Eskinita and Other Poems and Form, Historiography
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ESKINITA AND OTHER POEMS AND FORM, HISTORIOGRAPHY, AND NATION IN NICK JOAQUIN'S ALMANAC FOR MANILEÑOS A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities 2011 VINCENZ SERRANO SCHOOL OF ARTS, HISTORIES AND CULTURES 2 Contents Abstracts 4 Declaration 5 Copyright Statement 5 Acknowledgements 6 Eskinita and Other Poems The Collapse of What Separates Us 8 Fog 9 Cornerhouse 10 Market 11 If You Can't See My Mirrors I Can't See You 13 "Poetry is read on faces. Therefore it is urgent to create new faces." 14 Ferrante and Teicher 19 Making Scenes 22 Short Walks 24 Static 27 Café 29 Eskinita 32 Form, Historiography, and Nation in Nick Joaquin's Almanac for Manileños Introduction: Time Lines: Framing the Almanac for Manileños 54 Chapter 1: Contextualising and Theorising the Almanac Genre Planetary Motions and Road Directions: Elements of the Almanac 65 "To Alter Radically How Time Is Lived": Social, Political, and Cultural Functions of the Almanac 70 Precisely Cut Components, Large-Scale Constructions: Heteroglossia, Montage, and Nation as Conceptual Frameworks 90 Chapter 2: A Portrait of the Almanac as Historiography Momentary Interruptions, Historicising Uncertainties: Critical Receptions of Nick Joaquin 103 "Wedded in the Association": Cohesion of Discrepant Materials and Accommodation of Distinct Genres in the Almanac 125 3 "Giving Calendar Dates Their Physiognomy": Compression, Conjunction, and Direction in the Calendars 134 "The Crystal of the Total Event": Fragmentary Historiography in the Essays 142 "Headier Bits of Reading": Aesthetics and Politics of Non-Linear Historiography 161 Conclusion: Unrealised Coherences, Thwarted Conjunctions 171 Works Cited 178 Total word count (creative and critical elements): 50,285 4 Abstracts The University of Manchester Vincenz Serrano PhD, 2011 Eskinita and Other Poems Eskinita and Other Poems is a collection of poems and sequences with Manila as its context and the city walker as its key figure. An eskinita—a Tagalog diminution of the Spanish word esquina, which means "corner"—is a term used to refer to sidestreet so narrow that even a car would find it hard to maneuver there; an eskinita that leads to a dead end, moreover, is called an interior. Grounded in, yet taking flight from, the language and imagery of Manila, the manuscript draws on the city's history and its present moment as it juxtaposes personal experiences and scholarly sources to portray a city whose development—considered in works like Nick Joaquin's Manila, My Manila, Manuel Caoili's The Origins of Metropolitan Manila, and Robert Reed's Colonial Manila—is bound up with political, social, economic, and postcolonial structures. Through this space goes the city walker, a figure considered in literary and theoretical texts like Walter Benjamin's study on the flâneur, Michel de Certeau's analysis of walking, and psychogeographic writings of the Situationists. The poems are concerned with formal strategies that take their cues from Anglo-American Modernism—collages of texts in lyric and prose, serial structures, and line splicings—and aim to express the complex experience of walking in Manila, of writing Manila: juxtapositions and interpenetrations between interior and exterior, scholarly and demotic language, past and present. The long poem Eskinita extends the use of these devices: apart from prose and verse combinations, it incorporates quotation, parataxis, and photography. Although the overt aim is to offer, using the aesthetic resources of poetry, multiple and refracted views of Manila, Eskinita nevertheless endeavours to express—by constraining words, lines, and page layout—a sense of containment and limit. By counterpointing multiple textual and visual modes—and including various sources and formal devices—Eskinita and Other Poems explores and sometimes rejoices in the tensions between polyphonic and disjunctive elements, and the way their structures generate resonance and dialogue between unlikely familiars. Form, Historiography, and Nation in Nick Joaquin's Almanac for Manileños This thesis argues that the Almanac—when contextualised within the long-standing tradition of the almanac genre, and examined using the theoretical underpinnings of Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia, Walter Benjamin's views of fragmentary historiography, and intertwining aspects of literary form and nation formation—expresses the multiple, not singular, temporalities that constitute and complicate the Filipino nation. Produced in 1979, during Martial Law in the Philippines, the Almanac's formal strategy—demonstrated by the accommodation of discrepant genres, compression and correspondence in the calendars, and fragmentation in the essays—is a kind of non-linear historical emplotment. Such an aesthetic—derived in part from Modernism—is distinct from, and critically interrogates, fixed and linear articulations of national history. The focus of the analysis is a reading of the Almanac's calendars and essays. The distinctions and interactions between these subgenres result in a text that is both cohesive and stratified: calendrical entries which are comprised of national and religious elements and have past and future orientations inhabit the same space as temporally disjunctive essays. Despite fragmentation, the Almanac is nevertheless held together by correspondences and associations. The Almanac's oblique and tangential strategy of representing Philippine history—when seen in the light of the obsolescence of a now-moribund but then-vital genre—critiques linear historiography. By accommodating accounts of missed chances and foregrounding seemingly irrelevant details, Joaquin's Almanac interrogates historical narratives which, in the name of progress, fail to incorporate materials that are aberrant and inconsequential. 5 Declaration No portion of the work referred to in this thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification from this or any other university or other institute of learning. Copyright statement i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the "Copyright") and s/he has given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes. ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made. iii. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trade marks and other intellectual property (the "Intellectual Property") and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example graphs and tables ("Reproductions"), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions. iv. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions described in it may take place is available in the University IP Policy (see http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/medialibrary/policies/ intellectual-property.pdf), in any relevant Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library's regulations (see http://www.manchester.ac.uk/library/aboutus/regulations) and in The University's policy on Presentation of Theses. 6 Acknowledgements I would like to thank, first and foremost, my supervisors John McAuliffe and Robert Spencer: their support, which was consistently demonstrated from the earliest stages of thesis writing to the last, was invaluable. I would also like to thank my fellow Creative Writing PhD candidates for commenting on numerous aspects of the creative thesis: Sarah Corbett, Simon Haworth, Ian Pople, and JT Welsch. Vona Groarke and Jeremy Tambling also offered comments on a number of poems. Friends and colleagues were crucial in developing the critical thesis, in terms of suggesting sources and commenting on drafts of the manuscript: Oscar Campomanes and Lulu Torres-Reyes from Ateneo de Manila University and Rajeev Patke from National University of Singapore. Conversations with Marra Lanot, Fernando Zialcita, and Beatriz Alvarez-Tardio helped me think through some of my positions as regards Nick Joaquin's work. I would also like to acknowledge institutional support from the University of Manchester. The Centre for New Writing bursary provided much needed material support, and the Pathways to Cosmopolitanism Research Exchange Programme, initiated by the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures, made possible a research trip to Manila and Singapore. Much gratitude is due to John McAuliffe and Ian McGuire, Co-Directors of the Centre for New Writing, and Nina Glick-Schiller, Co-Director of the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures. Some poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the following journals and anthologies: New Poetries V (ed. Michael Schmidt), Kritika Kultura 14 (ed. Lulu Torres-Reyes, literary ed. Mark Cayanan, intro. Conchitina Cruz), High Chair 13 (ed.