U topia atbp : V ersions of the i deal in p hilippine f iction1
Vicente Garcia Groyon
ABSTRACT
In Utopia, Thomas More delivers a specific and context-bound critique
of Tudor England through a faux anthropological report on a perfect society, “perfect” being defined as everything that Tudor England was not. Philippine fiction can similarly be read as visions of what the nation could and should be, delivered in oblique flashes that project a fragmentary composite picture of everything that the Philippines is not, or no longer is. The supposedly opposed vectors of romance and realism coincide in their explicit and implicit yearnings for contentment and happiness, echoing More’s own bemused, amused impatience with his flawed country. Through a telescoped survey of Philippine fiction in English, this article traces the contours of the Philippine utopian ideal.
KEYWORDS: Philippine fiction in English; Utopia; realism;
romance; Philippine fiction; Philippine genre fiction
A few years ago, I supervised the master’s thesis of a student completing an MFA in creative writing. He was writing a science fiction novel about a dystopian alternate history of the Philippines predicated on the idea that the 1986 EDSA Revolt had failed and that the Marcoses had remained in power indefinitely. As he labored over his concept, long before the drafting process
1A longer version of this essay was delivered as a lecture at the Ateneo de Manila University on 5 September 2016.
began, we both realized that a Filipino writer seeking to write dystopian fiction, at least according to the conventions of North American or European science fiction, would end up in realist mode, for so many of the tropes and elements of dystopian worlds—corrupt totalitarian regimes, poor or crumbling public infrastructure, shortages of basic necessities—are sad truths in our country. Indeed, much of the science fiction by Filipino writers extrapolates from current conditions and pursues their grim conclusions years, decades, centuries into the future, and many inhabitants of Metro Manila today would find the living conditions in the world of The Hunger Games a considerable improvement on their own existence. To imagine a future far removed enough from present reality for it to qualify as science fiction, my student had to concoct a Philippine utopia of progress and modernization and peace and order, enabled and marred only by the absence of freedom of speech.2
The task imposed by this article—identifying echoes of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) in Philippine fiction in English—reminded me of that student’s conundrum. Stepping back from Philippine literary history to identify patterns, one sees that while there is no lack of utopian visions in Philippine fiction, they tend to be backward-looking, seeking perfection in the past rather than straining toward a foreseeable ideal. While “perfect” implies a state of completion and wholeness already consummated, “ideal” implies something better to work towards, as well as improvement or development, and therefore utopias are usually assumed to be forever in the never-attainable future, and humans are like Zeno’s arrow forever straining toward but never hitting the target. However, while More’s Utopia is contemporaneous with Tudor England, its location marks it as an ideal displaced in space rather than time—a preferred negation of Tudor England. Therefore, a utopia can exist not only as another place or another state, but also anywhere else in time—
before, after, or concurrent with the present.
More’s Utopia, representing as it does the culmination of efforts at progress and development, has no more room for change. In narrative terms, it is a climax infinitely extended in stasis. Its citizens are conditioned to abandon or suppress ego, and therefore desire. The conditions and conventions of Utopia tamp desire down, striving for a uniformity of temperament that
2Jose Carlo C. Flordeliza discusses the development of his concept and its rationale in the essay “Orchestrating the Silence: A Personal and Critical Perspective on 351: A Novel,” which accompanies his thesis entitled “351: A Novel” (2014), submitted to De La Salle University–
Manila. The novel remains unpublished.
renders its inhabitants as soulless automatons, ants in an anthill observed from a distance, devoid of passion or personality.
It is therefore difficult to write engaging fiction about a utopia. Utopias are the parts that are skipped over in narratives, rendered in summarizing passages, condensed in Hollywood montage sequences, or dismissed with a phrase or sentence: “And they lived happily ever after.” Small wonder that utopian fictions must introduce a disruptive element into the deadening equilibrium, either from without—as in an outsider like Lemuel Gulliver blundering into foreign lands and causing trouble there—or from within, as when inhabitants are driven to break the rules of the utopia in some way. When either of these scenarios happens, the utopia is laid bare as a dystopia instead.
Perhaps the boredom induced by perfection has led our fiction writers to look elsewhere for narrative excitement, but our tendency to seek and find utopia in the past seems to indicate unique conditions in our history that cause a collective predisposition to reject the momentum of progress for the stasis of nostalgia. This inclination appears to unite the supposedly opposed vectors of romance and realism in our fiction, demonstrating a common font from which our stories flow.
PHILIPPINE UTOPIAS BEFORE AND AFTER ENGLISH To trace the contours of utopia in Philippine fiction in English, I must begin before English. Glancing over the history of our literature, we find that there is no dearth of the utopian.
Our indigenous precolonial cosmology, as reflected in our epics and myths, posit a three-tiered cosmos: the langit, sky, or heaven; the earth; and the underworld. The sky is said to contain many wonderful worlds where divine beings reside and to which worthy humans may retire after their time on earth. In the Manuvu tale of Tuwaang, the hero overcomes enemies to win the hand of his beloved, and takes her and his people to “the country of Katuusan . . . the doorway of heaven . . . the land without death.”3 They are borne aloft on a golden sinalimba, or flying vehicle, pulled by several diwata.
In the Suban-on epic of Sandayo, on the other hand, the hero likewise takes his family up to the “ninth heaven, / A heaven of gold, / A heaven so bright,
3E. Arsenio Manuel, “The Maiden of the Buhong Sky,” in Philippine Folk Literature: The Epics, ed. Damiana L. Eugenio (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2001), 191.
/ As bright as a star.”4 There they live in a floating golden “house of the blessed,” which is forever thereafter their home in “this eternal world / Where all is happiness.”5
In contrast, the underworld is the endpoint of mortality, a place to which the dead retreat. The hero may venture into the underworld to retrieve people and things, but it is generally not a good place for the living.
However, the middle tier—the earth—while often the site of conflict, is also often characterized as being fundamentally pleasant. Many of our creation myths say the world originated as collateral damage in a grand battle between deities, but also as the creation of supernatural beings (sometimes by accident, sometimes by design), and the creation is either perfect, or perfected after a few false starts. Epic heroes are often born into idyllic places that they must either leave to go on an adventure or defend from disruptive forces that compel the restoration of equilibrium. In some cases, heroes take an active role in creating ideal societies on earth, demonstrating that the langit has no monopolies on happiness.
In the Visayan creation myth, a divine being named Tungkung Langit either creates a beautiful world or beautifies an existing one, depending on the version one reads. He does so in the hopes of enticing his lost love Alunsina to return.6 These notions of beauty born out of sadness and of the eternal hope of a happy ending will prove to be enduring themes in Philippine literature.
Our first colonial encounter brought with it Roman Catholicism and, with it, a unitary myth of utopia in the form of the Garden of Eden and the Paradise Lost narrative. Eden is utopian because it is a place of innocence and superabundance, but it also contains the kernels of anti-utopia: There are an interdiction (partaking of one tree’s fruit is forbidden) and, interestingly enough, human beings. Eden could very well have remained Edenic if Adam and Eve had never been created. Human nature loses, and humans are cast out into a harsh world to live a life of suffering, never to be allowed the chance to return to Eden until the New Testament kicks in. Existence, as Catholics know it, is therefore dystopia—something other than paradise that must be suffered through meekly—and utopia is held out as a promise for the afterlife.
4Virgilio Resma, “The Tale of Sandayo,” in Eugenio, Philippine Folk Literature, 559.
5Ibid., 560.
6F. Landa Jocano, “Tungkung Langit and Alunsina (Panay-Visayan),” in Philippine Folk Literature: An Anthology, ed. Damiana L. Eugenio (Quezon City: University of the Philippines, 2001), 9–11.
This view presents a marked contrast to the indigenous middle tier of the cosmos, but it all makes sense if one remembers that the story of Eden originated among nomadic tribes living in a desert. It is logical that their paradise would be an oasis where plants and animals thrive, and which produces enough water to supply four separate rivers. The story of humanity’s fall from grace also explains their punishing and punished existence, which involves eking a living out of an arid, deadly landscape while fending off hostilities from similarly disenfranchised tribes.
It must also be noted that within this narrative, utopia is a regression, a prior state that one longs to return to, and any forward progress, the imperative to deserve paradise, loops back on itself in the end.
Spain’s extended colonial adventure was perhaps itself a utopian project born out of the belief that Spain was a utopia itself and therefore had to refashion the rest of the world in its own image. In creating the Philippines, Spain also created an incipient desire among those it had colonized for the fulfillment of the utopian promise of their becoming an independent, powerful nation like Spain. Thus nationhood became the utopian ideal as well as the enduring theme of Philippine literature and of the literatures of other postcolonial nations. This ideal was articulated in the Philippine Revolution, driven by the same contradictory humanism that had animated More three and a half centuries before. So linked is the concept of utopia to equality and freedom (incompatible though these principles may be) that the idea of a utopian colonial experience, no matter how benevolent, is impossible.
Jose Rizal himself would invoke More in his own utopian thought experiment, “The Philippines a Century Hence,” pointing out that the rest of the world had already improved on More’s vision, by abolishing slavery and capital punishment for adulterers, to bolster his argument for the plausibility of Philippine emancipation, independence, and progress as a nation.7
Rizal’s novels also dramatize the quest for a Philippine utopia, thereby casting the Spanish colony as a dystopia that holds the promise of redemption.
In Noli me tangere (1887), he even slips in a nod to More’s book when he reveals that Tasyo, the eccentric wise old man, has set his ideals of a perfect society to paper, but in code, leaving it to future generations to decrypt and learn from. This Borgesian text finds its echo in the ending of El filibusterismo (1891) in the casket of wealth that Padre Florentino hurls into the sea to await a future generation who will, with any luck, be ready for it.
7Jose Rizal, “The Philippines a Century Hence,” in Jose Rizal: Political and Historical Writings, trans. Encarnacion Alzona (Manila: National Historical Commission, 2001), 151–52.
In another interesting echo, the great twist of the Fili reveals that Simoun’s terrorist plot is nothing more than an elaborate diversionary tactic to spring his inamorata from her convent prison. Unlike Tungkung Langit, however, his reunion with his lost love can only take place in the afterlife, ideally in the Catholic heaven and not the indigenous underworld.
Ultimately, and predictably, Philippine independence did not bring the promised utopia. Conceived in and shaped by revolution, the postcolonial Philippines became a long-term work-in-progress toward the ideal nation, held back by residual loyalties to colonial cultural legacies (such as religion, language, and conventions of “civilization”) and marked by continual revolt, rebellion, dissidence, and protest. The literary movement known as socialist realism, which arose in the Soviet Union in the first two decades of the twentieth century and gave rise to the worldwide movements of “committed”
or “engaged” literature, neorealism, and social realism,8 became the appropriate, if not mandatory, mode and genre of storytelling for a nation-in- progress, and it became an effective tool for sustained critique of society’s ills.
Its forefather was acknowledged to be Rizal, and his descendants continued their documentation of the social cancer in its new mutations.
The theme, objective, even obsession, of social realism is justice. To this end, the genre’s tendency is a careful depiction and dramatization of injustice in whatever form it takes. The targets vary, but these are often rooted in socioeconomic inequality and the myriad problems that it engenders. The resultant stories rarely end well and therefore tend to paint a bleak, grim picture of the nation, even when their endings suggest the hope of redemption and salvation.
The principal social realist in English continues to be F. Sionil Jose, and the key text in his work is still his Rosales saga, but only because a resurgence of nationalism beginning in the 1960s began to privilege Philippine languages over English, and his banner was taken up by writers producing fiction in Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilokano, Bikol, Hiligaynon, and other languages.
Literature of protest peaked in the Martial Law era and plateaued in the decades after 1986, especially in English, as the imperative for committed art and literature relaxed. In the new millennium, writers in English tend to
8Michael Denning traces the history of socialist realism in “The Novelists’ International” in The Novel, Volume 1: History, Geography, and Culture, ed. Franco Moretti (Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2006).
explore other modes and genres, still looking to other countries for models to imitate and perhaps improve upon.9
Social realism cannot even claim to be dystopic, since it purports to show reality in the present, as it is, unless it forks into magical realism or alternative history, the way Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War (1988) and Charlson Ong’s An Embarrassment of Riches (2000) do. However, it cannot be denied that its underlying spirit continues to be humanist and utopian. Behind every injustice laid bare in a novel or short story is an implied declaration of principles about how things ought to be. Sometimes a narrator or character self-consciously and unrealistically discourses at length on what is wrong with society, but otherwise readers must read between the lines to determine what the true contention is. Utopia is thus telegraphed in flashes, or hovers over the text, casting its shadow upon it. This spectral socialist utopia is arguably closest to More’s, whose primary and most controversial proposal was the abolition of private property and the equal rationing of wealth to all Utopians.
Colonization by the United States of America brought another hubristic version of utopia, one even more explicitly founded on humanist ideals of equality, however imperfectly applied these were (and are). Democracy harks back to the earlier utopia of Plato, which America infused with a Protestant work ethic and the certitude of getting what one deserves, as well as the promise of modernity and progress.10 While the utopia of heaven still held out its carrot, equal emphasis was placed on creating utopia on earth, as a way of honoring God’s gift. Hubris is thus reframed as piousness, thereby rationalizing a multitude of sins. The first British settlers in the New World cast themselves as Yahweh’s chosen people and their settlement the New Jerusalem, and this hijacked narrative continues to serve as the foundation of the North American mythos.
In the North American thrust toward the future, the past might be fetishized in memorials and monuments, but it is ultimately set aside as baggage that impedes progress. What is emphasized is speed in the present, the faster for one to get to the future.11
9See my introduction to A Different Voice: Fiction by Young Filipino Writers, ed. Vicente Garcia Groyon (Manila: University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2007).
10Barbara Ehrenreich traces the links between religion and the American economy in Bright- sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), particularly chapter five, “God Wants You to Be Rich,” 123–46. Peter H. Schuck and James Q.
Wilson sum up aspects of American-ness in “Looking Back,” the final chapter of Understanding America: The Anatomy of an Exceptional Nation (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), 627–43.
11I discuss my observations on this and related aspects of Americana in “Theme Parks and Cemeteries: On the Fall and Recovery of American Cities” in Fall and Rise, American Style: Eight
America itself became a promised land for many Filipinos, for whom it represented the opposite of what the Philippines appeared to be: primitive, backward, and forever denied the status of paradise. This resulted in continuous waves of migration in search of utopia in the land of milk and honey—that is, the second land of milk and honey, after Israel. These quests often ended in despair, alienation, and defeat, or at least ended this way in Philippine literature. Again, fiction being what it is and requiring the elements that it does, the expatriate narratives in our literature are less about heroes arriving at happy endings after epic struggles, and more about Filipinos being ground down by the dehumanization of immigrant life.
Carlos Bulosan’s protagonists watch as their illusions of North American utopia are exposed as the myths that they are, and like the characters of Bienvenido N. Santos, they do their best to retain the integrity of their egos in the face of crushing humiliation, while longing for the homes of their past, now forever inaccessible to them.
Bienvenido N. Santos’s most poignant depiction of this narrative is the short story “The Day the Dancers Came” (1967). The story follows a Filipino oldtimer in Chicago eagerly looking forward to a performance by the Bayanihan Dance Troupe, which is touring America. Desperately lonely and socially inept, he fantasizes about inviting the dancers to his apartment and impressing them as a Filipino-American, but humiliates himself in the process, coming across as a creepy old man seeking to use the bond of shared nationality to take advantage of the performers.
This story is read as the definitive depiction of the oldtimer tragedy and as a portrait of the America-tainted Philippines. Aging and alone after a lifetime squandered trying to make it in a foreign country, deprived of the social networks, the transportation and communication technology, and the cultural tolerance that make working abroad easier today, these shuffling old men found themselves wandering between two homes—one unwelcoming and persistently unfamiliar, and the other forever barred to them by time. The story’s hero, Fil, is compared in the story to an island adrift and alone in the ocean and a dead fetus preserved in a jar, and he lives in his memories of the old country, which he acknowledges to be so changed as to be unrecognizable to him. He traps memories via sound through a tape recorder, but the machine betrays him in the end, erasing all his carefully preserved recordings. Here, the stasis that characterizes utopia is filled with death instead of bliss.
International Writers between Gettysburg and the Gulf, ed. Natasa Durovicova and Hugh Ferrer (Iowa City: 91st Meridian Books, 2015).
Fil’s redemption comes in his eventual self-awareness, but the hero of Carlos Bulosan’s autobiographical novel persists in his utopian delusion, perhaps because it is the only thing he has. America Is in the Heart (1946) is a novel of unrelenting sadness shot through with flashes of horror and outrage. On page after page, the hero Allos suffers stoically through a series of demeaning setbacks and tribulations in the promised land, constantly looking back on his memories of the Philippines. And yet, in the novel’s final chapter, he finds it in himself to declare: “I glanced out of the window again to look at the broad land I had dreamed so much about, only to discover with astonishment that the American earth was like a huge heart unfolding warmly to receive me.”12 He goes on to assert: “No man—no one at all—could destroy my faith in America again. It was something that had grown out of my defeats and successes, something shaped by my struggles for a place in this vast land . . . . It was something that grew out of the sacrifices and loneliness of my friends . . . something that grew out of our desire to know America, and to become a part of her great tradition, and to contribute something to her final fulfillment.”13 Hope springs eternal in his plucky, deluded heart, and this jarring conclusion is both an affirmation of his strength of will and a white flag of surrender.
THE PAST AS UTOPIA
After America, the complications of progress, modernity, and speed endowed the ideal of Philippine nationhood with plausibility, and it appears ever closer and more attainable under the aegis of North American democracy.
The horror of World War II and the subsequent granting of Philippine independence thrust utopia upon the Filipinos and, like the manong characters of Bulosan and Santos, we had to assess and contend with the reality of the promise fulfilled.
This situation manifests itself in Philippine fiction in English in the harking back to an earlier model of utopia—one rooted in the past and recalling the Paradise Lost narratives. In much Philippine fiction, the past is characterized as idyllic and ideal, and separation or departure from it constitutes a necessary pain en route to maturation.
12Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart (Pasig City: Anvil Publishing Inc., 2006), 326.
13Ibid., 326–27.
The starting point of Philippine fiction in English, Paz Marquez Benitez’s short story “Dead Stars” (1925) allegorizes this transition. Although other writers before her had been dutifully learning to write in English, mastering the new language and its modes of representing reality, “Dead Stars” has been canonized as the first mature accomplishment by a Filipino writer,14 successfully using the language as a means to an end rather than imitating foreign literary works. English by then had become a stepping stone to the American Dream, a code one had to master to attain utopia, and over the decades it has become an ideal in itself—for many Filipinos today, it seems to signify intelligence, success, wealth, and superiority.15
While Marquez Benitez still seems to be aping North American models (chief among them the tragic missed connections that abound in Edith Wharton and Henry James), there is little that is North American about her story. Her characters move in a Spanish colonial world despite the presence of North Americans, and they are bound by the mores and conventions of that world.
The story’s hero, Alfredo Salazar, spends the last section of the story weighed down by an unexplored romantic opportunity in his past and, like Bienvenido N. Santos’s Fil, his insight is that the past holds nothing for him but the leftover light from the dead stars of an aborted love affair. He meanders through eight years teased by this illusion, and the story gently guides him to the conclusion that he must move on: “An immense sadness as of loss invaded his spirit, a vast homesickness for some immutable refuge of the heart far away where faded gardens bloom again, and where live on in unchanging freshness, the dear, dead loves of vanished youth.”16
In the context of modernity and progress, the idyllic and the ideal often appear in the form of rustic, provincial life, which constitutes the myth of the quintessentially native Filipino. The stock elements of this utopia are the bahay kubo, the barrio, the farmland, the forest, the river, and, yes, the boy on the carabao. Many of these stories were written by writers working in “the big
14Primarily by Leopoldo Y. Yabes, who begins his anthology Philippine Short Stories: 1925–
1940 (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1975; repr. 1997) with it.
15I perceive this most clearly in the ways Filipinos resort to English in confrontations with other Filipinos (as in the case of viral sensation “Amalayer Girl”) and film and television melodrama villains who oppress heroes with language as with other more tangible things. On the reality show Pinoy Big Brother, English-speaking contestants have been forced to learn Tagalog as a way of leveling their status with those of other contestants.
16Paz Marquez Benitez, “Dead Stars,” in Yabes, Philippine Short Stories, 19.
city,” Manila. They were recalling the simpler days before urbanization and thereby adding to a more comprehensive composite picture of Philippine life.
The rural utopia is exemplified in the work of Manuel Arguilla, who paints his native La Union in loving detail. In “How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife” (1934), the urban-rural binary is reversed, and the encroaching city girl must undergo a series of tests en route to meeting her father-in-law for the first time to prove that she is worthy of her husband’s provincial roots.
Because the story is told from the younger brother’s perspective, the young bride is rendered as an exotic, fragile creature who nevertheless embraces the rusticity gamely, and who thereby is allowed entry into utopia. This story is remembered and praised precisely for its nostalgic depiction of the simple life that exists only as pageant in the modern world.
In another story, “Midsummer” (1933), Arguilla laces his utopian rural setting with eroticism and even more explicit allusions to Eden. A young man and woman meet on a road by a well, there is some oblique flirtation and preening, as well as some suggestive business involving the boy’s carabao, and in the opening paragraph the road “seemed to writhe under the lash of the noon-day heat; it swung from side to side, humped and bent itself like a fleeing serpent,”17 tingeing the already charged interaction between the two characters with hints of the fall from grace.
The young man and woman seem caught in time, suspended in a forever pure state of innocence like figures in an Amorsolo. However, Arguilla slips in a crucial detail—a repurposed petroleum can—that betrays the fragility of this utopia. Modernity has begun encroaching on this paradise, although its artifacts prove useless in this setting and must therefore be modified to find their place. Fuel oil is clearly an imported product, and used to power vehicles or machinery. However, these things remain off-limits to the inhabitants of this utopia, who cannot afford them, have no use for them, or reject them in favor of their own tools. Only the cast-off petrol can, now halved and used more practically as a water bucket, remains.
Arguilla’s stance in this story is much more ambiguous than in “My Brother Leon,” but both stories depict rural utopias that are under threat of corruption by modernity and that are pushing back when necessary, even as the bubble enclosing their world could pop at any moment and a return to Eden would no longer be possible.
Another way by which the past constitutes a preferable state of existence is found in the work of Nick Joaquin, who made no bones about his distaste
17Manuel Arguilla, “Midsummer,” in Yabes, Philippine Short Stories, 215.
for North American culture. Joaquin characterizes the Spanish colonial period as the Philippine golden age and renders the twentieth century and the precolonial periods as chambers of horrors. This idea finds its fullest expression in the novella Candido’s Apocalypse (1972), where the eponymous hero rejects the trappings and values of the Americanized Philippines, beginning with his nickname Bobby, which he replaces with Candido, the name imposed upon him at birth by the Roman Catholic calendar. He enacts his alienation from the new order by lashing out at his nemesis Pompoy Morel, the epitome of all things “O.A.” (or over-acting, Candido’s term for all the modern customs and behavior he sees as put-on and inauthentic), and by going “stowaway,”
escaping from the life he despises.18
Bobby/Candido tries to find his way to his grandmother’s house in Quiapo, presumably a prewar holdover, which he associates with security, warmth, and feelings of home and permanence. However, he cannot bring himself to face his grandmother, fearing that her unpretentious, authentic self may also have been corrupted by the new order. By the end of the story, his two selves finally disengage from each other, and Bobby rejoins the world and moves on, while Candido walks off alone into the sunshine. What seems to be a happy ending is undercut by nostalgia—the pain that returning home brings, usually caused by the realization that recovering the past is impossible.
In The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961), the theme of the split identity plays out in the nervous breakdown of Connie Escobar, who cannot accept the dishonorable capitalist corruption that her father brings to public service and from which she benefits. In the same novel, we encounter Dr. Monson the elder, who has exiled himself and his sons to Hong Kong after his glorious failure to secure independence for his country in the Philippine Revolution and the Filipino-American war. Monson rejects Philippine society even after it has gained independence from America, because it no longer resembles the Philippines that he left behind at the turn of the century. He refuses to join the nation’s speedy progress to an Americanized future, finding comfort and stasis instead in another country.
Like Bobby, Connie Escobar seeks a way of coming to terms with the new order that she detests. Unlike Bobby, however, she does not compromise.
The novel ends with her severing ties with her family by faking her death, and escaping to Macao to begin a new life.
18It is ironic, or perhaps fitting, that this rejection of North American values and ways is written in English and so closely resembles a modern North American classic, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), while featuring the newly minted archetype of the juvenile delinquent.
A significant shift in attitude manifests in Joaquin’s second and final novel, Cave and Shadows (1983). Here, the precolonial past and the Spanish colonial past become the sinister villain, weaponized by political forces and thereby wreaking havoc and exposing the vulnerabilities of the Americanized present. Neither the long-gone past nor the promise of modernity can offer any solace, and the hapless and helpless hero, Jack Henson, retreats to the pre- human solitude of an island wilderness off the coast of Davao. Disgust and despair pervade Cave and Shadows, in which Joaquin, the courtly gentleman from a prior time, finds the past perverted and misunderstood, the present chaotic, and the future apocalyptic. In a world where facts and lies are impossible to distinguish, the only viable responses are surrender or exile.
By this novel’s publication, progress and development had become foregone conclusions, if only in appearance. The Marcos years saw the modernization of the countryside, the better to milk it of produce and profit. Roads and highways allowed access to previously “untainted” rural areas, and population growth pushed urban development further and further into previously rural areas, rendering the pastoral utopias of the Philippines into distant memories.
Communication technology broadened the scope of modernization, and today it is difficult to find areas and communities still unreached by the broadcast networks or the telecommunications companies. Cities and towns outside Mega Manila resemble each other more and more, homogenized by the same malls and franchises.
The inevitability of modernization is probably what made the 1971 Tasaday hoax, another piece of Philippine fiction, so enthralling. Purportedly a stone-age tribe living in the jungles of Cotabato, Mindanao, that had managed to escape detection or assimilation for millennia, the Tasaday people were “discovered” by Manuel Elizalde Jr., a Philippine government official of the Marcos era, and subsequently brought to national, then international, attention before being discredited, although there continues to be some disagreement about their authenticity.19 The idea that a community could remain isolated and pure was inordinately attractive to Filipinos reaping the benefits and paying the costs of modernization, as well as to a dictatorship intent on building a nation compliant to its self-serving goals, and it encouraged the suspension of disbelief necessary for the hoax to work.
However, in a time when modernity is a fact of life, it is perhaps logical that Filipinos treat the pastoral past as an irrevocable Other, posed in direct
19Robin Hemley’s Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) is a thorough and even-handed investigation of this topic.
opposition to reality in benign or hostile forms. We see this tendency most clearly in genre fiction, resurgent in the last two decades or so, which first flourished in Tagalog and other Philippine languages in the post-war years, and in Philippine cinema, but only became popular in fiction in English recently.
Filipino (or Pinoy) fantasy has always drawn on local myths and folklore, but more recent fantasy fiction has taken cues from European high fantasy in the Tolkien mode or other genres and subgenres. Local elements are substituted for foreign ones—tikbalang rather than satyr, diwata instead of fairy, and so on—often bringing the indigenous and rustic into the modern world. On the other hand, in the horror genre, the past is used as the traditionally Gothic source of terror. The same past, seen one way as pure and innocent, can just as easily be interpreted as primitive and barbaric.
The same supernatural elements of the pastoral utopia can elicit fear by exerting inordinate control over the present, threatening the modern world with domination and/or destruction. Filipinos writing in this genre tend to mine Philippine lower mythology for unique monsters to distinguish Pinoy horror from that of other countries’. Pinoy horror also uses a more universal source of fear rooted in the past—the ghost, whose hauntings challenge the rationality and order of the modern world. More recent horror fiction finds terror in Catholic mythology, especially Satan and demons; in nature and elemental forces, which stand opposed to the artificial infrastructure that supports modern life; and in tropes and archetypes borrowed from Western horror, such as the vampire, the cannibal, the psychopath, the evil aristocracy or elite, the mutant, and the zombie.20
THE FUTURE AS UTOPIA
In a developing country such as the Philippines, it seems logical that a pre- modern past and the yearning to retain a pastoral state would be positioned as utopian. However, utopias are fundamentally forward-looking, implying improvements on current conditions. The genre that addresses such concerns
20The University of the Philippines Press has published fair samplers of recent Filipino fantasy and horror fiction as part of its Stranger Fiction Series: The Farthest Shore: An Anthology of Fantasy Fiction from the Philippines, edited by Dean Francis Alfar and Joseph Frederic F.
Nacino (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2013) and Demons of the New Year: An Anthology of Horror Fiction from the Philippines, edited by Karl R. de Mesa and Joseph Frederic F.
Nacino (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2013).
is science fiction, and until recently, science fiction was a marginal literary genre in this country, often treated more like fantasy or horror, and seen most often in komiks or the cinema.
Conventional wisdom points to the absence of a tradition of scientific inquiry and discovery in the Philippines as causing the scarcity of Philippine science fiction, but from the standpoint of utopia vis-a-vis modernization, the dearth seems to indicate more a dis-ease with, or skepticism about, progress and development, perhaps because the outcomes and effects of technological advancement have yet to be demonstrated and measured in the Philippines, as well as in other developing countries. Thus, in an oddity like Gregorio Brillantes’s short story “The Apollo Centennial” (1972), set one hundred years after the Apollo moon landing, the Philippines retains its pastoral backwardness, collapsing under a sustained totalitarian regime, even as the rest of the world, which has moved nicely along, celebrates one of the great scientific achievements of the twentieth century. Stasis and the inability to progress have rendered the idyllic pastoral utopia dystopian. The story suggests a desire to catch up with the modernized West and indirectly laments the failure of the Philippines to attain even the utopian ideal of prosperous nationhood.
The current rise of science fiction can be partly attributed to an increased comfort with the reality of modernization since, for at least some parts of Philippine society, modernization has arrived. In the last two decades, it has become easier to believe that the Philippines has caught up with the modernized West, since many of the trappings are now commonplaces of Philippine life. The same segments of Philippine society have experienced the sort of heightened prosperity previously available only to the elite, and access to technology has become increasingly democratized. Out of these social classes have come writers in English who are more comfortable imagining technologically advanced versions of the Philippines, and raising questions about the moral, ethical, and sociopolitical implications of such advancement.
Therefore, as early as 1995, a “computer geek” could dream up Project Pawai, which the author, Jose E. C. Anozo, describes as “Pinoy cyberpunk,”
but which is really more like a Filipinization of the 1983 John Badham film WarGames, in which a teen computer whiz kid accidentally triggers a nuclear holocaust and races against time to avert it. In Project Pawai, the MacGuffin is North American nuclear waste, the backdrop is the 1986 EDSA Revolt, and the renegade Pinoy hacker saves the country with a beautiful blond North American by his side. Here, utopia is defined as technology finally enabling certain Filipino initiates to catch up with the West and take active part in shaping the fate of their nation.
Even earlier, in 1973, another oddity in Philippine fiction was published—a collection of science fiction stories by Jose Ma. Espino entitled Sixteen Stories, republished in 1999 with the title Orbit 21: Twenty-one Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction! The stories cover a wide array of scientific topics and themes, including space travel, the end of the world, parallel dimensions, extraterrestrial intelligence, and other staples of science fiction.
Most of the stories feature local settings and characters, but a handful involve an international or intergalactic cast of characters and take place in foreign countries or in outer space, where geographical boundaries and identities are irrelevant. This indicates another, more cosmopolitan, utopian ideal, one which was previously available only to fully realized independent and autonomous nations.
Espino’s science fiction is playful, showing genuine awe and wonder at the marvels of science and technology. However, in many of his stories, the Philippines remains acted upon rather than acting, the object of changes wrought by science from elsewhere rather than an agent of change itself.
For example, the eponymous protagonist of “The Mystery of Leon Habay,” wounded in the Korean War, finds himself able to telepathically intercept and channel information from an unknown source, thanks to a metal plate in his skull. When his knowledge of advanced science and technology catches the attention of the Philippine government and, eventually, the United States and “the Reds,” the government kidnaps him to hide him from the Soviet Union (protecting North American interests), and he is mysteriously killed. The narrator of the story then reveals itself to be a member of an alien race that has perfected mind control and has been transmitting knowledge to poor Leon. He reveals that his fellow extraterrestrials decided to kill Leon because Earth was not ready for the knowledge. This pattern is repeated in other stories: characters are beset by forces larger than themselves, and they are limited to reacting or merely watching events beyond their control unfold.
Interestingly, many of the stories also exhibit an explicitly articulated Judeo-Christian worldview. Although science fiction from other countries, especially America, allude to Christianity and include Christian motifs, archetypes, and themes, in Orbit 21, the existence of Yahweh is taken for granted, as is the grand narrative of the fall from grace and redemption with the Second Coming. The longest story of the collection, “Valedictory,”
follows the last man on earth in his struggle to survive after a mysterious apocalyptic event causes all other humans on earth to disappear. The story details how he explores Manila and neighboring provinces for signs of life.
His eventual attempts to recreate sustainable living conditions in the absence of public services and infrastructure fail. Then, a coda to the story reveals a
Biblical scroll discovered by archaeologists explaining that God had decreed that all humans living and dead would be called to heaven, except one. In another story, “The Missionaries,” alien beings land on a planet and establish telepathic contact with the natives, who have come to live under the sea as a result of an environmental catastrophe in the distant past. In the course of comparing their cultures, they realize that apart from their similar anatomies, they have Christianity in common, but the native sea-dwellers, a.k.a. former humans on Earth, abandoned Christianity long ago. They conclude that the aliens must have been brought to Earth to bring God back to the humans.
In this vision of the future, modernity and technological progress, even alien life, are part of the Divine Plan, and the ultimate utopian paradise still awaits. Espino’s stories may be science fiction, but their forward movement into the future loops back into the Garden of Eden in the end.
At the same time, the presence of hope in the form of divine salvation in these stories keeps them light-hearted and prevents them from descending into the grim depths of dystopia. In the collection’s final story, “Strike Two,”
the hero is God, who is depicted as experimenting with different creations on two planets and starting over on a third when he becomes displeased with his handiwork. However, he does not destroy his creations and instead leaves them intending to return to them in time.
In contrast, the majority of the stories that won prizes in the now- defunct future fiction category of the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature are grim dystopian visions based on less savory aspects of modernization in the present—for instance, the proliferation of malls and the dominance of capitalism, the deterioration of public services and infrastructure, and the ethical and political implications of cloning. Some of the stories are nostalgia pieces in which characters long for the life of the past, forever lost or abandoned in the name of progress.21
Because science fiction operates by extrapolating from present-day conditions and pursuing these to their logical or absurd conclusions, its visions are limited and colored by its writers’ experiences in and perceptions of the world, much in the same way that More’s Utopia is bound to the context of Tudor England.
On the other hand, these writers may still be expressing dis-ease and fear of what progress will bring and take away, given that the Philippines still
21Carlos M. Piocos III provides an incisive analysis of these stories in his unpublished master’s thesis, “The Promise of the Future: Nation and Utopia in Philippine Future Fiction,”
submitted to Cardiff University in 2011.
appears to lag behind other nations in terms of technological advancement.
Many of the modern aspects of Philippine life—telecommunications and transportation chief among them—continue to be carefully sustained illusions, and those that are not have proven detrimental rather than beneficial.
However, fiction writers cannot help but focus on the negative, because the literary form demands it. Science fiction will therefore probably tend to the dystopian rather than the utopian, and will remain critical of utopia and dramatize its flaws. The rise of science fiction in the Philippines is still a positive development, since it indicates that Filipino writers are coming to terms with progress to the extent of being able to imagine a future, dystopian though it may be.
THE PRESENT AS UTOPIA
Defining utopia as what is not and what should be seems to preclude the possibility of finding utopia in the present, which in fiction is usually depicted as a state in flux. Given the form’s propensity for conflict, the present is likely to be a constant transitory struggle that leads to more struggle until a goal is achieved or a problem is solved.
I propose that utopia can be found in depictions of the present, but we must return to the opposite of realism to find it. We have seen the romance mode operating in utopian visions from our oral traditions, as well as in the genres of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. That said, the romance mode works most powerfully in the very genre that bears its name, and where else but in romance fiction will one find depictions of the ideal and the perfect?
In her seminal essay “The Romance Mode in Philippine Popular Literature,”
Soledad Reyes argues that romance was “a major shaping influence” on twentieth-century Philippine fiction, despite the greater demand for realism.
She says: “The tendency remained an idealizing one, seen specifically in a Utopian and visionary spirit. As Northrop Frye argues, the novel is a realistic displacement of romance. This is the reason that the two modes—romance and realism—could exist side by side in this genre.”22
Introduced into the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, chivalric romance narratives quickly became the most popular type of literature in the Philippines, despite royal proscription against bringing secular
22Soledad S. Reyes. The Romance Mode in Philippine Popular Literature and Other Essays (Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1991), 33.
printed material into the colonies. Fascinating Filipinos with their tales of heroic adventures in faraway lands, the metrical romance found expression in drama, pageantry, oral literature, and the printed text. Eventually it migrated to the cinema and the komiks, metamorphosing into the contemporary romance genre in the same way it did in Europe. So strong is its influence that in his study of the development of the Filipino novel, Resil Mojares characterizes the Filipino novel as developing through a “continuing dialectic between two sets of impulses, or organizing principles”: the didactic, romantic, and aesthetic versus the fictional, realistic, and empirical.23 Although Mojares positions these impulses as opposed, their dialectic interaction results in a happy fusion that finds its most comfortable expression in the romance novel.
Filipino romance novels have always been consistent bestsellers of the Philippine market, and their sales figures can only hint at their readerships, as copies tend to be passed on, exchanged, resold, or rented out to other readers.24 Modeled after Western romance novels of the Mills & Boon variety, they typically eschew historical milieus for contemporary settings and situations, and their narratives are usually aspirational, focusing on middle- class characters while targeting lower-class readers. While some are written in English, the majority are in Tagalog or, to a much lesser extent, other Philippine languages. The last two decades have seen Philippine romance novels targeting middle- and upper-class readers via local publishers of glossy magazines like Cosmopolitan and Candy, which are cashing in on the rise of chick lit in America. The latest trends, which continue to mimic North American and British models, are erotica, thanks to Fifty Shades of Grey, and romance targeted at the relatively new niche market of “young adults.”25 Technology plays a role here as well: story sharing/social networking sites like Wattpad and other online fora have spawned “Wattpad novels”—online-to- print crossovers—which have proven popular enough to merit spin-offs into
23Resil B. Mojares, Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel: A Generic Study of the Novel until 1940 (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1983), 370.
24Patricia May B. Jurilla’s Tagalog Bestsellers of the Twentieth Century: A History of the Book in the Philippines (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2008) remains the definitive study on this topic.
25I use this term, in its traditional book classification sense, to refer to books targeted at readers aged twelve to eighteen, as defined by the American Library Association in the 1960s (“Brief History of the Young Adult Services Division,” ALA: American Library Association. http://
www.ala.org/yalsa/aboutyalsa/history/briefhistory). However, with the emergence of subniche markets in recent decades (such as “tweens”), as well as the lengthening of adolescence in more recent generations, the age range covered by the term has become more nebulous, extending as far as the mid- to late-twenties.<LFN>
film and television. Most recently, Vince and Kath (2016), a novel originally presented online as a series of screen captures of SMS and chat conversations, and shared virally on various social media platforms, found its way into book form, was adapted into a film, and then a story app for Android phones.
Despite its innovative genesis and transformations, it hews true to its nature, tracing the repetitive travails of a love affair that should be but is not, thanks to the doubts and vacillations of its heroes. Its filmic incarnation pushes it more firmly into familiar romance territory, highlighting a love triangle that echoes, however faintly, Cyrano de Bergerac.
The romance novel is a predictable, formulaic genre, which fact accounts for its popularity; its reassuring familiarity is its main selling point. The expectations are simple: a happy ending via true love and/or insight, with a few struggles to make it worthwhile and numerous moments of that romantic frisson known as kilig. There are no supernatural or fantastic elements in romance novels, so the worlds they present are essentially realistic. However, they represent a heightened, idealized reality—recognizable, plausible, but largely pleasant and desirable, devoid of the inconvenient or unattractive.
The most implausible and unrealistic aspects of a romance novel are apt to be found in the motivations, decisions, and behavior of its characters, which are devised to nudge the plot toward the desired emotional effects. Any problems introduced for the sake of conflict are usually contrived and insignificant in the long run or, if not, are quickly resolved by the end. The style might be realism, but the mode is undeniably romance, and the form solidly fiction.
The world of the romance novel is one in which social barriers are routinely hurdled, where infidelity is nonexistent or forgivable, where the awkward and unattractive are appreciated for their inner strength and beauty by lovers who epitomize perfection, where bad boys are always beautiful and are merely acting out hidden pain and can therefore be redeemed by the love of the right woman, and where suffering for love is always exquisite and can be plumbed for wisdom to see one through another day.
These are perhaps the most characteristic of Philippine utopias, escapist and imaginary, animating our contemporary mythologies even as they are informed by our precolonial notions of life on our earth. Some utopias are built around equality, others around freedom, justice, innocence, or prosperity, but the most enduring, captivating utopias are apparently the ones built around love. They return us to the optimism of our precolonial myths, in which the present is perfected and the hope of even better days springs eternal.
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Vicente Garcia Groyon teaches at De La Salle University–Manila. He has published a novel, The Sky over Dimas, and a collection of short stories, On Cursed Ground and Other Stories. He may be reached through e-mail at [email protected].
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