. Reyes connects this to her work in popular literature and how these works were relegated to the margins because the formalist critics who studied these works “made categorical statements damning the texts’ sentimentality, didactism and ornate language” (1987, p. 88).

Reyes associates this relegation of popular literature like the Tagalog novels to the “acceptance of realism as the dominant, if not canonized, mode” of writing that has attracted the attention of both “historical” [Marxist] and “ahistorical” [formalist] critics (1987, p. 90). According to Reyes, this preference for realist work has made both take a “negative attitude toward modes other than realism” (1987, p. 91). Reyes argues that in the example of popular literary works, formalist critics did not take the time to look at them beyond the parameters of the “realistic mode” and Marxist critics only saw them as “instruments of escape” (1987, p. 91). In an earlier work, “The Romance Mode in Philippine Popular Literature,” Reyes convincingly argues that the romance mode in popular literature was used for subversive designs. I quote a section of her analysis at length:

Historically, the identity of the colonizer had changed, and the attempt to change the people’s values had become more systematic and widespread. The ideology rooted in a religious, non-individualistic matrix was being challenged by an ideology that had spawned a secular, individualistic and materialistic outlook. As novelists must have believed, they emanated from the new colonizers. The threat was real and must be contained even if only through literature. The Other must be named in the novels, which then became a collective gesture of containment. Caught up in a nostalgic haze, these writers of the first half of the century sought to arrest through their narratives what in real life could not be stopped—the deepening Americanization of the Filipinos. (1984, p. 176)

For Reyes, this critique of the Americanization of the Philippine cultural identity was something both the formalist and Marxist critics failed to explore because of the limitations of their methods. Filipino historian Reynaldo Ileto has done a somewhat related study to that of the work by Reyes. His focus in his seminal work, Pasyon and Revolution (1979), is on the relationship between the popular literary forms of the pasyon and the awit and the resistance movements leading to the revolution. He examines the role that the often-underrepresented Filipinos, the masses, had in the revolution against Spain and the significance of the Pasyon, a key literary work during the colonial times under Spain. So, it does not appear far-fetched on Reyes’ part to analyze Tagalog novels in this manner.

Both San Juan and Reyes have explored the two leading schools of thought in Philippine literary criticism between the 1950s and the 1980s and while San Juan has chosen a historical-materialist version of events thus highlighting only the failings of New Criticism, Reyes has chosen to look at both critically. The demise of New Criticism in the Philippines can be attributed to a variety of factors such as the enduring influence of Lopez’s tradition of literature of social protest, which paralleled the growing dissent against the Marcos regime in 1970s, and dissatisfaction with its pretext of an objective analysis, which deviated from the underground activism of several writers or critics. But the most significant factor has to be the “haunting of the Filipino writer” (Mojares 2002, p. 297) because of the horrors of the Marcos regime especially the imposition of Martial Law.

I refer here to a similar “haunting of the writer” that Mojares attributes to the silencing committed by both the Spanish and American colonizers on the local way of life. The suppression of freedom during the Marcos regime was equivalent to the Spanish era censorship which saw the publication of religious works as the preferred mode of writing or the ascendancy of Anglo-American cultural traditions; novels published in the Philippines during the Marcos regime mostly “limited” the writers to topics and themes that were not offensive to the Marcos regime. At the end of the Marcos regime in 1986, Philippine literary

criticism’s foray into New Criticism didn’t stand a chance against the renewed interest in socially conscious narratives as well as critical perspectives. Freedom from the Marcos oppression saw a deluge of historical fiction in English and the cultural turn in criticism. It seemed that finally, the Villa-Lopez debate had a victor.

Philippine Literary Studies Intersects with Postcolonial Literary Studies

Philippine literary scholarship “officially” joined the field of postcolonial criticism with the 1993 publication of Philippine Post-colonial Studies: Essays on Language and Literature edited by Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo and Priscelina Patajo-Legasto. This is not to say that prior to this publication there had not be any postcolonial readings of literary works because there have been others, such as the works of Reyes and Mojares. But as the first “compilation” to be published by the University of the Philippines press, the leading bastion of activism in the Philippines especially during the Martial Law period, it served as an implied declaration of the local scholars’ intent to join in this area of literary studies. Of the eleven articles in this collection, I will discuss Patajo-Legasto’s own contribution entitled “Literatures from the Margins: Reterritorializing Philippine Literary Studies” because it discusses a highly-contested aspect of Philippine writing: language. She situates the study of literatures from the margins as significant for postcolonial studies because they have rarely been studied and almost always only under university niche courses not the required course readings, which is the domain of the works in English (including those works with English translations).

Patajo-Legasto classifies the literatures studied in the Philippines as major, minor and minority (she has since amended the term “minority” to “from the margins” due to issues with local Filipinists in the late 1990s). The “Major” literatures are those Western literary texts such as the Greek tragedies and the European/Anglo-American novels. The “Minor” literatures are those written during the American Commonwealth period and just after World War II. For Patajo-Legasto, these texts are still very Western-oriented because of their themes that equate with “essentially” Filipino traits with the “underdevelopment”

of the nation. For her, the way these novels highlight “the importance of education in the uplift of the Filipinos’ real conditions” minimizes "the culpability of real/economic and colonial/neocolonial forms of domination in the shaping of our people and our history” (2004, pp. 50-51). She specifically includes in this category the Filipino novels in English published between the 1950s and the 1960s such as the works of N.V.M. Gonzalez and Nick Joaquin, what J. Neil Garcia would later refer to as the “canon” writers in Philippine literature in English (2004, p. 5). The “Minority literatures and/or literatures from the margins...are the articulations of the varied experiences and feelings and thoughts of individual and groups whose identities have been fractured by the imposition of a ‘common (Western) norm’ of identity” (Patajo-Legasto 2004, p. 51). She includes the literatures from the guerrilla movement, from women, and other marginalized sectors such as: “peasants, workers, the ethnic and religious minorities, lesbians and gays” (Patajo-Legasto 2004, p. 53).

Patajo-Legasto’s categorization of Philippine literatures is noteworthy since it highlights the Anglo-Saxon concentration in what would constitute a major portion of the reading list in high school and college curriculum. This is a practice that dates back to the American implementation of public education. Her discussion of the significance of recovering, recognizing, and analyzing literatures from the margins also shows the need to expand the scope of Philippine literary studies beyond what is offered in the university. But her discussion on the second and third type of literatures is unsettling because it seems to summarily dismiss the second type, the works written in English and published after the U.S. granted the Philippines formal independence, while elevating the status of the third type. It is unsettling because it covers a significant area and period of Philippine literature: the transition from Spanish to American and finally to a Filipino writing space. She questions the postcolonial status of these works based on only three elements: language, theme, and character. She does not account for how these aforementioned elements, especially language, have been used by some authors together with the narrative strategy of voice in an attempt to rewrite the American-endorsed narrative of Philippine modernity and development or later, to contest the divisive push by the nationalists for an authentic Filipino identity or history.

Patajo-Legasto’s criticism of the “minor literature” contradicts what postcolonial writers like Chinua Achebe have done with their works in English and locally, what Nick Joaquin has done with the baroque mode of English in his writing, which ironically her co-editor Pantoja-Hidalgo identifies as a striking technique in Joaquin’s fiction.

Going back to San Juan’s statement which I mentioned earlier about how “the ‘English’ practitioners have, as a group, never represented the nation in the process of emergence” and his preference for vernacular writers who are “authentic organic intellectuals who sought to organize the spontaneous national-popular energies and infuse them with conscientizing purpose rooted in the notion of justice in an egalitarian community” [emphasis added] (1996, p. 73). The notion of the authentic voice of the Filipino people, where Patajo- Legasto’s third category of minority would fit, points to the experience of the masses, outside those of the middle-class usually represented by the writers in English or as San Juan referred to as the intellectual elite. This identification of a supposedly authentic voice in the vernacular literature of the masses also isolates another group, such as those who have come from the masses and who have chosen to learn and write in English as represented by writers such as Carlos Bulosan, F. Sionil Jose, and to some degree, both N.V.M. Gonzalez and Bienvenido Santos.

Ironically, it is the staunchly anti-postcolonial theorist Isagani Cruz who first defends this use of English as he considers the “countering” qualities inherent in the Philippine English used by the early postcolonial authors (1990, p. 71). I. R. Cruz (2001) expands this idea and “tests” the validity of the occurrence of Philippine English variety in Filipino literary works based on the findings of Bautista’s study on standard Philippine English and samples the last paragraphs of fifty works of short fiction. I. R. Cruz notes, “Postcolonial writers often write within the imperial tradition, and their writing back to the empire consists not of wholesale rejection (that is done by English-dominant Filipino writers deliberately writing mostly or even exclusively in vernacular languages) but of deceptive acquiescence” (2001, p. 287). I. R. Cruz considers these grammatical features of Philippine English, when used in literary texts, as a way

of responding to the center of English because by resisting the former colonizer’s strict language rules and instead using a variation of it, the author unsettles their power over his work.

Despite his often anti-postcolonial rhetoric, I. R. Cruz also subscribes to the postcolonial critic’s position of language as a weapon; in the words of Ashcroft, “Language therefore can be made to change, to be used in different ways of talking about the world and in a metaphorical sense, to lead to changing the world itself” (2008, p. 4). This idea of the English language as a weapon in postcolonial societies is one of the reasons why Philippine literature in English, especially the novels of the authors I have chosen to study in this thesis, should not just be categorized as merely Western-oriented works. In the same manner that the Tagalog novel or other forms of popular literature also have a place in Philippine literary studies, novels in English also deserve space in postcolonial Philippine literary studies. In the succeeding sections I chart how a culturally specific formalist approach in the study of Filipino novels published between the 1950s and the 1970s can be valuable in investigating how Filipino authors in English examined the American-endorsed narrative of modernity and development or the nationalists’ recuperation of an authentic Filipino identity and history.

Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel: A Case for Narratology

Possibly the most valid reservation against “formalist” methods is its former “stereotype” of being overly text-based or blind to context. However, in Mojares’s (1999) study of the Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel: A Generic Study of the Novel until 1940, he does what previous “formalist” critics, such as the Tiempos or Demetillo or Casper, have failed to do for Philippine literary studies, and that is study formal elements of literary narratives to trace and examine the “rise of the Filipino novel” rather than just evaluate novels based on American conventions. In his innovative contribution to Philippine literary history, Mojares underscores how a simultaneous analysis of the narrative’s formal elements and the historical and sociological impulses surrounding the

production of these literary works can lead to the discovery of a Philippine narrative tradition and a possible description of its own formal elements.

Mojares’ insights provide significant contributions to the history of the “Filipino” narrative tradition because his investigation shows that despite the arrival of the novel (of European influence) as exemplified by Rizal’s novels, the origin of the Filipino narrative tradition can still be traced to locally developed forms as far back as the precolonial form of the epic (Mojares 1999, p. 369). Because his work is geared towards literary history and even though its attempt at giving equal importance to the analysis of the text and its context is commendable, the timeframe of the works covered is so vast that Mojares is constrained to cover the most basic of elements such as plot summary, identification of key characters and their roles in the story, and a discussion of the themes. For the types of pre-novel forms, he includes in his study, these aspects might have been sufficient to validate his claims; however, the development of the Filipino novel from its European origins in Rizal’s books to the novels in this study, also made other elements such as narrative voice ripe for analysis.

The study also covers a wide-array of works that date as far back to the pre- colonial oral forms such as the epic and ends with novels published until 1940 which means that his study does not cover most of the Filipino novels in English especially the novels written by the authors in my study—the early postcolonial novels. Because of the delimitation of his study of novels until the 1940s, Mojares was unable to account for novels that had yet to be published; especially the novels that dealt with the dual-trauma created by the abrupt replacement of American for Spanish colonizers, and the subsequent “independence” from America. But for a study done in the 1970s, Mojares raises ideas that mirror postcolonial studies, especially those raised by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism (1994), such as his observations about how the European model of the novel played a role in the narration of nation and how the “rise” of the Filipino novel also equated to a “rise” of the idea of nation. Mojares has shown in his study the merits of examining the textual elements of narratives. If Philippine literary criticism is to account for what Jonathan Culler calls, “the absence of good accounts of literary norms against which

postcolonial authors are said to be writing” (cited in Sorensen 2010, p. 141), a method that is sensitive to the specificity of the Philippine postcolonial situation may prove beneficial.

Narratology: From Classical to the Postclassical Approaches

David Herman (1997) situates the development of narratology as a movement from the classical school of its structuralist origins, to the postclassical schools, of which there is an engagement with other areas, in his case, cognitive studies. Similarly, Monika Fludernik refers to the early works as part of “classical narratology” (2005, p. 36). Fludernik attributes to “Saussure’s linguistic insights” the hallmark of classical narratology: “the structure of binary opposition” (2005, p. 38). According to Fludernik, another distinctive feature of classical narratology is its preference for “typology and classification” (2005, p, 38) as found in the works of Gerald Prince (1982), Mieke Bal (1997), and even in Susan Lanser’s early work (1981) on point of view. Classical narratology’s scientific aura, its objective approach to literature became its biggest problem. As a theory, classical narratology’s use of typology and classification has been criticized for its failure to have much impact on the understanding of the texts as it did not help generate new readings compared to critical schools such as feminism or postcolonialism. The shift to postclassical narratology, according to Fludernik can be connected to the “pragmatic revolution in linguistics” that saw a renewal of interest in “semantics, context-orientation, and textual issues to the study of language” (2005, p. 44).

Another trajectory of this shift can be attributed to the contributions of Lanser and her reexamination of narrative voice and its relationship with gender. Lanser’s (1981, 1986, 2004) and Robyn Warhol’s (1989) works show the relevance of sex, gender, and sexuality in narrative and vice versa. Lanser’s investigations of women’s texts have enriched narratology with previously unrecognized situations such as how gender factors into the relationship of the narrator and other characters. Her reworking of narrative voice particularly her proposal for a “gendered poetics” (Lanser 1999) is meant to show the mutual benefits between narratology and feminist criticism. On the one hand, Lanser

wants narratologists to include the field of sex and gender in the narrator’s features; on the other hand, she provides feminist critics with a description for future reading of texts. Her suggestions differ from classical narratology because “Traditionally, structuralist narratology has suppressed the representational aspects of fiction and emphasized the semiotic, while feminist criticism has done the opposite” (Lanser 1986, p. 199).

Her examination has also shown that narratology needs to acknowledge the socio-historical contexts of narratives, which is also significant for postcolonial analysis of novels. Reyes, in her opposition to “ahistorical criticism” such as formalism, cites the “artificial dichotomy between form and content” [emphasis added] (1987, p. 90) as one its limitations in dealing with Philippine literature in English. But as Lanser puts forward in her suggestions for the study of point of view, “dissolving the polarities of form and content allows us to recognize that aesthetic structure, like all content, is constrained and determined by ideology” [emphasis added] (1981, p. 100). Feminist narratology, as the model for later contextual approaches to narrative, opens the possibility for an investigation that takes into consideration how Filipino postcolonial concerns such as the preoccupation of writers with examining the American-endorsed narrative of modernity and development or the nationalists’ recuperation of an authentic Filipino identity and history might be demonstrated in the narrative strategies and techniques deployed in the novels. In the next section, I discuss the concepts of postcolonial theory that scholars working in postcolonial narratology have chosen as important areas to develop their own versions. I consider their suggestions for postcolonial narratology and how these versions provide a model for how I want to frame my own investigations of postcolonial Filipino novels.

Postcolonial Theory and Narratology: Early Works in Postcolonial Narratology

The main concerns of postcolonial theory that have been used by scholars in their versions of postcolonial narratology are the concepts of identity, alterity, and language. There are of course other postcolonial concerns but in order to

show how Fludernik and Marion Gymnich have examined the narrative strategies deployed in the postcolonial texts, I will only discuss the postcolonial concerns they also addressed. Fludernik examines the relationship between the concept of identity and alterity and the structure of the texts in postcolonial Indian fiction whereas Gymnich focuses on the appropriation of colonial languages by formerly colonized people by highlighting the significance of the linguistic relationship between the narrator and the characters. Said’s Orientalism (1978), considered one of the founding texts in postcolonial studies, interrogates the notion of otherness or alterity in grand narratives. Said notes that imperialism’s “worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental” [emphasis added] (1994, p.336). This idea that Said posed, of being exclusively something, contributes to the deeply ingrained binaries implanted in the minds of the colonized.

These binaries, in turn, create stereotypes of the Orient as strange, odd, abnormal, irrational, uncivilized or simply put, inferior compared to the colonizer. This perceived inferiority of the native other has been used as a justification by the colonizers to impose their own cultural traditions on the colonized. This is best exemplified by the spread of the colonial language in the colonized nations. In the seminal work The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin 1989), this postcolonial concept of the use of the colonizer's language by the other is examined. According to Ashcroft, et. al, the emergence of literatures in English produced by writers from the former colonized nations is a reminder of how the appropriation of the colonizer’s language has empowered the former colonized to “write back” to the center.

The postcolonial narratology that has emerged in recent years takes a similar line of inquiry that feminist narratology took years earlier. One of the first contributions to postcolonial narratology comes from Fludernik (1999). She suggests that in postcolonial fiction such as Indian texts, narrative strategies such as plot structure, spatio-temporal representations, or the representation of speech and thought (of dialogue and focalization) are informed by the quest of the other to invert hegemonic notions of the colonizer and the native other.

Fludernik later notes that this area of narratology “attempts to describe how the choice of specific narrative techniques helps to transmit underlying orientalist or patriarchal structures and how the narrative, by its choice of focalization, plot structure, or use of free indirect discourse sometimes resists these structures, undermines or deconstructs them” (2005, p. 45).

In another contribution to postcolonial narratology, Gymnich suggests that the aim of postcolonial narratology is the “exploration of relationships between narrative structures and those questions, themes, and categories which are of central importance to Postcolonial studies” specifically “how concepts of identity and alterity or categories such as ethnicity, race, class, and gender are constructed, perpetuated or subverted in narrative texts” (2002, pp. 62-63). In her study of postcolonial and minority literatures (for example, Chinese American, African American, Chinese Canadian, Trinidadian Canadian, and the Caribbean), Gymnich chooses language as her key area of analysis. Her work suggests the usefulness of looking at the linguistic relationship between narrators and characters, highlighting the occurrence of varieties of English in postcolonial nations. This is a promising suggestion considering the use of varieties of English in literature has been used as a postcolonial strategy of resistance to the once standardized colonial English imposed on the colonized which saw “all ‘variants’ as impurities” (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin 2002, p. 7).

Gymnich translates this idea to her version of postcolonial narratology by identifying six possible categories of the narrator to other character/s relationship. The categories proposed by Gymnich highlight the importance of differentiating between the two narrative situations—homo- or hetero-diegetic, that is, stories using either a first or third person narrator—because she wants to draw attention to the power relations inherent in the structure of texts in the same manner that these power relations exist in the postcolonial experience (2002, p. 65). The narrator in colonial texts, who is conferred “the highest degree authority by the readers,” “typically” use the colonizer’s language; be it in the homo- or hetero-diegetic situation. According to Gymnich this situation is less strict in the characters’ dialogue where “regional or social varieties of

language” or non-standard language were “more or less acceptable” (2002, p. 66).

Using these categories, Gymnich suggests an interesting way of looking at the relationship between the narrator and characters, and what “the distribution of such [non-standard or foreign linguistic] elements” means (2002, pp. 63). However, it would also be significant to postcolonial studies to ask why a specific category can be observed in a novel, what it says about the authors’ motivations, of which he or she may be entirely unaware, for using it in the novel. Gymnich’s categories will prove useful for this study, especially in chapter 5 of this thesis, where I will analyze the relationship between language and narration, specifically between the language used by narrator and that of the characters. Pantoja-Hidalgo notes how “Joaquin’s language borrows the cadences and the exuberance of Spanish. [N.V.M.] Gonzalez deliberately attempts to capture the syntax and rhythms of the local languages. Santos’ comes closest to American English” (2008, p. 25). The language that Pantoja- Hidalgo highlights here is in reference to the narrator’s discourse. As Gymnich does in her investigations, it would also be productive to not only look at the kind of English the narrator uses but also the characters.

The third contribution comes from Gerard Prince (2005). Although Prince praises the efforts of the two previous contributions he is adamant about categorizing their attempt as “postcolonial narratological criticism” whereas his work is the real “postcolonial narratology.” The difference, he writes, lies in how the narratives are examined; postcolonial narratology “characterizes and articulates narratively pertinent categories and features in order to account for the ways in which narratives are configured and make sense” whereas postcolonial narratological criticism “uses these categories and features in order to specify the configuration and sense of particular narratives” (Prince 2005, p. 379). Roy Sommer agrees with Prince on this matter and has also noted that the two earlier versions are “less concerned with re-examining narratology from a postcolonial perspective” than with “making use of narratology’s heuristic potential for a better understanding of how ethnicity or postcoloniality is evoked in fictional narrative” (2007, p. 69). Perhaps the motivations for Prince’s

insistence on a demarcation between what he considers “real” postcolonial narratology from that of Fludernik’s or Gymnich’s contributions to “postcolonial narratology” has to do with his partiality for classical narratology. Philippine postcolonial literature, in continuing the same line of inquiry as Fludernik or Gymnich—that is, of looking at how narrative structures are also informed by the core issues of postcolonial studies—may achieve a more rewarding investigation.

Where does this thesis intend to stand in its investigations of postcolonial narratology? Sommer’s comments that Fludernik’s or Gymnich’s versions of postcolonial narratology are “less concerned with re-examining narratology from a postcolonial perspective” [emphasis added] (2007, p. 69) may have been written to differentiate Prince’s version from Fludernik’s or Gymnich’s versions but he inadvertently confirms how Filipino scholars have long viewed supposedly objective formalist approaches to literary analysis as an undeniably Western-focused enterprise, otherwise there would be no need to look at it “from a postcolonial perspective.” I. R. Cruz finds the introduction and subsequent use of “formalist modes of literary study” such as Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s textbooks to blame for the “slight diminution of the perceived role of [Philippine] literature in society, because of the American- inspired belief that literature was autonomous and organic, ontologically unrelated to history” (1990, p.69). This “formalist” attitude, I. R. Cruz explains, was put in place to subdue “the central role of literature in the national struggle for economic and political independence” (1990, p.69). Just as Sommer confirms one of the reasons for the Filipino critics’ apprehension towards narratology’s predecessors, he also re-affirms the possibility and the need to “colonize” narratology or, to borrow Abad’s words, take it “toward a native clearing” and finally allow a postcolonial perspective.

As bold as that proposition sounds, one significant issue that arises is the breadth and depth of a postcolonial perspective or more appropriately, postcolonial perspectives. My decision to focus on the books of key authors published within a specific period (1946-1980) is intended to capture a specific literary response to the dominant cultural mood or the writers’ milieu of that

period. The experience of dual-trauma at the hands of both Spanish and American colonizers gravely affected the writers. Mojares called this the “haunting of the Filipino writer,” contending that this “haunting is a metaphor for what drives the vocation of writers and the practice of writing” (2002, pp. 297- 298). But because there is another “trauma” created by the Marcos regime, the “haunting” of the writers who wrote as a reaction to that period in Philippine history would be considerably different, understandably expressing how their experiences under the Marcos regime influenced their work.

Although Patajo-Legasto (2004) suggests that the early postcolonial authors may “perpetuate Western myths,” these writers instead explore why Filipino authors should engage with these so-called “Western” issues since they affect, to borrow Joaquin’s words, the process of Philippine becoming. For Santos and N.V.M. Gonzalez, where the narrative takes place in the belly of the new Western beast (the U.S.), there is no way to avoid the experience of alienation. In his novel, Joaquin questions the myth of a “true Filipino,” of a Filipino before the American or before the Spanish colonization, of a Filipino before any colonizer. He interrogates how this rejection of the Filipino’s “Western” aspect (that of the Spanish heritage) has created a madness of sorts; of a world where women are so alienated from reality that they may think they have two navels. In another novel by N.V.M. Gonzalez, who this time grounds his novel locally, in the agricultural landscape of Mindoro, an island south of the capital city of Manila, another layer of alienation is exposed—between the kaingineros (swidden farmers) and the land owners; just as Polotan’s novel shows the gap between Manila and Pangasinan, a rural town north of the capital city.

Postcolonial studies has shown that the trauma of colonization comes not only in the form of physical injury or loss of life and property but in the more savagely felt deep-seated emotional and psychological effects on the colonized. The effects may be different for those on different sides of the class line; the “minor” writers may write about supposedly Western issues of identity and hybridity or alienation and displacement and the “minority” writers may write about poverty or proper land distribution. In the subsequent chapters, I will examine how the novels of Bienvenido Santos, N.V.M. Gonzalez, Kerima Polotan, Edith Tiempo,

and Nick Joaquin deployed narrative strategies to interrogate either the colonial or nationalist versions of, to use Joaquin’s term, Philippine becoming.

Chapter Two—Narrative Complexity: The Narrators in N.V.M. Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers and Santos’ You Lovely People

Motifs of departure, nostalgia, incompletion, rootlessness, leave taking, and dispossession recur with force in most writing produced by Filipinos in the United States and by Filipino Americans, with the Philippines as either the original or terminal reference point. Rather than the United States as the locus of claims or ‘the promised land’ that Werner Sollors argues is the typological trope of ‘ethnic’ American writing (40-50), the Filipino case represents a reverse telos, an opposite movement. (Campomanes 1992, p. 51)

The works of Bienvenido Santos and N.V.M. Gonzalez are naturally considered part of the canon of Philippine literature. Santos’ You Lovely People (1955) and N.V.M. Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers (1960) were both initially published with Philippine-based publishing houses. But their books have also been included as part of Asian-American studies. This is probably due to the subject of their stories—Filipinos in America—and their frequent, sometimes prolonged trips to the U.S. When Santos acquired American citizenship in the late 1970s just when Asian-American studies became an emerging area in American institutions, it only added to this confusion. So, their fate, at least in terms of literary reception, was to be lumped under the umbrella term “Asian-American” studies dominated by mostly Chinese or Japanese writing. The problem with situating Santos and N.V.M. Gonzalez as Asian-American writers (in their early works at least) is that they were not immigrants nor were their works strictly about immigrants. Their works reflected the complicated history of the Philippine-U.S. relationship: sometimes it portrayed the painful tales of Filipinos, mostly men, forced to leave their homes for the sugar plantations of Hawaii then the fruit orchards of California, sometimes it depicted a merry band of men and occasionally women who have learned to adapt their lives to their present realities.

This appropriation was questioned by Oscar Campomanes who correctly argues that because of the “reverse telos,” or the balikbayan (return-to-the-

Philippines) motif of the works of Santos and N.V.M. Gonzalez, theirs should instead be considered as “a literature of exile and emergence rather than a literature of immigration and settlement whereby life in the United States serves as the space for displacement, suspension, and perspective” (1992, p. 51). In a 1997 profile of N.V.M. Gonzalez, James McEnteer notes that, on a trip back to his hometown of Romblon, N.V.M. Gonzalez was asked by a woman: “How long since you’ve been back?” to which N.V.M. Gonzalez replied: “I never left home.” Ten years earlier in an interview with Edilberto Alegre and Doreen Fernandez, Santos talks about the Filipino old-timers (a generation before him): “These exiles never really left home” (1984, p. 234). Santos may as well have been talking about himself and his friend, N.V.M. Gonzalez. In this context, I follow Campomanes in my treatment of the novels as literary works of exile and emergence.

Santos’ You Lovely People and N.V.M. Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers1, which both tell the often-harrowing experiences of Filipinos in America (or as Campomanes takes to calling them, U.S. Filipinos) during the Pacific war and in the decade immediately after the granting of formal independence, would fit Patajo-Legasto’s classification of minor literature in the Philippines that “perpetuate Western myths of identity formation and national development” (2004, pp. 50-51). Central to this view is how the works fail to account for “the culpability of real/economic and colonial/neocolonial forms of domination in the shaping of our people and our history” largely due to the use of a narrator with a privileged or elite status i.e. a male, pensionado or government scholar compared to the other characters in the stories such as the Filipino laborers or the Filipina scholars. While this position rightfully highlights the shortcomings of a largely male-centered and/or middle-class emphasis in the framing of Filipino national identity in the early works of some of the Filipino writers in English, I argue that these novels also suggest alternative forms of exploring the complexities inherent in the Philippine postcolonial situation.

1 The analysis uses the 1991 edition of You Lovely People (See Santos, B 1991) and the 1993 edition of The Bamboo Dancers (See Gonzalez, NVM 1993a)

Campomanes notes that for writers (N.V.M. Gonzalez and Santos included) “who literally experience this ‘alienated’ plight and outsiderhood through ‘the manipulations of extended residence in the metropole’ (N.V.M.’s own words), the convergence of linguistic and actual displacements could not but both burden and distinguish their cultural products” (1995, p. x). In this context, Homi Bhabha’s (2012) concept of ambivalence is a useful starting point. Bhabha suggests that the mimicry of the native/colonized has to be considered as oscillating between the desire of the native to be “almost the same, but not quite;” he points to the disruptive nature of this desire as it manifests as a form of ambivalence in the native’s/colonized’s view of his relationship with the colonizer. Bhabha’s ideas are especially useful in understanding the Philippine postcolonial situation considering the prevalent colonial view had interpreted the Filipinos’ mimicry as an inferior characteristic (Rafael 1993, p. 198) that ought to be exploited, according to the colonial administrators, or eliminated, according to the Filipino nationalists. This ambivalence—of desiring and detesting American colonial influences and at times the cultural traditions of the Philippines—is present not only in Santos and N.V.M. Gonzalez as authors but also in the narrators of their novels, You Lovely People and The Bamboo Dancers, respectively.

In one of his critical essays, “The road from Porto-Vecchio,” N.V.M. Gonzalez suggestively notes, “The narrator is there so that someone is around to tell the story. …For it might well be that the narrator, instead of the story he has been charged to tell his audience, is in fact the story itself” (1976, p. 115). In this chapter, I revisit these primary works about the plight of Filipinos in the U.S. by examining the story of these narrators; of how these narrators portray the Philippine-U.S. culpability in the state of the nation’s affairs and the alienated lives of the Filipinos especially those in the U.S. In particular, I draw from Gerard Genette’s separate but dependent functions of narration and focalization in order to explore the story of these narrators more fully. I begin with the history of narration used in Filipino novels and continue with a discussion of the focalization theory specific to the first-person narrator.

A Native Consciousness in Voice and Focalization

The dominant mode of narration in the early Filipino novels (this would span three areas: novels written in Spanish, vernacular languages including the Tagalog-based national language Filipino, and English) has not been given much attention in Philippine literary studies. Mojares is probably the first scholar to seriously examine Rizal’s novels within the Philippine novelistic tradition in his seminal work on the rise of the Filipino novel, where he comments about how the novels are “filtered through the consciousness of a native artist” (1981, p. 150). Although Mojares’ comment is about Rizal as the author, the same can be said about the omniscient narrator employed in the novel. Mojares’ observation is important because it coincides with what N.V.M. Gonzalez notes about omniscience:

What we must remember, then, is that the singular voice of the narrator grew out of a long process, authority assuming omniscience and control at the start. It is this voice that has been with us in nearly all these years under colonialism. Sacramentalized into myth, stories depended all the more on the leverage of ‘Once upon a time …’. [Emphasis added] (1976, p. 124)

Both Mojares and N.V.M. Gonzalez locate this narrative authority in the voice/s of the author/narrator and both also recognize the master’s/colonizer’s authority over the native/Filipino.

Rizal’s choice to use an omniscient narrator coincides with the popular use of this kind of narration in the nineteenth-century novel in Europe (which he used as a model for his own novel) but the use of the “consciousness of a native” is a significant alteration because at a time when nearly all of the publications about the Philippines were written by Spanish authorities, at a time when omniscience conveyed authority, Rizal endows his native, then known as an Indio, narrator with the ultimate narrative power, that is to finally tell the story of the Indios by an Indio. In his short work Why Counting Counts: A Study of Forms of Consciousness and Problems of Language in Noli Me Tangere and El

Filibusterismo, Benedict Anderson (2008) embarks on the tedious task of going over every line of the two novels in order to tag the words to its correct “speaker.” One of his key findings shows the narrators in both Noli and Fili are the principal users of Tagalog words in both novels. According to Anderson, the “heavy use of Tagalog was a way of expressing his [Rizal’s] indigenous and authentic identity as Tagalog, and maybe Filipino” (2008, p. 70). Clearly, Rizal’s narrator is a “Filipino” narrator.

More than half a century later, N.V.M. Gonzalez would take a remarkably different path, of using the less popular kind of narration as practiced by his Filipino contemporaries (nearly all novels written in English since the first one in 1921 use a third-person narrator; even the Tagalog novels published from 1900 onwards predominantly use a third-person narrator). N.V.M. Gonzalez uses the first-person narrator in his first novel, Winds of April (1941) then again in his third novel, The Bamboo Dancers (1960) in what may appear to be a complete break with the more widespread practice of third-person narration but N.V.M. Gonzalez notes:

There is a claim that the Tagalog novel grew out of trips to the city by locals who, on rejoining cohorts at the corner sari-sari store, felt obliged to regale the stay-at-homes with accounts of their adventures. If true, a thing to wonder about is why the first person is not found more frequently in Filipino letters. ... It is here that the convention of being told stories from above, as it were, may be traced. For in Philippine society, listening to voices of authority has become something of a convention. (1976, p. 124)

On the surface, N.V.M. Gonzalez’s choice of a first-person narrator may seem to break from the literary convention of his time but by identifying the roots of the tradition of the Tagalog novel in the locals’ return to the barrio (town) storytelling, he goes even further. In effect, N.V.M. Gonzalez confers a dual- level authority to his first-person narrator: initially by departing from the conventional textual authority held by a third-person narrator but at the same time, going back to a “tradition” of storytelling; then, to break the accepted

notion of a Filipino who, to borrow N.V.M. Gonzalez’s words, merely listens “to voices of authority,” this time, a Filipino narrator holds the power. This difference is especially telling in postcolonial novels, as Monika Fludernik notes in “The Narrative Forms of Postcolonial Fiction,” because the use of a first- person narrator shows how the colonized “has found his voice and is now telling the story in his own words and from his own point of view” (2010, p. 913). It is this desire to be true to his “roots” and myths of a time long gone while modernizing, reimagining these myths that is most resonant in N.V.M. Gonzalez’s oeuvre.

Mojares rightfully points out, “Colonialism is the trauma of Philippine literature. The trauma is defined not just by the disruptive force and duration of our colonial experience but the specific, manifold character it took and the site in which it was played out” (2002, p. 300). Just when Rizal and his generation mastered the Spanish language to start writing novels, the Spaniards sold them to a new colonial master—the Americans. Armed not only with guns but also with their English language and Anglo-Saxon culture, the Americans worked to dismantle three hundred years of Spanish influence in half a century of rule. By the time Filipinos learned the English language, the Americans were forced out, formally at least, because of a ‘promise’ made before the Pacific war. In this chapter I hope to demonstrate that what writers like N.V.M. Gonzalez and Santos have done with these constant disruptions, similar to Rizal before them, is to introduce “the consciousness of a native” in the deployment of the first- person narrators in their novels. Due to this native consciousness and the narrators’ elite position in the story-world, the narrators’ view of a U.S.-imposed narrative of nationhood and the subsequent nationalist project of an authentic Filipino identity take an ambivalent form. Throughout this chapter, I use theoretical terms referring to narration (voice) and focalization, in order to explore this ambivalence more fully. For the remainder of this section I explain how these two terms are central in the examination of the Santos’ and N.V.M. Gonzalez’s novels.

In the now classical approach to focalization, Gerard Genette’s (1980) Narrative discourse puts forward a clarification of the concept of “point of view” in older

systems where the subject of narration was sometimes confused with the subject of focalization. In his chapter on mood, Genette observes that these previous versions of point of view “suffer from a regrettable confusion between...mood and voice, a confusion between the question who is the character whose point of view orients the narrative perspective? and the very different question who is the narrator?” (1980, p. 186). Following Bal’s modifications, he would later amend the question of “who sees” to “who perceives” (Genette 1988, p. 64). But the main argument that focalizing and narrating are two separate but dependent actions remains. This is crucial for understanding the specific case of the first-person narrators in N.V.M. Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers and Santos’ You Lovely People because the narrators are essentially narrating the story of their lives, the events of which have happened in the past. Although the narrator (narrating self) is also the hero (experiencing self), the narrator’s temporal advantage over the hero (he has experienced what he is narrating) means he has the authority to regulate what information to narrate.

In my analysis of The Bamboo Dancers I want to suggest that because of this confusion over focalization and narration, critics of the novel often conflate the thoughts and deeds of Ernie’s experiencing self with that of the narrating self. This is not to say that all thoughts and deeds of the experiencing self do not correspond to the thoughts of the narrating self, because sometimes they do. Dorrit Cohn refers to this as consonant narration where the narrator “identifies with his earlier incarnation, renouncing all manner of cognitive privilege” (1978, p. 155). I hope to shed light on the implications of the narrator’s method of presenting the events. I argue that the narrator—Ernie Rama—exhibits the ambivalence inherent in the Philippine-U.S. neocolonial situation.

In Santos’ You Lovely People, the confusion is mainly over voice because of what seems to be the novel’s use of a mixed-mode narration (a combination of first-person narrators—Ben and Ambo—and third-person narrators). Firstly, critics ask, is You Lovely People a novel or a collection of short stories? Secondly, if it is a novel, why does the “first” first-person narrator (Ben) shift to another first-person narrator (Ambo) midway in the narrative then to unnamed

third-person narrators in the later chapter-episodes? Following Isagani Cruz (2010), I want to suggest that this confusion over genre can be resolved with an analysis of voice specifically concerning narrative levels. If the narrator Ben is considered as the overall narrator of the novel, then Ambo’s narration and the other chapter-episodes that use the third-person narrators can be seen as embedded narratives. I hope to show in my analysis that as a result of this narrative structure, Santos is able to demonstrate, just like N.V.M. Gonzalez, the ambivalence immanent in the Philippine postcolonial condition.

“He doesn’t write. He only sculptures:” Ambivalence in the Narrator of N.V.M. Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers

Although N.V.M. Gonzalez is mainly known for his work in English, he became quite successful as a Tagalog writer during the Japanese occupation, even winning a prize in 1943 for one of his short stories (Lumbera 1967, p. 388). With the Japanese at the helm, anything American was outlawed and this pushed distinguished writers in English such as Manuel Arguilla, Arturo Rotor, Francisco Arcellana and N.V.M. Gonzalez to try writing in Tagalog which had become the Japanese-sanctioned national language. As I noted earlier in the introduction to this chapter, N.V.M. Gonzalez initially wrote The Bamboo Dancers in Tagalog but he felt that the subject of The Bamboo Dancers did not conform to the taste of the Tagalog readers especially after receiving comments from his “editor friends” who “had misgivings about the theme and structure of the novel” (1976, p. 87). Patricia Jurilla, in her introduction to Bibliography of Filipino Novels 1901-2000 notes, “the nature of the novel in English” compared to the Tagalog novel was that it was “driven by interests focused less on making profits than on fulfilling artistic, cultural, nationalistic, or personal objectives” (2010, p. 13-14). Jurilla's comments coincide with N.V.M. Gonzalez’s own view, “Writing meant following the conventions of the trade as practiced by that class for which the industry provided profit. It did not mean pursuing the demands of an art form, and least of all the demands of an idea” (1976, p. 87). This is not to say that N.V.M. Gonzalez turned his back on Tagalog altogether, I. R. Cruz (1999) notes in his tribute to N.V.M. Gonzalez following his passing, that N.V.M. Gonzalez always subscribed to the notion that he wrote Tagalog in English,

which is coincidentally the same line of thinking that Santos takes, that he too writes Kapampangan (language of Pampanga where Santos was raised) in English. I examine this idea of Filipino writers “writing from English” in chapter six.

In N.V.M. Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers, I want to suggest that the narrator—Ernie Rama—exhibits the ambivalence inherent in the Philippine-U.S. neocolonial situation. I hope to demonstrate how the early significant critical works written about this novel have covered two main points: it is a structurally defective and morally deficient novel or it promotes a nativist formulation of nationalism. I argue, then, that N.V.M. Gonzalez’s use of a supposedly “detached”—which has sometimes been referred to as morally questionable— narrator is strategic. This strategy also factors in the often nativist reading of the novel. The Bamboo Dancers (1960) is N.V.M. Gonzalez’s third novel published a few years after A Season of Grace (1956) which I discuss in chapter five. The Bamboo Dancers consists of a prologue (“A prologue by post”), six chapters (“A lament,” “The mountain visit,” “Fall,” “After the cloudburst,” “The mainlanders,” and “In Sipolog”), and an epilogue. The novel uses a more “classic” first-person narration compared to You Lovely People, that is a single, first-person narrator has the task of “telling” the story. The narrator Ernie Rama, a sculptor, navigates through his memories about his year long fellowship in the U.S. and the events that followed. As hinted by N.V.M. Gonzalez (1960), Ernie’s recollection is triggered after receiving one of the letters in the prologue, the first letter sent by Helen Reyes. The narrator, Ernie, alludes to the same event—the tragic death of Helen’s fiancé in Taiwan—broached in Helen’s letter in the last line of the book: “I’ve set this down as a small tribute to what Herb Lane perhaps meant” (p. 330).

The Bamboo Dancers has been commonly described as a “travelogue” (Bernad 1961 and Demetillo 1986), which is a reference to the narrator’s account of his various travels. Whereas William Harrison, in a scathing commentary in the American weekly magazine Saturday Review, writes “the book’s most striking fault is that as a piece of social survey and criticism it really fails to criticize” (1962, p. 51), Leonard Casper (1960), in the front flap of the book’s dust cover,

finds this “disciplined self-restraint” to be its highlight because it “owes much to [N.V.M. Gonzalez’s] culture’s reliance, for unobtrusive communication, on courteous consideration of others.” In both cases, it is clear that the disagreement over the narrator’s method of presenting the events plays a key role in their overall assessment of the novel’s “success.” This section of the chapter, then, suggests how the novel in question has been typically read as a nativist discourse or a failure to criticize American influence. By contrast, I argue that the novel deploys narratorial ambivalence as a form of critique—rather than a criticism—of the Philippine-U.S. relations. I suggest, then, that this novel, like You Lovely People, exhibits the often-constrained position of the Philippines in its relationship with the U.S.

Augusto Espiritu’s (2005) chapter on N.V.M. Gonzalez in Five Faces of Exile: The Nation and Filipino American Intellectuals calls attention to N.V.M. Gonzalez’s “‘expatriate negation,’ or denial of the value of expatriation in Filipino intellectual life.” Espiritu suggests that N.V.M. Gonzalez’s “life and work represent the tension between a desire for nationalist community and authenticity and the individual urgings of literary ambition” (2005, p. 104). While Espiritu makes a strong case regarding “N.V.M. Gonzalez’s complex, heterogenous nationalism,” his emphasis on The Bamboo Dancer’s ending as “full of suggestions of renewal and of N.V.M. Gonzalez’s vision that return to one’s native land is crucial to moral and cultural regeneration” (2005, p. 104, p. 118) fails to account for the textual clues of the narrator’s ambivalence, which I argue presents another aspect of the novel: of the often unavoidable ambivalent attitude of a former colonized person towards his or her colonizer. Because of the nature of the Philippine-U.S. relationship during the time these books were written and published, both Santos and N.V.M. Gonzalez turned to strategies that reflect this complex situation of ambivalence that would later be criticized by scholars, particularly E. San Juan Jr. (1996), for failing to fully reject American tradition and/or capitalist influences.

Espiritu does recognize that N.V.M. Gonzalez’s “nativist discourse tends to hide his ambivalence to shifting geographic and cultural locations, which compelled him to reassess the meanings of Filipino-ness” [emphasis added] (2005, p.

104). It is precisely this concealed ambivalence in N.V.M. Gonzalez’s early works, including The Bamboo Dancers, that is regrettably missed in some of the analyses about the book. The first few literary scholars to comment on The Bamboo Dancers were heavily influenced by the American import “New criticism” that was popular between the 1960s to the early 1980s. Miguel Bernad saw a structural defect in the novel especially in the last three chapters and found fault with the weakness of the metaphor of the title (1961, pp. 50-51). In his final assessment of the novel, Bernad remarks that it “resembles a travelogue: episodic, but not a dramatic whole” (1961, p. 51). Bernad, being a priest, also did not shy away from another popular mode of criticism during that period: moral criticism; he was highly critical of the morality of the characters, taking to task the premarital sexual involvement between the narrator Ernie and his friend, fellow scholar Helen. He found that “The moral lapse in New York … is not really regretted by the participants on moral grounds” (1961, p. 51).

Both the formalist and moral critical slant of Bernad has much in common with the work of another “New critic” scholar Ricaredo Demetillo who also found several issues in the novel: its portrayal of the characters such as Ernie’s “curious” (1986, p. 68) morality, its resemblance to a “travelogue” (1986, p. 69), its failure to connect the “central symbol” (1986, p. 69) of The Bamboo Dancers with the other key symbols of the novel such as the lament in the first chapter. It is no surprise, then, that N.V.M. Gonzalez sometimes took a very defensive stance when it came to his works and went to the extent of analyzing some of his own fiction; most notably his published reply to Bernad’s criticism of The Bamboo Dancers (N.V.M. Gonzalez 1960a). Edilberto Tiempo, the premier practitioner of American New Criticism in the Philippines, made no secret of his disdain over the practice when he accused N.V.M. Gonzalez of “impos[ing] his ideas upon the reader” (1995, p. 281). For N.V.M. Gonzalez it was less a matter of imposing on his readers but rather an attempt at personally understanding how his own works manifest the “bond between imperialism and the novel” (1993b, p. 41).

Leonard Casper’s analysis of the novel is more coherent compared to the previous two scholars’ versions. For Casper, the novel’s “simple style and

almost random structure” demonstrated the “evasiveness on the part of the character” (1964, p. 32). Casper attributed this technique to the influence of Henry James on N.V.M. Gonzalez, highlighted by N.V.M. Gonzalez’s choice of a James quote as part of his epigraph. According to Casper, the narrator Ernie’s “restricted point of view” has a dual function, that is, “his sometimes deliberate coldness to any human embrace reinforces the native imperfection of human understanding” [emphasis added] (1964, p. 34). Invoking the concept of a sort of natural human understanding is, of course, a reminder of the tendency at that time of American-educated scholars, Filipinos included, to impose the rule of reaching a “universal” meaning as the standard of every novelist. Unlike Bernad, Demetillo, and Tiempo—who were all Filipinos educated in the U.S.— Casper is an American scholar who was a visiting professor in the Philippines for several years and who has also been credited for introducing the works of Filipino writers in English to an American academic audience. The critical views of these scholars shaped a significant number of the Filipino reading public, which consisted mostly of other university teachers and their students.

It is because of the highly American-influenced reading strategies such as these that a closer scrutiny of the novel’s depiction of Philippine-U.S. neocolonial relations rarely warranted a mention let alone discussion. This is most palpable in their glossing over of the analyses of chapter four or Ernie’s sojourn in Japan. I quote Casper’s comments at length as an example: “He [Ernie] is the perfect epitome, therefore, for those victims at Hiroshima who asked to be remembered by the Filipinos: ‘Tell them how we suffer’; without a word of the guilt for suffering caused by them… Hiroshima has erected itself as a symbol of self- pity…” [emphasis added] (1964, p. 38). What is ironic about Casper’s statement is that Japan has formally apologized to the Philippines and other Asian nations for the atrocities they committed during World War II. In fact, it is the U.S. that until today has not apologized for the “suffering caused by them” in its former colony during the Filipino-American war at the turn of the twentieth century. They continue to deny the event as a mere insurrection of bandits and this self- erasure from a brutal historical period has allowed them to be guilt-free of the atrocities they committed.

A more refreshing take on the novel comes from Edilberto de Jesus, Jr., (1967) whose essay “On this Soil, in this Climate: Growth in the Novels of N.V.M. Gonzalez” which was first published in Brown Heritage: Essays on Philippine Cultural Tradition and Literature (1967), appears in the 1993 edition of the novel. N.V.M. Gonzalez was still alive at this time and he would have given approval for it to be published with this edition. In his analysis, de Jesus tries to give a reply to the accusations of the novel’s structural defect and even the morality questions raised against it. Just like Casper, de Jesus also points to the Henry James epigraph serving as a sort of sign to the reader that the book’s “meaning will emerge only after a careful analysis” (1967, p. 749). He locates the key to the novel’s structure in the exposition of Ernie Rama’s character. For de Jesus, the novel ends with Ernie Rama’s “recovery of his alienation from his country’s tradition and his loss of cultural identity” (1967, p. 762). Although there have been vibrant discussions regarding both the novel’s form and morality and even the influence of N.V.M. Gonzalez’s biography on the assessment of the novel’s status as a “classic” Filipino novel, what is of central interest to me in this section is to examine how N.V.M. Gonzalez strategically deploys his “detached” narrator to portray the complexity of the Philippine-U.S. relationship. I suggest that while N.V.M. Gonzalez may have been highly influenced by Percy Lubbock’s principle of the novelistic convention of “showing” over “telling” (as popularized in the work of Henry James), his ambivalence towards the nature of Philippines-U.S. relations—of the widespread American influence on Philippine affairs and the supposedly detrimental effects on Philippine cultural identity—is also revealed in the novel’s narrator, Ernie Rama.

A more recent analysis by Antonette Talaue (2008), which gives a postcolonial treatment to the novel, comes closest to my argument. In her article “’Post- colonial duality,’ a reading of The Bamboo Dancers,” Talaue introduces the concept of “doubleness” and “how this challenges colonial impositions on three levels: language, identity, and the concept of the nation” (2008 p. 19). Talaue’s notion of doubleness is clearly similar to Bhabha’s ambivalence, she even mentions the “state of in-betweeness,” but she does not elaborate it. While she spends considerable space examining Ernie’s “identification and alienation” as shown in his “desire for and disavowal of his race,” what she considers Ernie’s

parallel “attitude towards the West” (Talaue 2008, p. 25, 28) obviously referencing America, warrants only a few paragraphs. I suggest, then, that it is also useful to account for the narrator’s ambivalent attitude not only towards his own race but also his patron, the Americans. In the following paragraphs, I discuss the textual clues of this ambivalence in the novel’s narrator.

N.V.M. Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers begins with a prologue which contains five pieces of correspondence via post written by three characters in the novel including the narrator, Ernie Rama (letters three and five), Helen Reyes (letter one), and Mrs. Akiko Ishikawa (letters two and four). It is worth noting that these letters, in terms of story time, would have been written or received after the events of chapter five. However, it is not clear exactly when all the letters were received or sent by Ernie. Ernie mentions receiving several letters in chapter six (p. 323) which possibly included Helen’s letter and the first of Mrs. Ishikawa’s post in the form of a postcard. Aside from the missing dates, the text for every letter also do not contain either welcome or closing address; instead the novel employs the marking device of naming the sender and the recipient as in the first letter we know it is written by Helen to Ernie because of the header “Helen Reyes to Ernie Rama” (p. 1) preceding the actual text of the letter. The absence of these important parts of a letter suggests the possibility that these are not faithful reproductions of the letters. While the letters do not mean much until chapter six, it is crucial for two reasons: firstly, because it is the only time that Ernie Rama is not the main voice and secondly, in the two letters written by Ernie to a newspaper editor and to his friends the Samonte couple, respectively, Ernie’s dissimilar tones in both letters reveal another layer of the narrator.

The entire novel is told from Ernie Rama’s point of view; both the voice and focalization is entirely Ernie’s. This novel does not suffer the same question of voice that some scholars have raised against Santos’ You Lovely People, which I will discuss in the next section. The novel’s use of an apparently detached first-person narrator is so effective that it has led some scholars such as Bernad and Demetillo to question the morality, not just that of the narrator but, implicitly, that of the author. Demetillo is the most baffled because he finds that the

novel’s “rhythm hardly, if ever, changes. There are no extraordinary building- ups of tensions or releases of tensions.… [it is] like reading a dated account of some event recorded in yesterday’s news magazine.… As a work of art, the novel is a failure” (1986, p. 69). An observation that clearly fails to account for the narrator’s image because it is closely fixated on the novel’s form.

The inclusion, then, of Helen’s and Mrs. Ishikawa’s letters gives the reader not only vital clues to the relationships Ernie formed with these characters but it also provides an insight into Ernie as a narrator; an insight sorely lacking in Demetillo’s criticism. The reader can quickly surmise in Helen’s letter that her relationship with Ernie is a close one: she mentions common friends, the Rices, and even asks Ernie a favor telling him to “Write me within the week” (p. 2). From Mrs. Ishikawa, the reader can also infer that Ernie made quite an impression on her and her husband because even after “many months…since [his] visit” (p. 2), she remembers to write him a letter; her second letter, which comes a year after Ernie’s sojourn in Hiroshima, reiterates this point because she takes the time to inform him of her husband’s passing. In his narration, that is the narrating self, a person alienated from some things such as those suggested by Talaue, that is, “the cultural code and local traditions of his own country” (2008, p. 25) emerges because as Ernie is narrating these events, he is trying to make sense of everything. He is also trying to understand his experiencing self.

The two letters written by Ernie are equally significant. In his first letter, written to the editor of Manila Standard, a local newspaper, Ernie’s tone echoes the same “clinical” or “restrained” tone used by the narrator Ernie in the novel. In the letter, he is sounding off about something to do with birds and the unnecessary actions by children of scaring away the birds with “little pellet guns” (pp. 3-4). He mentions the post atomic bomb situation in Hiroshima where “the birds have been pretty scared” (p. 3) to return. Whereas the tone in the first letter comes closest to the narrator Ernie of the rest of the novel, the tone of the letter-writer Ernie in the fifth letter, especially in the first few lines, coincides with Ernie’s experiencing self. He is still very thorough in his descriptions but there is more warmth in his letter to the Samonte couple who are his good friends based

in New York. Ernie writes “I’m pretty well set up here, as I’ve told you before. In giving up the house to try to stick it out in the sticks—such enterprise, such idealism, ahem! —Pepe and Ligaya did not figure on what I could really do with their place out here at Project 17” [emphasis added] (p. 5). Ernie’s tongue-in- cheek comments regarding his decision to move may seem almost uncharacteristic of Ernie’s narrating self but a closer inspection of the instances of Ernie’s experiencing self show that Ernie is relatively warm when he needs to be, and most especially with his friends for instance when he teases Reggie Samonte in a phone conversation about an invitation to a party (p. 18) or when he is around Helen.

It is with the last line of Ernie’s letter to the Samonte couple, which de Jesus (1967) uses to frame his entire argument, that the whole novel comes to its “proper” end: “The amazing thing is that here, on this soil, and in this climate, anything grows” (p. 6). The story that Ernie Rama narrates, then, is the story of how he got to that point in his life. In the first chapter, “A Lament,” Ernie’s fellowship program in America, which included a stint at a prestigious fine arts school, had just concluded but before going home the program asked him to “visit as many art centers in America as possible” (p. 9). The first chapter has become a focal point of discussion for a number of scholars because of the poem presented by Mrs. Rice called “Lament for Tammuz” that “so very nearly made [her] think of the Philippines” (p. 29). One of Ernie’s friends, Johnny Kilala or J.K. as he was fondly called by the other Filipinos, found the poem offensive considering the audience were all Filipinos. He especially found the line “For the perishing wedded ones, for perishing children it is; the dark-headed people create not.” (p. 31) offensive because being a “dark-headed” man, he did not take too kindly to the poem’s message that he was infertile. By extension scholars have read this to mean that Filipinos like him were unproductive.

Most notably, Bernad considers this as one of the “highlights” in the novel, possibly because of the irony with the choice of the poem; the speaker, Mrs. Rice and her husband are childless, so Bernad alludes to this potential double- meaning in his analysis (1960, p. 459). What has not been discussed in any of the previous analyses is Ernie’s presentation of the event—both his

experiencing self and narrating self. If Ernie’s story is indeed about how he found his way to his decision to not just return home but also start fresh then Ernie’s choice to include in his narration of events this specific party at the Rice’s out of all the parties he attended at the couple’s home, which according to Ernie he “frequented” with other “suffering Filipinos” including the Samonte couple and J.K. for a night of “clinical diagnosis” (p. 28), must be analyzed within that context.

Ernie chooses to include this event quite simply because of Mrs. Rice’s poem. The recitation of the poem also serves as one of the instances of Ernie’s ambivalence. He begins his narration of the events of that night (tagged as section three of the first chapter) with a seemingly innocent statement (in the gnomic present tense) “It is perhaps true that the remedies for the ills of the nation are often discovered at cocktail parties” (p. 28). But as the events will reveal, his narrating self’s statement comes out as sarcastic in nature. In fact, Ernie in this section makes a lot of revealing comments. Firstly, when he says “The American couple rather enjoyed us thoroughly and for this we were grateful, I guess” [emphasis added] (p. 28), the addition of “I guess” creates the impression that Ernie is unsure, even after a considerable distance from the events, of Dr. and Mrs. Rice’s intentions. What makes him hesitate with his gratitude is that Ernie considers the Rice couple as “Filipinophiles, professors of a truly touching love for the country, which emotion was perhaps the hangover of forty weekends or so of lechonadas and tinikling dances” [emphases added] (p. 29). This ambivalence in Ernie, of being grateful for the patronage of this American couple at the same suspicious of their “truly touching love for the country” is quite noticeable in this section that it is a wonder why both Bernad and Casper missed it. Then again, Bernad seemed intent on “masking” the meaning of the whole section with the irony of the childless couple and Casper, being an American visiting professor himself, is consistent in again glossing over any slights made against the American ideal just as he did with his analysis of Ernie’s sojourn in Japan. What is striking about this instance of ambivalence is that both Ernie’s experiencing self and narrating self have a similar reaction: an almost non-reaction. There is, however, an almost self- conscious aspect to the (non) actions of Ernie’s narrating self. While he would

like the reader to believe that he was unaffected by the poem’s implicit message through the insertion of funny peripheral memories—how he “picked up a piece of canapé” after Mrs. Rice recites the first line of the poem or how after Cora Samonte asks “who’s this Tommy [Tammuz] fellow?” immediately after the last line is spoken (p. 28) he offers her one of the canapés!—his narrating self is indeed affected as shown in his choice to include not just the party but especially this event.

Ernie’s ambivalence is not only towards the American couple but also to his friends. Ernie describes J.K. as “congenitally irreverent” (p. 28). This unflattering comment about J.K. early in the section connects with his reaction to J.K.’s opinion regarding Mrs. Rice’s poem. While most scholars have focused on the textual clues of Ernie’s sexuality—which is as ambiguous as his ambivalence— in the closing scene of this section, Ernie’s attitude towards J.K. also warrants a closer look. On their way home, when J.K. starts his drunken tirade against Mrs. Rice’s poem, Ernie snaps, “Quit it, J.K” (p. 33). At the end of the night, when J.K. and Ernie are taking the two women, Mimi and Delly, home and an argument over a goodnight kiss ensues between the women and J.K., Ernie recalls “Which, in point of fact, I meant to say although I had no emotions about the whole business” (p. 34). While Ernie’s comment was made regarding J.K.’s unwelcome good night kiss to Mimi, he may as well have said it regarding his emotions to the whole business of Mrs. Rice’s poem. As I have tried to provisionally discuss Ernie’s ambivalence towards both American and Filipino matters in the first chapter, in the course of the novel Ernie continues to narrate a few more events that show this. It is worth noting that the tinikling or the bamboo dance, aside from being the predominant metaphor used in the novel, also becomes the focal point of Ernie’s fluctuating attitude towards the Philippine-U.S. relationship. The tinikling metaphor has been analyzed exhaustively by other scholars so my concern in discussing it, then, is primarily focused on how it also plays a role in Ernie’s ambivalence.

In the second chapter, “The Mountain Visit,” Ernie has left New York and moved to Vermont and happens to stay in the same place his good friend from Manila, Helen, stayed. He ends up following her to Greenleaf, where she has joined a

writers’ conference. Upon his arrival at the conference lodgings, a conversation with the front desk clerk again shows his ambivalence. The whole exchange, which I quote at length below, is both tragic and comic:

“You’re a great people, you know,” said the clerk. “Bataan and all that.” “We only did our duty,” I said, lamely. “And an artist and musical race….” “How’s that?” I was beginning to feel embarrassed. “There’s that lively dance with the bamboo poles—what do you call it?” he asked eagerly. “That’s the tinkling,” I said.… “You’ve seen the dance?” “Last spring, in Boston. You can do it here, can’t you?” “Oh, my!” I said. “There aren’t any bamboo poles around.” [Emphases added] (p. 56)

It is tragic because Ernie is clearly uncomfortable during the whole exchange because of the American clerk’s patronizing comments. The reference to the “brotherhood” between the Filipino and American soldiers during the Bataan death march and Ernie’s feeble reply of the Filipino, again, simply doing his “duty” highlights the often unequal relationship between master and (former) colonized. This discomfort can be traced back to the first chapter when Ernie complains to Regie Samonte about Filipinos who enjoy the whole business of the tinikling or the bamboo dance that had become quite fashionable during those days with Filipino dance groups touring all over the U.S. The notion of the tinikling being synonymous to the Filipino is a kind of exoticism. This exoticization of the tinikling is repeated in chapter four, “After the Cloudburst.” Just when Ernie sarcastically thought another American, Mrs. Hobbs, would ask him about the tinikling, she initially surprises him by not even mentioning it but a few moments later, when another foreigner, Miss Page, comes to join their conversation, she does not disappoint:

“This is Mr. Rama,” Mrs. Hobbs said. “Mr. Rama’s a Filipino,” she added. “Oh, you know that bamboo thing, don’t you?”

What I had figured out earlier was beginning to happen. Miss Page flecked her long eyelashes, puzzled possibly. “You mean the tinkling dance,” I put in, as politely as I could. [Emphases added] (p. 210)

Ernie’s comment about replying “as politely as [he] could” again shows his frustration at always being asked about the dance. Ernie’s frustration leads him later in chapter five, “The Mainlanders,” to declare: “To me, a Filipino, there was nothing new in this at all. It was just another rendering in actual life of a scene that travel folders, calendar pictures, and pista sa nayon [national fiesta] programs had made drab.”

Ernie recognizes the pitfalls of this exoticization and his aversion to the stereotype reflects his ambivalence: firstly, to the simplification of the hybridity of the Filipino by the Americans and secondly, to the Filipinos’ acquiescence that their own diverse cultural identity can be simply packaged as the tinikling. While the tinikling is truly one of the more intricate Philippine dances, it is only one of several traditional dances performed in the Philippines. The whole exchange with the American clerk is also comic because despite his growing “embarrassment” and frustration with repetitive questions about the dance or worse, performance requests, Ernie manages to end the topic with a sarcastic comment about the lack of bamboo poles.

Another event that shows Ernie’s ambivalence occurs in the fourth chapter, when he is visiting Hiroshima and meeting survivors of the atomic bomb. While listening to his interpreter, Mrs. Ishikawa, Ernie comments on her “wonderful English” and how “[He] felt at home at once listening to so familiar an accent and intonation as hers” [emphases added] (p. 175). Like him, Mrs. Ishikawa who is a second-generation immigrant who had been living in Oakland before the war, had experienced the same American-influenced tutelage. While Ernie’s comments regarding a sort of instant connection upon hearing Mrs. Ishikawa’s similar American “accent and intonation” hints at the image of a desired “home” in America’s influence, his thoughts a few pages later regarding the near invisibility in Japanese “songs and novels” of their experience of the atomic

bomb paints another picture: “Surely, some songs must have been written about the Bomb,” I said. Back of my mind was the fact that little had been written about the war at home in the Philippines” [emphasis added] (p. 178).

Ernie, true to form, does not expand on his thoughts. The fact that it was in the “back of [his] mind” during this event means that it is his narrating self that later recovers this skepticism because his experiencing self was still “at home” with America’s pervasive influence. However, the ambivalent nature of the narrator Ernie means that his thoughts regarding the absence of discourse about the war is not only a critique of America’s treatment of its supposed ally but also a self-critique. By having been instantly “at home”, Ernie is almost always prone to temper his reaction, to suspend criticism. He says as much in the fifth chapter:

I couldn’t keep from asking myself whether my fellowship year in America had made me dislike the country and whether in any case it had made me a different person altogether. But I didn’t have it in me, I guess, to be honest enough with myself one way or the other. [Emphases added] (pp. 241-242)

Here Ernie acknowledges that prior to the “writing” of the novel, that is his experiencing self, he was still struggling with his own feelings; the irony here is that while he may have learned a lot during his fellowship in America, he also learned to doubt the very country that nurtured him during that period.

N.V.M. Gonzalez (1976 p. 126) once remarked, “It is in the first-person narrative that we form the habit of listening to some other and, eventually, to ourselves, and thus put the world in some kind of order. We have to snap out of having to be always told, however distant the voice from elsewhere” [emphasis added]. In trying to defy this distant voice, N.V.M. Gonzalez created a narrator who also had to go through the same struggle that he did. It is not entirely clear at the end of the novel what Ernie’s awareness of his growing “dislike” for the Americans means for him or whether his alienation from his own traditions are truly resolved. What is however evident is that Ernie’s ambivalence parallels

that of N.V.M. Gonzalez’s. As I have tried to show in this section, Ernie’s fluctuating attitudes towards the deeply embedded American influence in postcolonial Philippines as well as his own traditions may be seen as an attempt to textually represent the complicated nature of the Philippine-U.S. relationship.

The Hurt Narrator(s) in Santos’ You Lovely People

Compared to N.V.M. Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers, which clearly demonstrates the first-person narrator as Ernie, Santos’ You Lovely People is a more complicated narrative to navigate in terms of narration because, on the surface at least, it uses a mixed-mode. Not only does Santos use first-person narration, with two narrators: Ben (fictional Santos) who then frames the second narrator Ambo (Pablo Icarangal, a Filipino old-timer); the novel also uses third- person narration in four of the episodes (11 to 14). It is this use of a mixed- mode of narration in a supposedly autobiographical book that has led to its treatment as a collection of stories. Santos himself stresses this point regarding the “two voices” in his interview with Grow, “there are two voices there. My voice, Ben’s voice, and Ambo’s voice. Ambo, the illiterate whose English is supposed to be a translation from a dialect, and my voice is directly English; that’s the difficulty there” (1977, p. 11). Early analyses by Bernad and Casper have also framed the book in this manner leading to their criticisms regarding the lack of a “unified” narratorial voice (despite already acknowledging the book’s hybrid form).

You Lovely People is Santos’ first book and it is also his bestselling work. As Victoria Rico (1994) notes to talk about Santos is to talk about this book. Because of Santos’ success as a short story writer, it is quite possible that this has influenced the prevailing treatment of the book as a collection of short stories. It also does not help that several of the stories, notably “The Prisoners,” “The Door,” and “Scent of Apples,” were previously published as short stories. What is curious though is N.V.M. Gonzalez’s comment in his introduction to the first edition, which I quote at length:

For I have read these stories many times over, and I have been bothered by them. Why did not the author weave them into a novel? Why did he not make these stories short-stories?… But, then, I was soon to discover something else, a unity which the tightness of the short-story or the discipline of the novel would have destroyed. With one convention thrown by the board, the book acquired its own. (1955, p. ix)

Miguel Bernad, in his review of the book when it came out, also addresses the same hybridity regarding the book’s genre: “the nineteen stories in this volume should perhaps not be assessed as individual short stories. This is not a book of short stories in the ordinary sense” (1956, p. 102). Another critic, the American Leonard Casper declares that “At least half of its divisions are not self-contained, not short stories—although others are some of the country’s best stories. …It might, however, be considered a novel” [emphasis added] (1964, p. 122).

Santos’ remarks regarding You Lovely People adds to the ambiguity of the book’s genre and it also reinforces the picture of an ambivalent author: on the one hand, here is an author who is proud of a few of the individual pieces of the book, especially the widely anthologized “Scent of Apples;” on the other hand, here is also an author who is resigned to accepting that his book is not a “real” novel. Santos has repeatedly mentioned in interviews that You Lovely People is just “a series of related stories” (Grow 1977, p. 11) and “a very disappointing book … because [he] wanted it to be a novel, but those are really loosely connected stories” (Bresnahan 1990, p. 99). His comments seem to accept the notion that to write only short stories, only a collection of stories, was a lower form of writing and only when a Filipino wrote a real novel would he become a real writer, just like his American counterparts.

These comments about the confusion of genre in You Lovely People exist because of a confusion over the voice. N.V.M. Gonzalez points to two voices: the fictional Ben (Bienvenido Santos) and the character of Ambo (1955, p. x); Bernad hears not one or two but “a group—the Filipinos in the United States” (1956, p. 102); and Casper again refers to the plural (1964, p. 122). But as I. R.

Cruz (2010) revisits in “The Man Who (Thought He) was Bienvenido N. Santos: The Narrator in the Short Stories,” the confusion over You Lovely People’s genre as initially raised by N.V.M. Gonzalez is best addressed by the question of voice. In this section I also turn to the question of voice to address the question of genre but unlike I. R. Cruz my concern in trying to explain this issue is far more than formal. The common analytic approach to the book, for example in the works of Victor Bascara (2004) and Augusto Espiritu (2005), continue to treat the book as a collection of short stories and because of this emphasis on one or two short stories the book’s treatment now fluctuates between a narrative of nostalgia for the homeland or subtle complicity with ongoing Philippine-U.S. neocolonial relations. In this light, I want to suggest that if the narrator Ben is considered as the overall narrator of the novel then Ambo’s narration and the other chapter-episodes that use the third-person narrators can be seen as embedded narratives. I argue that this narrative structure demonstrates the ambivalence inherent in the Philippine postcolonial condition.

The impetus for writing this book was Santos’ experiences while on a tour around the U.S. during the Pacific War. Santos arrived in the U.S. as a pensionado just a few months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor then later Manila. The Japanese occupation of the Philippines forced the Philippine president and other high-ranking officials to escape the country and continue to function as a government-in-exile in the U.S. (Washington). Santos and the rest of the pensionados were asked to work for the government. One of Santos’ functions (as requested by the U.S. Office of Education) was to go around the country to talk about the Filipinos and the Philippines. In an interview with Alegre and Fernandez about this period, Santos refers to himself as “Exhibit A of the Filipinos” (1987, p. 243). Santos’ desire to portray his “nostalgia and love” (in Alegre and Fernandez 1987, p. 243) for the Philippines led a lot of Americans after his lectures to fondly refer to him and other Filipinos as “You Lovely People.” Santos has pointed to these moments as the reason behind his decision to change his book’s “working title phrase” which was “The Hurt Men” (N.V.M. Gonzalez 1955, p. viii). But despite Santos’ decision to change the title, his book is still about hurt men. The narrator(s) in You Lovely People also

struggle with what it is to be lovely because as the book shows, to be called “lovely” also means to be used by their colonial masters, to be alienated from their own people, indeed to be hurt by both.

The book contains nineteen stories which I refer to as chapter-episodes or episodes for short. As early as the first episode, “The Wise Man Who Was Not There,” the narrator Ben sets in motion what is to be the narrator/s’ ambivalence: hurt men who desperately want to be seen as lovely people but who also recognize that the same people they sought for approval are responsible for their pain. In this episode, Ben is alone for the Christmas holidays until his American friend John (who had initially gone to Indiana with his wife Betty but changed his mind) brings him to visit his friends—Mary and Duke—in Chicago. Upon meeting Ben, Duke asks him why he must write in English when “It’s the worse language for telling the truth. Besides, haven’t you got a language of your own?” (p. 10). The question/comment does not get any reaction from Ben (his experiencing self) nor does the narrating self say anything about it and so the topic is dropped and forgotten. It does not warrant any more mention in the entire book. This “exchange” mirrors the complicated Philippine-U.S. relationship in which the Filipino meekly accepts criticisms, even if made in jest, because silence can be a disguise for disagreement. While the narrator Ben says nothing about it at the moment of utterance and even while reporting it, Ben ends up writing/narrating his story in English anyway. As the reader discovers, one episode at a time, Santos’ book is full of “sad stories” (p. 105) about Filipino expatriates.

The desire of the narrator to seek the approval and friendship of his friend’s friends renders him silent, almost as if in agreement with the comment. But how can he agree with it in its entirety? Without doubt, he has a language of his own but he has not been able to use it because it has been replaced with English. In fact, English is also his language; it is the only language he uses to write/narrate. I give a more detailed discussion regarding the use of English by the narrator in chapter 6. Duke’s innocuous comment demonstrates, to borrow the words of Lisa Lowe (2006), the “violence of forgetting” (or is it never knowing?) the state of U.S. colonial affairs in the Philippines by most

Americans. The episode ends with Ben giving a gift to Duke’s baby (a gift which he had sent to the Philippines for his own children only to be returned because of the ongoing war in the Pacific). The ending of the episode projects a heartwarming story, of Ben apparently freely giving this to Duke’s child despite his earlier snide remarks. Taken as an independent story, it seems to portray a narrator eager for approval and acceptance. But within the context of the novel, the event highlights the narrator’s ambivalence where his desire to maintain normalcy by joining in the holiday festivities in Chicago is betrayed by his longing for home. This episode shows that even though the narrator’s exile is caused by the Pacific war unlike the personal and/or economic reasons that forced the manongs (Filipino laborers who came before him) to stay, the reader will discover, one episode at a time, that his reason for going to America as a government pensionado is still influenced by the same conditions that made laborer/slaves out of the first-wave of Filipino workers.

According to I. R. Cruz the first three episodes of the book function as a sort of “introduction” to Santos’ book (2010, p. 390). Indeed, the first three episodes serve the purpose of presenting Ben as the global or overall narrator of the book. Crucially, the choice of “The Prisoners” to close this trio of episodes, which have nothing in common other than the narrator Ben, also sets up an answer to the question of voice in another trio of stories later in the book— “So Many Things,” “Brown Coterie,” and “Ash Wednesday”—which have attracted most of the critical comments about the book’s lack of “organic unity.” Now in Kansas on another winter day, the narrator Ben recalls in “The prisoners” the time he was forced to stay on campus because a snowstorm had wreaked havoc on transportation and his plans to travel. As a result, he felt like one of the German prisoners stationed on campus. In this episode, while the title can certainly be understood as a reference to the German prisoners Ben sees on campus, it also sustains the symbol of “walls” in the previous episode and the notion of being trapped behind walls perfectly describes the narrator as well as the other Filipinos stuck in the U.S. during the Pacific war including the other narrator Ambo. In “The Prisoners,” Ben’s longing for home is heightened by the realization that this time, not only was he spending Christmas away from home

but worse he was alone and as one of the German prisoners had remarked, a prisoner just like them.

What follows this trio of episodes as an introductory section to the book is nine episodes (4-12)—the most structurally connected episodes—where the second voice of Ambo is used together with Ben’s. It takes the narrator Ben until the fourth episode, “The Hurt Men,” to mention Ambo. Remember, the original title of the book was “The Hurt Men” and the fact that Ambo is frequently mentioned by the other characters to Ben despite not appearing at all in this episode hints at Ambo’s pivotal role. In the next episode, “Manila House,” Ben learns that Ambo is Visayan-speaking. In fact, in the sixth episode, “A Peculiar Rustling,” when Ben finally meets Ambo, he specifically comments that from that point on, they—referring to his group and Ambo—all “spoke” Visayan. Ambo’s embedded narrative begins in the ninth episode, “Lonely in the Autumn Evening” after the funeral that takes place in the previous episode “Of Other Deaths.” Here, the narrator Ben passes the narrating duties to Ambo, “Ambo was talking in the dialect, unburdening himself and telling the story of the dead Nanoy” [emphasis added]. In Genette’s terminology this would make Ambo an intradiegetic- homodiegetic narrator. Fludernik notes, “The intradiegetic storyteller, qua character, belongs to the story level and his or her own story is by definition part of character’s discourse and therefore belongs to a lower embedded level of narrative structure” (1996, p. 342).

When Ambo narrates the story of Nanoy (the man who died in the previous episode) to Ben, it is, of course, not just the story of Nanoy’s suffering in America but of every other Filipino laborer, Ambo included, who left their families in search of better financial opportunities by working in the sugar plantations of Hawaii, then moving to the fruit orchards of California, and finally finding odd jobs on the East coast. Ambo rhetorically asks Ben as he begins his tale, “Deep in your heart, Ben, do you really think so? Do they truly remember us yet, the loved ones we left behind in the old hometown?” (p. 103). Then he retracts it later by saying “it is better that nobody remembers, that nobody knows” (p. 105). Here, the reader can recognize Ambo's desire to be remembered by his family despite the several years of separation then, later,

not wanting to be remembered. This shifting attitude has to do with the “sad stories” (p. 105) that Ambo is about to share. In the earlier episodes narrated by Ben, Ambo is initially presented as a contented man, seemingly happy in his old age in the land of opportunities. But Ambo’s own stories reveal a different side and his narration drives home the ambivalence inherent in the Philippines-U.S. relations that even though they were told better opportunities were available to them in America, it also came at a cost for the Filipinos: it meant leaving their families, sometimes without any chance of going back home.

I. R. Cruz points out that the problem of voice resurfaces in the penultimate episode of these nine closely connected episodes, effectively the eleventh episode of the book, “Woman Afraid,” because it uses a third-person narrator (2010, p. 389). But it may not be the case if taken in context with episode ten, “The Door.” According to I. R. Cruz the narrator Ambo is “merely reporting” the events in “The Door.” I. R. Cruz is correct in identifying Ambo as the first-person narrator who “reports” the tragic story about the couple next door; he addresses Ben in the opening paragraphs of the episode “Oh, the stories I can tell you, if you but have the time to listen, but you are going away…. But you will listen to me, Ben, even if you, too, are going away” (p. 109). However, Ambo as a first- person narrator would have limitations but in a few scenes, he goes beyond his abilities (which Genette refers to as “paralepsis”). In describing one scene where Delfin, the Filipino man who lives next door with his unfaithful American wife and their two young girls, becomes the talk of the neighborhood because he “allows” his wife to cheat on him, the narrator Ambo who is nowhere near Delfin during these times is able to “report” to Ben: “He [Delfin] would wait outside the apartment building, till a strange man came out, and he would try the door again with his key.” While it is entirely possible that Ambo was also outside when one of these instances happened, he would have to be attached to Delfin to know that “Often he slept elsewhere, especially on winter nights when walking up and down the streets or loafing in badly heated hamburger joints made him sick—a shooting pain through the meat of his legs or through the top of his back.” I suggest, then, that this event can be seen as part of Ambo’s imaginative capacity as narrator; no longer just one who “reports,” Ambo is now just like Ben, a storyteller.

In “Woman Afraid,” because of the imaginative tendencies of the narrator Ambo in the previous episode “The Door,” it is then possible to attribute the third- person narration to Ambo. In fact, I. R. Cruz spots two key markers in the episode that supports this interpretation (2010, p. 89). First, when the narrator Ambo begins his story about the couple Alice and Cris, he addresses a “you” (p. 127) who is presumably Ben, just like he did in “The Door,” and second, when the narrator Ambo switches to the story about another couple (p. 136), “You know what happened to Marge and Pete, another Filipino American couple, close friends of Alice and Cris. It’s in the papers.” It is important to note that even though Ambo “becomes” a narrator, his story and his narration is ultimately one that is embedded in Ben’s. I go back to this point later in chapter 6 where I analyze the implications of this embedding and the narrator Ben’s “translation” of Ambo’s Visayan.

Finally, I turn to a more recent analysis in Victor Bascara's (2004) “Up From Benevolent Assimilation: At Home with the Manongs of Bienvenido Santos.” Bascara’s focus is on the fifteenth episode, “Scent of Apples.” Bascara observes, “The narrator's [Ben’s] presumptuous understanding leads him to project onto Fabia a kind of nostalgia that he himself seems more prone to” (2004, p. 75). I. R. Cruz suggests in his analysis that the paragraphs in question comes from the Fabia but “filtered through the central narrative consciousness” (2010, p. 390) of Ben. Bascara continues, “With the curious turn at the end of the story, we see that the narrator is the one with illusions about American Filipinos” (2004, p. 75); that is, Filipinos in America who feel that they have become accidental immigrants but continue to yearn for a return. Bascara’s “curious turn at the end of the story” is presumably the one quoted below:

‘Look,’ I said, not knowing why I said it, ‘one of these days, very soon, I hope, I’ll be going home. I could go to your town.’ ‘No,’ he said softly, sounding very much defeated but brave, ‘Thanks a lot. But you see, nobody would remember me now.’ [Emphasis added] (p. 190)

Bascara is referring to another instance of the confusion over the experiencing and narrating self of the narrator. However, in the context of You Lovely People (which is where Bascara seems to be coming from) the “curious ending” is connected to a previous episode, “Of Other Deaths,” where Filipino expatriates question Ben’s reluctance to write a book about his tour in the U.S and have it published in America; a book that will not be “a hymn of praise” (p. 96) about America because the stories will obviously be about “hurt men” he met while on tour. When Ben tells them his “stories,” they are disappointed, with one character telling him that he “remember[s] the wrong things” (p. 99). Because surely, as the lovely people that they were, they shouldn’t talk about the painful experiences of their lovely life in the U.S. But it is not only Ben who speaks of these stories, it is also the other narrator Ambo; in the episode “The Door,” he tells Ben “Oh, the stories I can tell you, if you but have the time to listen, but you are going away. … those who stay have no ears for my stories, because they have seen them happen everywhere, and they don’t want them told…” (p. 109). Ben’s narrating self steers clear of his experiencing self. This is why Ben in “The Door” episode disappears and gives Ambo the “narrating” duties. It is only later, much later, in the episode, “Scent of Apples,” that we truly understand what it means for Ben to “remember the wrong things.”

In a near repetition of the exchange in “Of Other Deaths,” Bascara’s skepticism over the narrator’s reliability seems highly reminiscent of Ben’s recollection of “the wrong things.” What is missed in this “curious ending” in “Scent of Apples” is the ambivalence displayed by the narrator. Ben (his narrating self) remembers what he “said” then but both his experiencing and narrating self cannot remember why it was said. Is this a case of the experiencing self being given the freedom by the narrating self to exist as it did at the moment of experience? Or is this a case of the narrating self truly not knowing why it was said? Bascara suggests it was said because the narrator wishes to imprint his “illusions of exile” on Fabia. But what are we to make of Fabia’s words “nobody would remember me now?” This failure to remember is a resonant theme in the novel. In “Lonely in the Autumn Evening,” Ambo echoes Ben (or is it Ben who echoes him?): “All our stories are sad. … it is better that nobody remembers, that nobody knows” (p. 105). Here we have Ambo expressing the need to keep

the illusion: I choose to remember them as I hope they would remember me. So when Fabia says “nobody would remember me now,” what he really means is that I do not want them to know what I have become nor do I want to know if they have forgotten me.

Ultimately, as N.V.M. Gonzalez rightfully pointed out all those years ago, it is not Ben’s voice that one remembers in the end, it is Ambo’s—he who was given so little space by Ben to truly speak but whose voice permeates throughout the rest of the book. This is of course the story that Santos wanted to write, not just his but also Ambo’s and the other lovely people, the hurt men. Within this context, the ambivalence of the narrator in You Lovely People, just like the ambivalence in its author, indicates the deep-seated colonial apparatuses in place in postcolonial Philippines, and may also be seen as an attempt at a critique of the Philippine-U.S. relationship. But it is a critique that is not without its downside as shown in Denise Cruz’s (2011) “‘Pointing to the Heart’: Transpacific Filipinas and the Question of Cold-War Philippine-U.S. Relations.” According to D. Cruz the novel highlights “how sentimentalized benevolence masks the exploitation of Filipino labor and upsets normative gender relations between transpacific Filipinas and Filipinos” (2011, p. 15). But because of the novel’s male-centric narrative it ultimately marginalizes the Filipina resulting into what she terms, “a different form of narrative heartlessness" (D. Cruz 2011, p. 20)

Throughout this chapter, my discussion of the ambivalence of the narrators in N.V.M. Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers and Santos’ You Lovely People have focused on the deployment of first-person narrators. The choice of first-person narration, most notably in N.V.M. Gonzalez’s case, may be seen as an attempt to retrieve the authority of the local or in the words of N.V.M. Gonzalez (1960, p. 126), “to snap out of having to be always told.” As Fludernik notes, “The assumption of an authoritative narratorial role is foregrounded most clearly in first-person narrative and in omniscient ‘authorial’ fiction” (2010, p. 913). Interestingly enough, as I discuss in the next chapter, a similar notion of recuperating narrative authority is done by female writers—Kerima Polotan and Edith Tiempo, in their own novels. And in their choice of third-person narration

over first-person, another aspect of interrogating the hegemonic constructions may be brought to light. Perhaps, even serve as a sort of alternative to the male-centric preoccupations of the novels in this chapter.

Chapter Three—Subtle Subversion: Covert Narration in Polotan’s The Hand of the Enemy and Tiempo’s His Native Coast

For women to be accepted in both journalism and literature, they must think and write like men…. Whether they write well, however, or whether they’re merely popular, they’re lumped together as minor writers, accessories of literature, auxiliaries of journalism. All stand in the shadows of their fathers, husbands, sons. (Garcia, Lanot & Santiago 1984 in Pineda-Ofreneo 1992, p. 45)

I begin this chapter with a seemingly unremarkable statistic: in the influential two-volume anthology of Philippine short stories in English (1925-1940 and 1941-1955) edited by Leopoldo Yabes (1975, 1981), out of the 154 short stories chosen to be published, 29 stories are penned by women or roughly 18% of the entire collection. In a bibliography of Filipinos novels compiled by Patricia Jurilla (2010), out of the 63 English novels published before 1980, 11 books are by women writers or close to 18% of the list. What is of significance for this chapter, specifically in my choice of novels, is not the coincidental similarity of the percentage (18%) of works written by women between these two compilations (the former’s list of short fiction went through editorial cuts and the latter is a straightforward list), but two names that stand out: Kerima Polotan and Edith Tiempo. These two authors are featured in all lists (the first and second volume of Yabes’s anthology of short fiction and in Jurilla’s bibliography of novels) highlighting the expanse of their output in fiction and ostensibly positioning them as key figures in Filipino writing in English. There are only two other authors in the same company as Kerima Polotan and Edith Tiempo, Edilberto K. Tiempo (Edith Tiempo’s husband) and Bienvenido Santos. Thus, it is possible to surmise that the fictional works of both Polotan and Tiempo were recognized for its literary merit by the literary establishment.

And yet a survey of studies about Filipino writing in English, specifically fiction, shows a regrettable lack of discussion of these two authors’ works. While this may be expected in the context of global postcolonial studies—as I discussed at length in the introduction, Philippine literature, to borrow Kanaganayakam’s

phrase, continues to experience “chronic neglect” (2012, p. 384)—in local literary studies however, the dearth of attention reflects a bigger problem not just in Philippine literary studies but in Philippine society. Both Polotan and Tiempo have produced works worthy of awards in fiction. Notably, Polotan’s only novel (The Hand of the Enemy) won the 1961 Stonehill Award presented by the Philippine P.E.N., the same award that Nick Joaquin’s more widely read and analyzed novel (The Woman Who Had Two Navels) won a year earlier. As for Tiempo, her novel (His Native Coast) was conferred the first prize by the Cultural Center of the Philippines. This apparent disconnect between Polotan and Tiempo’s significant contribution to Philippine writing in English (Polotan is also a notable journalist and Tiempo is also a poet and critic) and their critical reception, or lack thereof, is one of the reasons for focusing on their novels in this chapter.

The main reason, however, for this focus on Polotan and Tiempo’s novels is tied to the main point of this research, and that is the examination of the various narrative strategies deployed by authors of postcolonial Filipino novels in English. In chapter 2, I showed how the use of first person narration in both Bienvenido Santos’ You Lovely People and N.V.M. Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers was an attempt by both authors to restore the narrative authority of a Filipino narrator. By reestablishing the narrative authority of a Filipino narrator, both authors effectively tried to wrest back from their former colonial masters their own authority not only as writers but also as storytellers of the Filipinos, just like they used to in pre-colonial times as oral storytellers. The deployment of their first-person narrators also showed the often-unavoidable ambivalence inherent in a formerly colonized person. The narrators’ desire for approval from their American patrons occurs alongside a critique of the effects of this relationship on the Philippine postcolonial situation.

In this chapter I cover a different narrative situation, this time I turn to novels that use third-person narration. Whereas Santos’ and Gonzalez’s novels both locate narrative authority in the first-person narrator, Kerima Polotan’s The Hand of the Enemy (1962) and Edith Tiempo’s His Native Coast (1979) subscribe to the more conventional source of narrative authority in Philippine

novelistic tradition using third-person narrators. I argue, then, that in Polotan and Tiempo’s novels, despite locating their narrative authority within the confines of a colonial/patriarchal model that mainly recognizes this authority as a male domain, beneath this superficial layer of conformity lies their own postcolonial project of interrogating the colonial/patriarchal traditions that marginalize the Filipino woman or Filipina. The most significant account of narrative voice in fiction written by women emphasizes a similar notion about narrative authority. In Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice, Susan Lanser (1992) claims that women writers from Britain, France, and the United States (including Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Toni Morrison, to name a few) have turned to certain narrative strategies to disguise their narrators and avoid an overt positioning of their narrative authority.

Lanser notes, “One major constituent of narrative authority, therefore, is the extent to which a narrator’s status conforms to this dominant social power” (1992, p. 6). Thus, according to Lanser, “In Western literary systems,” which has been a major influence on the Filipino novels in English, “white, educated men of hegemonic ideology” (1992, p. 6), become the conventional source of authority. The Philippines, due mainly to its more than three hundred years under Western powers, is also a patriarchal society (Fernandez 2004, p. 839). Initially, dominant social power rested in the hands of the male colonial administrators. Later, after the granting of formal independence by the American authorities, this power was transferred to Filipino, educated men who come from the upper and middle class. Some critics, however, argue that because of ongoing American-Philippine neocolonial relations this transferal is superficial. The salient point here is that because social power in Filipino society is ultimately a male domain this also translates to the relative ease with which male writers can just write. Lanser’s (1992) theorization of the construction of narrative authority thus corresponds to the Philippine condition.

This male privilege is noticeable in the case of Santos’ and Gonzalez’s shift to first-person narrators in You Lovely People and The Bamboo Dancers, respectively. Their attempt at re-establishing narrative authority using first- person narration is made possible because of the access unavailable to both

Polotan and Tiempo, or any Filipina writer for that matter, at that time. I am suggesting that the innovative use of the (male) first-person narrator by both Santos and Gonzalez in their early novels, in the context of Philippine novelistic tradition in English, is possible because as male writers they can assign narrative authority to their male narrators. They do not have to think about the authenticity of the narrative authority of their first-person narrators to a Filipino audience; their main concern is writing back to the Americans.

Regrettably, the same cannot be said about female writers especially in the novelistic tradition in English. In a revealing interview, Edith Tiempo is asked by Roger Bresnahan about her “dilemmas in writing from the point of view of a character who is an American and a man” in her novel, His Native Coast, to which she replies,

I decided that it had to be done that way because if I spoke from my own viewpoint, from that of a woman, it would lack authenticity and objectivity. And I thought that an American would be close enough to the Filipino so that his view would be based on experience but, at the same time, not be so tangled up emotionally as a Filipino might with issues going on in this country. An American, in other words, would be objective and yet sympathetic. [Emphases added] (Bresnahan 1990, p. 137)

Tiempo’s reply illustrates what I mean when I contend that Filipina writers have been denied the opportunity to just write. I go back to this quote later when I discuss Tiempo’s novel because there is another layer to her choice of the “American [who] would be close enough to the Filipino” but it is quite telling for Tiempo, who at that time of her novel’s publication was not only an accomplished creative writer but also a highly respected literary critic, to still consider that the only way for her novel to claim “authenticity and objectivity” was to substitute a Filipina's point of view with that of a male American. It must be noted, however, that I do not wish to suggest that writers like Santos and Gonzalez have failed in their postcolonial writing projects for not empowering the Filipina in their own narratives, which some scholars have done. As I have already argued at length in the previous chapter, their works account for just

one of the many forms of Philippine postcolonial writing where their narrative strategies were constrained by their association to their former American masters.

In order to explain the gender complexities within Philippine society, I begin by examining the construction of the ideal Filipina as Maria Clara dating back to the early twentieth-century. I recognize that the use of the phrase “the ideal Filipina as Maria Clara” is, of course, problematic seeing that this construction was initially confined to the elites before its gradual expansion to include middle-class women thus excluding a significant portion of Filipino women: the lower-class Filipinas (Balce 2006; Roces 2006; D. Cruz 2012). However, given that the focus of this chapter is specifically on women writers of a middle-class background and whose novels also feature mostly middle-class issues, I suggest that these two authors works’ may have been influenced by this construction of the Filipina. Finally, to peel off the facade of conformity and reveal this subversive layer I examine the deployment of the third-person narrator in the novels of Polotan and Tiempo, in particular the narrators’ shifts in focalization. I hope to shed light on the narrative strategies that Polotan and Tiempo use and to give insight into the conditions that exist in Philippine society that compelled these writers turn to these narrative strategies.

The Transformation of Maria Clara into the Ideal Filipina

Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil, a Filipina writer, once boldly declared: “The greatest misfortune that has befallen Filipino women in the last hundred years is Maria Clara. I mean this in a very real sense for, in trying to live up to the pattern set by Rizal’s beautiful heroine, millions of Filipinas became something other than their real selves” (1956, p. 30). No other woman, whether a historical or a literary character, up to that point, had so affected the construction of the ideal Filipina as Maria Clara. The pivotal role of Maria Clara (and her idealization), according to Mina Roces, can be observed in the women’s suffrage movement in the Philippines that happened around the 1920s to 1930s (2006, p. 49). I return to these ideas by Guerrero-Nakpil and Roces when I discuss how the idealization of Maria Clara not only leads to the marginalization of the Filipina in

Philippine society but also the inhibits the progress of a Philippine postcolonial society. But first, I want to briefly discuss Maria Clara’s portrayal in Rizal’s novels and then examine the subsequent flawed reception of her character.

I have repeatedly discussed Jose Rizal’s influence in Philippine society in previous chapters and here is another case of that influence. In Rizal’s novels, the mestiza Maria Clara is the long-suffering beloved of the protagonist Juan Crisostomo Ibarra. In the first book, Noli me Tangere, Ibarra describes Maria Clara as “the poetic embodiment of my homeland” (Rizal 2006, p. 47). She is portrayed as a woman who patiently waits for her betrothed; and later, when Ibarra is in trouble with the authorities, she is the picture of an obedient daughter who initially follows the commands of her father. I say initially because after she hears news of Ibarra’s death, she disobeys her father’s wishes to marry another man and threatens to take her life if she is not allowed to enter a monastery so she can mourn in peace. However, as the epilogue reveals, she is instead subjected to the “many horrors” (Rizal 2006, p. 422) of the convent. The narrator’s vague reference to “the violence of hypocrisy” (Rizal 2006, p. 422) in the convent suggests that these horrors (sexual violence) are suffered at the hands of the rector of the convent. Ten years later, in the second novel, El Filibusterismo, Maria Clara tragically dies shortly before Ibarra, now known as Simoun, plans to rescue her from the convent. But her tragedy does not end within the confines of Rizal’s fictional world. In the idealization of Maria Clara in Philippine society, she is repeatedly glorified for the wrong reasons: as a long- suffering, submissive, politically oblivious woman. When she should have been a cautionary tale for Filipinas, she or more specifically her transformation into what Nick Joaquin calls a “mock-Victorian” (1951, p. 72) figure has instead become the unfortunate ideal.

Joaquin’s term is a reference to the widespread acceptance amongst the elite in the early twentieth century of the Filipino woman as “convent-bred, religious, charitable, demure, chaste and strictly located in the domestic sphere” (Roces 2006, p. 25). Maria Clara’s transformation into a pseudo-Victorian icon in the Philippines is made possible because she is easily identifiable as the betrothed of Jose Rizal’s protagonist in his novels. If she had been a character in another

novel by another Filipino who did not die for his country, she would have been forgotten. Joaquin laments how this hero worship of Rizal has raised the status of his novels to the sacred level of the Bible (1951, pp. 59-60). Rizal’s elevation to hero status was encouraged by the American colonial administration. It was quite an effective narrative popularized by the Americans, one that sought to, according to San Juan, construct Rizal as highly supportive of the “Westernization” (1996, p. 29) embodied by the Americans. By westernization San Juan refers to President McKinley’s infamous “benevolent assimilation” of the Philippines to the United States. Crucially, this resulted in two things: firstly, Rizal’s construction as hero of the revolution against Spain meant that his novels have been consistently read as what Benedict Anderson calls “ethico- political treatises,” (2008, p. 1) and secondly, as a consequence of the first, the conventions of the novel have been forgotten, particularly how the characters are constructed as part of a fictional world. This situation highlights the pitfalls of forgetting that Rizal’s novels are first and foremost works of fiction.

Mina Roces’s illuminating account of the women’s suffrage movement in the Philippines around the 1920s and 1930s details the strategies of both sides of the debate. As I mentioned earlier, Carmen Guerrero-Nakpil’s frustration over the idealization of Maria Clara in Philippine society can be linked to this period. As Roces observes, “The debate over women’s suffrage became the site for the contest between various definitions of ‘the Filipino woman’” (2006, p. 25). In her exploration of the suffrage movement, she carefully traces the deep-rooted complexities of the construction of the Filipina: on the one hand, the Hispanic version subscribes to the previously mentioned mock-Victorian qualities (Roces 2006, p. 25); and on the other hand, the American Anglo-Saxon envisioned a “modern” woman who is “English-speaking, public school educated (preferably university educated, a professional or a ‘clubwoman’ active in civic work), and by the 1920s a suffragist (and thereby a participant in the American democratic project)” (Roces 2006, p. 27).

Despite the American-influenced Rizal narrative, Filipino politicians who fought for the granting of full independence from the American government during the Commonwealth period of the Philippines and at the height of the women’s

suffrage debate would turn to Rizal’s novels for inspiration. Filipino male politicians argued that the Filipino woman (with Maria Clara clearly in their minds) belonged in the home. Roces notes that while the Filipina suffragists were sidelined from the “official debates,” (2006, p.48) they sought to have their voices heard nonetheless. As members of various women’s organizations, they actively distanced themselves from Maria Clara, turning to the American version of the ‘modern’ woman while still subscribing to “cultural constructions of the woman as ‘wife and mother,’ as beauty queen and as civic worker” (2006, p. 48). In the end, according to Roces, their determination to win the right to vote saw them modify their strategies to appease the status quo (2006, p. 48). Remarkably, Roces’ examination of the suffrage movement reveals a parallel situation in women’s writing in the Philippines.

Dolores Stephens-Feria’s (1991) book, The Long Stag Party, is a collection of her essays exploring what she terms the “anti-feminine” nature of Philippine society. In one of the essays, “The Patriarchy and the Filipina as Writer,” Feria discusses several important Filipina writers and through these profiles she exposes the gender bias inherent in the Philippine literary tradition. In her discussion of these Filipina writers’ careers spanning more than a hundred years, Feria declares:

All major woman writers in our society who have attempted to define the qualities of their feminine world as something more than this tacit understanding between colonial church power and neo-colonial secular power have been penalized in special ways, unlike masculine writers. Freedom to write has generally been the freedom to conform to the canons of the ilustrado class. (1991, p. 83)

By “ilustrado class” Feria is referring to the educated middle class; the same social class of the politicians who participated in the women’s suffrage debate. In this context, then, I argue that Polotan and Tiempo’s use of third-person narrators, which falls under Feria’s notion of conformity, is precisely a way for them to avoid being “penalized” by a writing tradition that predominantly favors men. Lanser observes that in fiction, first-person narration is “formally

indistinguishable from autobiography” (1992, p. 20), thus possibly compelling women writers to avoid using it or risk what Tiempo refers to as a perceived “lack [of] authenticity and objectivity.”

“Rearranging” Narrative Authority through Covert Narration

Earlier in the chapter, I wrote how Edith Tiempo’s reply to Bresnahan’s question about her decision to write His Native Coast from the point of view of the male, American former soldier reveals the writing environment that women writers like her and Polotan had to face. Tiempo’s comments suggest the desire of women writers to be taken seriously, as equal to their male contemporaries. But as Feria observes, “If she has the instincts of a serious writer, she has very little to go on” (1991, p. 34); a sentiment echoed by Polotan:

we heed that black instinct and accordingly rearrange our ambitions: setting our sights on the low target; practicing to vault only the lower hedges, touch the lower skies; living life out in a series of small scenes, the larger perspectives obscured by standard definitions of middle-class happiness (‘marriage and a house in the suburbs’ or ‘a gilded mediocrity lacking ambition and passion, aimless days indefinitely repeated, life that slips away gently toward death without questioning its purpose’), writing—if we are writers—‘in small letters, an abundance of what might be called village fiction’. [Emphases added] (1965, p. 246).

Consequently, both Tiempo and Polotan (and other Filipina writers) have had to “rearrange” the construction of narrative authority in their works in order to conform to the “standard definitions” of a patriarchal society.

I want to suggest that these two authors turn to what Chatman Seymour refers to as covert narration, that is, “we hear a voice speaking of events, characters, and setting, but its owner remains hidden in the discoursive shadows” (1980, p. 197). The covert nature of this narrator allows the authors to minimize the authority of their narrators to satisfy the conventions of their milieu. Lanser notices a similar strategy in Jane Austen’s novels; this strategy is magnified in

the shift from the “overt authoriality” detectable in Northanger Abbey (Austen’s first major novel to be written) compared to the “compensatory textual practices” found in all of her subsequent novels (1992, p. 72). One of these alternative narrative strategies Austen employs is free indirect discourse (FID). According to Lanser:

[Austen’s] FID may embed maxims in the more contingent authority of a character’s perception in which the narrator’s participation is ambiguous. Such ‘hybrid’ discourses that blur narrative responsibility are less frequent in but by no means absent from the writings of these earlier women, but they become in Austen’s novels a critical mechanism for suggesting a narrative stance whose attribution cannot be verified. [Emphases added] (1992, p. 74)

Lanser claims that the unfavorable reception of Northanger Abbey made Austen refrain from demonstrating “explicit feminist ideology” in her novels post- Northanger Abbey which consequently resulted in the noticeable prevalence of FID that “blur narrative responsibility” (1992, p. 72).

Besides the free indirect discourse that Lanser highlights in her study of Austen’s works, Chatman also discusses other strategies that characterize this covert narration including: “the nature of indirect discourse [other than FID], the manipulation of the surface of the text for covert narrative purposes, and the limitation of point of view to a particular character or characters” (1980, p.196). Filipina scholars Caroline Hau (2000) and Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo (1998) have previously discussed these strategies in Polotan’s novel and Tiempo’s fiction, respectively. Taking after Chatman’s first characteristic of covert narration, Hau notes that Polotan’s “novel is ‘filled’ by a profusion of indirect discourse that bleeds into each other. The characters often speak without direct quotations” [Emphases added] (2000, p. 195). As for Pantoja-Hidalgo, she echoes Chatman’s second and third characteristics when she observes that in A Blade of Fern and His Native Coast, Tiempo deploys various “narrative strategies such as the manipulation of point-of-view, the recurrence of the ‘learning-the-

lay-of-the-land’ theme, and the vocabulary used in the rendering of the male protagonists’ interior monologue” [Emphases added] (1998, p. 89).

In the subsequent sections, I explore these narrative strategies further and discuss how both Polotan and Tiempo navigate their way within the conventions of their writing milieu while chipping away at the edges of colonial/patriarchal walls. I begin with an analysis of Polotan’s The Hand of the Enemy2 where I examine how she turns to a third-person narrator, who while mainly sympathetic to the struggles of her female protagonist, Emma Gorrez, also maintains affinity with her double, Glo, and the effect is one that allows Polotan to not only problematize the representation of women in Philippine society but also join in the larger (that is, male-dominated) discourse of the construction of nation. In the case of Tiempo’s His Native Coast, I look at the implications of her peculiar strategy of turning to a predominantly male, American consciousness, which paradoxically privileges the male, American gaze.

Kerima Polotan’s Smaller Upheavals: The Covert Narrator in The Hand of the Enemy

In Kerima Polotan's essay, “The Education of a Woman,” she tellingly writes about contemporary women’s writing being “an abundance of what might be called village fiction” which she defines based on an unnamed American author’s words: “‘It offers no grand intellectual preoccupations, it does not venture beyond the home or the hometown or further than childhood and marriage’” (1965, p. 246). This unnamed American author is Ellen Moers, who in 1963, wrote in the Harper’s magazine (which was also widely read by the upper and middle class readers of Manila) “The Angry Young Women,” an essay on what she considered as the golden age of women’s writing (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Virginia Woolf, and Katherine Anne Porter to name a few) during the 19th and early 20th centuries. While Moers finds “the softness” and “touch of complacency” in contemporary women’s writing worrying (1963, p. 88), Polotan seems to think otherwise.

2 The analysis uses the 1998 edition of The Hand of the Enemy (See Polotan, K 1998) and the 1979 edition of His Native Coast (See Tiempo, E 1979). 90

Despite their conflicting understanding of women’s writing, Moers’ discussion of exceptional women’s writing during the golden age actually highlights a key aspect not only of Polotan’s writing but also that of Tiempo’s: “though they thought often and hard about the ‘Condition of Women Question’—held themselves aloof from feminist agitation….” (1963, p. 93). Indeed, Polotan seems to echo this, when she writes: “Ours then are the smaller upheavals” [Emphases added] (1965, p. 246). I suggest that these “smaller upheavals” work their way into Polotan’s fiction.

As previously mentioned by Hau (2000) in Necessary Fictions: Philippine Literature and the Nation, 1946-1980, there is a tendency in Polotan scholarship to equate Polotan, the writer, with her characters. Hau notes how Bernad’s (1969) and Casper’s (1969) reviews and Joaquin’s (1999) profile of Polotan resort to a “psychological reading of Polotan’s female characters” (2000, p. 189). Early in his review, Bernad (1969) draws attention to the supposed transformation of tone in Polotan’s stories. Bernad describes this shift of tone in this way: “the gentle irony (of her earlier works such as ‘The Virgin’) is gone. It is replaced by anger and bitterness. The controlled understatement has yielded to volcanic intensity” (1969, p. 41). Later, the anger is attributed to the characters: “They are, in short, angry women: angry at their husbands, at their friends, at their condition, at the world, at themselves” (Bernad 1969, p. 43). Bernad does not clearly explain how Polotan’s fiction formally portrays the tone or the change for that matter other than locating anger and bitterness in her characters.

In discussing point of view (that is focalization), Bernad indicates who he thinks is formally accountable for this tone specifically in Polotan’s novel: “The main protagonist in the novel is Emma Gorrez…and it’s from her point of view that much of the action is seen” (1969, p. 47). This emphasis on Emma Gorrez as the main filter leads Bernad to declare at the end of his review: “There are flaws in rhetoric and flaws in technique: shifts in point of view and violations of artistic distance” [Emphases added] (1969, p. 59). He does not expand on this assessment at all. When he could have tried to explain why he thinks Polotan’s use of a shifting point of view is a “flaw” or how Polotan violates “artistic

[aesthetic] distance,” he simply leaves this unqualified statement as the final word. While the supposed issue of a shifting point of view is another instance of the penchant of Filipino New Critics to impose “conventions” on everything, the implication of Bernad’s comments on artistic distance is that the correlation between the female characters in the novel and Kerima Polotan is clear-cut because the female characters in the novel are mostly angry and bitter and so is Kerima Polotan. In his Introduction to Literature, fellow New Critic Edilberto Tiempo notes that a good writer pays close attention to aesthetic distance because “the writer may get personally involved and confuse facts with artefacts. If he is wise he tilts the story, or opens a window such that the view is far removed from his everyday life as his craftsmanship would allow. Thus, he achieves objectivity” (1977, p. 117). This push for so-called objectivity is expressed in the interchangeability between Polotan and her characters (especially her female protagonists) as magnified in another review, this time by Leonard Casper (1969).

Just like Bernad, Casper calls “The typical Polotan story [as] bitter with the experience of loss and betrayal” (1969, p. 61). But while Bernad never mentions a narrator, Casper does but also assuming the characters are the narrators (in Polotan’s other major publication in fiction, Stories [1968], only three of the eleven short stories deploy a first-person narrator: “The Trap,” “The Tourists,” and “The Visit”). When Casper questions the role of Polotan’s female characters as wives/mothers: “The narcissism of her typical female characters, who serve also as her principal narrators, results in the shadowy presentation of husbands and lovers and—even more significantly—in the virtual absence of details about children even where they are known to be abundant” [Emphases added] (1969, p. 64), he is pointing to the (female character) narrator as the one responsible for this “shadowy presentation.” Indirectly, Casper is suggesting that Polotan, a married woman and mother of several children (she had ten in total) has disregarded her most important duty as a woman by not even allowing her narrator to describe her protagonists’ children. Later, he extends the blame to the gender of her characters: “It becomes a largely female prerogative, also, to prosecute and condemn those men who betray their youthful ideals—possibly as scapegoats for the recurring failure of the exaggerated dream of

womanhood. Sexual equality is reduced to ‘getting even’” [Emphases added] (Casper 1969, p. 65).

As Feria (1991) reminds us, it is no longer remarkable (because it is almost the norm) to see two male scholars, avowed New Critics, spend a great deal of space in their earlier assessments of Santos’ and Gonzalez’s novels discussing form whereas in their discussion of Polotan’s fiction, her supposedly flawed presentation of the conventional roles of the woman as wife and mother take center stage. Based on her pronouncements in “The Woman as Writer,” Polotan is clearly conscious of the double standards imposed on women in Philippine society: “I was driven by a desperation to become something besides wife and mother, although my previous training conditioned me to accept these roles and seek happiness in them” [Emphases added] (1975, p. 24). As I have explained at length earlier in the chapter, this burden of domesticity can be traced back to Maria Clara’s conversion “into a sentimental stock-figure” (Joaquin 1951, p. 66) by Philippine society from the 1920s onward. However, it is Polotan’s observation about the “dilemma peculiar only to women writers, that of being accused of living what they wrote, and vice versa” (1975, p. 25) that is especially telling. She continues, “Men write as they please and no one accuses them of transgressing good taste. They write of lust and avarice and deceit and no one walks up to them and accuses them of having been guilty of these” (1975, p. 25). In this way, I suggest that we can understand Polotan’s novel as shaped by the constraints of her milieu. On the one hand, she desires to write without having to “fear for her womanly reputation” (Polotan 1975, p. 25). On the other hand, she hesitates to reject the expectations of domesticity because of her “strong sense of duty” (Polotan 1975, p. 25).

For the remainder of this section, I analyze how Polotan’s The Hand of the Enemy formally portrays her critique of a system that imposes glaringly colonial/patriarchal standards on the Filipino woman. Polotan uses two specific strategies in her narrative: first, her choice of focalizing characters and second, which is closely related to the first, the narrator’s presentation of the thoughts of these focalizing characters. In “Empathy and 1970s Novels by Third World Women,” Sue Kim (2015) identifies three strategies commonly used by “third

world women writers” such as Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston in their works that examine U.S. racism, among other socio-political issues. Significant for the understanding of Polotan’s own strategy is what Kim calls “split internal perspective” (2015, p. 156). In this strategy, as Kim explains, “internal perspective alternates between two doubled female characters, usually with one character who obeys some cultural rules, and another who does not follow the rules, or, rather, follows different rules” (2015, p.157). I suggest that in positioning Emma Gorrez as the former and Glo, the querida or mistress of Emma’s husband, as the latter, the narrative sheds light on their antithetical positions in society. Polotan’s subtle subversion is thus formally portrayed in the split internal perspective of Emma and Glo. As a postcolonial fiction, her novel examines the limitations associated with each character’s circumstances (without attempting to resolve it).

Kerima Polotan’s The Hand of the Enemy is a four-part novel told by a third- person narrator. The novel begins media res at the point in the story when the protagonist Emma Gorrez has reluctantly returned to Manila this time with her husband, Domingo (Doming), to run a printing press funded by the scheming Cosio couple. From this point, the narrator gradually reveals Emma’s story and principally uses her for internal focalization. I suspect that this is one of the main reasons some scholars mistakenly identify Emma Gorrez as the narrator of the novel. Emma’s sustained internal focalization creates the false impression that she is the narrator (despite evidence to the contrary in the use of third person pronouns, among other indicators). Instead, this sustained internal focalization can be seen as an indication of the narrator’s affinity to Emma. Furthermore, the narrator’s approval of Emma is signaled by their comparable disapproval for the Cosio couple, especially Nora Cosio. Emma’s disdain for Nora is quite obvious; in fact, one of the novel’s more memorable scenes is at the end of part one when Emma’s anger drives her to hold Nora’s arm under the cutter of the printing press machine. The narrator’s attitude, however, is more ambiguous; it is projected through Emma. Consider the following passage:

Emma Gorrez had sometime ago stopped listening to the words. Only the voice fascinated her. Nora Cosio used it expertly, letting it encircle

the crowd. It was a dulcet lasso. Each time that she pointed a finger at them, she pulled the loop tighter, and tighter, until everyone who had run in the nervous response to the wailing siren that morning now stood hypnotized by the slender, fair woman who had, as she had said, deserted the comforts of her home to visit a blessing of sugar and slippers and shirts upon Tayug. [Emphases added] (p. 37)

While it is possible to consider that the quote is focalized through Emma, the absence of reporting verbs after the first sentence creates a kind of ambiguity. Are these Emma’s thoughts about Nora? Or is it the narrator’s? Does Emma or the narrator find Nora’s voice hypnotic? Adding to this confusion is the fact that this quote is preceded by the narrator’s description of Nora Cosio’s arrival in Tayug. In that paragraph, there are no indications that it is focalized through Emma unlike the passage above thus adding to the uncertainty of attribution.

What is clear, however, is what Nora Cosio represents. She is clearly depicted as an antagonist in her role as the cunning politician’s wife who befriends the Gorrez couple in order to tap the political clout of the Gorrez name—Domingo’s father was a former governor—to boost the chances of their presidential candidate in Pangasinan. As an aside, three of Polotan’s short stories: “The Giants” (1959), “The Tourists” (1960), and “The Sounds of Sunday” (1961) are in some way connected to the novel, Casper calls them “preliminaries” (1969, p. 68). In “The Giants” not only do the Cosio couple figure prominently as the corrupt couple that they are in the novel but Nora Cosio specifically refers to Doming and Emma as “common thieves, patay-gutom” (Polotan 1968, p. 186). Patay-gutom is a derogatory Filipino expression comparing a person to the way a pig eats quickly as if it will run out of food. In the past, people of higher socio- economic status used the term to insult lower-class people. Subsequently, the term has also been used as a disparaging comment about a person’s corrupt lifestyle. So, coming from Nora Cosio, it becomes an ironic statement. Polotan thus consistently portrays Nora as the villain that she is. To further drive this point, Nora Cosio is the only notable female character in the novel that the narrator never deploys as a focalizing consciousness. Even Norma Rividad, Rene’s promiscuous wife, is granted focalizing duties.

The other reason that Emma Gorrez is sometimes erroneously identified as the narrator of the novel might be Emma’s “goodbye letter” (I use the term loosely because I argue against the notion that it is an actual reproduction of the letter) to Doming in the final part of the novel. Perhaps, for scholars like Bernad, the supposed “shifts in point of view” (1969, p.59)—which is really a shift in voice, that is, a shift from third-person narration of the first three parts to the “first- person” narration of the last part—denotes Polotan’s failure to sustain the third- person narration. It is worth noting that this misunderstanding between voice and focalization is also common in Philippine literary criticism. Often, “who sees/perceives” (or in this case, who sees/perceives most of the events) automatically becomes the narrator “who speaks.” Indeed, Emma seems to “narrate” events that happened during and after her failed tryst with Rene: “On the way to Sual, riding in Rene’s bouncy coupe, I saw the colors of the world, the blue and green and red” (p. 134). The profusion of direct discourse in part four also lends credence to Bernad’s suggested infraction: “I said nothing on the way, Rene had spoken for both of us. ‘I am done with talking, aren’t you, Emma?’ Yes, I agreed, and now for the violence…” (p. 134).

I contend that this part, this supposed letter, only becomes as problematic as Bernad suggests if the opening line is disregarded. Part four begins with the line: “Dear Doming (Emma wrote): I went but did not fornicate. Do you wince at that word?” (p. 134) [Emphases added]. The inclusion of the parenthetical “Emma wrote” indicates that Emma’s “narration” of her letter is embedded in the main narrative because it would make no sense, structurally at least, for the supposedly Emma-as-first-person-narrator (as suggested by Bernad) to refer to herself (in the third-person no less) as the writer of the letter if she was already the narrator. Interestingly, a somewhat similar presentation of thought/letter narration is made in part one. After Emma’s colleague sexually harasses her, she “rehearses” her application letter in her mind as a reply to the advertisement looking for teachers in Rene Rividad’s school in Tayug, Pangasinan:

Dear Sirs, her mind ran as she hurried down the steps into the lighted street below. “Dear Sirs, I am confident I shall make you a fine teacher but I desire first to know the guarantees of the job. Will it ensure this applicant against hopelessness, despair, bereavement? Will it close old doors and open new vistas, so to speak? Will your old lechers keep away and will your young men be polite and will everyone be kind and none will ask about my dismal story? [sic.] (p. 7)

Unlike part four, this section of part one is unquestionably a reproduction of Emma’s thoughts (direct thought) not of an actual letter: it is italicized, enclosed in quotations marks (although a typographical error omits the closing quotation mark), and the narrator marks it off with “her mind ran.” Although it may be argued that Polotan’s presentation of part four may not be as clear as her earlier attempt in part one, to suggest an actual “shift” from third-person to first- person narration seems dismissive of Polotan’s markers.

There is more to the inclusion of this “letter” as simply a flaw in rhetoric that Bernad claims. It acts as Polotan’s subtle reminder of her narrator’s affinity with Emma and the limitations associated with her character’s circumstances. Polotan’s decision to bestow Emma the space to “narrate” the contents of her letter almost seem to authorize Emma in lieu of the narrator; as if allowing Emma to reclaim the authority that she has lost. But despite this gesture, Emma’s final words in the novel, “Good-bye, my dearest Doming” (p. 139), also points to the limitations imposed on women like her: the morally upstanding Filipina, the Maria Claras. This line implies that although Emma Gorrez has finally decided to leave Doming for good, even with Rene gone, she can only do so in a geographical gesture; legally, she cannot divorce him because divorce is not allowed in the Philippines, then and until now.

As I suggested earlier, the subversive layer of Polotan’s novel is in her choice of focalizing characters and the narrator’s presentation of their thoughts or rather, in the implications of these choices. In the use of free indirect discourse (FID) in the thought representation of Glo, Polotan attempts to blur the boundaries between her narrator and the focalizing character as a way to “blur narrative

responsibility” (Lanser’s 1992, p. 74). This blurring is crucial because it allows Polotan’s narrator to slide into covert territory. This covert narrator can speak “with” Glo without having to reveal her evaluative stance towards the morally questionable querida. This creates an ambiguity between narrator and character necessary for women writers like Polotan who have to consider their “womanly reputation” (1975, p. 25) or else risk being “penalized in special ways” (Feria 1991, p. 83).

It must be noted I am not the only one to notice Polotan’s strategy of thought (and occasionally indirect speech) representation. Hau mentions this strategy in her analysis where she notes how “The silence of the landscape in the novel is ‘filled’ by a profusion of indirect discourse that bleeds into each other. The characters often speak without direct quotations; voices blend and flow into each other and into the narrative in a disquieting way” [Emphases added] (2000, p. 195). However, Hau is not really clear where this “profusion of indirect discourse” can be found nor how the “voices blend and flow.” In fact, she does not refer to FID at all. But her notion of characters “speaking” without the quotation marks and based on the only textual evidence she provides, which I also quote at length below, suggests that she may be referring to free indirect discourse (FID):

There were spasmodic stints at employment—writing falsely cheerful copy about deodorant, whipping up nearly successful fashion shows, modeling for TV—but all done with a cavalier, nonchalant air, aristocracy fallen upon hard time: the I-am-really-if-you-must-know-a-little-too-good- for-this-but air. Her expenses mounted, she couldn’t think of retrenching, a taxi was de rigueur when her car was in hock, she was positive she would die if she gave up her credit cards and then one day, in a particularly reckless state, in a cocktail lounge off Isaac Peral, she received a proposition. It was dark in that lounge. The air was a welter of smoke and sweat. She could not see her escort’s lacquered mustache. Moreover, he had stated his idea with extreme care, in no way making her feel the suggestion had been all commercial. He had the good taste to fabricate a small story (…loveless marriage…difficult wife…no

children…middle-age doldrums…) undistinguished for its imagination but thoughtful of him just the same. Why not? So then why not? Oh damn it all, why not? “Why not?” she said.” [Emphases added] (pp. 110-111)

The italicized lines portray FID and the rest of the passage, as Hau notes, uses indirect discourse (narrator’s report). The point I want to make here is that when the “voices blend and flow into each other and into the narrative” what Hau really means is that the characters’ “voices” (speech and thought) “blend and flow” into the narrator’s discourse. The last line of Hau’s chosen quote is a perfect example of this: “Why not? So then why not? Oh damn it all, why not?” (p. 111). It is difficult to know whether the series of why nots is a thought representation and more impossible to know who is exactly responsible for the first “why not” because Polotan uses the technique, as Hau notes, everywhere. It is possible to attribute it to Glo because the passage has been filtered through her. Then there is the question of who would have uttered or thought “So then why not?” the escort or Glo? The third “Oh damn it all, why not?” can ostensibly be attributed to Glo, as an instance of FID, because of its proximity to the last “why not” that denotes Glo’s direct speech. But the whole line or set of why nots can also just be taken as Glo coming to terms (in her mind and via the narrator’s report) with the idea of becoming a querida.

The stereotype that Polotan seems to examine here is how infidelity becomes socially acceptable only within the framework of the male, upper- and middle- class querida system. As the editors of Querida, an anthology of stories featuring the famous literary queridas in Philippine literature, point out, “the querida is traditionally the figure through which the ethos of masculinity as well as a fragile sense of the male self take shape” (Hau, Tuvera & Reyes 2013, p. 8). Indeed, the timing of Glo’s character exposition reaffirms this notion since it coincides with the revelation to Emma of her existence (as his querida) in Doming’s revived corporate career and what follows is the retelling of Doming’s descent into corruption. While it is possible to perceive Glo’s focalized sections as the narrator’s ironized mentioning of her views, the narrator’s attitude towards Glo, a few pages later, dispels this notion:

“What’s he giving you?” he [Gorrez] asked. “Nothing,” Glo said and it was the truth. Doming and she had spoken of nothing although she had heard faintly of a wife and some children. A wife and children—she should worry about them! A wife walks out on her husband and leaves him fair game for all.” [Emphasis added] (p. 113)

The statement “it was the truth” again proves to be an ambiguous one that can be attributed either to Glo or the narrator. But by pointing out the truthfulness of Glo’s claims that she had been promised “nothing,” the statement seems to reinforce the idea that Glo knew nothing about Emma or chose to avoid knowing more about her, as revealed by the rest of the quote.

More importantly, by taking part in the chorus of why nots, Polotan’s narrator seems to be joining Glo as she asks, not just herself but also the reader, why not be a kept woman? The querida in Philippine society is almost always the one vilified instead of (or together with) the man who keeps her. In “Marriage– Philippine Style,” Polotan paints the wife’s acquiescence of the querida system as another unfortunate trait of (upper- and middle-class) Filipino women. Polotan mentions queridas like Glo or “the widow, the divorcee, the estrangee (sic.) or the free-lancer—a woman of the world” as more desirable because they understand “the ground rules,” exhibit “empathy,” and “respect the wife’s rights” (1969, p. 202). It is precisely the patriarchal nature of this system that Polotan exposes in the novel. On the one hand, Emma is resigned to accept her situation: “This is the beginning, Emma thought, one lie after another, the start of a necessary deception. How many women have propped up their crumbling selves this way, because the end of love had come in a manner they did not expect, I must take comfort in that thought: I am not the first, I shall not be the last” [Emphases added] (p. 127). On the other hand, Glo is left in the dark regarding Doming’s real domestic affairs.

While Emma flirted with the idea of an affair with Rene Rividad before his tragic death, she ultimately had to reject him: “Desire: the act of love. And doom: the act of death. I was not afraid of what I was about to do, I was afraid of the aftermath: the injury, the sorrow, the taste of ashes upon the tongue” (pp. 135-

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136). Her unflinching admission that acting on her desire for Rene was not something she was afraid of rather it was the doom that came with the repercussions of breaching social expectations is another reminder of the pervasive influence of Maria Clara on the Filipina. As I have discussed in this section, Polotan’s novel is shaped by the constraints of her milieu. On the one hand, she desires to write without having to “fear for her womanly reputation” (Polotan 1975, p. 25). On the other hand, she hesitates to reject the expectations of domesticity because of her “strong sense of duty” (Polotan 1975, p. 25). In the next section I suggest that Edith Tiempo’s His Native Coast also encounters the same limitations in its interrogation of the Philippine postcolonial situation.

Edith Tiempo’s Substitute for Authenticity: The Covert Narrator in His Native Coast

In his essay “The Art and Craft of Edith L. Tiempo,” Ricaredo Demetillo dismisses His Native Coast as “escapist and anti-nationalistic,” “not seriously meaningful, except as an interesting romance” (1986, p. 100). Clearly, Demetillo is coming from the nationalist sentiment of the times. As I have discussed in chapter 2, the steady rise of nationalist (bordering nativist) sentiment from the 1950s to its peak in the late 1970s to 1980s did not do Edith Tiempo or any Filipino writer who chose to write in English, any favors. Her choice of protagonist (and main filter) in the American Michael Linder also did not help. Demetillo is highly critical of the supposedly pro-American message of the novel (1986, p. 100); after all, it is the former American G.I. who exposes the corruption at a local sugar plantation.

Tiempo’s His Native Coast may seem like a classic case of orientalism. A male, American solider named Michael Linder is sent to the exotic jungles of central Philippines (Negros) to assist the Filipino guerrillas to drive out the remaining Japanese troops. He meets a half-indigenous Filipina named Marina (her mother is Ifugao) in the mountains and falls in love. He proposes and offers to take her back to the U.S. with him but she rejects him. He goes home to the Midwest; wandering aimlessly for the next ten years and wondering about the

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unresolved “issues” with Marina. He keeps contact with his former guerilla friend Jimmy Carr (a Filipino-American) who tells him Marina has married Paulo Lacambre who is an illegitimate (but recognized) child of a landed man in Negros. This connection to the Philippines opens the door for one of his friends, a sugar baron in Negros, to offer him a job as personnel manager. He accepts, of course, with the hope of seeing Marina again. As personnel manager he is asked to resolve suspicious activities in the sugar mill linked to Marina’s husband. Michael, together with the local authorities led by another former guerilla, Captain Flores, thwarts the corrupt activities. As Paulo flees Negros for Manila to avoid incarceration, Marina also leaves for the Cordillera mountains to join her mother’s people in Ifugao. Michael goes after her but when he fails to find her, he chooses to go back to his job in Negros. Apparently, his search for Marina makes him understand his own search for identity: “how one need not always be rooting physically or metaphysically in any one place” (pp. 297-298).

Some readers like Demetillo may find in His Native Coast traces of the manifest destiny doctrine of McKinley that overshadowed and ultimately doomed the Filipinos’ fight for independence in Michael Linder’s savior complex because that is what Tiempo’s novel presents: the Philippine situation shown (mostly) through Michael Linder’s consciousness. The novel is, for the most part, a story about one’s search for identity; there is no question about that. Scholars such as Genotiva (1997) and Ventura (2008) have noted as much. This thematic focus is of course typical not only of the times but what makes her novel disconcerting for some scholars is the primacy of Michael’s own quest for identity and the implications of his involvement in uncovering the corrupt practices in the local sugar industry to the Philippine postcolonial situation. This novel, I suggest, can be understood to reflect Tiempo’s limitations as a Filipina author, resulting in her preference for a male, American point of view for a bulk of the novel. But what makes this narrative strategy subversive despite pronouncements to the contrary is her deployment of a narrator who still provides access (albeit limited) to a female (half-indigenous) character in Marina Manuel.

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The narrator’s covert performance is necessary for Tiempo’s novel because as she admits, it is only through a male, American point of view that her novel gains the authenticity and objectivity she cannot achieve with a female, Filipino point of view. But Tiempo’s desire to be heard, to be taken seriously has in some ways not met the approval of readers; her recourse to a male, American for the novel’s point of view has usually been taken as a problematic aspect of her novel because as Pantoja-Hidalgo notes, some readers associate it with the notorious “colonial mentality” of some Filipinos (1998, p. 103). However, to paint Tiempo’s choice of Michael as the main focalizing character as a testimony of her colonial mentality is also to forget that behind the focalizing character is a narrator who exists as separate from said character. I am not suggesting that the views of Tiempo’s narrator are completely incongruous with Michael’s views. Nor am I suggesting that Tiempo satirizes the American in Michael. Rather, I contend that by looking at this relationship between Tiempo’s narrator and her focalizing characters in key moments, we can begin to retrieve the views Tiempo thought she could not convey with an overt female, Filipino perspective. At a time when the push for a nativist nationalism was at its peak, Tiempo prefers to pose two contradictory positions: first, as represented by Michael’s choice to remain in Santa Rosa, is the idea of an identity that is “not root[ed] physically or metaphysically in any one place” (pp. 297-298) and second, as represented by Marina’s flight to her mother’s hometown in Lagawe, is the idea of embracing your indigenous origins. Scholars such as Demetillo (1986) and Rosca (1981) may find the implications of this supposedly pro- American novel troubling but Tiempo’s critique of the Philippine postcolonial situation, unfortunately embedded in the “authentic and objective” perspective of Michael, is worth reconsidering as her claim to a substitute authenticity.

It must be noted that besides Lanser’s classic work on gender and narrative voice, Pantoja-Hidalgo’s (1998) innovative re-reading of Tiempo’s two early novels was one of the motivations for the ideas that framed this chapter’s focus on women writers. In Pantoja-Hidalgo’s feminist analysis of Tiempo’s His Native Coast, she goes beyond “the story of a search for identity” emblazoned on the back cover of the novel’s first edition by looking for the hidden story of the female characters. For her the hidden story in His Native Coast is that Michael’s

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desire to understand Marina’s choice to go back to her mother’s village, to convince her of making more rational decisions is characteristic of the colonial/patriarchal power relations that exist in Philippine postcolonial society. While Pantoja-Hidalgo’s argument in her analysis of Tiempo’s of A Blade of Fern (1978) and His Native Coast emphasizes the significance of Tiempo’s “manipulation of point-of-view” and “the vocabulary used in the rendering of the male protagonists’ interior monologue,” (1998, p.89) she stops short of exploring how the presentation of Michael’s thoughts (and Marina’s) connects back to how the narrator presents these thoughts and ultimately, how the narrator is connected to the author who chooses what to represent.

In this section, I want to take Pantoja-Hidalgo’s argument about point of view in another direction, this time by examining the stance of Tiempo’s narrator to her characters, specifically those who are used to focalize. As Lanser notes, “One of the least obvious and most manipulative elements of point of view [is] the choice of focalizing characters” (1981, p. 242). I want to suggest that Tiempo’s turn to Michael as the main focalizing consciousness in the novel is part of her desire to bestow her novel the authenticity and objectivity which she thinks is only attainable with a male, American protagonist. I argue that Tiempo’s choice of Michael as the main focalizing consciousness is not an endorsement of American authority rather it is an examination of his identity as male, American in a world populated by Filipinos deprived of their own understanding of their identity. In His Native Coast’s six-parts: part I (Pagatban); part II (Vinas); part III (Columbus, Ohio, et al.); part IV (Revisited); part V (Un Bel Di); and part VI (His native coast), Tiempo deploys a third-person narrator who uses both Michael and Marina (but mainly Michael) as the filter.

In part I, while waiting for orders in the mountains of Pagatban, Michael starts to form mostly negative opinions about the kind of English the guerrillas were speaking: “To Michael it all sounded more quaint than quarreling. His trouble was their awful accent and the scandalous way they mingled English and whatever vernacular that came in handy” [Emphases added] (p. 24). Notice that the narrator marks this as Michael’s thoughts with "To Michael,” as if to distance herself from his opinion about the Filipinos’ accent. But not all Filipinos

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unsettled him: “Someone had told Michael about Jimmy, that he was a Filipino- American mestizo, and since then Michael had been secretly pleased about the fellow and his pert looks. And indeed one had to admire Jimmy, who appeared to be a successful result of strong racial disparities fused together” [Emphases added] (p. 19). In both instances of reported discourse, the narrator is clearly present as shown in the use of evaluative and descriptive words and in consonance with Michael. A few pages later, Michael and a few guerrilla soldiers, including Jimmy, discuss his observations about Filipinos and the Philippines being schizophrenic or schizoid because of the “Eastern” and “Western” marks on them as a people and as a country (p. 26-27). Jimmy has misgivings about Michael’s observation:

“I’m not split, that’s for sure, sir. If anything, I might be the unbelievable, the integrated spirit. I’m both sides of the picture that seems to be bothering you.” A little pause. “That’s real boasting, I am the integrated spirit.” He peered at Michael, “If true, are you pleased?” The ironic tone did not escape Michael, but he brushed aside impatiently his own quick flash of irritation. He was more interested in pursuing the idea of cultural coherence or the lack of it. In the case of Jimmy the hybrid, was the accident of eugenics so automatic in its benefits? [Emphases added] (p. 28)

In the quoted passage, the second paragraph is a combination of psychonarration (“brushed aside impatiently”) and FID in the last line. So while the narrator shows signs of consonance with Michael’s observations about the “split” nature of the Philippines, it is Jimmy’s comment that is described by the narrator as an “uncanny insight:” “I’m entrenched. Maybe the politer word is adjusted. My father, an American, might not be, or not entirely, but I am, sir. I’m born to it” (p. 28).

The tendency to paint Tiempo’s portrayal of Michael’s views in this section as simply her “colonial mentality” fails to account for the content of Michael’s interaction with Jimmy. If the very subtle cues I mentioned in the previous paragraph are considered, despite its position within a section of predominantly

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direct discourse, the narrative instead suggests that Michael’s views at this point in the story actually form part of Tiempo’s development of his character. Tiempo notes as much in her interview with Bresnahan: “[Michael] evolved as a character. In the beginning, he felt that the language was a barrier. And then in the end he started to think it was an interesting country trying to find itself. He did not try to say this is western and that’s oriental” (1990, p. 138). Indeed, Tiempo takes painstaking care to present Michael as an atypical American character; he comes from the Midwest whose values resemble those of the “traditional” Filipino. When Jimmy observes, “I know, sir, it doesn’t present a comfortable picture at all does, it? Transition is a painful time. And transition into what mongrel Utopia nobody can tell” (p. 29), Michael quickly agrees. The narrator’s covert presence in the conversation between Michael and Jimmy is achieved through the narrator’s use of Michael for focalization. Michael’s views stand out because he is the main consciousness from the beginning of part I up to the point where he and Jimmy have the conversation. These subtle cues become significant in understanding Tiempo’s attempt to bestow narrative authority to her narrator not Michael. It is not until Pantoja-Hidalgo’s re-reading that an “omniscient” narrator who speaks is not confused with Michael who sees. But as I mentioned earlier, Pantoja-Hidalgo does not explore the nature of this relationship between Tiempo’s narrator and Michael. Only until the significance of this “separation” is examined do we also understand that Tiempo’s narrator does not only turn to Michael for focalization but also uses Marina in some sections of the novel (found in parts I, II, IV, and V).

So, while Michael is the main character who focalizes in the novel, he is not the only one used by the narrator. In fact, Tiempo’s narrator demonstrates a similar kind of affinity with Marina. In part II, with the war finally behind them, Marina attends a party hosted by one of the sugar barons in Negros. Mrs. Rivas (who was with her in the mountains of Pagatban) introduces her to Mrs. Diana Roca (the wife of one of the managers of a major sugar estate in Negros). Their conversation turns to Marina’s Ifugao heritage and how she must have been “at home” in the mountains of Pagatban. The discussion leaves Marina unsettled. I quote the representation of her thoughts at length:

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A while ago, before the two women came, she had been telling herself it was good to be here. But she was not really easy deep down in her mind. It was absurd how her ego could rise up and parade before her mind’s eye the stances of agony and uncertainty. And there was no doubt about it; it was ego, all right, [emphasis added] the self arraying its postures with the wounds and scars of its adventures, and trying in its dark greedy need to become the very things it could not assimilate. It was fatal rapacity but very necessary for self-awareness and survival. The war had interrupted her attempts in the University to work with meaningful things and she had been just as bent on doing that as any lively adolescent in her classes. Then many things happened one after another which were unaccountable; they happened, all right [emphasis added] but there was a big puzzle about them so that accepting them was like choking on strange and unpalatable food. (p. 91)

In the quoted passage, the narrator renders Marina’s inner turmoil indirectly using a mix of FID and narratorial report. In the quoted passage, the kind of thought representation that Fludernik (1993, p. 297) refers to as “a more verbalized level of consciousness” can be detected. The formal cues include the repetition of the phrase “all right” (“it was ego, all right” and “they happened, all right”) and choice words for what Chatman (1980, p. 200) calls “special emphasis” (“meaningful” and “happened”). The narrator’s turn to Marina for focalization and the deployment of this combination of indirect discourse thus demonstrate the narrator’s affinity to Marina.

This moment of introspection shapes Marina’s story and forms part of Tiempo’s examination of the colonial/patriarchal traditions that marginalize the Filipina. When Demetillo asks in his essay (1986, p. 89) “Is it all believable? Is it possible that the civilized Marina should regress to the primitively maternal?” he seems to be dismissing Tiempo’s slow build-up leading to Marina’s decision to return to her mother’s hometown in Lagawe. It is a recurring dilemma for her character which the narrative hints at early in the story while Marina was still in the mountains of Pagatban in part I especially in her interaction with the Tumandok mountain people (pp. 51-63), and even up to the moment during the party:

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Like with Rod, who everybody had said would make a nice considerate husband for her, a typical Filipino husband who would live by the safe traditional values of a small and provident community. But Rod fooled them all—her refractory gallant had crated his law books and paid up the lease on his Dumaguete office and skipped town permanently to marry the girl from Cebu. Small blame to him, no man’s vanity could stand up to year after year of waiting for no apparent reason…. […] It was a question—why had she let Rod slip out of her life and why was Lagawe which she loved with a fierce loyalty so unsuitable somehow? There were things she loved, or merely allowed to move her instinctively, or that she ached to possess in all her reasoned need, and it was terrifying the way the dreadful things managed to turn sour or unsubstantial. [Emphases added] (pp. 91-92)

The passage shows Marina's inner turmoil regarding her indigenous roots. In this section, the narrator reports Marina's thoughts regarding her former boyfriend who represented "traditional values" and how it clashed with her "fierce loyalty" to the "unsuitable" Lagawe. In the last sentence, the juxtaposition of instinct and reason highlights Marina's predicament.

The opening scene of part V shows Marina attending one of her ladies’ group’s lavish meetings (this specific meeting included the opera singer Lucretia's rendition of Un Bel Di). Afterwards she visits the worker’s village to ask about her new housemaid, intent on fetching the girl so that they can go together to her husband’s office in the sugar mill but she is told that the girl is still in her hometown. The visit only leaves her dispirited mostly because of the stark contrast between her earlier lavish gathering and the squalid conditions of the village. This leads her to suggest a children’s “playground” or “even just a small woods lot,” the thought of which reminds Marina of her mother's town: “In a flash Marina remembered the pastures and the creeks in the green uplands of her own childhood in Lagawe" (p. 231). Chapter 5, with its glimpses of Marina’s desire for Lagawe, thus foreshadows her ultimate decision to go back to her roots.

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In part VI, Marina retreats to the mountains, back to her mother’s hometown of Lagawe. For the final part of the novel, the narrator returns to Michael as the main consciousness. But Marina’s presence does not disappear entirely because she is very much present in Michael’s single-minded quest to bring her back or bring some sense into her. Pantoja-Hidalgo (1998, p. 113) contends that Marina’s unexplained departure (in Michael’s point of view) coincides with “The textual strategy of refusing a definitive explanation of woman’s behavior or motives, of sustaining woman as enigma.” Indeed, Tiempo formally portrays this refusal through the withdrawal of Marina’s consciousness from her narrator’s available options for focalization in part VI. The decision to tap Michael alone also cuts off the reader’s access to Marina and her reasons. As Pantoja-Hidalgo observes, the novel never really explains Marina’s decision. Tiempo’s choice of Michael as the main consciousness for her novel and seemingly relegate Marina’s views to a secondary position serves as a reminder of the shadow of Maria Clara’s legacy on women writers. Although the narrative is mainly about Michael's understanding of his identity, it is after all called His Native Coast, it is also one that paradoxically demonstrates the subversive possibilities of the narrating Other and the institutional limitations of that narration.

My discussion in this chapter has tried to show how the colonial/patriarchal construction of the ideal Filipina as Maria Clara not only continued to influence the lives of everyday Filipinas but also, to borrow Hau’s words, bled into the works of women writers. The Hand of the Enemy and His Native Coast both formally portray this limited access to narrative authority. Despite Potalan and Tiempo’s regular inclusion in lists of authors (the others are Joaquin, Santos, N.V.M. Gonzalez, and F. Sionil Jose) that “could be considered the most influential in the development of the Filipino novel in English” [emphases added] (Pantoja-Hidalgo 2008, p. 27), the novels of both authors then and even now do not generate as much critical attention as their male contemporaries particularly Joaquin and N.V.M Gonzalez. Thus, in the next chapter I turn to the novels of these two authors to examine their own narrative strategies.

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Chapter Four—Narrating Temporal Interventions in N.V.M. Gonzalez’s A Season of Grace and Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels

Implicit in the category “postcolonial” is a concern with the event of colonialism, its consequences, and the representation of both. Consequently, for many postcolonial writers history is the crucible out of which their fiction is fashioned. They respond not only to written histories in terms of content and narrative form, but also to concepts of history. Their novels counterpose memory and history, and myth and history. The opposition between memory and history also involves an attempt to create—or re-create—a collective memory that will be the source of a collective national identity—an imagined community. (Innes 2012, p. 823)

In the seminal anthology, Brown Heritage: Essays on Philippine Cultural Tradition and Literature, the editor Antonio G. Manuud remarks: “One appalling thing about Philippine literature today is not so much that it is little read; the greater tragedy is that, when readers come at length to it, they often read it out of context” (1967, p. xiii). Indeed, as I have discussed at length in previous chapters, not only is the Filipino postcolonial novel neglected, the early novels in English were expected either to be replicas of English or American novels, which prompted Manuud’s criticism, or they were expected to promote the “Filipino” national identity or fashion national narratives. In the same manner that the narrative construction of the Filipino woman as Maria Clara is problematic, so too is this desire for a uniform Filipino national identity. This can be attributed to the effects of the nation’s double-colonial history, particularly the homogenization of the Philippine archipelago’s various ethnicities, languages, and cultures. No longer are the Ifugaos or the Mangyans or the other indigenous peoples of the Philippines or even the pre-Spanish immigrant population (most notably the Chinese) visible in this version of the Filipino because he is clearly created with the image of the lowland Christian (Catholic) in mind.

In a remarkable way, the problematic nature of a homogenous Filipino national identity is evident in the kind of critical work that was published concerning the

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novels of two of the most popular Filipino writers in English, N.V.M. Gonzalez and Nick Joaquin. The criticism echoed this desire for a national narrative. On the one hand, early scholarship of N.V.M. Gonzalez’s works, according to Oscar Campomanes (1995, p. ix), either “reduce[s] N.V.M.’s literary geography into a valorization of the primordial ‘Filipino’,” as in the reviews of Bernad (1957) and Casper (1964), or “dismisses it as a naturalistic representation of an ‘archaic economy’,” as in the criticism of San Juan (1993). On the other hand, Nick Joaquin’s works have been referred to either as a nostalgic view of the Hispanic dimension of Philippine culture (San Juan 1988) or was a condemnation of the American influence on Philippine culture (Bernad 1961). However, as I have stated in the introduction to this thesis, this kind of approach to reading N.V.M. Gonzalez’s and Joaquin’s novels is rather dismissive of these writers’ milieu.

I turn my attention to A Season of Grace (1956) and The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961) by N.V.M. Gonzalez and Nick Joaquin, respectively, because both novels have defined the careers of these two authors. N.V.M. Gonzalez gets his “nativist” tag because of the novel’s portrayal of the subsistence living of kaingin (slash-and-burn or swidden) farmers from Mindoro, whereas Joaquin’s much-maligned nostalgia is usually blamed on his depiction of the ilustrado family background of the characters of his novel. This is not to say that other critics have not revisited these novels. In fact, in “’As in Myth, the Signs Were All Over’: The Fiction of N.V.M. Gonzalez,” Richard Guzman (1984), reassesses Gonzalez’s writing to examine his preoccupation with the supposedly primordial past means. Guzman suggests that this is a kind of “countermythmaking” in the fiction of N.V.M. Gonzalez, which he says is a form of historical “re-vision.” Guzman declares, “It is in countering the myths of the Philippines’ irretrievably lost native past, of her people’s weakness, of the near- total triumph of the foreign that N.V.M. Gonzalez’s fiction is unique. Such countering is most beautifully realized in A Season of Grace, his masterpiece…” [Emphasis added] (1984). Interestingly, this notion of a historical re-vision has also been used to describe Joaquin’s fiction. Mojares notes, “Joaquin demonstrates in his own work that it is in being rooted in the colonial past that his is the most original voice in postcolonial Philippine writing” [Emphasis added] (2002, p. 305). Thus, we have two authors and their novels, published

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roughly five years apart yet with two different projects of historical re-vision, the “native” past in N.V.M. Gonzalez and the colonial past in Joaquin.

Both authors’ preoccupation with the historical re-vision of the past brings to mind what C.L. Innes observes about postcolonial writers: “They respond not only to written histories in terms of content and narrative form, but also to concepts of history. Their novels counterpose memory and history, and myth and history” [Emphases added] (2012, p. 823). Although both authors belonged to the same milieu, born two years apart (N.V.M. Gonzalez 1915; Joaquin 1917) and started writing around the same time (just before the Pacific War broke out), their memory of the same history is starkly different. This difference, again, is a reminder of the heterogeneous, archipelagic nature of the Philippines. Even though both men were born in the northern part of the country, Luzon, Joaquin was raised in Paco in the capital Manila whereas N.V.M. Gonzalez grew up in Romblon, in the island of Mindoro. As N.V.M. Gonzalez observes, “understanding the Philippines begins in the realization that it is one nation made up of three countries” (1976, p. 53). The three countries he refers to are: the City (Manila), the Barrio, and the Mountain. The geography of experiences that N.V.M. Gonzalez maps here is of course based on his own history. Having grown up in Romblon, a barrio, he was also cognizant of the mountain where the formerly coastal-dwelling Mangyans (the collective term for the indigenous people of Mindoro) now reside. It was not until his move to Manila to pursue higher education and later, a writing and academic career, that he discovered the city. So, N.V.M. Gonzalez and Joaquin’s memory of the same history is different because their experience of it was also different; the barrio shaped N.V.M. Gonzalez’s experiences whereas the city molded Joaquin’s.

In this chapter, I want to examine how the disparities in the authors’ experience of history shape their handling of time in the representation of events. Monika Fludernik notes, “Time plays an important role in postcolonial fiction” (2010, p. 919). She observes, “postcolonial fiction frequently experiments with duration by contrasting or more often expanding narrated time to mythic proportions” (Fludernik 2010, p. 919) as shown in her sample texts, Ayi Kwei Arma’s Two Thousand Seasons (1973) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958). This

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is noticeable in A Season of Grace where N.V.M. Gonzalez creates this mythic quality to the narrative. As I discuss later, N.V.M. Gonzalez uses the cyclical nature and shifting pattern of kaingin farming as a sort of template for his experimentations with temporality in the novel. I want to suggest that in the formal portrayal of kaingin farming, the narrative’s temporal indeterminacy demonstrates the non-specificity of events and the repetitive nature of these events also show how the kaingineros (kaingin farmers) have been subjected to institutionalized exploitation. In The Woman Who Had Two Navels, however, Joaquin is less concerned with the effects of duration and instead turns to frequency and order. In Joaquin’s novel, this takes the form of the pseudo- repetition of events in the narrative present in chapter 4 that happens alongside a movement backwards (past) and forwards (future) in time. The novel’s temporal structure, I suggest, is Joaquin’s formal portrayal of the Philippine historical and cultural disjunction. Connie has to face her past and acknowledge its effect on her life in the same manner that Philippine history has to recognize its Hispanic aspect. But before I analyze the two novels, I will briefly consider existing scholarship on modernity and tradition in the Philippine context in order to situate the respective projects by N.V.M. Gonzalez and Joaquin. I then move to a short discussion of the notion of time and narrative in Philippine novelistic tradition.

Modernity and Tradition: A Philippine Postcolonial Context

In her essay “Temporality and Postcolonial Critique,” Keya Ganguly (2004) examines the role of temporality in postcolonial studies. She notes that while the notion of time did not originate out of postcolonial studies, it has however expanded the debate to highlight postcolonial issues. Ganguly writes “the most useful way to provide concrete form to the abstract issue of temporality is by looking at the central position given to the problem of being modern within the purview of postcolonial analysis” (2004, p. 163). The colonial discourse around modernity and tradition is conventionally one that runs parallel to the discussion about the notions of progress and stagnation or worse, regression. Consider the following words taken from the pamphlet “The Philippine Islands: Information for

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Americans Thinking of Entering the Philippine Teaching Service” published by the Department of Public Instruction:

Brusque American methods frequently clashed with the more suave and easy-going ways of the country. But intense earnestness on the part of the American teacher and keen desire for education on the part of the Filipino, soon brought order out of chaos, and it was not long before a smooth-running system of education, free from hampering traditions, cleared the way for definite progress. [Emphases added] (1925, p. 13)

This short document, made to entice American citizens to join the troop of dedicated teachers in the Philippines, is littered with praise for “the unselfish devotion of the American[s]” (p. 14) to the “suave and easy-going” (p. 13) Philippines who “have made rapid strides along the road of progress” (p. 10).

Three insights from this document are relevant to the current discussion. First, the downplaying of the Spanish contribution to Philippine society, as highlighted by phrases such as “brought order out of chaos” or “free from hampering traditions,” is meant to paint Filipinos under Spain as nothing but disorderly wards of the state. This myth, of the Spanish colonial administration’s disorganized and brutal occupation of the Philippines, was perpetuated by the Americans as early as the Spanish-American war. It is the same line of propaganda used in the now oft-cited, multivolume work The Philippine Islands 1493-1898 by Americans Emma Blair and James Robertson. Gloria Cano claims that the multivolume work has “became the standard reference work for all books devoted to the Spanish regime;” a work that has contributed to the “stereotyped images of the Spanish regime by abusing the [primary] sources” (2008, p. 28-29). This concerted effort on the part of the Americans to discredit the Spanish colonial government was meant to garner the support of their citizens for its continued presence in the Philippines and its dreams of territorial expansion. This is not to say that the Spanish colonial government was faultless. But by highlighting the regressive nature of the Spanish administration in the colonies and by extension, the Filipinos under their rule, the Americans sought to emphasize the modernity of theirs.

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The second insight from the pamphlet is closely related to this narrative of American modernity. By exaggerating the role of the American government in the supposed progress of the Philippines, the pamphlet reiterates this American claim to modernity. In the third insight, the American imperial project of benevolent assimilation is again brought to the forefront. Phrases such as “a smooth-running system of education” (p. 13) and “the consuming thirst for knowledge on the part of the Filipinos” (p. 14) are meant to convey not only the modernity of the American as bearer of “education” and “knowledge” but also the submissive and tolerant attitude of the Filipinos towards their presence. However, the U.S. quest for territorial expansion was interrupted by another nation longing with its own imperial ambitions, Japan. Although the aftermath of the Pacific War saw the formal end of U.S. occupation this did not mean the end of U.S. influence in Philippine affairs.

While I have focused only on the American colonial discourse on modernity and tradition, the same can be said of the Spanish accounts, for example the ethnographic reports that became the primary sources of the multivolume work by Blair and Robertson. In both cases, the time of the colonizer is split from the time of the colonized. This notion of an Other time—that is the “denial” by the anthropologist that he and his subject belong to the same time—is taken up by Johannes Fabian in Time and the Other (1983). This imaginary gap not only perpetuates the myth of an Other time, it also reinforces the split between tradition and modernity. As Susan Friedman astutely points out about the problem with the “periodization” of modernism, “Modernity invents tradition, suppresses its own continuities with the past, and often produces nostalgia for what has been seemingly lost. Tradition forms at the moment those who perceive it regard themselves as cut off from it” [Emphases added] (2006, pp. 427, 434). Because, as Gonzalez and Joaquin would reveal in their novels, modernity is not the rejection of the past but a recognition of how “each person is a sort of unconscious anthology of all the epochs of man; and that he may at times be moving simultaneously among different epochs” (Joaquin 1989, p. 51).

Nick Joaquin, in describing the period when he began writing, recalls:

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When I started writing in the late 1930s I was aware enough of my milieu to know that it was missing from our writing in English. The Manila I had been born into and had grown up in had yet to appear in our English fiction…. Back in the 1930s it was ‘modern’ and even ‘nationalistic’ to snub anything that wore the name of tradition. (1987, pp. 1-2)

It is a common refrain from writers with a similar history of colonization, even for writers as far off as the other side of the Pacific like Carlos Fuentes. The Mexican writer and one of the names associated with the so-called Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, Fuentes echoes Joaquin when he writes in his essay, “How I Started to Write,” “For my generation in Mexico, the problem did not consist in discovering our modernity but in discovering our tradition” (1988, p. 23). For Fuentes, according to Susan Reid, this has translated into a “fluid concept of time” in his novels (2014, p. 723). While some of Joaquin’s own works have occasionally overlapped (and in fact predated the Latin American “Boom”) with what has now become synonymous with magical realist temporal experimentations, such as those used by Fuentes, N.V.M. Gonzalez has stuck to a more conventionally realistic variant. The salient point here is that both Joaquin and Gonzalez recognize the rupture of their past from the present and out of this their own writing emerged, the kind of writing that sought to represent their time in their own vision.

Time, Memory, and Narrative in the Philippine Novelistic Tradition

“The relationship between narrative and temporality,” declares Monika Fludernik in her entry on “Time in Narrative” in the Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, “has been one of the most popular research areas in narrative theory” (2010, p. 608). Indeed, in Genette’s classic Narrative Discourse, time takes up considerable space, nearly half of his work. Genette (1980) suggests the following categories of temporality: “order,” “duration,” and “frequency.” Of particular interest for this chapter are the first two areas. “To study the temporal order of narrative,” according to Genette, “is to compare the order in which events or temporal sections are arranged in the narrative discourse with the order of succession

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these same events or temporal segments have in the story” (1980, p. 35). Anachronies, as Genette takes to calling the discrepancies between the order of narrative time and story time, are “not a modern invention” (1980, p. 36). Mojares notes that the Philippine novelistic tradition had its fair share of anachronic narratives dating back to the early period of vernacular novels; he cites Nena at Nenang (1915) by Valeriano Hernadez y Penas as an example (1983, p. 200).

What is however interesting in the works of Filipino novels by writers in English such as N.V.M. Gonzalez, Joaquin, and even Polotan is the departure from what Mojares refers to as “conventional” representation of time in vernacular novels “where time is parceled into discrete blocks of past, present and future” (1983, p. 348). For Mojares, the “impressionistic handling of sensations and memory” in N.V.M. Gonzalez’s first novel, The Winds of April, “conjures a fluid time continuum” (1983, p. 348). Mojares here is referring to the narrative’s movement backwards and forwards in time. The same can be said about the handling of time in A Season of Grace and The Woman Who Had Two Navels3 and it is this “fluid time continuum” that I want to examine in this chapter. Both authors’ departure from the vernacular novelistic convention occurs alongside their respective projects of historical re-vision.

In both novels, the fluid time continuum allows the narrative to move seamlessly between events. It must be noted that when I refer to the movement between events in A Season of Grace I am specifically referring to the movement from the narrative present to memories recalled by Doro or Sabel. In The Woman Who Had Two Navels I am referring to the movement from the narrative present to both Connie’s frenzied hallucinations of her future or hypothetical deaths and her memories. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan notes in her discussion of anachronies that when it comes to “character-motivated anachronies” such as in “Eveline” by James Joyce, “The act of remembering, fearing, or hoping is a part of the linear unfolding of the first narrative.… It is only the content of the memory, fear, or

3 The analysis uses the 1992 edition of A Season of Grace (See Gonzalez, NVM 1992) and the 1972 edition of The Woman Who Had Two Navels (See Joaquin, N 1972a) 117

hope that constitutes a past or future event” [Emphasis in the original] (1993, p. 51).

History, No Longer Fuzzy: Weaving the Kaingin into the Temporality of A Season of Grace

In one of the first reviews of A Season of Grace, Miguel Bernad, mentions being “impressed” by a paper read by his “friend,” Dr. Donn V. Hart, at a symposium organized by the Writers' Club of the University of the Philippines for N.V.M. Gonzalez’s novel. The cultural anthropologist was apparently “appalled by the primitive conditions depicted in Professor Gonzalez’s book” because “Mindoro is only forty-five minutes by air from Manila but in culture it is many centuries behind” (1957, p. 341). The novel opens with an epigraph, a short paragraph taken from the journals of the British privateer and explorer, William Dampier, published in 1697 as New Voyage Around the World: “At this place where we anchored the Land was neither very high nor low. There was a small Brook of Water, and Land by the Sea was very Woody, and the Trees high and Tall…” (N.V.M. Gonzalez 1992, p. 1). Typical of these kinds of travel writing of this period, the epigraph is Dampier’s bare-bones description of his first sighting of the “Island of Mindora” [Mindoro]. If we are to believe Dr. Hart, then this epigraph is essentially a prelude of things to come in the novel, of the “primitive conditions” (Bernad 1957, p. 341) of life in the island of Mindoro.

However, the novel actually does the opposite. What N.V.M. Gonzalez is trying to do in this novel, I argue, is to imagine this world of the kaingin farmers, in their time, no longer muddled by a “history made…fuzzy” (1976, p. 50) through centuries of colonial rule that misrepresented them in history. Considering Dr. Hart took particular issue with the novel’s “absence of schools and the almost total absence of the Church” (Bernad 1957, p. 341), it is no wonder why he would see the novel’s depiction of Filipino life so backward. There are only two events in the novel that allude to Christian practices, one of Dr. Hart’s criteria for modernity. First, when the kainginero community completes a novena after Nong Tomas dies (pp. 105-109). A novena is a nine-day period of prayer for someone who has died and Catholics in the Philippines traditionally observe it.

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This practice actually shows that despite the absence of the Church as Dr. Hart bemoans, the kainginero community performed their religious duties by observing the novena. The practice of the novena only requires a prayer leader. Second, at the end of the novel, when Nay Rosa is looking for the name of a saint to offer their prayers of petition she consults the Almanaque Panayana (p. 234). The Almanaque Panayana is the first and oldest almanac in the Visayas and Mindanao. It became the main source for information including dates of Catholic feasts and Catholic saints since 1884. N.V.M. Gonzalez embarks his project of historical re-vision by reaching back into the past in order to envision a different future for the postcolonial present, one that no longer marginalizes the people who practice kaingin farming.

Kaingin, also known as swidden agriculture, shifting cultivation, or the more simplistic term slash-and-burn farming, is a traditional farming system employed not only by Mangyans but also “lowland Filipinos” (Schult 2001, p. 154) or the migrants from the highly Christianized towns from the mainland of Luzon and also the central Visayas region. Kaingin has become synonymous with “environmentally unsound” practices. Outsiders point to the kaingineros “as important contributors to the problem of tropical deforestation” (van den Top 2003, p. 124). But according to van den Top, “The term [kaingin] does not differentiate between the wide range of agricultural strategies, including long- and short-fallow swidden farming, agroforestry practices and forms of ploughed cropping which fall into this broad category” (2003, p. 124). In his article, “Deforestation and the Mangyan,” Volker Schult (2001) traces the surge in environmental degradation of Mindoro uplands to an American colonial policy in the early 1900s, shortly after the Americans claimed the archipelago as their own. Schult’s study thus supports Harold Conklin’s findings in 1957 that questioned “longstanding views that upland farming could be equated with exhaustive and shifting forms of slash-and-burn agriculture” (van den Top 2003, p. 125).

Schult draws attention to the American colonial policy that aggravated, if not accelerated, the environmental degradation of Mindoro forests (2001, p. 156). Under the guise of preserving the forest and protecting the Mangyans, the

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American colonial government “encourage[d] people to apply for homesteads and occupy permanent farms” and adopt a more modern “concept of land ownership” which meant the acquisition of land titles and the implementation of land taxation (Schult 2001, p. 156). This essentially translated to a policy that promoted American “political control” (Schult 2001, p. 156). Another, more environmentally damaging aspect of the American colonial government’s push for modernity under the banner of progress was “the economic development of the archipelago, which included the commercial exploitation of the Philippine forests” [Emphasis added] (Schult 2001, p. 156). The statistical information provided by Schult shows a staggering rise of timber production during the American colonial period (2001, p. 159). Upon the arrival of the Americans in 1902 only 3,708 cubic meters of timber were produced. The sharp rise from 1921 (13,059 cubic meters) to 1951 (84,473 cubic meters) resulted in the reduction of forest land from 63% forest coverage in 1908 to only 49.5% in 1951 (Schult 2001, p. 160). As Schult perceptively points out, “Both, Mangyan and forest, were regarded as obstacles in the ‘bright future’ of Mindoro” (2001, p. 159). This abbreviated history of the kaingin, the exploitation of the island of Mindoro, and the marginalization of its inhabitants simmers beneath A Season of Grace. This is why N.V.M. Gonzalez ventures into, to borrow Guzman’s (1984) term, “countermythmaking.”

For the remainder of this section, I examine how N.V.M. Gonzalez formally portrays his historical re-vision. I want to suggest that N.V.M. Gonzalez uses the cyclical nature and shifting pattern of kaingin farming as a sort of template for his experimentations with temporality in the novel. This translates to two strategies that N.V.M. Gonzalez uses in the novel. First, this recurring quality of the kaingin is reflected in the use of the present tense in some parts of the novel. On the surface, the novel covers roughly an undated year in the life of a married kainginero couple, Doro and Sabel, and the travails of their farming community during one season of kaingin in Oriental Mindoro. But as the months progress, as the experiences and memories of Doro and Sabel mesh together so too is time seemingly expanded as if the one season of kaingin that covers the story time is more than just one specific season. In the second strategy, the move from the narrative present to Doro or Sabel’s memories and back to the

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narrative present mirrors the shifting pattern of the kaingin. One aspect of kaingin farming, the shifting cultivation, calls for the temporary abandonment of land after it has reached its harvesting potential in order to allow for the recovery of the land. The farmers then shift to another land to do their farming. They only return to the previously used land once it has recovered. This is the traditional method followed by the Mangyans. It is also a method, according to experts like Schult (2001) and van den Top (2003), that actually helped preserve the environment rather than destroy it. It was not until the American colonial policy of land ownership that kaingin farming was transformed into an environmentally unsound method because farmers (not necessarily the Mangyans) no longer waited for the land to recover.

Earlier I mentioned that the inclusion of an excerpt taken from the British privateer and explorer Dampier seemed to support the misgivings one cultural anthropologist had regarding the backward depiction of Filipino life in the novel. What the novel’s epigraph seems to evoke is not a disconnection from the modern times but rather a connection to the old world. In fact, the novel appears to sustain this notion at the start of the novel. Consider the opening paragraph:

It is in the hills beyond the sitio of Bondoc where the Alag begins. During the rainy season, which starts around May and ends late in September, trees and clumps of bamboos and wild bananas are hurled down the river-course by the flood. Some of these get their roots deep enough into the new soil. Where trunks of trees and clusters of bamboo have caught large deposits of clay from the hills, the cogon is green and tall. Around October, the stream dries up; the river-course becomes a lake of grass, with islands of palms and trees. (p. 2)

The use of present tense in the narrator’s scenic description is sustained for another six paragraphs until the actual narrative begins. Guzman (1994) finds these kinds paragraphs as a reminder of N.V.M. Gonzalez’s tendency to provide vivid descriptions of the local environment. According to him, “in the midst of detail will often come a kind of time warp making us realize that certain

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facts, certain rhythms of action, somehow rise from some ancient memory, some cosmic pattern, and, more important, have the potential of connecting us to those things from which they arise” [Emphases added].

I argue that the narration of these opening paragraphs in the present tense emphasizes the continuity between the present and the past. In a study on tense and narrativity, Susan Fleischman, quoting Bolinger, suggests, “The simple present…is ‘timeless’ not in the sense of ‘eternal’ but of ‘non-committed about time’. Whenever, then, the speaker wishes to avoid the confinement of time implicit in other tenses, he uses the simple present” (p. 436, in 1990, p. 35). The temporality of the opening passages of the novel is thus “non- committed about time” projecting what Guzman refers to as “a kind of time- warp.” N.V.M. Gonzalez does not merely present a specific kaingin season, but rather an account of a kaingin season. In fact, the choice of an indefinite article in the novel’s title—A season instead of The season—supports this claim. Here is another line from these opening paragraphs: “During the clearing and planting season, as well as during weeding and harvesting, work in the kaingins is without end” (pp. 3-4). This is another instance of the non-specificity of the seasonal references in the opening passages that add another layer of temporal indeterminacy. The narrative subjects in these present tense sections are also vague or non-specific: “A man comes along, a bolo at his side” (p. 2) or “Across the bed of the Alag, carabao and man make all kinds of new tracks every dry season” [Emphases added] (p. 3). The passage suggests that it can be any man, any kainginero making this journey, every dry season.

Although the basic tense of the novel is narrated in the past tense N.V.M. Gonzalez returns to the present tense during other points in the narrative (pp. 96, 109-112, 186-187). In the second instance (p. 96) where the narrative uses present tense, it is again the narrator giving a description, this time how to reach Alag. However in the third instance, the longest section that uses the present tense, it is no longer a case of the narrator’s scenic description. Consider the following lines:

It is evening, late evening in January.

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On the riverbank, at the landing-place in Bakawan, a man is standing. A banca, held by a pole has been stuck into the mud, waits for him. He steps into it carefully. Ankle-deep water has collected in the boat. He starts to bail, using the coconut-shell that lies together with a paddle in the bottom of the boat. At last the banca is dry. Now the man paddles away. (pp. 109-110)

The aforementioned man, who is revealed a few paragraphs later, is none other than Doro:

“I am home now. And I’m drunk, mind you!” He adds, proudly: “Doro is tired and drunk.” Hasn’t he some right to be? He has worked in the interior and made hardly three caravans. Does not one try to forget one’s troubles? Besides, there’s the tiredness that comes from saying, “Yes, master! Yes, Manong Epe! Yes, Manang Tiaga!” It is the off-season and, after having tied him down in debt, they have made a handyman of him. “I am not questioning their right to do that to me. I’m not, am I?” he shouts. [Emphases added] (pp. 111-112)

In the passage above, the narrator turns to the present tense to report events in the narrative present that, prior to this, had been consistently reported using the past tense. This takes place during the off-season just after Nong Tomas has been buried. Interestingly, in the italicized sections above, it is also possible to consider the lines as Doro’s thoughts. “The shifts from PS [simple past] to PR [present]” according to Fleischman, “mark shifts from an external to an internal focalization that once again privilege the aspectual component of the respective tenses” (1990, p. 291). Doro’s distress regarding his ongoing predicament thus becomes highlighted.

This event also marks the beginning of an extended section detailing the effects of poverty on the life of the couple due to mounting debts incurred in the

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previous planting seasons. The tenancy problem leads to a vicious cycle of borrowing, one that is rarely difficult to break. At the beginning of the season, kaingin farmers get their rice seeds from the landowners. In return, the farmers have to repay by giving part of their harvest (sometimes half). However, due to the farmers’ lack of resources they are forced to make an advance in order to afford basic necessities. Landowners, most often than not, impose exorbitant interest rates on these advances and the farmers accumulate more debt over the seasons. As the novel shows, kaingin farmers like Doro and Sabel are left with nothing during the off-season. In order to pay off some of their debt, Doro works for Epe and Tiaga. The shift to the present tense in this particular event emphasizes the chronic debt of kaingin farmers, one of the hallmarks of the institutionalized exploitation experienced by peasants in the Philippines not just Mindoro.

By turning to the present tense, Doro’s experience no longer just refers to this one season in the past. When he proclaims: “Besides, there’s the tiredness that comes from saying, ‘Yes, master! Yes, Manong Epe! Yes, Manang Tiaga!’,” he seems to echo the same frustration other Filipinos have had over centuries of colonization and abuse; the same Filipinos who have said, “Yes, master!” to various forms of “master” (the unscrupulous landowner or the American colonial administrator or the Spanish friar). Fleischman notes, “The PFV [perfective] PS offers a retrospective view of events that for the narrator are completed and now constitute history; the IPFV [imperfective] PR enables a temporary release from the closure of this retrospectivity by reinstating the erstwhile contingency of a present in which the future is still undecided” (1990, p. 291). This passage rendered in the present tense suggests that the recurring experience of the kaingin farmers may continue in the ensuing seasons, quite possibly every season.

The formal portrayal of kaingin farming is also demonstrated in the move from the narrative present to Doro or Sabel’s memories and back to the narrative present because it mirrors the shifting pattern of the kaingin. The novel contains five unmarked chapters. Chapter “2” begins with Doro and Sabel walking along the trail, with their baby boy Eloy in tow. They are on their way to Blas Marte’s

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kaingin to take part in the harvesting of crops. Sabel makes a detour to the hut just off the clearing where she meets the paralyzed Clara who offers to watch over the baby. Clara and Sabel’s conversation about work in the kaingin triggers the first recall; this one is Sabel’s memory of the couple’s arrival in Bondoc:

As Sabel walked to the clearing, where the harvesting had already started, it was as if those two men on horseback were following her. She turned around quickly. Of course, there was no one. But she remembered them more vividly now. Both of them had worn coconut- brown khaki shirts and trousers and had carried pistols in shiny leather holsters. (p. 31)

The next eight pages (pp. 31-38) then go back to a point in the story (April) just before the narrative (May) begins. As I noted earlier, during the off-season kaingineros such as Sabel turn to other sources of income, in her case she weaves buri (a kind of palm native to the Philippines) leaves into mats and either sells them or barters them for other goods. This section is focalized through Sabel; her memory of their arrival in Bondoc is set against the backdrop of the grim reality facing kaingineros in the form of the abuse at the hands of corrupt local officials. The quote I include below is part of the narrator’s report of Sabel’s thoughts after the Treasurer demands that Sabel hand over several of her mats despite her and Doro’s protestations that they were not for sale and were supposed to be given as gifts to their friends:

Maybe, the Treasurer read the word ‘Recuerdo’ in golden-yellow letters woven in across the mat; maybe he did not. Sabel wondered. The edges were flowers with short green leaves ranged three rows deep. The first mat, like the others in the stack, was smooth to the touch, and exuded the fragrant scent of buri leaves bleached in the sun. She had bleached the leaves to whiteness like that of the inside of a banana stalk. (p. 35)

Sabel’s memory is made more significant because near the end of the novel Clara experiences a somewhat similar encounter with the corrupt officials.

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This event, however, is not Clara’s memory but part of the narrative present: “two men on horseback rode up toward the little camp. The first one to reach the shelter was a man in brand-new khaki suit. He carried a revolver at his side. The other wore a faded suit, also of khaki, the trousers frayed at the cuffs, and wet and stiff with mud” (pp. 220-221). Clara’s experience is eerily similar to Sabel’s:

Brand-New Khaki spread the first mat from the stack. On it, woven in green letters, was the word ‘recuerdo’. The mat was bordered with red and blue and yellow things that might have been flowers. The petals were too angular, though. From the smoothness of the finely-stripped buri exuded a fragrant smell, something of sunshine and the lime that had been used to bleach the palm leaves into a whiteness that could well be that of the inside of a seashell. (p. 224)

The most significant feature of these two events (Sabel’s memory and Clara’s experience) is the recurring image of the word recuerdo, Spanish for “to remember” or “the act of remembering.” Interestingly if recuerdo is considered alongside the vernacular terms for it, another layer of its function in the novel can be suggested. Borrowing from Mojares’ own observations in his discussion of the narrativization of Philippine history, it can be gleaned that on the one hand recuerdo is marked (taken from the Tagalog tanda or to mark with a sign) in the buri mats; on the other hand, recuerdo finds its way (taken from the Cebuano dumdum or to locate or find) into the novel’s content and form (2002, p. 291). On the level of content, the story asks the reader to remember an aspect of the nation’s past, to remember the continuing marginalization (or in this case, a double marginalization) of some of the nation’s inhabitants. But as N.V.M. Gonzalez weaves this story, recuerdo becomes a key part of the novel’s structure too.

According to Majid the novel covers twelve events that happen over a year. He notes, “Through narration by recall these are interwoven without reference to chronological time, with others which took place in the past” [Emphases added]

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(1970, p. 88). Majid does not state what these twelve events are but my own count shows (based on the time markers given in months) that there are only eight events which are structured chronologically in the unfolding narrative. The “interwoven” events that take place in the past that Majid mentions are presumably in reference to the following events: first, Doro and Sabel’s memories about some events that occurred prior to the start of the narrative (pp. 31-38, 87-88, 98, 137-138) or Genette’s external analepsis; second, Doro’s recollection of Nong Tomas’s burial which takes place after the start of the narrative but prior to the moment of his recollection (pp. 212-213) or internal analepsis; third, a proleptic narration of Sabel’s vision for her sons Eloy and Porton’s future (p. 143); fourth, Doro’s dream (pp. 168-171); and fifth, a proleptic narration of Doro’s vision of planting corn after the planting of rice (p. 174). Except for Sabel’s memory (pp. 31-38), of their arrival in Bondoc, and Doro’s recollection of an incident during the burial of Nong Tomas, all these other events are, as Majid observes, “without reference to chronological time,” that is temporally unmarked in the narrative. These events do not really have a clear location in the story time. Take for example Doro’s recollection of working in Taro-Poro, the island-town from which he and Sabel had come from before moving to Bondoc:

In Tara-Poro, the man whose land Doro used to farm ran a hemp buying- and-selling business…He remembered that hemp-drying quite well. It was a simple matter of letting the head of finer catch the tip of the wooden stakes of the fence. In a minute he was ready for the other hanks in the bale. This took many trips, from where the bale stood on the ground to the farthermost end of the fence. (p. 137)

Indeed, as Majid claims, these memories are “interwoven without reference to chronological time” (1970, p. 88). The revelation of Doro’s indentured labor prior to the events of the narrative, as I have discussed extensively, is repeated in his indentured labor to Epe Ruda throughout the narrative. Thus, these non-specific memories recalled by Doro and Sabel are events that can happen during any kaingin season, at any given year, perhaps even for the rest of their lives. This feature of N.V.M. Gonzalez’s novel is also what sets it apart from Joaquin’s

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historical re-vision, which I discuss in the next section. Not only do these memories lack a reference to the chronological time, they also have no specific reference to historical time; in fact, the whole narrative lacks historical denotation.

The effect of the temporal indeterminacy of these memories is what Guzman (1984) refers to as a kind of time-warp, an expanded time. This suggestion of an expanded time is initially detectable in the rhythms of the novel's action. In the narrative order, the presentation of these memories is located within the longest section which takes up nearly half of the entire novel (pp. 5-109). Although this section takes up the longest part of the novel, it only covers the harvest season (roughly between October and November). The beginning of this section is specifically marked in the narrative as the month of October (p. 19). The expansion of time is pronounced in this section because the events covered in this section cover roughly two months, in terms of story time, yet require nearly half of the narrative. Compare that to the section devoted to the six-month clearing and planting season (April to September) that takes up only a third of the narrative (pp. 147 -222). This is possible because N.V.M. Gonzalez deploys variable tempo in these sections.

In the harvest season section N.V.M. Gonzalez not only uses a profusion of dialogue but also the occasional descriptive pauses, as alluded to previously by Guzman (1984). Genette (1980, p.94) identifies dialogue as the classic evidence of scene or the “equality of time between narrative and story.” The use of dialogue here clearly denotes the steady progress of events but the use of descriptive pauses portrays the deceleration to conjure the expanded time. In the clearing and planting season section, Gonzalez begins the section slow, using dialogue and detailed narration as if to mirror Sabel’s recovery from her illness but as she gets better, as the clearing turns to planting and planting turns to waiting for the harvest, N.V.M. Gonzalez turns to summary and ellipsis which both create the effect of acceleration. The build-up of the effects of these aforementioned narrative strategies thus adds to the illusion of an expanded time in the harvest season section.

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This temporal indeterminacy, I suggest, is also noticeable in the formal portrayal of recuerdo. In the movement from the narrative present to Doro and Sabel’s memories an illusion of the suspension of time is generated. As Rimmon-Kenan suggests, “only the content of the memory…constitutes a past or future event” [Emphases added] because “The act of remembering…is a part of the linear unfolding of the first narrative” (1993, p. 51). So while the memory is textually presented in the narrative, the past is only revisited in the characters’ mind. As I discussed earlier, at the start of the novel, Gonzalez seems to evoke continuity with the past, which as Guzman (1980) observes, “deemphasize[s] the forward- moving, the linear, in favor of a complex, often near-static time frame.” But unlike the often Orientalist connotations associated with static time, N.V.M. Gonzalez subverts it in the narrative because the longest section becomes the locus of Sabel and Doro’s recuerdo. Through the recollection of their memories, the institutionalized corruption experienced by the kaingineros is again brought to the forefront just as it did with the use of the present tense during Doro’s drunken night.

A Season of Grace is, as Dr. Hart claims, unsettling. The novel is unsettling because the story is so far removed from the lives of highly urbanized readers that you almost agree with the nativist label that is commonly attached to it. But as I discussed earlier in the introduction to this chapter, N.V.M. Gonzalez’s story is borne out of his barrio sensibilities. And once you reconcile that with the history of the kaingin, N.V.M. Gonzalez’s historical re-vision then becomes clear. The novel is really unsettling because in the formal portrayal of kaingin farming, N.V.M. Gonzalez leads us to understand how temporal indeterminacy can demonstrate the non-specificity of events. Consequently, the repetitive nature of these events also leads us to see how the kaingineros have been subjected to institutionalized exploitation. However, despite the wretchedly poor state of their lives, N.V.M. Gonzalez declares, it is still one of grace. N.V.M. Gonzalez not only wants the reader to remember the history of the kaingin or the exploitation of the island of Mindoro, but also the grace of its inhabitants.

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Reimagining a Postcolonial Philippines: Temporal Frenzy in Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels

When Nick Joaquin published his early works, the critics did not know what to make of his shocking stories, populated with bizarre characters such as a pious Catholic woman publicly celebrating pagan traditions to the mortification of her husband or a woman who believed she had two navels. At the time of his emergence, Joaquin’s stories were significantly different in terms of the execution of the English language, which H.B. Furay and Miguel Bernad would call “lush,” and the choice of fantastic plots, which the same scholars found exotic (1953, p. 154; 1961, p. 61). In most of these works, Joaquin situates the story in the Spanish colonial period. In “May Day Eve,” a Joaquin classic, the story is set in the mid-nineteenth century Spanish colonial Manila when the belief in witches was as commonplace as the belief that little girls who look into a mirror one May day eve would find the face of either their future husband or the devil. “Summer Solstice” too is set in the mid-nineteenth century and is about one woman’s curiosity of the cult about the Tadtarin celebrated during the feast of St. John. Although these are clearly Spanish-era stories meant to portray a life in the past, Joaquin unsettles the prevailing idea that what happened during the Spanish period was also a life apart from the present. Despite the pastness of Joaquin’s stories, they are actually teeming with everyday Filipino qualities such as the adherence to conservative rules of the family, the observance of religious customs, and even the persistent belief in pre-colonial practices.

One of the first scholars to review Joaquin’s work was Miguel Bernad. In “Haunted Intensity,” Bernad is especially critical of the “hysterical conduct of the characters” because they lead to a “distortion…of ideas and moral perspective” in Joaquin’s work (1961, p. 61). I return to this comment about hysteria later but for now it is his suggestion that Joaquin’s stories in Prose and Poems (including the first chapter of The Woman Who Had Two Navels) are the product of his anti-American ideology that is significant for the current discussion; Bernad notes, “Joaquin’s aversions are intense. He dislikes modernity. He dislikes Americans and things American. He dislikes them intensely” [Emphases added]

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(1961, p. 66). The line of argument that Bernad takes here is influenced by the same context that compelled Joaquin to write his stories in the manner that Bernad found questionable. Bernard associates modernity with the Americans whereas Joaquin questions that claim. At the start of his writing career Joaquin was clearly dismayed by the absence of the Hispanic “tradition” in Philippine fiction. He observes, “The result was a fiction so strictly contemporary that both the authors and their characters seemed to be, as I put it once, ‘without grandfathers.’…I realize now that what impelled me to start writing was a desire to bring in the perspective, to bring in the grandfathers, to manifest roots” [Emphases added] (1987, pp. 1-2). This “desire to bring in the perspective” of the nation’s “grandfathers” figures prominently in Joaquin’s novel.

This aspect of Joaquin’s stories, however, is often read as his nostalgic representation of the Hispanic influence in Philippine culture. In a rare interview with Roger Bresnahan, who asked him about his “appreciation for the Spanish heritage which exists in the present,” [Emphases added] Joaquin replies, “The same appreciation that an American would have, say, for the period of the Revolution, the period in New England under the Puritans, the period of Emerson. In other words, that’s all part of the culture. If you don’t appreciate it, you’re dead” (1990, pp. 73-74). This appreciation for the Hispanic past is evident in his writing because, as Joaquin sarcastically notes, this past still exists in the present. It seems that every time a critic considered Joaquin’s works as a romantic nostalgia for the Spanish period, the implicit suggestion is for Joaquin to write about something else more important, more modern, more nationalistic. There are several reasons for the kind of criticism Joaquin’s works received but it can be summed up in the social, political, and historical circumstances of his writing milieu. Most significant of these reasons would be that at the time Joaquin wrote and published his works, two divergent schools of thought emerged in Philippine literary criticism. On the one hand, influenced by the American New Criticism in the 1960s, formalist approaches portrayed Joaquin’s experimentations as a failure to follow the conventions of realism. On the other hand, inspired by the clamor for (nativist) nationalism in the 1970s, Marxist approaches voiced their criticism of Joaquin’s emphasis of the Hispanic

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influence in Philippine culture because of its implicit dismissal of the pre-colonial aspects.

The shadow of realism is quite resonant in Regina Garcia-Groyon’s (1972) essay, “Joaquin’s Connie Escobar: Fall and Rise.” She is critical about Joaquin’s treatment of chapter 4, “The Chinese Moon.” For Garcia-Groyon, the “realistic treatment of events [is] an indication of Nick Joaquin’s intention to make his story credible” in The Woman Who Had Two Navels but “The dream sequences [in chapter 4] are perfectly incredible when treated on the literal level” (1972, p.40). She does concede, “an air of unreality characterizes the other events, an atmosphere created by Joaquin’s prose style with its hypnotic enumeration of details” [Emphases added] (Garcia-Groyon 1972, p. 41). What becomes evident here is the framing of her analysis of Joaquin’s novel within the conventions of realism. But if there was one thing that Joaquin was never good at, it was following conventions. As Chelva Kanaganayakam observes regarding this disregard for conventions, Joaquin “wrote in ways that were sometimes considered reactionary and ahistorical” (2010, p. 1158). As I noted earlier, Joaquin was highly skeptical of the erasure of the Hispanic aspect of Philippine culture by both the American and nationalist authorities. This, I suggest, ushered in Joaquin’s historical re-vision.

In his illuminating study of Joaquin’s short fiction taken from the collection Tropical Gothic (1972), Philip Holden (2009) examines the Gothic in a postcolonial context. His analysis of “Guardia de Honor” and “The Summer Solstice” is based on what I earlier referred to as Bernad’s criticism of Joaquin’s penchant for hysterics. According to Holden, these stories “express excess, are infused with the hauntings of the past, and are often incomplete” (2009, p. 368). Although Holden is more concerned with these two stories, his exploration of this aspect of Joaquin’s writing provides a good starting point for my own argument. Joaquin’s novel, I argue, can be understood to reflect his examination of the disjunction of Philippine history and culture; one that simultaneously registers the problems associated with either the uncritical acceptance of American influence or the zealous nostalgia for the Hispanic period. For the rest of this section, I analyze how Joaquin formally portrays his

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interpretation of this disjunction in his novel. I want to suggest that Joaquin turns to Gothic tropes such as: “the disturbing return of pasts upon presents,” “imaginative excesses and delusions,” “mental disintegration and spiritual corruption,” “tales of darkness, desire and power” (Botting 1997, p. 1). The two temporal strategies Joaquin deploys in chapter 4 of the novel complements this appropriation of the Gothic: first, the pseudo-repetition of Connie’s drive towards the monastery and second, the subsequent movement backwards (Connie’s past) and forwards (Connie’s frenzied hallucinations of her death) in time.

The Woman Who Had Two Navels is composed of five chapters and told by a third-person narrator. Four chapters are entitled with the names of the characters in the novel: chapter 1 (Paco), chapter (Macho), chapter 3 (La Vidal), and chapter 5 (Doctor Monson); it is only chapter 4 (The Chinese Moon) that does not use a character’s name. In chapter 1, the opening scene of the narrative takes place in Hong Kong where Pepe Monson, the son of a Filipino former revolutionary in a self-imposed exile, is having a discussion in his home- office in Kowloon with a woman named Connie Escobar, a Filipina visiting from Manila. The meeting is quite farcical because Connie, a human, is asking Pepe, a horse-doctor, to perform surgery for the removal of her second navel. The absurdity of her request is heightened by the circumstances of her arrival in Hong Kong and subsequent quest to find a “Doctor Monson.” The reader later learns from Pepe (p. 196) that when Connie arrived at the door, she had asked for a Doctor Monson, an ambiguous request considering there are two “Doctor” Monsons in the premises—the human doctor (the Monson patriarch) and the horse doctor (Pepe). I return to this point later because Pepe’s observation is important for understanding the turn of events that leads to the novel’s climactic scene between Connie and the real Doctor Monson.

In the opening scene, Connie informs Pepe that she is a thirty-year old, recently married woman (as recent as that morning before she met Pepe) on a desperate trip to get her extra navel removed before her new husband discovers it when they go off on their American honeymoon. Her own mother who comes to visit Pepe not long after Connie leaves refutes her story. Connie, according to Concha, is really her eighteen-year-old daughter who has been

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married for over a year to Macho Escobar, a haciendero (wealthy landowner) from the Southern Philippines. Pepe’s growing disorientation during his meeting with Connie is suggested by his odd “feeling [of] the room’s furniture hovering vaguely” (p. 4) and of the presence of fog and mist (pp. 4-5) outside the window. The occurrence of the mist or fog at specific points in the novel plays a significant role in understanding the events in chapter 4. In Gothic literature, mist or fog is conventionally used to blur objects not only to reduce visibility but also to usher in terror, be it in the form of a person or a thing. In a way, the choice of Hong Kong as setting serves a dual purpose. First, Hong Kong is an important locale for Filipino revolutionaries and expatriates. Jose Rizal practiced as an ophthalmologist in Hong Kong prior to his exile in Dapitan and of course, the first Philippine republic led by General Emilio Aguinaldo used Hong Kong as its base for its government-in-exile. Doctor Monson’s character is loosely based on another Filipino general— General Artemio Ricarte—who spent time as an exile in Hong Kong (Zialcita 1990, p. 222) after refusing to pledge allegiance to the U.S. and controversially returned to the Philippines at the request of the Japanese during the occupation of Manila. Second, Hong Kong’s infamous fog, especially during winter, generates the ideal Gothic atmosphere for the novel. If in The Season of Grace the time-warp is produced by the very nature of kaingin farming, in Joaquin’s novel the temporal frenzy arises out of the whorl of Connie’s mysterious navels.

In the novel, mist or fog appears twice before chapter 4, where it is a recurring image in Connie’s frenzied hallucinations of her deaths. The first time that mist or fog is mentioned is when Connie shows up at Pepe’s office and the second time is later in the same chapter, after Pepe leaves Paco at the park (pp. 43, 48-49). Just like in the opening event where the fog marked the beginning of Pepe’s involvement in the mystery of Connie and her two navels, the second time the fog is mentioned is another sign of things to come, “The light fog, always a gleaming sheet a step away, made him feel like Alice, stepping though mirrors. But it wasn’t I who stepped through the mirror, he thought. It was Father and Paco—and the glass broke” (p. 43). Pepe is referring to the disappointing end of the recent trips to the Philippines undertaken by his father and Paco. For his father it was supposed to be the fulfillment of his dream to go back to his

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motherland but only to be disappointed by the Americanized state of the nation. For Paco it was supposed to be only part of his job as a musician but only to end in scandal caused by his involvement with Concha then Connie. In chapter 2 Connie’s husband, Macho, has arrived in Hong Kong looking for her. Pepe helps her avoid him, by letting her stay with his Rita, if she promises to seek help regarding her situation by meeting his brother, Tony, who is a priest in the convent perched on the hills of Hong Kong. Despite leaving Rita’s place without an explanation, Connie keeps her promise and in the beginning of chapter 3, she drives up to meet Father Tony. In an exchange that only adds to the novel’s running mystery of whether Connie has two navels or not, Connie vehemently responds to Father Tony’s accusations about “the horrible idea” of her two navels: “It’s not an idea! And what difference does it make if it’s only in my head or actually here if I believe it’s actually here?” After Connie abruptly leaves the convent and then reappears this time in the Monson residence, the brothers decide the only way to settle the mystery of whether Connie had two navels is to visually confirm it.

There is an implicit ellipsis between the end of chapter 3 (where Pepe slowly approaches his room where Connie is waiting to reveal her two navels) and the start of chapter 4 (Connie driving towards the monastery). This temporal gap is not only meant to contrast the earlier scene of Pepe walking very slowly towards his room with the ensuing high speed at which Connie is driving at the start of chapter 4 but also to confuse the reader. While it is implied later in chapter 5 that Pepe does indeed enter the room and check whether Connie has two navels (p. 198), at the start of chapter 4 the reader is not made aware about Pepe’s discovery nor is it ever revealed by the time the novel ends. So at the start of chapter 4, like Connie, the reader becomes disoriented. The events in chapter 4 have been previously called as follows: “hysterical anticipations” (Casper 1964, p. 134) or “frenzied hallucinations” (Mojares 1969, p. 62) or a “dream sequence” (Garcia-Groyon 1972, p. 35) or a “mnemonic production” (San Juan 1988, p. 145) or a symbolic regeneration (Davis 2008, p.267). I borrow Mojares' term—frenzied hallucinations—because the term best describes Connie’s mental and spiritual turmoil after the events of chapter 3.

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It is worth repeating that the only chapter that is not given a title using one of the characters’ names is chapter 4, “The Chinese Moon.” This deviation ostensibly marks the significance of this chapter. The events in chapter 4 finally shed light on the mystery of Connie’s past that led her on the quest to rid her body of her imaginary (or is it?) second navel. The notion suggested by Holden of “the place of the past in the modern world” is indeed not only a Gothic trope; it has also become synonymous with Joaquin’s works exploring the Philippine historical and cultural disjunction. As Vicente Rafael astutely observes, “Joaquin kept to a notion of history where the past was always current, the present always haunted by the future becoming past, and where modernity was not the negation of tradition but its fictive kin, its compadre” (2013/2014, p. 16). The importance of examining the order of events in chapter 4 is not simply to demonstrate Joaquin’s formal experimentations. If the past and the future sequences are isolated, the narrative is simply that of Connie driving towards the monastery. The narrative is moving forward, not repeating, because Connie is moving closer to her destination as the night progresses. This means that chapter 4 is not entirely Connie’s hallucination. Connie’s mental and spiritual turmoil in the narrative present triggers the narrative of the past. The recollections become the catalyst of her hallucinations. By resorting to this temporal structure, I argue, Joaquin develops a formal way to problematize the Philippine historical and cultural disjunction. Connie has to face her past and acknowledge its effect on her current ordeal just as the rewriting of Philippine history has to include its Hispanic aspect because as the narrative demonstrates, erasing the past (in Connie’s case, burying the trauma) can lead to serious consequences. In the remaining sections I discuss how the narrative formally portrays the Philippine historical and cultural disjunction.

On the surface, the narrative seems to repeat a singular event—Connie’s drive around the spiral road towards the monastery—four times. The narrative produces this illusion with the aid of three strategies. First, Joaquin’s Gothic- inspired setting helps establish the blurring of the real and the fantastic time so that the reader is uncertain what to make of Connie’s hypothetical deaths. Second, still part of the setting, is the choice of the twisting road which creates the false impression that Connie’s driving is recurring. Third, the consistent

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order in the narration of the four temporal sections tricks the reader into thinking that every time the narrative present “restarts” after each of Connie’s hypothetical deaths, it is the same event as the beginning of the previous temporal section. Here the first two strategies play a big part. Each temporal section begins in the present (Connie driving), goes back to the past (Connie’s memory), and jumps to the future (Connie’s hypothetical death). Each of these scenes—that is, each of the hypothetical death scenes—always begins with a narratorial description of the color of the sky (as a reference to the time of the night) followed by a description of the monastery focalized through Connie (as a reference to her location).

In the first hypothetical death scene, the narrator indicates the time, just as the sun has set, “the air was brown with dusk as the Jaguar started uphill” (p. 141) and as Connie looks up “she saw the monastery high overhead still in daylight, one side flat with sunshine, the trees round below like a tide swaying” (p. 141) which indicates Connie’s location, relative to her destination, the monastery. In the first recollection, Connie remembers the time when she was just five years old and had wanted the statue of the carnival God, Biliken, but her mother did not want her to have it because she already had a doll named Minnie so she tried to “drown” her doll by throwing it to their pond and then lied about it being stolen. Consider the following shift from this memory back to the narrative present:

“Minnie! Minnie’s in my bed!” “But Minnie has been stolen.” “No, no—she’s drowned!” “Drowned?” “I threw her into the pond!” “So you were telling a lie?” “”Yes, yes—I was telling lies, nothing but lies!” cried Connie as the Jaguar shot up the dark hill, […] But “Lies! Lies! Lies!” sang the wind in her ears. (p. 145)

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This scene shows how an event from Connie’s past continues to affect her present rather how her past is still part of her present. A past built in a foundation of lie after lie not just regarding this specific event but also her family’s past: her father’s work as an abortionist and her mother’s affair with Macho.

The complexity of the temporal structure in chapter 4 reaches another level with an abrupt shift to the hypothetical death scenes. Consider the following excerpt below which immediately follows the one above. This except shows where the narrative present dissolves into the first hypothetical death scene:

Orchard and high wall collapsed all about her. Here she was outside, alone, captive in the car, fugitive through the night, impelled towards that monastery on the hilltop to face her own lies. “Oh, no, no, no!” she cried, and wrenched at the wheel. Rock swayed in her headlights as the car spun around, all the way around, and fled back down the road, the wind now rushing up to meet it. The lights below misted in her eyes as she sped down the dark hill, away from terror. The mist had jelled into fog when she reached the railway station in Kowloon. (p. 145)

As I noted earlier, the fog plays a crucial role in the events of chapter 4. To signal the shift from “real” time to fantastic time (hallucinations), the fog is mentioned. The fog only appears during Connie’s hypothetical death scenes not elsewhere in chapter 4. Two more sections follow this order. In the second hypothetical death scene, the time seems to be later in the evening as indicated by the line “the brown sky had darkened” [emphasis added] (p. 151) and Connie’s destination also seems to be closer, “she saw the monastery emerging, again overhead, nearer now but dimmer, and sinking deeper into the mass of shadow round below” [emphasis added] (pp. 151-152). Connie is clearly moving closer to the monastery as the night progresses. This progression is also mirrored in the chronology of the recalled memories. Connie is possibly eleven or twelve years old at the start of the past segment (p. 153) and grows to become “taller and thinner and fourteen years old now” during the

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“last year of the war” (p. 156). The shift back to the present is also becoming more seamless:

Leaning out to wave, she saw her mother standing on the veranda, her arms still held out before her, her turning face blurring as the car swung round the rose garden, where corn and squash now bloomed instead of roses; past the tall iron gates, where a Jap soldier now stood guard; down the lonely noon bright street, where the bombed tenements lay in ruins; and out into this cold night smelling of pines, this cold hill high above Hong Kong. [Emphasis added] (p. 157)

These seamless transitions seem to mirror the frenzy of Connie’s hallucinations so when the narrative reaches the fourth temporal section of chapter 4, Connie’s hallucinations become intricately wound in the temporal frenzy of the narrated events.

Before I proceed to the discussion about the fourth hypothetical death scene, I digress to comment on a typographical peculiarity in this section of novel. Joaquin, like most authors, uses the standard quotation marks to indicate dialogue but in this specific section he turns to the quotation dash. It is almost similar to James Joyce’s preferred typographical style in his works. But unlike Joyce who uses the dash to substitute the quotation marks in all of his characters’ direct discourse, Joaquin only uses it in certain events that have special significance. Scholars seem to have overlooked this typographical style in Joaquin's works perhaps because he has only used it twice, in the novel and in the short story “Guardia de Honor.” It is important to note that “Guardia de Honor” and the original short story “The Woman Who Had Two Navels” (chapter 1 of the novel) were published as part of Joaquin’s first collection of works Prose and Poems (1952) which may explain Joaquin’s typographical preference during this period. Whenever Joaquin turns to the quotation dash in an extended section, it is meant to convey a time outside the main narrative, specifically a future or hypothetical event.

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In chapter 4, Joaquin not only marks the shift to a future/hypothetical time by using this typographical style in the dialogue, he also signals it by using the future conditional tense in the section where Connie “meets” Father Prior. Joaquin uses a very cleverly worded lead-in to confuse the reader. The quote below is taken from the paragraph before the meeting between Connie and the priest takes place:

Still far away at the foot of the hill, but coming steadily towards her, was the post with twin lamps that marked where the road divided, half of it going on round the hill, the other half cutting right into the rock. When she entered the light of those twin lamps she would turn right, into that second road; would vanish inside the tiny canyon winding up through the rock…she would look down. [Emphases added] (p. 177)

Contrast that to the second narrated event. Even here the event is not repeated because the first one was merely a hallucination:

[Connie] saw the two eyes [Father Prior’s eyes from the hypothetical encounter] up in the air turning into the twin lamps that marked where the road divided, half of it going on round the peak, the other half cutting a canyon into the rock….To her right she saw the dark mouth of the canyon and felt its chillier breath on her face….The Jaguar veered left. (p. 183)

By this point in the narrative, it becomes nearly impossible to tell which events are part of the “real” time and which are part of Connie’s hallucinations. The narrative temporality is well and truly in a frenzy. By taking into account what I earlier described as Joaquin’s typographical peculiarity, it can be inferred that the meeting between Connie and Father Prior is another hallucination. However, even after the narrative returns to “real” time, when Connie chooses to turn left instead of right, the narrative again goes back to show one more scene of Connie’s death (the fourth). The reader naturally thinks she has (finally) died as it is implied as much in the opening pages of chapter 5. It is not until the middle of chapter 5 (pp. 200-201) that the reader (and the rest of the

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characters) find out what happened to Connie. She does turn left but unlike the narrative, which shows her hypothetical death by fire, she manages to escape her car before it falls over the cliff and explodes.

As I noted earlier, the progression of Connie’s driving is paralleled in the chronology of the recalled memories. The linear progression of the recalled memories is significant because it fills in all the narrative gaps about Connie and her navels. By the end of the third death scene, Connie’s two navels can be traced to Biliken. After the Japanese occupation of Manila, when Connie and her family revisit their house, she finds that Biliken is now marked with “two small black holes” (p. 166) from gunshots. To her mother Biliken is a grisly figure that no child should own. It is not clear if Joaquin patterns Biliken after the American creation of the same name that is now popular in Japan with its own shrine in Osaka or the more common (in the Philippines at least) laughing Buddha. Despite its frightening appearance, Biliken becomes Connie’s source of comfort during her troubled life: her discovery that her father was an abortionist (one of his patients was actually Concha before they got married), her own mother’s constant abandonment, and finally her discovery of the letters between Macho and Concha. This pattern of trauma is again mirrored in the first three hypothetical death scenes but this time it is in reverse, in the order of the most recent traumatic life event: first, Connie encounters Macho and they both die by land (in a train that is being attacked from the border by communist troops from China); second, she encounters her mother and they both die by water (in a sinking ship); and third, she encounters her father and they both die by air (in an airplane crash). Connie’s recollections thus play an important part in the narrative because as the catalyst of her hallucinations, Connie’s choice and subsequent actions at the end of the novel would not be possible.

The significance of the narrative’s temporal frenzy therefore rests on the functions of recollection and repetition. By underscoring the past in the chapter, Joaquin suggests its importance in his own historical re-vision. Connie’s memories have to be revisited in order for the cathartic hypothetical deaths to take place. That is why it is crucial to locate the temporal position of the hypothetical death scenes as hallucinations brought about by Connie’s

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recollection. By turning to this temporal frenzy in chapter 4, Joaquin develops a formal way to problematize the Philippine historical and cultural disjunction. Connie has to confront her past and recognize how much it is disturbing her present state of mind in the same manner that a rewriting of Philippine history needs to incorporate its Hispanic aspect. But the narrative also cautions against the dangers of glorifying the past. Indeed, the narrative’s temporal frenzy becomes part of the formal portrayal of this warning. The jump to these frenzied hallucinations show that despite the recognition of the past, Connie still has to repeatedly experience her hypothetical deaths; she still has to work her way out of her moral and spiritual turmoil. In the final temporal section the narrative no longer invokes the past; this future, hypothetical encounter with Father Prior corresponds to the role of the memories in the previous three temporal sections. This time, it is her imagined future that becomes the catalyst for her final death.

The implication of Connie’s “enlightenment” is only fully explained in the final chapter, when she ends up back in the Monson residence and finally meets the dying Monson patriarch. As I mentioned before, Pepe had observed that when she had first arrived, she had come looking for a “Doctor Monson:” “You know, Tony,” he said, “I have the strangest feeling it was Father she was looking for, all the time” (p. 193). Connie becomes the catalyst for Doctor Monson’s own epiphany. He finally acknowledges the futility of his exile and realizes that the Hispanic past is not lost after all: “It had not been lost; he had been foolish to think it could ever be lost…Here is was before him…in the faces of his sons…it was now in the present, alive now everywhere in the present” (p. 222). Thus contrary to criticisms of Hispanic nostalgia leveled against the novel, its complex temporal structure is actually a way of avoiding nostalgia. In the climactic chapter 4 time not only shifts between the narrative present (of Connie driving towards the monastery) and her past but also jumps to imagined futures or Connie’s hypothetical deaths. The fluidity of temporal structures suggests a seamless relationship between tradition and modernity.

In my discussion, I have focused primarily on the temporal strategies used in Gonzalez’s A Season of Grace and Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels. I have suggested that such a reading highlights both authors’ historical

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re-visions of the past. On the one hand Gonzalez emphasizes the marginalization of pre-colonial traditions and on the other hand, Joaquin’s project draws attention to the suppressed connection to the Hispanic traditions. In Gonzalez’s novel this is demonstrated through the formal portrayal of the kaingin where the temporal indeterminacy of events reflects how the kaingineros have been subjected to institutionalized exploitation. In Joaquin’s novel this is shown through the temporal frenzy of chapter 4. Although the narrative suggests that the recognition of the historical and cultural disjunction with the Hispanic past is critical for the nation it also warns against the repercussions of glorifying that past. In the next chapter, I return to Gemino Abad’s original intent in his concept of a native clearing within the English language by Filipino writers.

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Chapter Five—Conquering the Frontier: Various Forms of the Native Clearing of English in Filipino Postcolonial Novels

In our prewar fiction, English is expressing itself as it is through the medium of the Filipino. But in our postwar fiction, the Filipino is expressing himself as he is through the medium of English. That is the achievement that today, alas, we tend to belittle or dismiss as irrelevant. How can it be irrelevant? Toynbee has said that the quality of a culture is determined by the way it responds to challenges. English was the challenge, was the frontier, that faced us in the 1900s. Is it to our discredit that we chose to pick up the challenge and to conquer the frontier? (Joaquin 1978, p. 124)

Language, specifically the notion of a colonial language as a national language, is a contentious issue in the Philippines. No one knows this more than the Filipino writer who chooses to write in English. For the Filipino writing in English, according to Lily Rose Tope, “has borne much of the postcolonial burden of proof” (2008, p. 263), that is, the burden of defending his relevance in representing the national interests of the Philippines using a borrowed language. N.V.M. Gonzalez makes this connection between the task of the novelist and nationalism: “Rare is the nation with a novelist for a national hero. Thus, to know what novels are, what their writing entails and what their writers ask of us as readers, is for the individual as well as, perhaps, for the nation, a decisive step toward self-knowledge” (cited in McEnteer, 1997). His comments call attention not only to the author’s perceived responsibility but also the acceptance of that role. This comment is made in reference to Jose Rizal, who wrote his own novels in another colonial language—Spanish—to reveal the problems of Spanish colonization. This subtle, perhaps even unintended, connection to Gonzalez’s own situation as one who writes in a colonial language warrants a closer look.

Rizal's novels in Spanish have long been the benchmark for nationalist writing in the Philippines. Resil Mojares notes: "Though Rizal’s novels were written and published on foreign soil, and shaped by impulses of a broad European

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tradition, they are Filipino in the particularity of motive, subject and intent” [Emphasis added] (1983, p. 150). It is worth repeating that at this point in Philippine history, Filipinos such as Rizal were not called Filipinos, instead they were called Indios. So Mojares confers the concept of "Filipino-ness" on Rizal's novels as the primary factor in assigning them the label, Filipino novels. This clearly coincides with the common idea of Rizal being the "first Filipino.” Rizal’s novels then can be considered Filipino novels not because of the language in which they were written but as Mojares claims, because of their Filipino “motive, subject and intent” (1983, p. 150). What then makes the choice of English in the writing of a Filipino novel so questionable that a Filipino writer has to defend his choice? Or as Joaquin asks, “Since English is not our native language, how can writing done in English be regarded as ‘truly’ Philippine?” (1978, p. 118). We can find the answer in the passionate language debate that dominated Philippine letters post-war.

In “Pinoy English: Language, Imagination, and Philippine Literature,” R. Kwan Laurel explores the politics behind the national language policy debates that I mentioned earlier. Laurel provides a summary of the position of the pro-Filipino (and anti-English) faction: “To affirm the position of English in the Philippines is seen as a negation of Philippine culture. To affirm Filipino as the language for the Philippines is to affirm Philippine culture and history” (2005, p. 538). By linking language with culture, the pro-Filipino group gives language a second and more powerful function besides its conventional use for communication, that of engendering Filipino cultural identity. It is this notion of the embeddedness of cultural identity in language that becomes problematized in postcolonial writing in English. In Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in Post-Colonial Literatures, Bill Ashcroft revisits one of the main tenets of postcolonial studies, the appropriation of the colonial language in formerly colonized nations:

Colonial languages, can, and have, been taken and used in ways that privileged the local culture. The most powerful discovery made by an examination of post-colonial language use is that language is used by people. Although it can be an ontological prison it need not be, for the

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key to post-colonial resistance is that speakers have agency in the ways they employ language to fashion their identity. (2008, p. 3)

Filipino poet and literary critic Gemino Abad echoes this view of the colonial language being transformed at the hands of the formerly colonized. According to Abad, Filipino writers in English have “colonized English because its use in our literature has been chiefly toward a native clearing within the adopted language where its words are found again to establish and affirm a Filipino sense of their world” [Emphases added] (2008, p. 4). And so this thesis comes full circle.

At the start of my investigation into the postcolonial narrative strategies of Filipino novels in English, I turned to Abad’s notion of a native clearing, specifically a native clearing of narratology’s structuralist image. This native clearing of narratology, I argued, is one that recognizes the importance of a postcolonial perspective in the reading of novels from formerly colonized nations such as the Philippines. So far I have looked at the relationship between the use of first-person narration and the recuperation of narrative authority in chapter 2, the deployment of covert, third-person narration as a possible corollary of the position of the Filipina in Philippine society in chapter 3, and the demonstration of alternative temporal strategies as a reflection of postcolonial historical re-visions in chapter 4. At this point I return to Abad’s original intent in his concept of a native clearing within the English language by Filipino writers. If, as Joaquin declares, “English was the challenge, was the frontier” (1978, p. 124) that Filipino writers conquered, in this chapter I want to examine how the Filipino authors I have studied in this thesis formally portray Joaquin’s notion of conquering the frontier. Before I proceed to the analysis of the six novels, I start with a brief discussion of the previous studies on the kind of English used in Philippine literature since it helps establish the difference of opinion between Filipino scholars in linguistics and Filipino literary scholars (and also the Filipino writers in English).

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Standard Philippine English or Philippine english?

Andrew Gonzalez together with Maria Lourdes Bautista are the two foremost Filipino linguists working in the area of world Englishes. Bautista’s (2000), Defining Standard Philippine English: Its Status and Grammatical Features, is the first work to analyze a substantial corpus of Philippine material. Unlike Bautista who has mainly focused on non-fictional material, A. Gonzalez has extended his work to Philippine literature in English. In “Poetic Imperialism or Indigenous Creativity?: Philippine Literature in English,” A. Gonzalez contends that in Philippine literature in English, “barely anything of native literary forms in both structure and techniques has been transferred; only subject-matter and themes are local; the techniques are foreign” (1987, p. 152). He claims further,

the loss of Philippine indigenous traditions, lost even before the coming of the Americans, at least among the Philippine educated elite, is a negative development. In fact, it seems that together with manifstations [sic.] of linguistic, intellectual, scientific and artistic imperialism, one must recognize the reality of literary imperialism as well, for little of the indigenous tradition survives. [Emphases added] (A. Gonzalez 1987, pp. 154-155)

A. Gonzalez’s assertions regarding “a negative development” in Philippine literature in English because of “literary imperialism” seems to relegate Filipino writing in English to irrelevancy because of its disconnect with the “native” past. This position affixes the mark of postcolonial "progress" (in the use of English in Philippine fiction) only with its reconnection with the supposedly indigenous tradition; an argument that has already been refuted by Mojares’ work on the origins and rise of the Filipino novel.

It is this supposed irrelevancy that becomes the focus of Joaquin’s (1978) paper, “The Filipino as English Fictionist.” Whereas A. Gonzalez (1987) is cynical about what he considers the absence of any native form in both “structure and techniques” in Philippine literature in English, Joaquin takes a different perspective:

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English is basically a plain, simple, direct and unemotional language. The Filipino, on the other hand, is highly emotional, indirect and elaborate, very flowery and extravagant in speech. What has ever astonished me is that, when Filipinos began to write in English, they became plain, simple, direct and austere. I suppose that the nature of the language imposed itself on the Filipino writer, creating him after its image. Then we must also remember that the editors and English professors who first influenced our writers were mostly American and would surely not have tolerated the bombastic style in serious writing…. after the 1940s our fiction stops being quiet or simple. It becomes unquiet, it becomes noisy, it becomes experimental, it becomes complex, it becomes elaborate. [Emphases added] (Joaquin 1978, p. 123)

This notion of “noise” is clearly evident in Joaquin’s works as I noted in the previous chapter. I suggested that this strategy might be connected to Joaquin’s desire to recuperate the Hispanic aspect of Philippine heritage in his novel. I discuss in detail how his novel formally portrays this “noise” later in the chapter. But for now, I want to discuss this difference in perspectives between linguistic scholars and literary critics and writers. Isagani Cruz (2001) makes a similar claim to Joaquin’s notion of noise in Filipino literary works in English. In "Philippine Fiction from English,” I. Cruz examines the viability of locating instances of Standard Philippine English (SPE) use in Philippine short stories taken from The Best Philippine Short Stories of the Twentieth Century: An Anthology of Fiction in English (2000). His study considers Bautista’s (2000) findings from her study regarding the grammatical features of SPE. Although I. Cruz is unable to categorically prove or dispute Bautista’s findings in his samples he does propose another mode of looking at the use of English in Philippine fiction, one that is clearly aligned with the idea of postcolonial appropriation. I. Cruz echoes Abad’s native clearing of English in his suggestion of the term Philippine english.

In this chapter I want to examine this appropriation of colonial language by revisiting the six Filipino postcolonial novels that I have studied so far. I am

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speculating that, following Marion Gymnich’s (2002) proposal, the examination of the linguistic relationship between the narrator and character in these novels may provide more formal evidence to test the two contradictory views regarding the use of English in Philippine fiction: on the one hand, A. Gonzalez’s (2002) claims of literary imperialism; on the other hand, Abad, Joaquin, and I. Cruz’s claims of a native clearing, noise, and Philippine english, respectively. In the next section, I discuss Gymnich’s proposal and explain how I intend to examine the novels for this chapter using her theory.

Language and Narration

Early interest in narratology regarding the linguistic relationship between the narrator and characters in postcolonial fiction can be found in Monika Fludernik’s (1996) groundbreaking work “Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology.” In the section on “Ideology and Power,” Fludernik notes the significance of “the choice of language, dialect or idiom for the narrator’s language and for the represented dialogue” in postcolonial fiction (1996, p. 366). Several years later, Gymnich (2002) proposes a way to look at this relationship in her study of postcolonial and minority literatures (for example, Chinese American, African American, Chinese Canadian, Trinidadian Canadian, and the Caribbean). Her proposal takes into consideration the insights brought to light by postcolonial studies, particularly the appropriation of colonial languages by formerly colonized people. What is noteworthy about Gymnich’s proposal is her emphasis on the linguistic relationship between the narrator and the characters (2002, p. 63). The reason for this focus is again tied to the conventional position of authority conferred on the narrator in narratives. According to Susan Lanser, the narrator’s “privileged status” over the “narrated characters” means, “his or her word carries greater authority than the word of the character” (2004, p. 127); that is why, as Gymnich notes, narrators in English literature conventionally “did not use a non-standard language” (2002, p. 65).

In her study, Gymnich notes that the power relations noticeable in the colonial experience mirror the power relations inherent in the structure of narratives (2002, p. 62-65). The narrator in colonial texts, who is conferred “the highest

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degree authority by the readers,” traditionally turns to the colonizer’s language in either the homo- or hetero-diegetic situation (Gymnich 2002, p. 62-65). However, when it comes to the characters’ dialogue, the use of “regional or social varieties of language” or non-standard language were “more or less acceptable” (Gymnich 2002, p. 62-65). That is why in her proposed six categories she differentiates between the two narrative situations (homo- or hetero-diegetic). Gymnich suggests three types for each narrative situation based on the following configuration (2002, pp. 70-73): first (Type 1 and 4), the narrator (heterodiegetic in Type 1 and homodiegetic in Type 4) uses Standard English, one or more characters use a language other than English; second (Type 2 and 5), the narrator (heterodiegetic in Type 2 and homodiegetic in Type 5) uses Standard English, one or more characters use a non-standard language; and third (Type 3 and 6), the narrator (heterodiegetic in Type 3 and homodiegetic in Type 6) and one or more characters use a non-standard language.

Following her categories, the analysis in this chapter begins with a discussion of the two novels which use first-person narrators: Bienvenido Santos' You Lovely People (1956) and N.V.M. Gonzalez's The Bamboo Dancers (1959); followed by the examination of the novels which use third-person narrators beginning with N.V.M. Gonzalez's A Season of Grace (1956) and Nick Joaquin's The Woman Who Had Two Navels then Kerima Polotan's The Hand of the Enemy (1962) and Edith Tiempo's His Native Coast (1979). I hope to demonstrate that the linguistic configurations in these narratives are shaped by the same conditions that influenced the strategies I have previously discussed: how the ambivalence inherent in the Philippine-U.S. neocolonial situation is portrayed in Santos' You Lovely People and N.V.M. Gonzalez's The Bamboo Dancers, how the historical re-visions of N.V.M. Gonzalez and Joaquin are demonstrated in A Season of Grace and The Woman Who Had Two Navels, respectively and how the colonial/patriarchal marginalization of the Filipina is reflected in Polotan's The Hand of the Enemy and Tiempo's His Native Coast.

It is worth noting that with the exception of N.V.M. Gonzalez’s works, all novels were developed out of short stories. In fact, as I have discussed at length,

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Santos’ You Lovely People is widely read as a collection of short stories. Joaquin’s short story, “The Woman Who Had Two Navels” (1960), later became the first chapter of his novel. Polotan’s “The Sounds of Sunday” (1961) forms a bulk of chapter 2 of her novel. And finally, Edith Tiempo’s “The Black Monkey (1951) is a prequel of sorts as it features the same female character—Marina— while she is hiding from Japanese forces in the forest, and “Un Bel Di” (1969) makes up chapter 5 of her novel, except for the extended ending added in the novel. This means that all these works were written and published in a three- decade period. According to Soledad Reyes, this period—that is, the 1960s—is usually regarded as “a fertile period in Philippine writing in English” because “some writers attempted to go beyond a superficial study of native material” (1994, p. 220). This period is also significant because its writers were all educated, at one time or another, by American or American-trained teachers. N.V.M. Gonzalez, Santos, and Tiempo all studied and at some point taught in U.S. universities. As for Polotan, she attended the University of the Philippines, the state university established by the American colonial government in 1908. Only Joaquin did not attend any more formal education past the elementary level but his own mother was one of the first American-taught Filipinos to learn and teach English.

These writers are still essentially America’s “little brown brother,” the patronizing term for the Filipinos used by the first Governor-General of the Philippines, William Howard Taft. I take note of this because the degree to which a novel’s native clearing is demonstrated varies according to the writer’s specific circumstances. As Tope observes, “the process of abrogation begins with the conceptual dismantling of English as a pure (Western) language and the unequivocal, unhesitating exploration and exploitation of its properties to absorb and express the sound and spirit of local cultures” (2008, p. 271). For the remainder of this chapter, I chart how these Filipino novels formally portray Joaquin’s notion of conquering the frontier.

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Translation as the Foundation for Native Clearing in Santos' You Lovely People and N.V.M. Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers

In a revealing lecture, “The Filipino Writers in English as Storyteller and Translator,” Bienvenido Santos declares that the Filipino writer who writes in English has taken on the role of cultural translator:

A translator is ordinarily thought of as a bridge between cultures, as one who takes ideas and carries them over (as its etymology suggests) from one culture to another. It is as though the translator has no life of his own apart from the existence of two separate cultures for which he is the bridge. My view is that the writer in English as translator already is the unity, that is, he is the synthesis, the embodiment of both cultures. In other words, there is no longer a bridge; the unity that is possible between cultures is already incarnate in the writer whose medium is a non-native tongue. For the non-native writer of English, the very act of writing is pure translation. (1991, p. 47)

Interestingly, N.V.M. Gonzalez's attitude towards writing in the colonial language is little more subdued: “The life I described quite literally spoke a different language—and became a different life. Rendered in an alien tongue, that life attained the distinction of a translation even before it had been made into a representation of reality” (1995, p. 63). Nevertheless, both authors have raised how this notion of translation is resonant in their works, willingly for Santos and reluctantly for N.V.M. Gonzalez. I want to suggest that the mode of native clearing in these two novels reflects this notion of the Filipino writer in English as cultural translators. In their novels, the role of translator is assigned to their storyteller or the novel’s narrators.

As I originally posed in chapter 2, the overall narrator in You Lovely People is Ben and because of this, the old-timer Ambo’s tale is an embedded narrative. What makes this embedding significant is Ben’s comment that Ambo relays these stories in Visayan. But Ambo’s story is textually presented (by Ben) in the Standard language. In an interview with Roger Bresnahan, Santos is asked to

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comment about “the problem of the Filipino writer who uses English” and has to “somehow convey the impression that the characters are speaking Tagalog or Bikol or anything but English” (1990, p. 96). Santos’ solution to this supposed problem of authenticity is translation: “That’s why in You Lovely People I have two narrators…. when Ambo talks, he talks in Visayan and the English is supposed to be a translation of his Visayan. That’s why it is poetic, that’s why it’s fluent. Because his Visayan is fluent” (Santos in Bresnahan 1990, p. 96). Notice that Santos does not mention who translates Ambo’s Visayan but he implies it with his reference to the “two narrators,” one of whom translates the other. Crucially, this means that the novel follows Gymnich's Type 4, where the first-person narrator, Ben, uses the standard language (Standard American English) and one or two characters use a language other than English, in this case the second narrator, Ambo, uses Visayan ("translated" Visayan).

When asked by Alegre why he wrote in English, Santos answers, "Americans have asked me that, and I’ve felt affronted. I said, why not? I explained to them that in the first place, I am not a Tagalog; I’m from Pampanga. Yet I have not read anything in Pampango. I studied in English, of course..." [emphases added] (Alegre and Fernandez 1984, p. 218). His statement suggests that because of the imposition of English on the Filipinos, they were left little choice but to use it. I quote at length his reply to Alegre's observation regarding "the question of identity" and language:

We too had problems with the U.S. then. But we did not negate the language we were taught in, and it didn’t matter that we were speaking in English. As a matter of fact, we felt that it was an advantage, because we spoke their language, and we could tell them what we really wanted to say. After World War II, for instance, we were not going away from English, but making English a tool for expressing our feelings. [Emphases added] (Alegre and Fernandez 1984, p. 220-221)

This position is one that is challenged by the nationalist movement that decried English as a denial of Philippine culture and identity. It is, however, a position

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that forms part of the postcolonial appropriation of colonial languages. It is, in fact, a position echoed by Chinua Achebe in “English and the African Writer,"

Those of us who have inherited the English language may not be in a position to appreciate the value of the inheritance. Or we may go on resenting it because it came as part of a package deal which included many other items of doubtful value and the positive atrocity of racial arrogance and prejudice, which may yet set the world on fire. But let us not in rejecting the evil throw out the good with it. (1965, p. 28)

But unlike Achebe, Santos appears hesitant to embrace the local in his English. Is this reluctance, then, also a sign of his denial of the local? Is it ultimately a position that privileges the center?

You Lovely People begins with the narrator using the Standard English to recall his experiences. What is striking about the first few episodes of this novel is the noticeable absence of local words. Understandably the novel is mainly set in the U.S. and most of the characters in these early episodes are either Americans who use Standard American English (SAE) or educated Filipinos (pensionados) who are equipped to use the Standard English. Provisionally, it seems that there is no linguistic gap between the narrator Ben, who narrates in Standard English, and the other characters in the early episodes. However, in the episodes that feature Ambo, a gap starts to emerge. In the episode, "Manila House," Val describes Ambo to the narrator, Ben, “He is well loved by the Filipino community. If he had only been educated, he would have been an articulate leader of our countrymen in this country…. Incidentally he knows very little Tagalog, but it’s better than his English. His Visayan is classic" (p. 60). It is not until the episode, "A Peculiar Rustling," that the kind of English Ambo uses is finally shown through non-standard phonology, “‘Dat’s awright…dat’s awright,' Ambo said in his own brand of English, waving his hand, 'Dat’s nebber mind atoll’ [emphasis added]” (p. 72). This kind of non-standard phonology is similar to what the American G.I. Michael Linder describes as the Filipinos' "awful accent" in Edith Tiempo's His Native Coast.

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So far, I have tried to show that there exists a linguistic gap between the narrator Ben who narrates in the Standard language and the character Ambo who also later narrates in Visayan which Ben translates back to English (p. 103): “Ambo was talking in the dialect, unburdening himself and telling the story of the dead Nanoy.” The question, then, is why does Ben translate Ambo? This act of translation may be considered an act that seems to privilege the center. The overall narrator, Ben, seems to impose the colonial language in the translation of Ambo's story. But if Ambo's plea for his stories to be heard (p. 109) is considered, then Ben's act of translation serves as an act that assists in the retrieval of the silenced voices of the laborers or old-timers such as Ambo. The translation then becomes an act that recuperates the local, through Ambo’s Visayan, rather than denying it. As I noted in chapter 3, when Ben was questioned by the American Duke about why he must write in English when he has "a language of [his] own” (p. 10), the question/comment does not get any reaction from Ben (his experiencing self) nor does the narrating self say anything about it, which I suggested is linked to Santos' own position regarding the colonial language as the main language he learned and used for writing.

The linguistic configuration in You Lovely People demonstrates Santos’ interpretation of the notion of the Filipino writer in English as a storyteller- translator. For Santos, “The goal of the storyteller-translator, therefore, is not so much to ferry across a bridge, but to conflate, juxtapose, coalesce; not so much to trans-fer, as it is to trans-form; not so much to carry over, as it is to change over” (1991, p. 47). Although it is an act that ultimately embeds the old-timer Ambo’s voice beneath the voice of the pensionado Ben, it is still one that provides the space for their stories to be heard. Crucially, it is also an act that attempts to "share" Ben's narrative authority with Ambo.

The Bamboo Dancers follows You Lovely People in deploying a narrator who uses Standard English in his recollection of the events in his life in the U.S. as a sculptor-scholar. But unlike You Lovely People that clearly marks the translation of Ambo's Visayan to American English by the overall narrator, Ben, the notion of translation in The Bamboo Dancers takes on a different form. As I noted in chapter 2, N.V.M. Gonzalez originally wrote the novel in Tagalog but

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abandoned the project due to criticism about its themes being unfit for a Tagalog publication. With this information in mind, it becomes possible to simply consider the whole novel as a "translated" novel. However, the language, of both the narrator and majority of the characters, in this version at least, does not project the same local rhythm or "transliteration" in the local syntax that is quite noticeable in his earlier novel A Season of Grace, which I discuss in the next section.

Unlike Ambo's case in Santos’ You Lovely People, where Ben can be tagged as the "translator," in N.V.M. Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers it is just Ernie who narrates. I want to suggest that the two strategies N.V.M. Gonzalez uses in this novel, just like Santos’ strategy in You Lovely People, demonstrates the notion of the narrator as cultural translator. It is Ernie who translates some of the dialogue into English. He does not mark them save for two incidents: first, when he meets a Filipino family in chapter 3 of the novel and he speaks Tagalog and second, when a non-Filipino speaks it later in chapter 5. When local terms are used by Ernie they are usually contextualized. Here is Ernie in chapter 5 describing the crowd at his hotel’s lobby: “There was no mistaking them; they were Filipinos. An elderly woman in a butterfly-sleeved dress led the group, and the men were all them in barong tagalog” (pp. 246-247). Ernie uses a descriptive term to identity the woman’s dress. Instead of using the Filipino term, Balintawak, he opts for the phrase “butterfly-sleeved dress” in order to contextualize the male counterpart of the traditional Filipino attire, the barong tagalog. Later in the same page, Ernie then refers to the same woman and her clothing as “Balintawak dress” because he has already described it a few sentences earlier. This strategy, according to Gymnich, does not risk the loss of reader comprehension “while at the same time stressing not only the alterity, but also the autonomy of the linguistic and cultural world that is presented” (2002, p. 69).

Similar to the translation of Ambo's Visayan, it is the novel's second strategy that warrants further discussion. In order to understand Ernie’s attitude towards English and Tagalog, it is important to take note of a key event in the novel. The

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first reference to the use of Tagalog occurs in chapter 2 when Ernie is writing postcards to send back home to the Philippines:

"May you be hale and strong for always; and please, Mother, don't worry about me..." It was the sort of message I had set down many times before, if perhaps in a different way each time. It was embarrassing, I knew; but I couldn't help it. Mother could read English; and maybe, the language would make it less banal. I wished I had written it in Tagalog; and yet, again--oh, well, the thing was done. Still, just so I might feel good, I did another card for Father--in Tagalog. He'd receive it in Sipolog, at the farm. [Emphases added] (p. 60)

It can be inferred from this event that Ernie has been writing his postcards to his family in the Philippines mostly in English. While his mother "could read English" it was clearly not used for intimacy that is why he hoped his choice of words made it sound "less banal." This event highlights Ernie's detached nature because his preference for English in writing these notes, which he acknowledges was better written in Tagalog, creates some sort of distance from his mother. As a form of self-reproach he turns to Tagalog in the second note for his father.

Ernie, it seems, is quite aware of the sense of intimacy engendered in using Tagalog. Consider the following exchange between Ernie and another Filipino in chapter 3: "'Well, Mr. ___,' I began to sense something interesting. 'Ernesto Rama's the name. At your service,' I said in Tagalog. The old man didn't answer in Tagalog. He probably was Spanish-speaking" (p. 149). Ernie's observation regarding the man possibly being a Spanish-speaking Filipino is a subtle reminder of the social stratification associated with language in the Philippines. Unlike English which became accessible to the masses like Ernie who is a provinciano (from the rural area), only those in the higher socioeconomic class learned Spanish. So what we have here is Ernie who, as his experiencing self, tried to use Tagalog in order to connect with another Filipino only to experience a rejection of his greeting. However, what is interesting about this exchange is that this is the first instance that Ernie mentions using Tagalog. In his speech

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with other Filipinos, notably Helen, the narrative does not signal whether the English used by the characters is in Tagalog, or translated from Tagalog or not. The reader is meant to accept that two Filipinos in the U.S. would use Standard English, rather than Tagalog, to communicate. Although the narrative does not mark these sections as translations, consider the following exchange between Ernie and the kasambahay or the housekeeper in chapter 6 of the novel,

"Rosa," I said to the girl who was setting the table for supper. "You don't like the washing machine, do you?" "Oh, Manong," she said, "I'm afraid to touch it. I don't know how it works." (p. 297)

Ernie does not make note of any accent in Rosa's speech (as Ben’s friend Val did when he described Ambo’s English) nor does the narrative use non- standard phonology. Traditionally, housekeepers or domestic workers in the Philippines who come from rural areas to work in cities like Manila are rarely educated or if they were they wouldn’t speak English in a household of Tagalog speakers. We may consider Rosa’s use of the Tagalog sign of respect for an older male, Manong, as a signal that Ernie may have translated this dialogue which means that Ernie, the narrator, is translating himself. But again, this is still not clear because in an earlier event, when his brother Pepe voices his fear that his packages for his trip home to the Philippines may get lost, a bemused Ernie comments, “For crying out loud,” I said, “Kuya, you’re definitely provinciano” (p. 147). “Kuya" is another Tagalog sign of respect for an older male, usually an older brother. Ernie’s use of “kuya” and “provinciano” does not necessarily signal a translation on the part of the narrator Ernie. He does, however, leave the local words untranslated in the sentence.

Crucially, in another event in chapter 6, when Ernie visits his father in Sipolog, the dialogue is also in Standard English. It would not be far-fetched to consider that the conversation between Ernie and his father is again translated in this event. After all, the farm is a very intimate locale for Ernie and his family and to communicate in Standard English would contradict what was earlier established in the incident with the postcards in chapter 2 regarding the use of Tagalog

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and/or English. In this way, despite the absence of narratorial comments indicating that the dialogue in these scenes are translated from Tagalog, it is still possible to interpret, based on contextual information, that Ernie, as the narrator, has translated it for his narratee. I want to suggest that due to the unmarked “translation” in these scenes the strategy in The Bamboo Dancers indicates N.V.M. Gonzalez’s desire to locate his narrator and characters in a similar linguistic plane even if it means that his narrator is perceived as an unintentional translator.

Consequently, the form of native clearing in both novels does exactly what Santos had imagined a storyteller-translator would do: “conflate, juxtapose, coalesce.” In the case of You Lovely People, the translation is evident because Ambo’s tale in Visayan is embedded in Ben’s narration in English whereas in The Bamboo Dancers it is only implied because save for two events, Ernie does not refer to the use of Tagalog. There is, however, an unexpected by-product of this translation, one which I think N.V.M. Gonzalez acknowledges when he notes that his characters “spoke a different language—and became a different life.” In the process of translating the local to English, have they managed to “trans-form” English? The authors’ attempt to try to reflect in their linguistic strategies a “synthesis” of two cultures again echoes the inherent ambivalence of the postcolonial situation, this time when faced with the simultaneous pull of their local language and the colonial one: to almost transform, but not quite. In the remaining sections I examine whether this notion of translation is still palpable in the novels that use third-person narrators.

"Imposing" the Filipino on the English Language in N.V.M. Gonzalez’s A Season of Grace and Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels

In her study of Philippine literature in English, Tope notes, “The Filipino cultural impingement on English is perhaps felt more in the use of local situations and Filipino words, speaker cadence and allusions rather than a definite ‘variety’ such as those found in, say, Singapore and Malaysia” [emphases added] (2008, p. 269). I want to suggest that Gonzalez portrays this “cultural impingement” on English in A Season of Grace. The narrative achieves this effect through two

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strategies; first, by including local words everywhere in the language of both the narrator and the characters and second, by trying “to capture the syntax and rhythms of the local languages” (Hidalgo 2008, p. 25). In the opening paragraphs of A Season of Grace, the narrator uses several local words such as sitio, cogon, cogonal, hinagdong, kaingins, banca, bayanan, which are italicized, and some that are not italicized such as bolo, carabao, barrio. The italicized words correspond to native words whereas the non-italicized words correspond to Spanish-loan words that have become part of the local language. This strategy of including “a large variety of indigenous expressions,” notes Fludernik, is an example of how non-native writers in English “react to the problem of non-English lexical items” (2012, p. 918). She notes further, that novels which are “mostly geared towards a Western audience, abide by the traditional format and even add a vocabulary list at the end of the volume.” On the surface, A Season of Grace seems to do exactly that. In fact, Gonzalez adds a glossary at the end of the book. When asked by Bresnahan about this, N.V.M. Gonzalez comments that it was his decision to add a glossary, a task which he took particular care in writing, and insists that it was written for “deracinated Filipinos” (1990 p. 60). It is important to note that Bresnahan is an American scholar. For N.V.M. Gonzalez to specifically mention the intended audience not only of the book but also of the glossary coincides with his prior repudiation of his critics regarding accusations that he wrote only “to satisfy the taste of the Western literary establishment” (1995, p. 89). His comment about writing the glossary for deracinated Filipinos warrants some attention.

Indeed, some of the local words used by N.V.M. Gonzalez would be foreign to some Filipinos mainly due to the Philippines’ myriad of local languages but also because some of these words are no longer commonly used. In a way the inclusion of the glossary again highlights the ambivalence inherent in postcolonial writers in English. On the one hand, N.V.M. Gonzalez wants the English used in the narrative to closely capture the language of the people from Mindoro. On the other hand, he also does not want to alienate his readers, the deracinated Filipino. It is worth noting, however, that N.V.M. Gonzalez does not prepare a glossary for The Bamboo Dancers. Considering the fact that The Bamboo Dancers had a U.S. edition and A Season of Grace was only published

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by a local publisher, it does beg the question as to why he does not include one for The Bamboo Dancers. As I explained in the previous section, in The Bamboo Dancers, N.V.M. Gonzalez formally accounts for this by translating the local to English. When local terms are used in The Bamboo Dancers, such as the ones that appear in the later chapters, 5 and 6, the words are contextualized instead of being listed in a glossary.

Although it is easy to consider the inclusion of the glossary at the end of the novel as evidence of N.V.M. Gonzalez's orientalist bent, this needs to be understood in context with his other strategy. Majid describes the language of the novel as follows: “In transliterating the idiom of the local dialect into English, N.V.M. Gonzalez is, in effect, tailoring the medium to meet the demands of the material” [Emphases added] (1970, p. 87). In order to weave the local into English, N.V.M. Gonzalez includes various local words in both the narrator's discourse and the characters' dialogue. I want to suggest that N.V.M. Gonzalez's native clearing of English is one that walks the fine line between an orientalist approach and one that tries “to capture the syntax and rhythms of the local languages” (Hidalgo 2008, p. 25). By doing so, N.V.M. Gonzalez tries to lessen the “foreign-ness” of using English in the depiction of the lives of the kaingin farmers. In effect, unlike in The Bamboo Dancers, N.V.M. Gonzalez seems to be far more concerned in portraying the local within English rather than translating the local to English. However, that novel was set mainly in the U.S. and this one is in Mindoro. Plus The Bamboo Dancers also highlights the ambivalent attitude of the narrator Ernie towards his local traditions and his former colonizer patron.

In A Season of Grace, the language used by the third-person narrator is virtually indistinguishable from the characters. In his study on voice and free indirect discourse in contemporary omniscient fiction, Paul Dawson refers to this as “shared linguistic habitus” (2013, p. 183). A Season of Grace demonstrates this through the “shared” language of the narrator and the characters. Consider the following narratorial report of the kaingineros during their lunch break:

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The two old ones were Ora Basion and Nong Tomas. Clara, it turned out, was their niece. And here also was Nay Pas, who was Clara’s mother. And Nong Jose, who was Clara’s step-father. Bibo and Inggay were Nong Jose’s children by his first wife, and were they not grown up enough to have families of their own? Ay, but they liked being around and helping the folks. [Emphasis added] (p. 50)

The narrator’s use of the local interjection “ay” indicates this shared language. Sabel, a few pages later, also utters another local interjection: “‘Susmaryosep!’ Sabel gasped” (p. 57). In the characters' discourse, the local is more pronounced. Consider the following passage:

It happened that she was at the well, washing her sinamay blouse and patadiong, when the first pains came: “I can look after you. Have no fear,” Nay Kare assured her, when Sabel ran to her hut behind the tamarind tree. And to Doro, who came to find out why Sabel had not returned from the well, the old midwife said: “Go now, and don’t worry. Do what you have to do. We, women, can take care of ourselves.” (p. 36)

The transliteration from Visayan of Nay Kare's lines suggests N.V.M. Gonzalez’s attempt at trying to impose the local syntax in English and in a way marks the characters' language as a foreign language. What is striking about these strategies in the representation of both the narrator and characters' discourse is that despite the inclusion of local words and local expressions, the language used still meets the standard conventions of American English writing or Standard American English (SAE). So A Season of Grace follows Gymnich's type 1 where the third-person narrator still uses the standard language, despite the introduction of a lot of local words into the SAE, and one or two characters use a language other than English. The only reason the characters' dialogue can be assigned the tag of “language other than English” is because the notable local syntax in some sections, not all dialogue, suggests the foreign- ness of the characters’ language. Let us now look at the implication of this configuration in the novel.

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Gymnich observes that in the first type there is a large linguistic disparity between the narrator who uses the standard language and the characters who use a language other than English (2002, p. 70). This disparity, according to Gymnich, is tied to the power structure inherent in the narrative. Conventionally, this means that in the characters' dialogue the use of a language other than English is acceptable but not in the narrator’s discourse because only Standard English is suitable for the highest level of narrative authority. Interestingly, despite the established linguistic gap between the narrator and characters and because of what I noted earlier as their shared linguistic habitus, what is demonstrated is not a monumental distance between the narrator and the characters—rather a sort of "intimacy and solidarity" is exhibited. According to Gymnich, this “expression of intimacy and solidarity,” (2002, p. 71) is normally portrayed in type 3 where the third-person narrator and one or more characters use a non-standard language. N.V.M. Gonzalez's strategy in A Season of Grace, as I noted earlier, is an attempt to minimize the “foreign-ness” of using English in the depiction of the lives of the kaingineros.

This is why, I argue, the use of the glossary acquires a non-orientalist designation. While the glossary does highlight the distance between “us and them,” the inclusion of the listed words in both the narrator's discourse and the characters' dialogue implies some level of intimacy between the narrator and the characters because they share this local language. It is also important to remember that the reason behind N.V.M. Gonzalez’s inclusion of the glossary does not necessarily privilege the former colonizer. Instead it reminds us of the archipelagic nature of the Philippine cultural identity. That is, despite the insistence of the proponents of the national language, Tagalog is only one of the many languages used by Filipinos. So, for the deracinated Filipino whose only knowledge of a “Filipino” language is their own local language, the glossary serves as a reminder of the other languages in the Philippines. The native clearing of English in A Season of Grace thus reflects the notion of cultural impingement, in this case of the Filipino on English. Despite the narrator's use of Standard language and the characters' use of local language, the strong presence of the local or N.V.M. Gonzalez's attempt to impose the local in the

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narrator's discourse and the sometimes-shared language with the characters minimize the gap associated with this linguistic configuration.

A. Gonzalez claims that Joaquin's deployment of language in The Woman Who Had Two Navels "is within the potentialities of the English language and is not a carry-over from any native tradition or a transfer in discourse structure from Tagalog to English" [emphasis added] (1987, p. 153). However, I want to suggest that it is precisely in Joaquin's experimentations "within the potentialities of the English language" that the novel becomes linguistically subversive through his recovery of a Filipino tradition, specifically the Hispanic aspect. Unlike A. Gonzalez who was fixated on locating the "native tradition" or "a transfer in discourse structure from Tagalog" in his study of Philippine English, Joaquin was clearly concerned in "imposing his style on the [English] language and shaping it" [emphasis added] (1978, p. 124). Previously described by scholars as "lush" (Bernad 1961, p. 61; Furay 1972, p. 10), the language in Joaquin's novel "borrows the cadences and the exuberance of Spanish" (Pantoja-Hidalgo 2008, p. 25).

In order to better understand Joaquin's linguistic strategy, it is best to briefly discuss his position in the controversial choice of Tagalog as the national language. In "The Language of the Streets," Joaquin's essay on slang reflects his position regarding this issue. Joaquin tellingly writes:

People who doubt that Spanish is a foundation of the national language have only to note that when the masses, who know no formal Spanish, construct a word, the construction is often Spanish. There must, therefore be a Spanish source that masses draw from. Spanish is not dead in the Philippines; we unknowingly speak it every moment of our lives, and it continues to be one of the roots from which flowers the vernacular. [Emphasis added] (1963, p. 10-11)

In this essay, Joaquin is not convinced about the viability of Tagalog, specifically the formal kind that was pushed by the proponents of the national language policy. For Joaquin, the kind of Tagalog they proposed, contrary to

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their justification, did not spring from the masses. After all, not everyone spoke Tagalog. In The Bisayan Dialects of the Philippines: Subgrouping and Reconstruction, David Paul Zorc notes, “Cebuano alone has the greatest number of native speakers in the republic. If taken together with other members of the immediate family (Hiligaynon, Waray, Aklanon, Kinaray-a, Surigaonon, etc.), speakers of binisayáq come to over forty percent of the Philippine population” (1977, p. 7). Instead Joaquin points to the potential of street corner talk or slang. Joaquin here is problematizing the main point of argument used by the pro-Tagalog group. If the main idea behind the national language is to unify the people, then why turn to a language that is not used by the masses? Joaquin draws attention to the influence of Spanish on the vernacular or the local languages used by people of all backgrounds despite the repression of the Hispanic traditions. Joaquin even goes as far as to playfully suggest that perhaps, if we probed deeper, the very origins of some English words may have come from local Philippine languages. The salient point in Joaquin's essay is that the notion of a pure, truly native national language is no longer possible in the Philippine postcolonial situation. So, what does this mean for Joaquin's native clearing of English in his novel?

As I discussed in the previous chapter, Joaquin's project of historical re-vision in his novel is anchored on a recuperation of the Hispanic aspect of Philippine history and culture because it was repressed by the American colonial presence and the subsequent nationalist/nativist agenda. Joaquin's desire to reverse the shame that accompanied overt signs of the Hispanic is not only formally portrayed in his spatiotemporal strategies, it is also "imposed" in the narrative's language. But besides the clearly subversive nature of the narrative's language, does this extend to the narrative's configuration of the linguistic relationship between the narrator and the characters? The subversive possibilities of Joaquin’s language style are reproduced in the linguistic relationship between the narrator and the characters. At no point does the narrator mark any shifts to any language in The Woman Who Had Two Navels. The narrator and the characters both speak English. On the surface the kind of English they use may seem to be the standard version but as the novel progresses what is portrayed is a non-standard variety. Thus, the novel's configuration of the linguistic

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relationship between the narrator and the characters corresponds to Gymnich's third type where both the third-person narrator and one or two characters speak a non-standard English. "This linguistic constellation," according to Gymnich, “involves a subversive and assertive use of a non-standard language by the speaker who is accorded the highest degree of authority in the text” (2002, p. 71). This linguistic configuration is demonstrated in the narrative using four strategies: first, the narrator's discourse reflects Joaquin's penchant for excess in his elaborate syntax; second, the narrator's use of various characters for focalization allows for the bleeding of this excess into the representation of characters' consciousness; third, in the characters' dialogue, borrowing from Joaquin words, “their tone of voice [is] no longer sweet and low” (1978, p. 123); and fourth, both the narrator and characters' discourse contain untranslated Spanish and Latin words and phrases.

The narrator's discourse in the novel has already been extensively studied because it is what scholars usually describe when they speak of Joaquin's "language style." But A. Gonzalez's linguistic analysis is worth quoting at length:

The clear innovation in language is his use of long, run-on sentences— sentence-paragraphs—which, while following the conventions of English orthography and mechanics in capitalization and punctuation, do not follow normal canons of good writing....There is a piling up of participial phrases, usually using right-branching and adjunctions (to use the terminology of transformational generative grammar), creating an almost mesmerizing effect and leading to a crescendo of emotional pitch. [Emphases added] (1987, p. 153)

The complexity and elaborateness of the narrator's discourse corresponds to Joaquin's notion of "noise" in the kind of English used by Filipino writers post- war. The most representative section of this strategy is found in the ending of chapter 4, in Connie's fourth and final frenzied hallucination of her death. I am only including the beginning section of this two-page long sentence-paragraph:

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Terror and speed veining her flesh with lighting, she swept round the hilltop, smelling the sea and tasting its salt on her breath, and hearing, through the shriek of space rushed past as though dragged by the wind, a dim roar approaching, the rumbling of seawaves; the radiance brimming now over the top of the road and streaming upon her face as she rose smoothly from darkness into light, as the road that had been like a wall between her and the radiance fell away, dissolved, it seemed, by the brightness, by the glory of the revelation—for there it was, the moon, huge and pure and perfect. (pp. 183-184)

Crucially, this "piling up of participial phrases" in the narrator's discourse adds to the effect of temporal frenzy because it is focalized through Connie. Oscillating between narrated perception (as shown in the above excerpt) and psychonarration, as shown in the following: “she could hardly hear the sea, and was only vaguely aware that the night had awakened, that the whole world seemed to have come to life” (p. 184), it is through the narrator's use of elaborate language in the representation of Connie's mental state that her hallucinations in chapter 4 achieve its desired frenzied effect.

The characters' discourse also reflects what Joaquin refers to as a change in the "tone of voice." This is evident in the language used by the female characters because it no longer conforms to the kind of language that the Filipina as Maria Clara would have used. This is best represented in the comic scene between Father Tony Monson and Connie Escobar in chapter 3 (pp. 93- 96). Connie is no longer the "Maria Clara" of her grandmother's generation who would naturally be reluctant to speak her mind. In her replies to Father Tony's questions, Connie's language is assertive; it is, as Joaquin observes about the kind of English used in the post-war Philippine fiction, “unquiet” (1978, p. 123). Finally, both narrator and characters also use Spanish phrases and words which are never translated nor explained. It is worth noting that the main characters (the Vidals, Escobars, and Monsons) in Joaquin's novel come from upper-class families, who have a Hispanic background. Only Paco has parents with a working-class background. This has previously been a source of criticism regarding Joaquin's supposedly bourgeois stories. However, the Spanish

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phrases (p. 33) and Spanish words are easily understood through contextualization, in the former, or because they have become part of everyday language, in the latter.

According to Fludernik, “By using non-Standard English for the narrator’s language, a strong statement is made about confident national assurance in one’s own native use of the colonizer’s language as an innovative and independent resource” (2012 p. 919). As previously noted, Joaquin was never concerned with following conventions but by eschewing the conventions of the Standard language in his narrator's and characters' discourse, Joaquin demonstrates in his novel that it is possible to use the colonizer's language without having to undermine the Filipino. In Joaquin's preoccupation with bringing back the Hispanic past in his works he has also found a way to affirm the Hispanic aspect of the Filipino cultural identity. Contrary to Bernad's claim regarding Joaquin's disdain for “Americans and things American” (1961, p. 66), the novel's language actually demonstrates his acceptance of at least one thing American, the colonial language. Joaquin’s disavowal of the standards of American English is precipitated by his paradoxical acceptance of English as his language, that is, a Filipino language. In his native clearing of English in the novel, Joaquin not only claims English as a Filipino language but also, through his narrator's use of this non-standard version, re-claims the narrative authority of the former colonized. Thus, Joaquin's examination of the Philippine cultural and historical disjunction in The Woman Who Had Two Navels reveals another subversive layer, this time through the novel's linguistic configuration.

As a result, both novels demonstrate another form of the native clearing of English. Just like Joaquin’s attempt to impose the Hispanic on English, in A Season of Grace, N.V.M. Gonzalez tries to weave the local into English. Although the linguistic configuration where the narrator uses Standard language and the characters use local language establishes a linguistic gap, N.V.M. Gonzalez's attempt to impose the local in the narrator's discourse and the sometimes-shared language with the characters minimizes the gap associated with this linguistic configuration. In a way, his native clearing of English is also similar to Joaquin’s in the manner that it also complements the formal portrayal

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of his historical re-vision, that is, how temporal indeterminacy demonstrates the non-specificity of events and therefore, brings to light the institutionalized exploitation of kaingineros.

A Language of Her Own: Becoming More at Home with English in Polotan’s The Hand of the Enemy and Tiempo's His Native Coast

Departing from the language strategies of the three foremost male Filipino writers in English, I now turn to two of the foremost female writers of their generation, Kerima Polotan and Edith Tiempo. If in both Santos’ You Lovely People and N.V.M. Gonzalez's The Bamboo Dancers the notion of the Filipino writer as cultural translator influences their approach to colonizing the colonial language, or in both N.V.M. Gonzalez's A Season of Grace and Joaquin's The Woman Who Had Two Navels the Filipino is imposed on the English, Polotan’s The Hand of the Enemy and Tiempo’s His Native Coast also take a different form. As I argued in chapter 4, despite the marginalized position of the Filipino woman in Philippine society both Polotan and Tiempo’s novels turned to the strategy of the covert narrator because it allowed them to minimize the authority of their narrators to satisfy the conventions of their milieu which designates narrative authority as a male domain. Following their constrained position as women writers, Polotan and Tiempo’s novels do not experiment with the colonial language; none of Joaquin's elaborate, paragraph-length sentences appear in their novels. For the most part, it reads just like any other narrative written using the standard language.

In Polotan’s The Hand of the Enemy, however, the narrator and the characters again seem to share a similar language. But unlike Gonzalez’s A Season of Grace where the projection of foreign-ness in the characters’ discourse (primarily demonstrated in the transliteration of the local syntax) becomes the contextual signal that the characters speak in a foreign language, Polotan’s strategy does not give away much. In part one of Polotan’s novel, the narrator and characters use a variety of Filipino, although mostly Spanish loan words, such as: cajista, vale (p. 1), municipio (p.7), patio (p. 8), Manang (p. 10), lawislawis, jota, colorums (p. 14), Señor's queridas, Señora's ternos (p. 18),

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azotea (p. 27), and "platter of galletas and bottles of sarsaparilla" (p. 28). As shown in the last example, Polotan inserts these foreign words without translation but does not risk the loss of reader comprehension because she strategically situates them within the sentence thus allowing for understanding via contextualization. This strategy also works due to the use of Spanish loan words which no longer need translation because it has become widely-used in the Philippines.

What makes Polotan's strategy somewhat different from Gonzalez's A Season of Grace is her suppression of the local in clearly local-speaking characters. In part one of the novel, the narrator (focalized through Emma) describes Isabelo, the cajista: "At the same time, beneath the guilt, something tender stirred in her heart for the thin, consumptive employee. Poverty was always crushing. Isabelo came to work in his dirty t-shirts, with his grimy nails, looking as if it had been years since his last meal" [emphases added] (p. 1). Here the narrator establishes that Isabelo is Emma's poverty-stricken employee, yet later in the chapter, he manages to speak in English to Emma, "Isabelo crept up to Emma Gorrez and plaintively asked, 'Missis, how long will this go on?'” (p. 54). The use of "Missis," which is non-standard phonology, in lieu of the formal title "missus," may indicate that Isabelo’s language is Tagalog because the former is usually used in local speech but not exclusively. “Missis” can also be used in combination with English, locally known as Taglish. So, the narrative does not provide any more clues that the characters use a foreign language besides this small slip and the socio-economic evidence suggested by Emma’s thoughts. Consequently, the language of the narrator still follows the conventions of SAE despite the profusion of local words in the narrator’s discourse, and despite the characters’ use of local words and the aforementioned clue above, the characters also mainly use the standard language.

What are the implications of this linguistic configuration in Polotan's attempt at native clearing of the colonial language? Although the language of both narrator and characters is presented in the Standard language, it is precisely this homogenous appearance that points to the lack of linguistic disparity and demonstrates a sort of "intimacy and solidarity" between the narrator and

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characters. As I noted in the examination of the linguistic configuration in A Season of Grace, this "expression of intimacy and solidarity” (Gymnich 2002, p. 71) is normally portrayed in type 3 where the third-person narrator and one or more characters use a non-standard language. Even though the language used by both is still the standard language, the fact that Polotan bestows characters like Isabelo the ability to use it expertly suggests that Polotan does not want to confine the ability to use it to a specific socio-economic class specifically those who belong to the upper and middle class.

My claim regarding this intimacy between the narrator and the characters is related to my earlier argument in chapter 3. In Polotan's attempt to "rearrange" narrative authority, she deploys a third-person narrator who turns to covert strategies such as free indirect discourse (FID) to represent the characters' consciousness. Consider the following excerpt of the narrator with Emma imagining, with the aid of Mrs. Pintoy’s colorful stories, about Rene Rividad and his promiscuous wife:

In the large room with a print of the Last Supper looking down at them, the walls washed yellow by an old bulb, Mrs. Pintoy conjured for Emma Mercene the persons of two—the illegitimate daughter of the town politician, seeking: What had she sought in the arms of the tortured, haunted man whose father had led two hundred others to a useless death? Tethered like puppets, jerked here and there, meeting at last upon a wedding bed—the postures of passion and the sighs of love had not sufficiently strangled the demons that dogged these two lives: Norma’s mother, visited twice weekly by the loud-mouthed betel nut- chewing vice alcalde, crept to in the dark like some animal, in the hut by the cockpit, the windows closed, the lights out. And Rene Rividad. What manner of devil plagued him? The memory of a father, sightless, headless, in the sun-baked patio of the Tayug Church: his mother plunging down upon her womb—had she perhaps screamed: Life within me, death without? (p. 22)

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In the excerpt above, Polotan’s language style comes close to Joaquin’s notion of noise in the use of English. Some sentences are complex and elaborate. The use of FID in scenes where Emma’s thoughts are the focal point, as I previously discussed in chapter 3, allows Polotan to reclaim her voice. In a way, the narrator’s continued use of the Standard language and the glimpses of the complex and elaborate language in sections of FID in Emma’s scenes are proof of the limitations that writers like Polotan faced. Despite her desire to be heard in a language of her own, she can only do so if her narrator’s voice can be concealed behind Emma’s thoughts unless Polotan wants to risk “her womanly reputation” (Polotan 1975, p. 25).

Out of all the novels discussed in this thesis, Edith Tiempo's His Native Coast has to be the most unusual because the novel’s title alludes to the male American protagonist’s search for his identity. More importantly, because of this American protagonist her novel portrays a narrator who focalizes a significant portion of the narrative through this character. In fact, as I mentioned in chapter 4, some scholars have been highly critical of Tiempo because of the supposedly pro-American sentiments of her novel. In an interview with Bresnahan, Tiempo observes,

There was a time when he [Filipino writer] had many indigenous feelings and attitudes which he couldn’t couch adequately, or so he thought, in the new medium. When one borrows a language, one really doesn’t borrow the significations. And so what the Filipino writer did at the beginning was to be safe. He talked of universal postures of the soul which could be couched in any language whatsoever, rather than try to express an indigenous thing elusive in a second language. However, when he became more at home with the language, he thought, why do I just talk of these things? Why not about my society, my concerns as a Filipino? [Emphases added] (1980, p.131)

In her depiction of the Filipino writer who has become "at home with the [colonial] language," Tiempo acknowledges that it took time for writers like her to recognize that English could be used to write about local matters. Indeed, His

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Native Coast becomes the embodiment of this sentiment. Due to her novel’s emphasis on the journey of the male, American protagonist and, perhaps, because of her desire to position her narrator as covertly as possible, her novel follows a peculiar linguistic configuration where the language used by the narrator appears to be homogenous with that of her main characters specifically the American Michael Linder and even the Filipina Marina Lacambre. I want to suggest that Tiempo’s approach to the native clearing of English reflects her view of what she thought was an acceptable theme for novels written in English which were, as she puts it, about “universal postures of the soul.”

In His Native Coast the issue of the use of the colonial language by the colonized figures prominently in part I. Upon hearing the local rebels speak English amongst each other, the American Michael Linder's thoughts are described by the narrator as follows:

To Michael it all sounded more quaint that quarreling. His trouble was their awful accent and the scandalous way they mingled English and whatever vernacular came in handy. The men came from different regions and they spoke different dialects, and most of these were not even mutually understood in the camp. Still, everyone seemed to manage one bewildering English tongue for their little wranglings. (p. 24)

As I noted in chapter 3, the narrator clearly marks this as Michael's thoughts with "To Michael" instead of merely making a comment as the narrator. The narrator's turn to Michael for focalization thus allows the narrator to distance herself from his thoughts. The narrative's emphasis on Michael's agitation early on in the novel regarding the language "gap" he thought he had with the Filipinos is somewhat re-visited in the last chapter. In his futile quest to bring some sense into Marina, Michael meets Old Simeon, who clearly spoke no word of English. But despite this linguistic gap, Michael develops a way to communicate and understand Old Simeon through hand gestures (p. 282). Although the representation of Old Simeon may have shades of the colonial stereotype of the native as silent or unable to communicate, the narrative’s portrayal of Old Simeon as the one who ushers in Michael’s eventual epiphany

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suggests that despite Old Simeon’s lack of English skills, he is ultimately the one who provides Michael the space to resolve his identity issues. Consequently, the linguistic configuration in His Native Coast shows a narrator who uses the Standard language and one or two characters that use a language other than English.

In a way, this configuration means that Michael’s criticism of the Filipinos’ ability to use English is undermined by the narrator’s use of his language. As I noted in chapter 3, Tiempo's narrator also turns to Marina for focalization. The narrator also uses the same kind of English in reporting Marina’s thoughts, that is, Standard American English. Consider again the following quote of Marina’s thought representation in part II, which I discussed earlier in chapter 3:

In chapter 3, I emphasized the inclusion of the interjection “all right” indicates the narrator’s affinity to Marina. Interestingly, although this interjection first appears in Marina’s thoughts, it appears again in part III, this time as part of Michael’s thoughts when he meets fellow G.I., Waxman, years after they parted ways in the Philippines, “Later Michael told himself it had been the man’s familiar breathless tenor that had jerked his attention. It was Waxman, all right,

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heavier and somewhat more hearty than he remembered” [emphasis added] (p. 154). So the narrator’s casual use of the interjection, first in Marina’s thoughts then in Michael’s, contradicts Michael’s criticism of the Filipino’s command of the colonial language because here is a narrator who is at home with his language in portraying not only his thoughts but also Marina’s. So even though Tiempo felt constrained by the standards placed on women by Philippine society, her deployment of a covert, third-person narrator, at the very least, allowed her some way to reclaim her narrative authority, this time through her narrator’s expert use of the colonial language.

Accordingly, both novels exhibit a different form of the native clearing of English. The mode of native clearing mirrors the constrained position of women writers in the Philippines. In Polotan’s The Hand of the Enemy, the deployment of the complex and elaborate language in sections of FID in Emma’s scenes, in the midst of the narrator’s use of the Standard language in a bulk of the novel, is only possible because the narrator’s voice is hidden behind Emma’s thoughts. Tiempo takes this a step further in His Native Coast, where the narrator turns to a male, American protagonist for focalization for most of the novel. However, the continued use of the Standard language in the limited sections where the narrator turns to Marina for focalization, suggests the narrator’s willingness to grant equal status to the American Michael and the local woman Marina. Thus, for both women, a language of their own is only possible if portrayed covertly by their narrators.

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Conclusion

The purpose of this thesis has been twofold: to address the noticeable absence of Philippine literature in postcolonial literary studies; and to demonstrate how a culturally specific formalist approach can shed light on the postcolonial issues represented in Filipino novels. This neglect, according to Chelva Kanaganayakam (2012, p. 386), has deprived postcolonial studies of “the opportunity to confront some of the distinctive questions posed by this body of writing” [emphasis added]. By analyzing these Filipino novels, I hope to have expanded scholarly inquiry into postcolonial literatures to include the “distinctive questions” addressed in Philippine literature. Consequently, this thesis examined how Filipino novels published between the 1950s and the 1970s wrestled with the narrative of Philippine modernity and development as sanctioned by the U.S. and later, the retrieval of an authentic Filipino history and cultural identity as encouraged by nationalists.

In my introduction, I mapped how this neglect of Philippine literature by postcolonial studies can be traced back not only to American unexceptionalism but also to other factors such as an entirely local, clearly underfunded literary book publishing industry in the Philippines and the ensuing global scholarly disinterest in the country’s postcolonial literary output. I also outlined the contemporary concerns of postcolonial studies, specifically the need to bring the focus back to the text and its literary aspects. For this reason, chapter 1 provided the foundation for this thesis by proposing a kind of native clearing of narratology, that is, a native clearing of its formalist-structuralist image. I examined the narratological theories best suited for this kind of analytical approach. Taking my cue from the contributions made by Susan Lanser in her proposal for feminist narratology and from early works in postcolonial narratology by scholars such as Monika Fludernik and Marion Gymnich, I identified three narrative concepts (voice, focalization, and time) for analysis. In order to understand how these concepts operate within the Philippine postcolonial situation, I closely examined six Filipino novels: Bienvenido Santos' You Lovely People (1955), N.V.M. Gonzalez's The Bamboo Dancers (1960), N.V.M. Gonzalez's A Season of Grace (1956), Nick Joaquin's The Woman Who

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Had Two Navels (1961), Kerima Polotan's The Hand of the Enemy (1962), and Edith Tiempo's His Native Coast (1979).

In chapters 2 and 3, I examined the attempt at postcolonial repossession of narrative authority by several Filipino authors. I began my examination in chapter 2 by looking at the choice of first-person narrators in The Bamboo Dancers by N.V.M. Gonzalez and You Lovely People by Santos. I argued that their deployment of the first-person narrator is an attempt by both authors to reclaim the authority of the local, “to [finally] snap out of having to be always told” (N.V.M. Gonzalez 1960, p. 126) by the Filipino’s colonial masters. The chapter highlighted how the ambivalence of the narrators—Ernie in The Bamboo Dancers and Ben in You Lovely People—is an attempt by the authors to formally portray the complicated nature of the Philippine-U.S. relationship. In The Bamboo Dancers, this is specifically demonstrated in Ernie’s fluctuating attitudes towards the deeply embedded American influence in postcolonial Philippines as well as his own traditions. In You Lovely People, this is shown not only in Ben’s but also Ambo’s desire to be seen as lovely people while recognizing that the same people they sought for approval are responsible for their pain.

In chapter 3 there was a shift in focus from first-person narrators to third-person narrators. Here I argued that the decision to deploy the third-person narrators in Polotan’s The Hand of the Enemy and Tiempo’s His Native Coast is also an attempt by both women to interrogate the narrative authority that is largely influenced by the colonial/patriarchal traditions that marginalize the Filipino woman or Filipina. This chapter, then, argued that while the male Filipino writer has an “easier” access to what Monika Fludernik considers the more “authoritative” narrative situation in his deployment of a first-person narrator (the other is in “omniscient ‘authorial’ fiction”) (2012, p. 913), the Filipina has to resort to covert narrative methods. In The Hand of the Enemy, Polotan’s subtle subversion is formally portrayed in the split internal perspective of Emma and Glo since it highlights the limitations associated with each character’s circumstances. In His Native Coast, Tiempo’s limitations as a Filipina author results in her deployment of a narrator who can only provide limited access to

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her female (half-indigenous) character, Marina Manuel, and the preference for a male, American point of view for most of the novel.

In chapter 4 I focused primarily on the temporal strategies used in N.V.M. Gonzalez’s A Season of Grace and Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels. I argued that their temporal experimentations were influenced by their respective projects of historical re-vision. In my discussion, I argued that N.V.M. Gonzalez highlights the marginalization of pre-colonial traditions while on the other hand, Joaquin seeks to reverse the shame associated with the recognition of the nation’s Hispanic traditions. In N.V.M. Gonzalez’s novel this is formally portrayed through the cyclical and repetitive nature of the kaingin. As a result, the temporal indeterminacy of events in A Season of Grace reveals the institutionalized exploitation of the kaingineros. In Joaquin’s novel this is demonstrated through the temporal frenzy of chapter 4. The Woman Who Had Two Navels, then, problematizes the Philippine historical and cultural disjunction with its Hispanic past. The novel simultaneously registers the nation’s disconnect with its Hispanic past because of the uncritical acceptance of American traditions while cautioning against a zealous nostalgia that impedes the present from developing into a future for the nation.

I concluded my examination of the narrative strategies deployed in Filipino postcolonial novels by returning to Gemino Abad’s original intent in his concept of a native clearing within the English language by Filipino writers. In chapter 5, following Marion Gymnich’s (2002) categories, I examined whether this native clearing is reflected in the linguistic relationship between the narrator and the character/s in the novels. I argued that the linguistic configurations in these narratives are shaped by the same conditions that influenced the strategies discussed in the previous chapters. Firstly, the notion of the author as a storyteller-translator influences the form of native clearing in Santos' You Lovely People and N.V.M. Gonzalez's The Bamboo Dancers. In You Lovely People this is shown explicitly through Ben’s translation of Ambo’s embedded Visayan tale whereas in The Bamboo Dancers it is implicitly expressed in Ernie’s use of English in the narration of his experiences specifically his interactions with clearly Tagalog-speaking characters including his family. I argued that both

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authors’ attempts to reflect in their linguistic strategies a “synthesis” of two cultures are related to their inherent ambivalence.

Secondly, in A Season of Grace and The Woman Who Had Two Navels, both N.V.M. Gonzalez and Joaquin, respectively, attempt to impose the Filipino on the colonial language. N.V.M. Gonzalez weaves the local into the colonial language in his novel. I argued that despite the linguistic gap between the narrator and the characters, N.V.M. Gonzalez's attempt to impose the local in the narrator's discourse and the sometimes-shared language with the characters minimizes the gap associated with this linguistic configuration. Joaquin’s attempt to impose the Hispanic on English is demonstrated through the use of non-standard English by both the narrator and the characters. I argued that both authors’ form of native clearing complements their temporal experimentations because by turning to these narrative strategies, both Gonzalez and Joaquin attempt to position the importance of the native over the colonizer; perhaps more effectively in Joaquin's than in N.V.M. Gonzalez’s version.

Finally, in Polotan's The Hand of the Enemy and Tiempo's His Native Coast, their form of native clearing is the least subversive. I argued that this cautious approach to their native clearing is due to the colonial/patriarchal marginalization of the Filipina in Philippine society. In The Hand of the Enemy, the use of complex and elaborate language—which according to Joaquin marked the shift from the pre-war, American-influenced Filipino writing to the post-war writing—in the sections of FID and narratorial reports in Emma’s scenes point to this limitation imposed in the Filipina. The narrative can only use this kind of language if the narrator’s voice is concealed behind Emma’s thoughts. In His Native Coast a similar pattern is discernible, that is, both the narrator and the characters also use the standard language. It is only in Tiempo’s deployment of a covert, third-person narrator, that she is able to undermine Michael’s criticism of the Filipinos’ ability to use English.

In my introduction, I borrowed Nick Joaquin’s phrase, “a veritable terra incognita” (2004, p. 40), to describe the position of Philippine literature in

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postcolonial studies. Joaquin originally used the phrase to describe the status of the Philippines in Asia:

The Philippine condition in pre-West Asia can thus be summed up in two words: unknown and unknowing; while the attitude of our neighbors to us can likewise be summed up in two words: ignorant and indifferent; and this ignorance and indifference are exemplified by their supposed maps of us, which are so wildly inaccurate (even as late as the 16th century!) as to proclaim that, though the Philippines was not remote nor inaccessible, nevertheless we were, for our close neighbors, a veritable terra incognita. (2004, p. 40)

In a way, the absence of Philippine literature in postcolonial studies mirrors Joaquin’s notion of the country’s state of being an unknown entity in Asia and the neglect by scholars also echoes the indifferent attitude of the nation’s Asian neighbors. In finally addressing this absence, this thesis has shown how a culturally specific formalist approach can help shed light on the “distinctive questions” addressed in Philippine literature. The insights gleaned from this examination has also shown that despite questions regarding the postcolonial status of the novels analyzed in the thesis, a closer look at their technical strategies belie this criticism. Consequently, when it comes to the postcolonial analysis of novels, or fiction, the thematic concerns of the novels need to be related more productively to their narrative strategies.

Avenues for Future Research

Philippine literature is an unsurprising source for examining diverse postcolonial themes and issues due to the country’s double-colonization as well as archipelagic nature. As I discussed at length in the introduction, this thesis seeks to address the neglect of Philippine literature by postcolonial studies. Despite my contribution, however, this thesis has only covered a handful of novels by authors who are considered as part of the “canon” of Filipino writing in English, namely Bienvenido Santos, N.V.M. Gonzalez, and Nick Joaquin. My inclusion of Kerima Polotan and Edith Tiempo may be seen as an attempt to

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expand this corpus and to include these women in that hallowed list. Subsequently, there remain more unexplored periods or authors that will possibly show another aspect of the Philippine postcolonial situation. For example, the novels published post-Martial Law period. According to Ruth Jordana Pison, the lifting of Martial Law in 1981 resulted in the publication of forty-one novels between 1981 and 1992, eighteen of which addressed the traumatic legacy of former dictator-president Ferdinand Marcos’ regime (1997). A closer look at the relationship between the thematic concerns of these Martial Law novels and their narrative strategies may reveal more insights into the problematic nature of Philippine history and culture.

Finally, subsequent analyses of the narrative strategies in postcolonial Filipino novels might also consider looking at vernacular novels. Perhaps a project similar in wide-reaching scope to Mojares’ work on the origins and rise of the Filipino novel but covering the novels published from 1942 onwards, may demonstrate the narrative strategies that comprise the modern and contemporary Filipino narrative tradition.

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