Lit Lit
Lit Lit
Lit Lit
Soledad S. Reyes
Philippine Studies vol. 35, no. 1 (1987) 7192
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1. See for example, the views of American critic Leonard Casper, "The Hazards of
Writing in the Vernacular," "PhilippineStudies 17 (1969): 283-96.
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There have been other books published within the last fifteen
years, but those enumerated here are representative works which
scrutinize Philippine materials from certain critical perspectives.
It appears that for these critics, Philippine literature, in any language, should be the primary concern of any critical enterprise.
But it is also quite obvious that more emphasis is being placed on
texts in the vernacular, even as various critics have realized that
works in English constitute a minority in the corpus of Philippine
writing. What concerns our scholars and critics, as will be shown in
the following section, are issues'dealing with conceptual frameworks, functions of criticism, the tools and strategies for clarifying
the texts' meaning, and the role of literature in a wider system of
interlocking institutions.
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also during this period that writers and critics were polarized into
two movements represented on the one hand by Salvador Lopez,
and on the other by the poet Jose Garcia Villa. Variously called
traditions, movements, schools, this perceived opposition between
two types of texts would capture the imagination of subsequent
generations of critics who held on to this polarization as a means
of explaining Philippine literature in English.
As late as the sixties, no substantial discussion of literary
theory had taken place. Writers and critics were content to follow
certain models derived from their readings. Alejandro G. Abadilla,
the acknowledged pioneer of modernist poetry in Tagalog, espoused a theory which was actually an amalgamation of ideas
drawn from D.H. Lawrence, Walt Whitman, and E.E. Cummings.
Most of the critics in the fifties and sixties, on the other hand,
were indebted to Formalist and Realist canons which meant
explicit preference for verisimilitude, ironic detachment, subtlety,
and other concepts that formed the critical apparatus of Ricaredo
Demetillo, Leonard Casper, and other critics.
Within the last ten years or so an increasing number of Filipino
critics have ventured into literary theory. The range and interest
of these critics vary, their influences are eclectic. Nonetheless,
their texts constitute a welcome addition to current literary
studies insofar as such works do attempt to provide theoretical
framgworks for a better understanding of literary materials. The
majority of these works are not exclusively devoted to theory.
In fact, they are primarily books of essays analyzing a number of
selections. In a few cases, what is discussed is the history of a
particular genre. Serving as a common denominator is the writers'
effort to explain the critical assumptions that govern their analysis
of the texts. Generally speaking, the writers seem to have relied
heavily on certain concepts and categories that first evolved and
were later deployed in studying Western literature.
Four representative attempts at theorizing appeared in the last
decade or so; all of them deal with texts in English. One of these
attempts is Ophelia Dimalanta's Philippine Poetics, which begins
and ends by discussing certain assumptions of the critic. In between her Introduction and Conclusion, she proceeds to examine
the works of a number of poets writing in English.
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But in his essays, Abad does not fail to set up the framework
through which he means to analyze the text. In the process, his
exegesis exhibits some rigor mainly because it is made t o follow
a particular perspective. His analysis of "The Groundhog," for
example, explains by classifying the whole process of poetic
production in terms of the object of imitation, the manner of imitation, and the means of imitatioq which Abad shows are what
make a poem a lyric poem.
In both Dimalanta and Abad, criticism is focused mainly on
the text, and secondarily on the possible effect the text has on
a reader. The uniqueness of the text as a self-contained artifact is
thus affirmed in this view. The same ahistorical orientation is
shown in Alfeo Nudas' Telic Contemplation which approaches
the stories of seven Filipino writers in terms of their consciousness
as artists. Nudas acknowledges his debt to such thinkers as Bernard Lonergan, Jacques Maritain, and the so-called critics of
consciousness. The complex network of their ideas forms the basis
of Nudas' discussion of Telic contemplation, first as a concept,
and then as a method that alerts the reader's mind t o the dynamic
interaction of various components of the texts that the writer's
consciousness has created.
Where Nudas limits his work to writing in English, Resil Mojares
covers a much wider area-the novel in English, Cebuano and
Tagalog studied diachronically or in time, and the various modifications the genre underwent in the first three decades of the
twentieth century. Although conceived primarily as a literary
history, Mojares' Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel offers
certain provocative theses which any study on the novel should
consider. In this book, the novel is shown to be polygenesis,
exhibiting a syncretic form, and transformed by its interaction
with concrete historical moments.
Other books published during this period approach the texts
from an avowedly historical position, not exclusively in terms of
7. Cemino Abad, In Another Light (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press,
1976), p. 84.
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The aesthetic-historical approach, Hosillos further qualifies, requires a methodology called concentric comparaticism, imaged
in terms of a concentric sphere. This image is explained as a continuum composed of the author continuum, tradition continuum,
language continuum, national continuum and regional continuum.
All these factors must be considered in any attempt to understand
the literary text.
Another critic espousing a kind of historical approach is Virgilio
Almario, who in his Balugtasismo Versus Modernismo proceeds
to interpret the clashes among sociopolitical forces and aesthetic
factors in his attempt to analyze the development of twentieth
century Tagalog poetry. In this lengthy study, Almario has sought
to explain the dissonance and disharmonies that structured the development of Tagalog poetry by using a paradigm rooted in Balagtasismo and Modernismo as the main impulses of Tagalog poetry.
His approach is clearly historical even as he shows how deeply
rooted poetry has been in the different poets' own confrontations
with various historical forces such as those related to our colonial
experience.
8. Lucila Hosillos, Ongrnality as Vengeance in Philippine Literature (Quezon City:
New Day Publishers, 1984), p. 14.
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as the cognition and creative rendering of the entire process of life as the
totality of sensuously concrete forces, as the perpetual ever-higher reproduction of underlying contradictions in history.'
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reason an interdisciplinary approach appears as a far more attractive, although more difficult, method.
These developments indicate the kind of activities Philippine
critics engage in but the discussion, by itself, does not deal directly
with the basic changes in the critical orientation of our critics and
scholars. Nor does it deal with the reasons for the series of changes
that has shaped literary studies today. What the following discussion hopes to achieve is rather limited-to clarify what formalism
and Marxism contributed to literary studies and what other approaches might shed light on Philippine literature.
In retrospect, it is easy t o understand why formalism as a mode
of analysis and as a source of norms triumphed in the sixties. As
a set of concepts, formalism was a powerful programmatic capable
of clarifying certain issues in literary analysis. Moreover, as practised by the likes of Cleanth Brooks and William Wimsatt, for
example, formalist analysis exhibited an intellectual rigor that the
other approaches could not approximate. Furthermore, in the context of Philippine literature, texts written in English were considered, at least in the fifties and sixties, the most significant body
of works, especially by those teaching in universities who also
dabbled in creative writing and criticism. Because of their own
exposure to formalism as a mode of analysis, it was almost inevitable that they would turn to English texts which had been largely
steeped in modernist conventions. Vernacular texts, on the other
hand, which had been shaped by more traditional codes, did not
generally lend themselves to formalist analysis. Once standards
canonized in formalist criticism were employed t o study nonEnglish texts, the results were bound to be disastrous; non-English
texts resisted norms rooted in irony, tension, paradox, or wit.
Critics who opted to work on texts in the vernacular made categorical statements damning the texts' sentimentality, didactism
and ornate language.
Formalism thus became a canonized perspective through
which relationships between text and reality (nonexistent), text
and writer (international fallacy), text and audience (affective
fallacy) were accepted uncriticially. The writer, so goes the argument, is a God-like individual who creates a self-contained world
divorced from history, milieu and consciousness. The result is a
notion of criticism that perceives itself as solely devoted t o the
unraveling of the text's complex design and structure. To those
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