Don Q, via Syjuco

Authorship and the self-determination of characters


At the start of Miguel Syjuco's puzzle novel Ilustrado, a character named Miguel Syjuco began investigating the mysterious death of his mentor, the writer Crispin Salvador. There's no shortage of possible motives to his death. Salvador blazed through the Philippine literary scene with a series of books that divided the critics and earned him a lot of enemies. The character Syjuco reflected on Salvador's career as he searched for papers left behind by the deceased in his apartment:

To end his own life, Salvador was neither courageous nor cowardly enough. The only explanation is that the Panther of Philippine Letters was murdered in midpounce. But no bloody candelabrum has been found. Only ambiguous hints in what remains of his manuscript. Among the two pages of notes, these names: the industrialist Dingdong Changco, Jr.; the literary critic Marcel Avellaneda; the first Muslim leader of the opposition, Nuredin Bansamoro; the charismatic preacher Reverend Martin; and a certain Dulcinea.

Dingdong Changco Jr, Nuredin Bansamoro, and Reverend Martin are not-so-veiled references to actual personalities in Philippine politics and church affairs. If they were not Danding Cojuangco, Nur Misuari, and Bro. Mike Velarde, then they were at least possible stand-ins or stereotypes of these recognizable personalities who continue to persist in Philippine society: the oligarch and Marcos crony, the Muslim separatist leader, and the fanatical preacher.

Two names are not readily identifiable: Dulcinea and Avellaneda. Who are they in Salvador's life? Avellanada is mentioned earlier on as Salvador's fiercest critic. And we learned later that Dulcinea's relation to Salvador is quite significant after all.

Syjuco's "quixotic" quest to find out the truth about Salvador's death brought him to unexpected places and enabled him to confront some of these characters. "Quixotic," along with "messianic," is a word that appears in page 21 of Ilustrado (via), mentioned in Salvador's Paris Review interview while he is discussing his current engagement in polemical writing.

Dulcinea is of course the name of Don Quixote's object of affection. Don Quixote, the messianic knight errant, is so enchanted with Lady Dulcinea of Toboso that she almost becomes his battle cry, the sole reason for his existence. She is a lady of incomparable beauty, peerless, the one and only muse that drives him to chastity, spurning the designs of other women. The only catch is that Sancho Panza also knew Dulcinea, the three of them being inhabitants of La Mancha, and if we are to believe Squire Sancho, then she is in reality a crude peasant woman, not a lady of noble birth, certainly a far cry from Don Quixote's idealization. (In some ways, what Dulcinea is for Don Quixote, is probably what "the Intended" is for Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.) Cervantes's sharp irony is always in full effect as Don Quixote is to finally "meet" Lady Dulcinea later, but this time only in enchanted form.

To discuss the circumstances of the character Syjuco finally meeting the Dulcinea character in Ilustrado is to spoil a lot of things. Let me just say that it is one of the best parts of the book and completely overturns the whole puzzle, such that what one is looking at all along is not a completed jigsaw but the jigsaw turned upside down to reveal another puzzle.

At the start of the second part of the history of the ingenious knight Don Quixote, in its prologue, we are told that a "false" second part of the Quixote was published in 1614, a year before the actual second part by Cervantes came out. In one of the rare moments in the errant knight's history, the "real" author of the Quixote directly speaks to the reader of the book ("illustrious or perhaps plebeian reader") in a furious, or at least ambivalent, tone about certain licenses taken by another writer, a native of Tordesillas, to continue his history and to do so in very poor imitation. Cervantes's resentment is evident as he starts to refute and discuss the disagreeable personal attacks to his character in the spurious second part. The full title of this second part is Segundo tomo del ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha ... compuesto por el licenciado Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, natural de la villa de Tordesillas. Avellaneda is a pseudonym. The identity of the author was never known.

Yet another notable scene in Ilustrado is the character Syjuco's "confrontation" with the critic Avellaneda. This direct reference to the author of the false Quixote, in the guise of a literary critic, is a brilliant play on a book that is, like the true Quixote itself, concerned with truthful transcription of history and ultimately with the question of authorship.

The last chapters of the Quixote are almost devoted in fact to the question of authorship and of Avellaneda's poor depiction and appropriation of the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. What better way to demonstrate the falsity of Avellaneda's version than to point out that Don Quixote is "no longer in love with Dulcinea del Toboso" and that Sancho Panza's wife is not given the same name she had in the first part (Part II, Chapter LIX). It is understandable that Don Quixote flared up whenever mention of this second part reaches him.

It is almost as if the whole conception of the "real and truthful" second part of the Quixote is but a kind of direct response or reaction to Avellaneda's book. In any case, Cervantes has given Cide Hamete Benengeli enough leeway to write and publish the continuation and to faithfully incorporate what happened outside in his history. As the events in real life directly impinge on the fictional, the extra-literary is given a life of its own.

The Avellaneda affair has so consumed Don Quixote that, on his own initiative (yes, possibly without any intervention from any author, real or imagined), he intentionally changed his itinerary just to prove that he is the authentic character, to assert his own palpable existence. Here he and Sancho are speaking to a certain Don Álvaro Tarfe, a character from the false Quixote(!), who they "accidentally" met at a village inn. They were able to persuade Don Álvaro Tarfe that they were the real characters (Part II, Chapter LXXII, tr. John Rutherford):

   'I do not know,' said Don Quixote, 'whether I am good, but I do know that I am not the bad Quixote, as proof of which I should like you to know, Don Álvaro Tarfe sir, that I have never in my life set foot in Saragossa; on the contrary, having been told that the fantasy Don Quixote had taken part in the jousts in that city, I refused to go there, to prove to all the world that he is a fraud; and so I went straight on to Barcelona ... And although what happened to me there was not very pleasant, indeed was most disagreeable, I can bear it all without heaviness of heart, just for the sake of having seen Barcelona. In short, Don Álvaro Tarfe sir, I am the Don Quixote de la Mancha of whom fame speaks - not that wretch who sought to usurp my name and exalt himself with my thoughts. I entreat you, sir, as you are a gentleman, to be so kind as to make a formal declaration before the mayor of this village to the effect that you have never in all the days of your life seen me until now, and that I am not the Don Quixote who appears in the second part [by Avellaneda], nor is this squire of mine Sancho Panza the man whom you knew.

Don Álvaro Tarfe was convinced and subsequently executed an affidavit in front of the village mayor and the notary (both of whom, as it happened, conveniently entered the very same village inn they were eating in) to the effect that "Don Quixote was not the man who appeared in print in a history entitled The Second Part of Don Quixote de la Mancha written by one Avellaneda, from Tordesillas." De facto and de jure then, Don Quixote's authenticity was validated beyond reasonable doubt.

Don Quixote's reactions to the spurious sequel and the actions he took to uphold the truth demonstrate the freedom granted by the storyteller to his own characters, such that the character is given complete power to set the record straight in the story he found himself in. The storyteller has transferred to the character his right to self-determination, to speak for himself, to chart his own plot in his own story. Right up to his own death, Don Quixote was so affected by the false character impersonating him that the author of the false history, Avellaneda, even featured in his last will and testament, albeit in a tone of reconciliation.

The author Syjuco, in the spirit of granting his characters the same freedom and right to self-determination, has produced Ilustrado. It is a novel that is a fitting tribute to what is authentic and original in books.



Related post:

Don Q, via M. Menard

Prologue to Ilustrado (Miguel Syjuco)

A review of the prologue, not the entire book.


1. Rizal

Early on in this award-winning Filipino novel, Ilustrado, Miguel Syjuco (the novel's author and the writer of the prologue) announced its high ambitions by echoing the words of national hero José Rizal in one of his two quintessential Filipino novels in Spanish, Noli Me Tangere (1887). This is Crispin Salvador talking to Syjuco, his protégé:

“The reason for my long exile is so that I could be free to write TBA [The Bridges Ablaze],” Salvador had said, that first time, spitting out the bones of chicken feet we were eating in a subterranean Mott restaurant. “Don’t you think there are things that need to be finally said? I want to lift the veil that conceals the evil. Expose them on the steps of the temple. Truly all those responsible. The pork-barrel trad-pols. The air-conditioned Forbes Park aristocracy. The aspirational kleptocrats who forget their origins. The bishopricks and their canting church. Even you and me. Let’s all eat that cake.”

This has the tone of satire. The relevant passage in the Noli appears in the dedication of Rizal, “To My Motherland” (Europe, 1886):

Desiring your well-being, which is our own, and searching for the best cure, I will do with you as the ancients of old did with their afflicted: expose them on the steps of the temple so that each one who would come to invoke the Divine, would propose a cure for them.

And to this end, I will attempt to faithfully reproduce your condition without much ado. I will lift part of the shroud that conceals your illness, sacrificing to the truth everything, even my own self-respect, for, as your son, I also suffer your defects and failings.” [translation by Ma. Soledad Lacson-Locsin]

The epigraph of the same novel by Rizal is taken from Schiller’s “Shakespeare’s Ghost,” containing the lines condemning the “laughable medley” of “priests and shrewd commercial attachés, / ‘Subalterns and scribes, majors enough of hussars.’ ” The very personalities that Rizal also skewered in his novel – the people in the halls of power – are also the figures that correspond to Salvador’s targets in his final book: the traditional politicians, the aristocracy, the kleptocrats, the bishops and the church.

The novels of Rizal, the Noli Me Tangere and its sequel El Filibusterismo, are the formative documents in the securing of Philippine independence from the Spanish government before the turn of the twentieth century. The tinder that set on fire the hearts and spirits of Filipino freedom fighters, they inspired the revolutionaries to fight for their own independence. The Noli and the Fili were written, like Salvador’s purported book, when the author was studying abroad, in a sort of exile.

By invoking Rizal, the most illustrious Filipino ilustrado there ever was, even if in a tone of parody, Syjuco is drawing on the tradition of political Filipino novels, the tradition of social realism and protest.


2. Bulosan

It seems that Ilustrado is surveying the accomplishments of its predecessors. A reference to Carlos Bulosan’s publication of a story in The New Yorker reflects an awareness of the literary achievements of Filipinos abroad. A footnote, referring to Crispin Salvador’s short story (“Matador”) published in the same magazine, mentions that Salvador’s fiercest critic Marcel Avellaneda dismissed the story as being sourced out from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. What the footnote does not say is that the same accusation of plagiarism was leveled against Bulosan. This rather ugly affair was detailed in the introduction by Carey McWilliams to Bulosan’s autobiography America Is in the Heart, a work of profound testimony against racism and poverty of the spirit. Syjuco is hinting at the challenges and anxieties faced by the previous generation of Filipino writers, migrants, and expatriates, men whose experiences became a catalyst for their written works. Behind any form of literary success in another country is the struggle to be recognized on their own terms, to dispel the anxieties and insecurities of being in a foreign land. This bookish book knows and is paying homage to its antecedents.


3. Silver Swan Soy Sauce

And it is very funny in parts. The parade of the who’s who in international and local publishing, one by one bringing out Salvador’s books, is enough to make us question his erudition (and that of Sjyuco, the novelist, himself). A worldly writer is being produced right before our eyes, and we are reading him with a smirk. Do we really have here the ring bearer of Philippine writing out to conquer the international literary scene? Aren’t the self-awareness and self-reference too much of a farce? The Enlightened (which is but another term for Ilustrado), Salvador’s first novel, “won prizes before it was published but could not live up to the fairy-tale hype.” Why do I think that this self-mockery is inserted for its own good? The book is alive with comedy. Plausibility and possibility merging into a kind of hysteria.

Salvador’s fastidiousness of manner also opened him to rumors of homosexuality, yet he was criticized for being a womanizer “with the lascivious energy usually found in defrocked clergymen.” And he could never live down his 1991 TV commercial which showed him being served lunch in a book-lined study, shaking a cruet over his food before turning to the camera to deliver the now immortal words …

Okay, that was funny. I didn’t even need to hear the punch line to rofl and lol. But another layer of funny here is the word association buried between the “defrocked clergymen” and the “cruet” of condiment. Don’t priests shake their small bottles of wine too, especially the renegade drunken ones? It appears as an uncalculated association of ecclesiastical terms but it is funny, period.


4. Sionil José

Literature is an ethical leap, says Crispin Salvador in his unfinished speech. It is a dictum he shared with F. Sionil José, the only Filipino writer, save for Salvador in this book, who has been constantly rumored to be a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

I’m reminded of Sionil José here because he and Salvador seem to share the same grim view about the social ills of the country. Sionil José’s greatest shame, according to his double platinum essay collections Why We Are Poor and Why We Are Hungry, is that he did not shout loud enough, loud to the point of hoarseness and breathlessness. The angst of youth is potent indeed, but the protestations of an old writer – Sionil José is in his mid-eighties – are more scathing, more wounding, and more irreproachable.

The experience of eight decades in the Philippines is history lived. For the old writer, hostage to the plethora of world-changing events, events that shape and destroy a nation, the Philippines, with its corrupt system of government and its people shackled by the colonized mind, is still a place of hope. In his essays, he described in sometimes harsh and harrowing details the naked truth, the essence of his life-witness. From the second world war, to the various uprisings besetting the country, to the dark years of Marcos dictatorship, to the people power revolution, right up to the ongoing era of corruption and thievery, Sionil José lambasted everyone who has a contributed to the economic, moral, ethical, and cultural decline of this country. His primary target: the elite of this country who formed a self-serving oligarchy.

With his repetitive tirades and exhortations, Sionil José is the closest thing we have to a living conscience of the nation. We have yet to see whether Salvador’s missing manuscript will carve out a national story with the same earth-shaking force, albeit posthumously. It’s not that I’m seeing here, in the book's opening, a passing of torch from Sionil José to Syjuco. I am just reminded of the way Syjuco framed Salvador’s convictions in terms of “literature as ethics.” I am also reminded of the evil band that the two writers are bent on demolishing with their letters: Sionil José’s oligarchy and Salvador’s kleptocracy-aristocracy. Both are concerned with the pricking of the dying conscience.


5. Salvador

The writer Crispin Salvador was pronounced dead by a news obituary, even before he was dead. Part of the obituary is in the prologue’s epigraph. The prologue then has an epitaph for an epigraph, one that merely described the writer’s name: Crispin Salvador. The prefabricated death sentence did not mention the manner of his death, but the post-newspaper truth is that he died and was fished out of the Hudson River. Possibly a murder, possibly a suicide. This is the narrative frame from which Salvador's tale unfolds, a writer grappling not only with his own writer’s block demons but also with an enlightened readership. The government of the few and the church are shaping up to be the formidable enemies of Salvador and Syjuco. The media, the literary establishment as well, is equally heinous in its shallow beats. Salvador before his unscheduled death is already in the throes of an epiphany. But Salvador in his death is still waiting for his break, struggling for a proper context to detonate the time bomb, the exposé, the whatever that will allow him to fish out the truth from the blue river. Now that his time is up, it remains for his story to be pieced together, as told by Syjuco.


6. Syjuco

The prologue to Syjuco’s Ilustrado is one of the excellent openings I have ever read in a novel. To some extent, it reminds me of the way Rizal masterly painted the opening of El Filibusterismo, with the cast of characters shuttling between the upper and lower decks of a steamer. Here, the cast of characters are the books in Salvador’s résumé, shuttling past each other with the speed of a writer’s aborted lifetime. As described by Syjuco on his way to Manila, the opening is a biting literary biography, with too many questions hanging in the air, too much anger served on the plate.

My expectations are set. I hope to be able to read a Filipino novel that kicks some ass. Not for a desire to be liberated by the truth. That is too salty. But rather to watch a first writer enact his “freedom to write.” To try to be a free reader.

Now on to the jigsaw proper.