Download Nick Joaquin's Apocalypse and more Lecture notes History in PDF only on Docsity!
Nick Joaquin’s Apocalypse
Women and the Tragi-comedy
of the “Unhappy Consciousness”
AbstrAct
Beginning with the notion of experience exchanged via story-telling, this paper focuses on the evolving drama of consciousness variously rendered in Joaquin’s narratives. This drama has been rehearsed conceptually in Hegel’s critique of the “Unhappy Consciousness” in Phenomenology of Spirit. Torn between the patriarchal regime of the family and the necessity of survival in a bour- geois-capitalist milieu, Joaquin’s bifurcated subject (represented by characters in crisis) dissolves into the mirage of unifying myths or becomes reconciled to the alienating system by artistic fiat. Joaquin’s motive of attempting to recon- cile polarized memories and fantasies, a project of extracting universality from particularized dilemmas, symbolizes the predicament of the ilustrado class. Joaquin articulates the conscience of this embattled group whose legitimacy has been challenged by the sheer force of repressed natural drives. These energies were hitherto sublimated in subaltern negativity embodied in collective labor and resistance. Truthful to the ilustrado syndrome, Joaquin’s art is thus unable to resolve the dialectic of the “Unhappy Consciousness” within a materialist
E. San Juan, Jr.
University of the Philippines, Diliman
historical frame, thus functioning as the testimony of mere utopian longing or the allegory of a compulsively repeated tragicomedy rescued from an embalmed past.
Keywords
bifurcated subject, ilustrado syndrome, Nick Joaquin, phenomenology, “Unhappy Consciousness”
tion of romanticized story-telling. Actually, Benjamin linked narrative art to the web of determinate social relations, specifically the mode of production and conflicted classes (peasantry, guild artisan, merchant trader, capitalist industrialist), which produced the substance and circumscribed the narrat- ability of diverse experiences. Story-telling is tied to the rhythms of work and the oral context of a long-vanished communal audience. With the onset of capitalism, that context dissolved; the “short-lived reminiscences of the storyteller” gave way to the “perpetuating remembrance of the novelist” in a commodified milieu. Memory, a conjured homeland, the narration of collective experience, shared fate—this is what is at stake in estimating Joaquin’s relevance today. It is the novel as “the form of transcendental homelessness” (a concept borrowed from Georg Lukacs) to which Benjamin attributes the function of revitalizing epic memory. And so it is the novel, such as Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Cave and Shadows , that evokes “the genu- inely epic experience of time: hope and memory….” (Lukacs 99). Whether such a mode of experience salvaged from the “ruins of modernity” can be conveyed by the tales and legends that comprise the bulk of the Penguin collection, is what needs to be clarified. We cannot echo what Gorky once said of Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” that Filipino writing all disingenuously came out of Joaquin’s two navels.
rebirth of the Author?
Poststructuralist critics have long pronounced the death of the author in its conventional sense as a sacred demiurge, a sovereign genius. Earlier Marx, Darwin, Saussure, Freud, and Nietzsche all concurred in the demise of that individual-centered cosmos. But Barthes and Foucault have resuscitated the author as a function, a site of discursive contestation, rather than an origi- nating presence with the mystical halo given by the Penguin Classic editors and blurbs. One American reviewer ventured peremptorily to dismantle that halo by ascribing to Joaquin a melancholy anger, relentlessly composing “a fierce elegy for a past that never was.” She summed up Joaquin’s central preoccupation thus: “the older generation is bitterly impotent against the sea
changes of the present, and the younger generations desperate to understand the world, but adrift between potential and petrification” (Valentine). The thematic problem that Joaquin engages with concerns the ques- tion of the Subject of a singular Filipino national experience. It is a complex hypothesis, a speculative proposition, that we have explored before (San Juan, Subversions ). This involves accounting for the subject-positions offered by the texts. It is not the mismatch or incompatibility between generational attitudes, but rather how this Subject, confined to the petty bourgeois urban sector, asserts itself, its negativity, in the process of evolving to a dynamic self-con- scious historically concrete position. Essentially, this Subject is an evolving identity-in-difference (Marcuse). Situated in the transition from the feudal/ colonial mode of production to a bureaucratic-comprador mode, this Subject undergoes diremption. Defined by Otherness, it proceeds to recognize its difference/alienation and struggles to sublate the antagonisms converging in its life-world in order to construct its new subject-position, a relatively auton- omous, free, rational self-consciousness in command of its lived experience. In brief, it is the ordeal of a particular community discovering its concrete universality in the process of attempting to reconcile historically determinate contradictions, yielding tragi-comic spectacles and language-games. The Subject as an identity-in-difference, for Joaquin the hispanicized Filipino creole (Rizal, Luna, among others) bifurcated by Spanish and Anglo- Saxon subjugation, refuses to accept the domination of alienated labor (capi- talist exploitation) and struggles to maintain the honor-centered norm of theocratic Manila. Proof of this is Joaquin’s 1943 essay, “La Naval de Manila,” a celebration of the Spanish victory over the Dutch in 1646, which won him a scholarship to St. Albert Monastery in Hong Kong in 1947 (De Vera). From the Commonwealth period up to the installation of the “puppet republic” of Roxas, Quirino, and Magsaysay, Joaquin’s endeavor to construct this Subject—the metamorphosis of the ilustrado sensibility into a civic-minded citizen of the Republic—founders. Only the sisters of Antigone—Candida and Paula of A Portrait —remain as testimony to this heroic attempt to shape a national allegory of bourgeois compromise. This would be nothing else but a self-determining reflexive story of private lives and individual destinies
Nonetheless, they may constitute Joaquin’s most instructive contribution to the current dialogue on national-democratic reconstruction. At the end of the day, the “Unhappy Consciousness” (as described by Hegel in Phenomenology of Spirit) of Joaquin’s Subject yields up the fruits of labor and enjoyment for the absolving act of the intermediary consciousness (such as the father’s in “Three Generations” or the epiphany of Candido, Sid Estiva, Bitoy Camacho, and Pepe Monson). But they occlude the fate of Others: of the sisters Paula and Candida, of the children such as Guia and the Monson brothers, and neighbors of the decaying house in Intramuros. In Tales , such as in “The Summer Solstice” and “Candido’s Apocalypse,” moral decision and understanding are sacrificed for a stance of stoic fatalism, or abject sinfulness. This is not useless if one grasps this stage of the experience as one aware of its particularity, the limits of mechanistic self-satisfaction, abstract solipsism, and alienated privacy. One can convert the experience of the “Unhappy Consciousness” as a prelude to attaining the stage of the universal, the rational self-conscious stance of the Subject, the self-deter- Fig. 1 Subversions of Desire: Prolegomena to Nick Joaquin is the only book-length study on Nick Joaquin. Published by Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1988.
mining agent of historical praxis. But that is a hypothetical possibility for Joaquin.
crucible of experience
The key concept of experience is central to our inquiry. Benjamin asserted that the old sense of communal experience embodied in Leskov’s stories has been destroyed, replaced by information. Information consists of incidents, positive facts or factoids, mixed with explanation. In industrial capitalist society, the business media communicates information, with instant veri- fiability, eradicating the amplitude of traditional storytelling based on the interactive collaboration of the audience. The modern audience consists of atomized psyches devoid of memory, victimized by the reifying impact of universal commodification. Memory, death, and time disappears; experience degenerates to information in an anomic society (epitomized by the rhetor- ical shifts in “A Pilgrim Yankee’s Progress” and “The Mass of St. Sylvestre”). What Benjamin has condensed in the term “information” is the reduc- tion of life as the passive undergoing of the phenomenal world. Empiricism and sensationalism informed the scientific exploration of the world by merchants and industrialists. Immanuel Kant rejected this by positing the active thinking of the empirical subject, leaving the thing-in-itself untouched. It was Marx who revised contemplative materialism by affirming practical action to change the material world. Marx qualifies Hegel’s philos- ophy of experience by accentuating the role of the collective subject (social classes). By investigating the necessary properties and the laws of motion of the phenomenal world, and the rational methods of activity to transform it, humans have given the concept of experience a new meaning. Experience thus denotes the dialectical interaction of the social subject with the external world, merging with the “sum total of society’s practical activity” (Rosenthal and Yudin 154; see also Adorno 83-86). Experience is thus a complex notion of imbrication of various layers of phenomena, both subjective and objective. It was Hegel who defined expe- rience as a transactive interface of subject and object working its way in a dialectical process in his Phenomenology of Spirit. From a phenomenological
the fate of imperial domination. Whether the experience of his protagonists demonstrates a genuine immanent critique and resolution of the schisms in their world remains to be analyzed.
MApping the orAl spAce of tiMe
Let us examine how this adventure of the “Unhappy Consciousness” unfolds toward a sublimation of its immanent contradictions. Joaquin’s two novels originate from the matrix of tale-telling. The core problem we need to engage with is the nature and consequentiality of those experiences rendered by Joaquin’s moralizing plots. We need to understand what shapes of memory and hope may be glimpsed and delineated so as to give counsel, warning, or ultimatum to its modern audience. Who this audience is and where, remain also as problematic as the specific contingencies underlying both Joaquin’s life and the still taken-for-granted sociohistorical situation that is the condi- tion of possibility of his art. To approach the intricacies of this question, let us take as specimen the widely-anthologized “The Summer Solstice.” The time-period (1850) is still colonial, materialized in the suburb of Paco (also replicated in Obando, Bulacan) outside of the Walled City, still pervaded with pagan practices. The Tadtarin , a three-day fertility festival overlaid/legitimized by the Christian feast of St. John the Baptist, enacts the death, flourishing, and birth of the sun/life-force. The Tadtarin is represented by an old woman who ritually dies, carrying a wand-fetish and a sheaf of seedlings; she is resurrected, the crowd of women-worshippers dancing around her, with St. John the Baptist figuring as the somewhat tabooed, engulfed phallic icon. The orgy is supposed to synchronize human biological time and the rhythm of the universe, here intimated by the triple-time dance steps evoking the sound of a circumcision ceremony (Roces). It is less a Dionysian debauchery than a celebration of desire, passion, lust, attuned to the organic cycle of animal/ natural life. Patriarchy temporarily submits to the maternal, generative principle. But history, not myth, preoccupies Joaquin in celebrating June. In the zodiac-designed Almanac for Manileños , Joaquin assigns the solstice month to
Juno, the patroness of marriage and fertility, following prehistoric Roman tradition. But more significant is June 12, 1898, Aguinaldo’s proclamation of the independent Malolos Republic. June 24 is the feast of St John the Baptist canonized by Christ himself; “all the rest of humanity were born in sin,” adds Joaquin, except for St. John, Christ, and the Virgin Mary (Almanac 170). But what for Joaquin is more significant is the founding of Manila by Legaspi on June 24, 1571, because with city records and chronology of deeds, Spanish conquest gave history to the country and began to eradicate pagan myths and animist/obscurantist practices like astrology and occult fortune-telling. This palimpsest translates Joaquin’s formula ( La Naval 30) of reconciling the form, temper, and physiognomy that Spain bequeathed to us and the national destiny we are trying to create. Communal time, however, is cyclical and cannot be reduced to the spatial linearity of the merchant’s calendar. What Joaquin does is to use this social/cultural arena to dramatize the phase of consciousness which Hegel described as the conflict of slave and lord, the bondsman and master. In it the slave wins recognition (self-consciousness) via his labor and creation, whereas the lord remains in-himself, sunk in empirical solitude, treating the slave as a thing/object. In the relation between Doña Lupeng and the husband Rafael Moreta, the archetypal gender-war centers on the woman’s introjection of the collective, universal for-itself of the community. She is no longer just wife or mother, for she now embodies the in-itself/for-it- self Subject that mediates between the patriarchal law of property-owning society (wives and children are the slaves in the Roman familia and the divine sphere). The melodramatic episode of the husband crawling to kiss the wife’s foot has externalized the “Unhappy Consciousness” into a fight between two humans reduced to animal/physical sensations, with mastery as the object/ goal, in the realm of the empirical/natural life. No genuine mutual recog- nition of each other’s identities transpires. We are remote from any hope of reaching the self-conscious Universal that sublimates the organic/natural impulse into the ordered ethical sphere of the family and ultimately in the self-reflecting Spirit of civilization.
example, the Albigensians alluded to by Joaquin as the “terror of the trouba- dors” ( La Naval 33) suppressed by St. Dominic and the Papacy) ready to purify the earth so as to establish “the new Jerusalem, the shining Kingdom of the Saints” (Cohn 73). The Pauline image of the crucified Christ, performed by Father Melchor, invokes the millenary tradition of revivalist sects inspired by St. John’s apocalypse (Smith 172-79), a repetition-compulsion lacking catharsis. What needs underscoring is St. Augustine’s insistence that the millen- nial kingdom wished-for by millenarian movements actually began with the birth of Christ. One historian notes that in the anti-Papacy movements (for example, the Anabaptists) from the thirteenth to the sixteenth, “the earlier millenarianism bloomed again in full vigor. It became part of the baggage of the Reformation and has continued to the present day, a seemingly necessary consequence of verbal inspiration of the Scriptures” (Mead 492). Joaquin’s revival of this chiliastic, millenarian tendency testifies to a proto-revolu- tionary impulse in his work that connects with the genealogy of our rich tradi- tion from Tamblot to the Colorums and Mt. Banahaw sects, the Rizalistas, up to the revolt of the Lapiang Malaya of Valentin de los Santos on May 21, 1967 (Agoncillo and Guerrero 508). This may also explain his praise of the Crusades and slaughter of the infidel Turks at the Battle of Lepanto (1571), defeat of the Calvinist Dutch fleet (1646), and the Moros of Luzon annihilated by Legaspi, Martin de Goiti, and Juan de Salcedo (1570-76; Zaide 149-57).
triAngulAting counter-ModernisM
Counter-modernist reformation evokes not a return to a utopian past but a futuristic projection of an authentic fulfillment. This is a transitional subject-position occupied by the “Unhappy Consciousness” whose itinerary we are tracing here. It might be worthwhile to note first, as a heuristic guide, the time-span covering Joaquin’s production of his stories and novels, between 1946 and 1966, except for “Three Generations,” published in 1940. We are plunged into the postwar milieu of General MacArthur’s “Liberation,” the onset of the Cold War, the founding of Communist China, the Korean War, the upsurge and crushing of the Huk rebellion, and the Vietnam War.
Fig. 2 Photos of Nick Joaquin. The photo on the left was taken from goodreads. com while the photo on the right was taken from the Philippine Daily Inquirer online version. Fig. 3 The aftermath of the Liberation of Manila in 1945 part of the Pacific Theater of WWII. Next to Warsaw, Manila is the most devastated city.
It is easy to demonstrate how Joaquin exorcises the haunting specter of WW2 catastrophe by imposing a break, an ineluctable cut between past and present. This is clear in “The Mass of St. Sylvestre.” The GI soldier’s collo- quial flat idiom to convey his witnessing is both truthful and parodic. Anglo- Saxon technology/photography cannot capture the aura of a ritual, the sacramentalizing cathexis of joining past and future through collective repe- tition. What supersedes the soldier’s momentary vision is the recording of the sight of ruins, immense blocks of ruins—the heritage left by MacArthur’s “Liberation.” The present sensibility can never fully capture the substance of Manila’s history, the implied narrator hints, so therefore let us just resign ourselves to that stark separation, that gap or rupture in time which seems impossible to cover up. In stories like “Three Generations,” “May Day Eve,” and “Guardia de Honor” where the problem of continuity is also center-staged, the moment of epiphany connecting generations is Joaquin’s easy fix. The father in “Three Generations” compulsively repeats the past which the son refuses to accept. In “May Day Eve,” the weeping Badoy struggles to discover coherence in the discordances of the past afforded by the urban rituals of Intramuros. Meanwhile, in “Guardia de Honor,” the contingency of everyday life furnishes the space for humans to exercise free-will by following sensuous inclina- tion and intuition (chiefly Natalia Ferrero’s) which bridge the gulf between parental authority and the children’s right to decide their destinies. In all three stories, we find a formula to reconfigure the repetition-compulsion as a wound healed by the same passage of time that allows the subject—here designating the spiritually tormented protagonists of three decades of US occupation—to accept historical necessity without the benefit of Christian transcendence. Surrender to providential fatality resolves the antinomies of life. In A Portrait , the role of Bitoy Camacho, the narrator-participant, easily fulfills the role of mediator, tying past and present, suturing the wounds of self-denials, hypocrisies, compromises, and fatalism distributed among family members, relatives, and strangers.
confounded teMporAlity
Modernity via imperial mediation ushered in fierce individualist compe- tition among clans, family dynasties, and ethnic assemblages. I think it is imperative to remind ourselves that our colonization aborted our entrance to modernity defined by the instrumental rationality of bourgeois society. U.S. rule strategically preserved the feudal landlord system supervised by a comprador-bureaucratic apparatus managed by American administrators. Except for a semblance of urbanization (railroad, highways), selective meri- tocracy and a paternalistic electoral system, the old order of exploitation of workers and peasantry, together with the repression of the indigenous/ethnic folk (Moros, Igorots, Lumads), prevailed. Proofs of this are the numerous peasant revolts, uprising of millenary sects, and the Sakdal/Huk rebellion of the thirties, forties, and fifties. The center failed to hold, everything seemed to have fallen apart. The surrender of Bataan and Corregidor was a prelude to the rapacious epoch of the next thirty years after MacArthur’s bombing of Manila which coincided with Joaquin’s most productive period as fictionist, poet, playwright, and journalist. In brief, we failed to make the transition, suspended in the dying world of Don Lorenzo Marasigan and a new world (ambiguously represented by Candido and the Monson brothers) struggling to be born. In between these poles, we witness morbid, bizarre symptoms of the passage of lives. We see how the reality of uneven/combined development preserved an ethos of authoritarian conduct, patriarchal despotism, and superstitious beliefs anchored to a backward economy that clashed with imperial financial inter- ventions which undermined its drive for efficient industrialization. How to reconcile the polar opposites of communal solidarity and individualist-fa- milial selfishness is one way of formulating the problem. Whatever our stance on the Hispanic heritage—no one denies such a legacy, especially given the globalized transnationalist network of histori- cist scholarship today—Joaquin’s framework of Spanish “physiognomy” is unnecessarily constricting. Its insistence only fosters authoritarian violence and irrationality. There is no returning back to a golden age of theocratic diplomacy and honor-centered decorum. Joaquin’s praise of “custom and
the concealment of meaning associated with the detective story, along with ‘fine writing,’ to make an overt bid for high prestige” (Ferguson 189). The crisis confronted in them inheres in the sharp division between the sacred and profane, the worldly and the spiritual. Incorporating vice and piety, Currito Lopez’s soul is saved by the intervention of the Virgin. However, this event cannot be made intelligible to a secular crowd without the mediation of Doña Ana de Vera. The contradictions between the debased world of sixteenth-century Spain/Manila and its exaltation of saintly virtues are resolved by the domestic routine of a devout Doña Ana. There is no hint of suspicion that the miraculous and the ordinary can co-exist in the person of Doña Ana, the exemplary mother of an official in the early years of Spanish pacification of the islands. Unless amnesia has overtaken the colonial state in 1613, the memory of the 1574 Lakandola-Soliman revolt as well as the 1587 Magat Salamat and Agustin de Legaspi conspiracy in the Manila area has probably not been wiped out. In 1589 and 1695, several uprisings in Ilocos and Cagayan against reduccion and tributes might have disturbed conscientious administrators of the provinces. And before the decade passed, the Bankaw uprising (1621) was followed by the Tamblot rebellion (1622) which exploded in Bohol with thousands of natives rallying to the native shaman, attacking churches and defying the fifty Spaniards and one thousand native troops recruited from Pampanga and Cebu (Constantino 85; Veneracion 57; Zafra 72). No doubt Currito and Doña Ana seemed oblivious of rebellions happening around them, turning the rest of 17th-century Philippines into a cauldron of indige- nous fury against Church and State. With the flourishing of the galleon trade and its eventual demise, the schism between the worldly and the spiritual intensified. The reliance on tribute, polo y servicios , ravaging of the natural resources (gold and silver), and exploitation of native labor can no longer be maintained in the face of British naval superiority in the 17th^ century. The capture of Manila by the British in 1752 kindled numerous uprisings against Spanish tyranny throughout the islands. One can no longer expect the Catholic Church and its hegemony to continue without serious erosion and eventual collapse. Joaquin wrestled
with this threat in “Doña Jeronima”: she becomes the symbolic return of the repressed, only to be tamed, recuperated, ultimately subdued. But the dialectical process of subsumption of the wild or dangerous appears spurious or fraudulent: a myth-making compromise yokes the penitent Archbishop/ lover with the wasted Jeronima. She becomes the local deity of the place, the new diwata celebrated by varying generations. But both lovers tran- scend their original historical matrix and exert mystifying reverberations, thus forfeiting the possibility of realizing the identity-in-difference born of self-consciousness and the labor of negative determination.
shAdowing the Advent of redeMption
It is relevant to ask at this juncture: Is the narrative scheme of unifying opposites a mystification? Native Catholicism is a syncretic product of the blending of medieval doctrines and folk mythology. This approximates the lesson of “Doña Jeronima.” However, the process of reconciliation elides a final closure because the Archbishop’s ring cannot be recovered from the river, emblem of the flux of nature and worldly exigencies. The Jesuit scholar Quentin Lauer describes the route of this “Unhappy Consciousness” as the practice of late-medieval pietism: while enjoying the image of the “immutable” as a gift from the “almighty power,” this persona persists in its division and evolves into the postures of devotion and thankfulness (122- 24). Despite the sacrifices, the universal and singular cannot be reconciled by the mediator, Doña Jeronima. We confront Joaquin’s typical narrative paradigm. We are suspended in the sphere of what Hegel calls “the Unhappy Consciousness,” the transitional passage of Spirit ( Geist, Hegel’s term, translates into the Aristotelian enargi a or cosmic life-force) from Stoicism, a thoroughgoing negation of the world sunk in fear and servitude, to Skepticism which dissolves all rules, percep- tions, certainties. But this freedom of the Skeptic “reinstates the dogmatism that it both requires and negates” (Findlay Hegel: A Re-Examination 100) In short, it embodies a truly paradoxical situation suffused with inner contra- dictions which were one-sidedly resolved by the proud self-righteous Stoic
