Metafiction in Philippine writing

EXPLODING Galaxies is a new publishing house that aims to reprint the classics of Philippine literature. First off the bat is Wilfrido Nolledo’s “But for the Lovers,” which he began when he was a writing fellow at the famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Nolledo’s “Canticle for Dark Lovers,” a collection of stories, has also been published, along with Linda Ty-Casper’s historical novel “The Three-Cornered Sun” and Erwin Castillo’s “The Firewalkers.” The late Doreen Fernandez wrote two iconic books on food, “Palayok: Philippine Food Through Time,” “On Site, In the Pot” and “Sarap: Essays on Philippine Food”; they both also got reprinted last latest book from Exploding Galaxies is Alfred “Krip” Yuson’s “The Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café.” The book was first published in 1988 by the Book Development Association of the Philippines as its grand prize winner for a novel-writing contest. Its 2015 reprint was done by Anvil and launched along with the novels of Merlinda Bobis, Lakambini Sitoy and ’s novel ushered the Philippine novel into the world of metafiction. Metafiction a la Yuson extends the breadth and depth of Philippine writing, for one way to capture our folk mythology and complex history is through the cosmos the genre contained. The prefix “meta” means beyond. This novel is fiction, yes, but it destroys the walls and ceilings set up by realism, and frees the Filipino imagination to novel chronicles the amazing life of Leon Kilat: sacristan, Singer sewing-machine salesman, circus performer, lover and revolutionary. Leon mirrors the Filipino’s many masks, worn because of the quirks and accidents of our history and builds upon the horizons of fictional techniques in this novel. James Joyce’s stream of consciousness in “Ulysses” finds a reprise here, but the resonance is clearer because it is more familiar. The novel also operates in a timeless universe. As National Artist Nick Joaquin observed: “In the world it creates, everything is happening under the light of eternity.”And what a wild, eternal world it is, where Nonoy Marcelo, Jose Rizal, Edilberto and Edith Tiempo, and Melchora Aquino come alive and, well, are meeting each other in a quirky coffee shop. There’s also Paciano Rizal calling the Cuban Juan Marti “but the Baptist to my brother Pepe’s Christ,” and even our dear, much-missed Freddie Salanga, in the now-classic line from director Peque Gallaga’s film, “Scorpio Nights”: “Ibaba ang lonta, ipakita ang ari.”Like E.L. Doctorow’s watershed novel, “Ragtime,” Yuson mixes people both imaginary and real, dead or alive, where the linear concept of time itself has melted. Scenes shuttle back and forth with the fluidity of cinema. There are close-ups, fade-outs and dissolves, and long shots. The technique implies that nothing is lost; the collective mind is a sponge that retains everything. Or as Leon Kilat himself muses: “There is strength in remembering.”There are word-plays and puns that remind us of Nolledo’s Filipino baroque magnum opus, “But for the Lovers.” But Yuson also adds his own language: at first vibrant with a nervous energy; and then later, lolling about in “an imperial form of sadness.”Rizal’s Sisa, who has become part of our mythology, surfaces again in this novel. Although no longer searching for her sons Basilio and Crispin, she still bears the gifts of grief. Listen: “To look at her though one would think she remained indifferent even to the peals of bells of sorrow.” Yuson paints scenes that are sad and beautiful. Here is a vignette on the island of Cebu, where “the sea [is] thinning off in slow seduction of unspeakable loneliness.”And when Yuson writes of food, one’s mouth begins to water in remembrance of tastes and fragrances past: “The milkfish bellies, eels in vinegar, snipes flambéd in lambanog, oh, the clear quick answer of the stomach, ahhh Maria of the catfish in cocomilk, of the crabfat with fermented shrimp rice sheathed in mustard leaf....”What to make, then, of this wild romp, this whirling dance of a novel?Full circle is the structure of the novel — the beginning is the end, and the end is where it begins. The novel shows our history of gladness and grief, but more of grief, for we stop moving on when the momentary light of joy has set in. What happened after the People Power Revolution at EDSA 1? The restoration of elite “democracy.” And what about EDSA 2? The downward spiral of a nation. And where did the UniTeam go?Near the tail-end of the novel someone asks: “And why are we back in the revolution? And someone says ‘aren’t we always?” That is why even our blasé millennials were shocked when they saw the film “Heneral Luna.” Shocked at how we treated each other like beasts, all in the name of are a people who begin to slacken when we should have gone full steam ahead after doing something grand and revolutionary. We gather at the coffee shop to gossip, but should we not also go beyond the casual vacancy of talk and do something solid after the coffee has gone cold?My friend, the sociologist and now lawyer Eric San Juan said that we should forge symbols that would unite us as a people. His theory of “symbolic activism” calls for alert, alive and active symbols that would try to bind land and people, mythology and history together, or would show the ruptures in between these categories. The Nobel Prize winner, the late and lamented Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s lasting legacy to his Latin America is “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” It is both a novel — and a symbol — not only of his beloved Colombia, but also of the sprawling continent kapihan symbolizes one facet of the Filipino. Amid the noise and the lunacy around him, Leon Kilat falls silent. “In his stillness Leon knew that the mysterious meant nothing else but the alternating currents of laughter and rubble.”This is a shorter version of a review in the now-defunct National Midweek magazine in 1988, after the publication of Yuson’s Remoto has written “Boys’ Love: A Novel,” “Riverrun: A Novel,” and “The Heart of Summer: Stories and Tales.” His books are available at Fully Booked, National Bookstore, Shopee, Lazada and Central Books; Kinokuniya in Asia; and Amazon globally.