Isagani Cruz and His Fiction - Animo Repository

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Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

Volume 3 Number 1 Article 5

4-30-2023

Isagani Cruz and His Fiction: A Footnote to the “Deconstructive Isagani Cruz and His Fiction: A Footnote to the “Deconstructive Effect of Feminist Materialism on the Newly-Discovered Cordillera Effect of Feminist Materialism on the Newly-Discovered Cordillera Archives”

Archives”

Isidoro M. Cruz

University of San Agustin, Philippines, [email protected]

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Recommended Citation Recommended Citation

Cruz, Isidoro M. (2023) "Isagani Cruz and His Fiction: A Footnote to the “Deconstructive Effect of Feminist Materialism on the Newly-Discovered Cordillera Archives”," Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance: Vol. 3: No. 1, Article 5.

Available at: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/akda/vol3/iss1/5

This Perspective Article is brought to you for free and open access by the DLSU Publications at Animo Repository.

It has been accepted for inclusion in Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance by an authorized editor of Animo Repository.

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Isagani Cruz and His Fiction: A Footnote to the “Deconstructive Effect of Feminist

Materialism on the Newly-Discovered Cordillera Archives”

Isidoro M. Cruz

University of San Agustin, Philippines [email protected]

Abstract

A cursory reading of Isagani R. Cruz’s literary theory and criticism on one hand, and his fiction on the other, suggests a disparity between Cruz as a scholarly literary critic and Cruz as a fictionist of stories “for adults only”; however, a detail in one of his short stories in his book, Father Solo and Other Stories for Adults Only, arouses a critical suspicion that his fiction is actually cultural criticism masquerading as irreverent or obscene fiction, so that the critic and the fictionist are one.

That detail is found in “Once upon a Time Some Years from Now,” where the narrator, a lover of President Cory Fernandez who lived more than two decades after former President Cory Aquino, speaks of a footnote he needed to complete for his paper on the “deconstructive effect of feminist materialism on the newly-discovered Cordillera archives.” Cruz’s fiction and feminist materialism enable us to see that the Filipina in the seeming seat of power, represented by Cory Fernandez of the 21st century, continues to be held in thrall by foreign domination, capitalism, patriarchy and politicking—so that despite the “gender barrier” breaking and high technology, the Filipino nation after the People Power Revolution is a continued mimicry of the Cordillera Archives of the 1900s: a disempowered people who are still colonial possessions “not ready to govern themselves.”

Keywords: deconstruction, feminist materialism, patriarchy, capitalism, Cordillera archives

A cursory comparison of Isagani R. Cruz’s literary theory and criticism on one hand, and his fiction on the other, may readily hint at a dual self: one a scholarly literary critic and another, a fictionist of stories “for adults only”; however, a detail in one of his stories in his book, Father Solo and Other Stories for Adults Only, has made me suspect that his fiction is actually

cultural criticism masquerading as irreverent or obscene fiction, so that the critic and the fictionist are one. This critical suspicion I will pursue in this paper.

That detail is found in his short story entitled “Once upon a Time Some Years from Now,” which won a Palanca in 1990. In that story, the narrator, a lover of President Cory Fernandez who lived more than two

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Isagani Cruz and His Fiction 31

lead story, “Father Solo,” was one of the “offensive”

works discussed in a session entitled “When Literature Offends,” which, according to Carmela G. Lapeña of GMA News, discussed “how far authors can take freedom of expression, with Jose F. Lacaba, Isagani Cruz, and Beverly Wico Sy reading excerpts from their most offensive work.”

Within the context of cultural prescription, what discourse is reinforced or undermined in Isagani R.

Cruz’s fiction “for adults only”?

Considering my critical suspicion—that his story is literary theory or cultural criticism masquerading as fiction—let me first talk about the theoretical baggage of the footnote to the “Deconstructive Effect of Feminist Materialism on the Newly-Discovered Cordillera Archives” in his story “Once Upon a Time Some Years from Now”:

(a) Feminist materialism is defined by a “commitment both to historical and social specificity and to the need to look at gender in relation to class and race.” It traces its roots to “the 1970s [when] feminist theories and critics…sought to develop a Marxist feminism that could account for both the specificity of capitalism and patriarchy and the interrelation between the two”

(Makaryk 41).

Feminist materialism is akin to materialist feminism.

Materialist feminism attributes the oppression of women to capitalism and patriarchy. To Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham, in “Reclaiming Anticapitalist Feminism,” materialist feminism

“links the battle against women’s oppression to a fight against capitalism” (1). To Stevi Jackson (citing Christine Delphy), materialist feminism understands

“gender as a hierarchical social division rather than simply a cultural distinction” (290). From Jackson’s wider perspective, “patriarchal or gendered structures, relations, and practices are…as material as capitalist ones, as are those deriving from racism, colonialism and imperialism” (284).

Significantly, to materialist feminist Christine Delphy, “Domination has as its ultimate motive exploitation” (86).

(b) Deconstruction “reveals the hidden work of ideology in our daily experience of ourselves and our world” (Tyson 241), in Derrida’s words, to “make the not-seen accessible to sight” (1830).

According to Louis Montrose, “The propositions and operations of deconstructive reading may be employed as powerful tools of ideological analysis”

decades after former President Cory Aquino, speaks of a footnote he needed to complete for his paper on the “deconstructive effect of feminist materialism on the newly-discovered Cordillera archives” (Cruz 24).

I got this idea of theory or criticism possibly masquerading as fiction tangentially from Isagani R. Cruz’s own account of a reference book entitled Dictionary of Philippine English which he and Ma.

Lourdes S. Bautista compiled in 1995. By its title alone, the dictionary was a serious book on Philippine English, but in one seminar, I heard Dr. Cruz say in jest that the dictionary was actually a joke book that everyone else took seriously. Surprisingly, in his frame of mind, an apparently serious book can be, in fact, a joke book. So, reading Father Solo and Other Stories for Adults Only about twenty years later, I figured this anthology of humorous short stories for adults could be, conversely, a serious book we might mistake for a joke book.

Such ambiguity in genre is typical of Isagani Cruz’s storytelling and writing. “He loves to tell stories inside and outside the classroom, and between genres,” says David Jonathan Bayot in his Introduction to Inter/

Sections: Isagani R. Cruz and Friends. “He tells them and stretches them to such a wide extent, that oftentimes I’m no longer certain if his stories—oral or written—are to be taken as fact or fiction, story or plot, narrative or prosody” (xv–xvi).

...The book...was cast in the scholarly form of critical theory and literary criticism. The next time I saw it, the manuscript was on its way to fulfilling the prophecy of biography as creative non-fiction. Today, we have here a critical book and a biography that is interspersed among genres, and finally, crisscrossed in the form of, what he calls, “a creative non-fictional biographical play.” (xvi)

Father Solo and Other Stories for Adults Only is a collection of five stories, namely, “Father Solo,”

“Termination,” “Picked,” “What I Did Last Summer,”

and “Once Upon a Time Some Years from Now,” the representative story that is the object of this critique.

All stories have sexual content.

Let me first turn to the title of the book. The title Father Solo and Other Stories for Adults Only hints at a cultural prescription for readership—”for adults only”—which is either a caveat or a teaser, or both.

In the 2011 Manila International Literary Festival, the

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(777). According to Derrida, “deconstructive readings and writings are concerned not only with...discourses...

Deconstructive practices are also and first of all political and institutional practices” (qtd. in Montrose 777–78).

In terms of deconstructive writing, in “A Deconstructive Meditation on the Writer and Society,”

Isagani Cruz speaks of the writer as “necessarily disruptive.” A “writer change[s] the world” by

“disbelieving in it,” specifically by casting “doubt...

aspersions...a net of unbelief and cynicism and nihilism.” Writing that is disruptive counters what is hegemonic:

In a democratic society, the writer must veer to the left. In a communist society, the writer must veer to the right...In short, the writer’s role is to lay bare the hypocrisy at the root of all sincere persons, the goodness at the root of all evil persons, the secret conversations saints hold with demons, the sanctity of sinners.

That is why the Filipino writer raved against the Spaniards when Spain was the colonial power...

against Marcos when Marcos was King. That is why the Filipino writer raves and will rave against Cory Aquino now that Cory Aquino is Queen. (192)

Society hates the writer because the writer always tells the truth, and if the truth cannot be told, then the writer creates the truth...On the other hand, the writer hates society because society always censors writing...always wants to read only what it wants to read. (193)

Deconstruction, as David Gunkel says in Deconstruction, “is and can only take place as an endlessly open form of engagement with existing systems of thought in an effort to challenge the status quo and provide potent opportunities to think, speak, and act otherwise” (140).

(c) The Cordillera Archives may refer to the photo collection taken by American colonialists in the Cordilleras in the 1900s, as described in Cristina B.

Villanueva’s paper entitled “The Power of the Image:

Photographs in the University of the Philippines Baguio Cordillera Archives”; or the term may refer to a newly- discovered sequel collection of Cordillera photographs.

According to Villanueva, “Dean C. Worcester, who was

appointed Secretary of the Interior of the 2nd Philippine Commission, collected over 16,000 still photographs on the Philippines…These images convinced Americans that the inhabitants of the Philippines were not ready to govern themselves.” Moreover, “many of the images…

taken in the Cordillera region in the...1900s…are images of bare breasted women, men in loincloth…

The photographs offer illustrations of the Suyoc people [of Northern Benguet] and the Tinguians who were transported and exhibited in the 1904 [St. Louis World Fair in Missouri which]…give a glimpse of the individuals who were part of the biggest display of

‘exotic people’ from the colonial possessions of the United States in the early 1900s.”

These terms as defined inform my critique of Isagani Cruz’s “Once Upon a Time Some Years from Now”: capitalism, patriarchy, women’s oppression, revealing “the hidden work of ideology” to “make the not-seen accessible to sight,” and “colonial possessions of the United States.” Inscribed in his short story are concepts such as feminist materialism, deconstruction, and post-colonial discourse.

“Once Upon a Time Some Years from Now” is the story of the thrice-married and thrice-divorced Philippine President Cory Fernandez and her lover, the narrator, a scholar writing a paper on the

“deconstructive effect of feminist materialism on the newly-discovered Cordillera archives.” This is how their love affair begins:

It all started with a social French kiss at a dinner hosted by the American governor of Metro Luzon. Cory was a little drunk, and careful not to show herself in such a state, had repaired to the library of the governor. I was in the library, trying to complete a footnote I was going to use in my next scholarly paper…I had misplaced my copy of the Reuter book on People Power, and my computer files had been hit by the IBM virus concocted by the IBM corporation to sabotage all Davao-made clones.

I knew the governor had a copy of the rare book in his library…I had myself stolen away from the party of ten thousand diplomats to search for a book. (Cruz, Father 19–20)

While the two were talking about the incomplete footnote, the tipsy President “lurched forward.” The narrator “caught her” and “fell in love with her right there and then” (23).

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In this speculative fiction, “Practically everything about her sex life as President was properly documented and audited” (27), except her clandestine affair with the narrator, which involved their use of a sex gadget widely popular in that technology-driven age, more than two decades after the People Power Revolution, or some years close to 2010, or perhaps our present time.

Until one day, “someone had beeped her workstation with the query: ‘Neutralize sex. Y/N?’” (32). That time,

“the IMF had sequestered all the top one thousand corporations and installed American managers in all of them” (13); moreover, Metro Luzon was under an American Governor (19). The fact that the Americans who ran “the everyday affairs of the Republic” through a “Big Machine” proposed “the neutralization of sex meant that something fishy was going on” (31).

The electronic query placed President Fernandez in a dilemma: neutralizing sex would mean the use of sex gadgets would be illegal (31), and for her, it “involved a conflict between Technology and Individuality, Science and Humanism, Sex and Politics, Government and People, Woman and Man, Good and Evil” (33–34).

“Yes,” she said, “Good and Evil, the primordial greatest good for the greatest number and the archetypal greatest evil of Faust and Faustus…

This was going to be a decision that would change the lives of everybody in the country.

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By that time, in her illicit affair with the narrator she had learned not to use her gadget. Her indecision, however, rendered her philosophical ruminations unproductive. “Having waited a full twenty-four hours for someone to press Y or N,” the President’s “terminal automatically made the decision for her” (35). The

“proper response, as indicated in her President’s Manual would have been to press N” (32).

The story ends with the narrator saying: “This story is not about politics, nor about the history of the Philippines, nor anything else but her [as a person]” (36).

On the contrary, the story is about politics and history of the Philippines.

Such deliberate contradiction in terms and the implausibility of the narrative demonstrate what Cruz calls “disruptive” (192) writing in “A Deconstructive Meditation on the Writer and Society.” As Bayot has observed,

His narratives, his surprises and shocks, his ambiguities, his refusal to be pinned down to a title, a category, a critical position, a genre—these are in fact living embodiments of paradigm shifts in action. He perpetually looks beyond the established, acknowledged horizon of expectations to check out the other, the other other existence of possibilities, and thus, he strains—to the consternation of many—the logic of plausibility. (xvii)

Moreover, Cruz’s “controversial statements on Philippine literature and literary history...not only sent waves of defamiliarizing shock to members of academe, but foregrounded, as well, a poetic violence to unaccustomed souls” (Bayot xvi).

Cory Fernandez became president through her third marriage, which was a marriage of convenience to a homosexual, the son of the then political boss whose former marriage to an aging American duchess ended in divorce. “Their divorce gave him exclusive rights to the million-dollar uranium reserves in Cotabato, and he used his money wisely to buy off all the American managers and all the registered voters in the 72nd district of New Davao.” He got himself “elected to Congress, which quickly made him speaker…and was able to manipulate all levels of elections from barangay to national” (Cruz, Father 17). Cory Fernandez, complicit with the institutions and structures of power that produced her, was elected president.

Significantly, the first sentence of the story concretizes the crisscrossing of gender and politics:

“Long after Cory Aquino had broken the gender barrier in Malacañan Palace, Cory Fernandez became President of the Republic of the Philippines” (12).

Yet, although she was President, those who ran the affairs of the Philippines were Americans, including the Governor of Metro Luzon (19) who was male [the American governor “had a copy of the rare book in his library” (20), italics mine], so that “there was hardly anything to talk about as far as her role in politics was concerned” (30). Despite the gender barrier breaking, this is a story of a woman told by an illicit lover, a man whose gender mark is a “urination appendage” (29).

“Her Chinese ancestry,” we are told, “had given her the privilege of not looking like their household maid”

(13). Clearly in the story is a discursive formation of politics, gender, colonialism, race/ethnicity, and class.

“Once Upon a Time Some Years from Now,” a story of

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a Filipina president as mere figurehead, is fiction and critical discourse in one, an interweaving of hierarchies of power narrativized under a mask of illicit sex in a language intermittently “for adults only.” In just a number of details, the story is telling us that after the People Power Revolution, despite the gender barrier breaking, the Philippines is still ruled by patriarchal, capitalist, colonial powers. I suppose the narrative representation of President Cory Fernandez is, in itself, the newly-discovered Cordillera Archives that still image Filipinos as subjects up to now of American rule that is both patriarchal and capitalist. It is a story of powerlessness that speaks of a “First Dictatorship” (32) which has foretold—should we say accurately?—that there is going to be a Second Dictatorship. Is it really true that the poet is a prophet, as Cirilo F. Bautista has written? If so, here is the scarier part: the story speaks of an era of “Grinning Martial Law II” (14), which we now realize has proved true for Mindanao following the Marawi siege in 2017. As to the resurgence to power of the Marcoses, a choice accommodation in the story is called “the Marcos suite in the Asiaworld Plaza,” where Cory Fernandez caught her first husband in flagrante

“during the second intermission…of the classic opera EDSA,” from whom “she would [later] get at least a million pesos a week as alimony” (15).

This speculative story also speaks of an “Accident at a nuclear reactor” that burned documents that could prove that “Diliman existed” (18), so that the Accident, along with “Grinning Martial Law II” and an overriding American presence in government and the economy, has resulted in a radical disruption in the lives of Filipinos—a change for the worse—and illicit sex or the widespread use of sex gadgets does not overturn the conditions of oppression and subjugation, even if its language seems to break barriers to free expression. In fact, the story recalls that the First Dictatorship of the Marcoses “forced people to see sex films in order to deaden their political desires” (32), so that sex has been exploited as a tool for instilling political indifference among Filipino citizens, forestalling social change and maintaining the hegemonic class and its ideology—

both during the First Dictatorship and the presidency of Cory Fernandez under American control.

Here lies the semiotic relevance of the footnote to the narrator’s scholarly paper. A footnote is a minor appendage that provides an explanation missing in the main text but necessary for its closure. Unfortunately, in the story the information needed to complete the

footnote on People Power is missing because the narrator “had misplaced my copy of the Reuter book on People Power, and my computer files had been hit by the IBM virus concocted by the IBM corporation to sabotage all Davao-made clones” (19–20). There is a possibility that the “Philippines [will be] completely forgotten despite its mythical past as the Country of People Power” (18), but the very book that has memorialized it is missing and the electronic file where parts of it may be retrieved has been saved by the narrator in a computer clone hit by a virus. People Power is just a footnote to history, and its historical record is missing in the story, because a global corporation, IBM, has deleted it through a virus that sabotaged clones that rivaled IBM computers.

The narrator’s use of a Davao-made clone may suggest a kind of mimicking of illegitimacy—the narrator’s account of his affair with President Fernandez as a clone of the history of the Philippines of her time, marked by illegitimacies in its government, politics, and repeated subjugation by foreign powers, particularly Americans who colonized the Philippines in the 1900s. Cloning computers, if tantamount to hardware and software piracy, also suggests illegitimacy in the theft of intellectual property, both by the Davao clone manufacturer and its computer user, the narrator, who, having used pirated material, may be after all unreliable.

The mention of virus reminds me of a question that has bugged me while writing this paper: what good can we derive from a critical paper on Isagani R. Cruz’s fiction during this Covid pandemic? I turn to the footnote to the “Deconstructive Effect of Feminist Materialism on the Newly-Discovered Cordillera Archives.” Patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, politicking, a distortion in historical representation resulting in the oppression not only of women but also of the general populace—all these have persisted during the pandemic but have remained invisible to those who are uncritical of the times. Just how capitalist can a country get? As reported by News 5 in its article entitled “Duterte defends appointing ex-military officials to lead COVID-19 response,”

President Rodrigo Duterte said that “It is not a study of medicine. Ano ito, parang transaction sa negosyo...You need not be a doctor here because you are transacting a business. It is not really a matter of medical science that you are talking of” (Demigillo). In terms of the effects of political power, there appears to be

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politicking at a time when hundreds of thousands of Filipinos have suffered and died from Covid infections (according to the Department of Health, www.doh.

gov.ph/covid19tracker, as of March 20, 2021, there have been 12,930 deaths due to Covid-19, and 80,642 active cases, as well as 562,484 who have recovered) so that instead of a prompt nationwide distribution of vaccines, we hear of “Run, Sara, Run” tarpaulins, as recounted in newsinfo.inquirer.net (Francisco, Israel and Rosauro).

Corollary to this, we see patriarchal discourse inscribed in President Duterte’s statement telling

“daughter Sara not to run, [saying] being president [is]

not a woman’s job,” as reported by www.cnnphilippines.

com (Ferreras). This politicking is punctuated by the President’s so-called “supreme sacrifice” to run for vice president in the next national elections, as reported by newsinfo.inquirer.net (Mercado).

A deconstructive reading central to Isagani R.

Cruz’s fictional story as cultural criticism teaches us to render visible the invisible hands of powers that rule our lives: patriarchy, capitalism, politics and the continued dominance of technology-driven post- colonial powers, even within the discourse of sex—

which is a systemic distraction that masks the hidden ideology that benefits the few and disadvantages the majority.

There is a radical, at times carnivalesque, reversal in this speculative story’s vision of the future, which may happen to be the present time. This is seen, for instance, in “the slums called Forbes Park, right in the inner city of Makati” (Cruz, Father 13). “Under the New Philippine Family Law, it was very easy to get a divorce. All she had to do was to send a form through computer mail to the Central Divorce Authority”

(16). “Dolphy’s Book of Etiquette required that [the narrator] show respect to the President by giving her a social French kiss” (21). These radical reversals in Philippine economic conditions, values, and cultural practices, however, do not seem to be to the advantage of the majority of Filipinos, for the Americans here exercise overriding control, so that even if the story has seen the “last of the Zobels, once a powerful clan in the country” (16), still the Fernandez’s household maid comes from the slums of Forbes Park. Also, the President’s “daughter…managed all the small family corporations, but not, of course, the huge beer bottling company which was now managed by an American”

(18). Furthermore, Tagaytay has become the “crowded

commercial center of the country, where there “were thousands of American managers” (14). Olongapo has become the “nearby New Hongkong set up by refugees from Chinese Hong Kong” where one can buy “all the newfangled technological speech aids,” including one that enabled Cory Fernandez to remove “from her tongue all clues to her being a Filipino” (14), an act tantamount to an erasure of her ethnic marker in a world dominated by Americans and other foreigners like the Chinese.

Chinese presence in the story recalls the account that as “far as Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon is concerned, the government’s failure to immediately close Philippine borders last year to ‘please China’

resulted in the high number of COVID-19 cases in the country,” as reported by www.gmanetwork.com (Colcol).

President Fernandez speaks of the “good old days”

before the Accident, “the days of the printed book [now that]…in less than three seconds, you had the entire novel in your head” (Cruz, Father 22). “The computerization of knowledge…had rendered all libraries useless” (20), but apparently the database is not so complete as to contain the missing information on People Power that the narrator needs to complete his paper. People Power is in the process of being deleted by social amnesia, to become like the file copy of its account that has been deleted in the Davao-made clone of the narrator. Truth in Cruz’s story is “an obsolete word that only theology majors now use” (24).

In exemplifying the “Filipino writer [who] raves...

against Cory Aquino now that Cory Aquino is Queen,”

Cruz has shown how writing can be “disruptive,” as he has stated in “A Deconstructive Meditation on the Writer and Society.” The hidden truth that Isagani R.

Cruz and feminist materialism enable us to see is that the Filipina in the seeming seat of power, represented by Cory Fernandez of the 21st century, continues to be held in thrall by foreign domination, capitalism, patriarchy and politicking. Despite the “gender barrier”

being breached by her rise to the presidency, the Americans in the story remain in control of government and business, so that by her complicity, “there was hardly anything to talk about as far as her role in politics was concerned” (30); the people of influence around her are male, including her father-in-law whose political machinery catapulted her to the presidency, the American Governor of Metro Luzon, and her illicit lover, among others. Moreover, Cruz’s fiction

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is a sad story of Filipinos who, despite the seemingly humorous narrative, will not have the last laugh. It is a narrative representation of present-day Filipinos that enables us to deconstruct the present, which despite high technology, is a continued mimicry of the Cordillera Archives of the 1900s: a disempowered people who are colonial possessions “not ready to govern themselves”—and Isagani R. Cruz in his cultural criticism masquerading as fiction is not joking.

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