Si Janus Sílang at ang Labanáng Manananggal-Mambabarang

Si Janus Sílang at ang Labanáng Manananggal-Mambabarang (Janus Sílang and the Battle Between the Armies of Manananggal and Mambabarang) by Edgar Calabia Samar (Adarna House, 2015)

Compulsive reading ang bagong yugto ng pakikipagsapalaran ni Janus. May bagong mundong tinatatag si Edgar Calabia Samar gamit ang mga lumang materyales ng kababalaghan at engkanto. Bagamat mahahalintulad ang ilang karakter at eksena sa mga popular na pelikulang banyaga, may sariling pambayang punto de bista ang pagkakalahad ng istorya. Updated na ang mito ng pinagmulan ng mundo. At ang labanán ay nakatuon hindi lang sa tagisan ng lantay na kapangyarihan kundi sa mental na pakikipaglaban ni Janus sa sarili nyang mga agam-agam bilang isang kabataang naharap sa mga matinding pagsubok sa buhay.

Ito ang ikalawang aklat pa lamang sa serye ng Janus Sílang na mukhang papantayan ang dami ng tomo ng Harry Potter. Isang taon na naman kaya ang gugugulin sa paghihintay ng kasagutan at closure sa cliffhanger sa dulo ng istorya. Sinu-sino ba itong 77 púsong na ito na nakabida sa pamagat ng ikatlong libro? Ano ang kinalaman nito sa 88 na pinakamabagsik na pamamaraan ng bárang (kasama na ang epektibong panlaban sa mga ito) na pinapaksa ng librong binubuklat-buklat ni Janus sa aklatan?

Next level na ang istorya. Umaarangkada na ang numerolohiya na itinampok din ni Sir Egay sa nobelang Sa Kasunod ng 909. Ngayon ay naurirat na ang siyam na mundo na kinapal ng Siyam na Bathala ng Santinakpan. Parang Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog lang ang peg. Tutal namamayagpag pa rin dito ang batang halimaw na Tiyanak at may Atisan blues pa rin kaya hindi madaling mawaglit ang alaala ng Walong Diwata. Ang mga nobela ni Sir Egay, maging ang serye na ito, ay may continuity, parte ng iisang mundo, ng iisang haraya. Pawang mga pambata o pangkabataan (young adult) ang puntiryang audience dahil na rin nakasentro ang mga misteryosong eksena sa bidang bata o tinedyer. May pang-akit sa awtor ang ganitong kabataang karakter at tema. Sabi nga sa Eight Muses of the Fall, na salin sa Ingles ng Walong Diwata.

Before all this began, I kept telling myself that I didn't want to talk to the adults, especially to the elders, because they already had their stories. They're whole. Beginnings, endings, and everything in between. On the other hand, the children, their stories are still fresh. Raw. No editing, no thought of revisions. Continuity; what a strange, foreign concept. No need for endings. You only need to figure out how to begin those stories. And when it's begun, it's a wellspring from where all other fresh, raw stories burst—raw, fresh stories that could only come from them, no one else.

*

"I don't want to talk to adults anymore," I said while I wove in and out of the waves, close to the shore. I remembered the afternoons when I'd pay a visit to the elders of Atisan, just to get a story, something I could put in the novel I could never seem to begin writing. "The problem with grownups, elders especially." I went on, "is that they already have stories. They already know what to say. They're whole. They're not raw, they're not as fresh as the children's. I like the truth in stories that don't have to abide by some formula, that don't have to snuggly [sic] fit into some structure. I like the truth when it's in something that's yet to be whole."

Dahil sa ganitong prinsipyo ng spontaneity ng pambatang kuwento, hindi mo alam kung saan ka dadalhin ng istorya. Kung kaya't ang timpla ng rekado ng mga kababalaghan ay may pang-akit din sa mga matatanda na tulad ko (36 anyos). Ang pagtatagpi-tagpi ng mga pangyayari ay orihinal sa pagkakaroon ng sariling salamangka at lohika bagamat kakikitaan nga ng impluwensiya ng popular na akdang banyaga. Technopathic mapping. Hello, Professor X. Ang Santuwaryo Castillo na mala-Azkhaban.

May sariling kodigo (batas) na sinusunod ang mundo (at kalibutan) ni Janus Sílang. May sariling kapit sa hindi pa naitakdang kinabukasan. Ang nagsisimulang trahedya ng Manto. Ang angkan ng Esturas na mukhang may malaking papel sa susunod na mga kabanata.

Kagaya ng Tiyanak, nananatiling maigting ang panghalina ng Manananggal sa panulat ni Sir Egay. "Halos isang buhay" na gumagabay sa likod nya ang Manananggal. Isang inspirasyon, isang musa. Bahagi pa rin ng siklo o continuity ang mga nilalang na ito. Ito ang binalik-balikan nyang ehemplo at basehan (batis) ng kanyang pagbabanghay.

Kailangan niya ng nilalang na makalilipad tulad ng mga banog, pero kailangan niya ng taling hihila rito pabalik sa lupa upang matiyak na kontrolado niya ito't mananatiling mag-uulat sa kaniya. Kaya't isang sumpa ang pagkahati ng katawan ng manananggal. Isa itong pangako ng lagi't laging pagbabalik, ng lagi't laging pag-uwi....

Ito ang eternal return o eternal homecoming ng pagnonobela. At ito ay pumapaimbulog sa ika-21 dantaon. Naka-adapt na sa teknolohiya ang mga engkanto at barang. Nababasa na ng electromagnetic waves ang brain imprints ng mga espesyal na nilalang (púsong at bagáni). Marahil ang mairereklamo ko na lang ay ang pagiging convenient ng mahika para bigyan ng paliwanag ang mga mahirap intindihing konsepto. Halimbawa ay ang paggamit ng masamang engkanto (evil) bilang isang paliwanag sa climate change, mga digmaan, mga delubyo na mahirap ipaliwanag dahil sa magnitude nito. Ang Yolanda bilang stage ng pananalasa ng Tiyanak. Ang pagsakay sa ganitong mga kalamidad, sa pamamagitan animo ng 'magic of convenience' ay bumubura sa lohika at siyensiya na hindi dapat tuluyang iwaglit sa kamalayan. Ang mga pangyayaring katulad ng extreme weather events at climate change ay napapatunayang gawang-tao at hindi gawang engkanto kung kaya ang responsibilidad at pananagutan natin dito ay hindi dapat ilagak sa supernatural na solusyon.

Gayunpaman, nananatili ang interes ng seryeng ito para manumbalik ang sigla ng pagbabasa na nakahuhumaling kagaya ng nakalakihan nating komiks na linggo-linggong sinusubaybayan. Sana lang ay may sapat na payoff ang bawat susunod pang kabanata para naman hindi masayang ang nakayayamot na santaóng paghihintay sa kapalaran ng mga bagáni at púsong.

Eight Muses of the Fall

Eight Muses of the Fall by Edgar Calabia Samar, trans. Mikael de Lara Co and Sasha Martinez (Anvil, 2013)

Maybe now, he thought, he'd have the confidence to begin writing his novel. He had written a story, after all. A story that, even though it had nothing to do with Atisan, was a story nonetheless.

Eight Muses of the Fall (translation of the novel Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog) was a first novel about a writer trying to write his first novel. In the process of thinking about his plot and characters and being diverted into many plot strands, and being fundamentally conscious about his efforts in writing and discovering if his true vocation is as a writer, the writer miraculously finished his work. The novel I was reading and holding in fact was the product of such roundabout telling about some young adult adventures and first love and local myths and legends. Yes, it was that kind of story, told in a dry, humorless tone of a first person narrator whose utter self-absorption was a perfect stand-in not so much for the selfie but for the meme phenomenon.

The "fall" in the title pertains to the literal free fall. The "muses" were the writer's creative inspiration although the original Filipino word (diwata) is closer to "fairies" in meaning, in the sense of mythic female beings with magical powers. The "eight" was a reference to the eighth life of a cat with nine lives, apparently hinting at the final act of an artist producing his life work and living his last life on earth. For a true artist, every creative work was a leap of faith into unknown territory. A kind of metaphorical death awaited him after his latest creation was ended by the final period. To produce a work of fiction is to escape the realism of reality. To freely fall into the abyss, to embrace the exhilaration of freedom.

It was only when he was sure that there would be no escaping the fall that Daniel felt a sense of loss, of regret. Why now, he thought, why did he have to die now, when, finally, he had a story to tell.

The story, to the novelist's credit, was told in a non-linear, spontaneous manner that recalled experimental writing. The materials of the novel were being excavated and found on the spot, or told on the spot, becoming the immediate constituent parts of the novel itself.

"Only water can mirror the skies. I will give you the earth, earth that could reveal the faces of sky that are hidden from water." The thought made Daniel happy, despite the fact that, still, he had no idea how to give the earth to Orange. He wrote it down in his journal, knowing that one day, he'd be able to use the line. If not in some love letter to Orange, some forlorn conversation, then maybe in the novel he was planning to write.

...

[Daniel] just told his Uncle Tony that he was not yet done with the story [he had just shown his uncle to read; a story that preceded this conversation with his uncle], and he was not just trying to make a version of a legend. That it was actually a part of the novel he's writing.

"Here we go again," smiled his Uncle Tony. "One day, I hope to finally see a chapter of that novel."

Who would have thought that that line and that story, the passages that the budding writer Daniel could not get out of his mind, would find its way into the novel that I am currently reading?

Even though there were nights when lines from this poem would rouse him from sleep—"We forgive the sadness of others/ when they don't mean it, we nudge/ their loneliness as we hurry// to cross streets, or find/ them looking over cliffs/ as we do..."—he never got up to write these lines. He would let sleep carry him off. The next day, as he woke, the lines would be lost, and not even a memory of the poem would be left in his mind.

It was too late. The writer had already written the lines, so the act of forgetting was here a mere artifice. The act of writing had preserved the lost lines of the poem, safeguarding it for posterity. In fact, the lines were now a component part of this species of novel-about-a-writer-writing-his-first-novel. The novel's studied aimlessness was a literary feint. It simulated journal writing when it recalled with a somber voice the young writer's friendships and disappointments. It was a raw, naturalistic style, mired by characteristic redundancy and much belaboring to make its point.

Here they were, along with so many others from even as far away as Manila, about to bury a countryman who went home in a casket, a countryman who was a domestic helper in Singapore, a domestic helper, a housemaid like Erik's mother in Hong Kong.

...

Daniel felt an ache inside him. It was as if something important had been lost, something important had been lost and could never be found again.

...

We know that language has a spirit. Language has a spirit. Even a name is a spirit.

The character Daniel was known by many names. His monikers and nicknames were like masks worn to test the various fantastical stories he would invent. Every character he encountered was treated like a character in his novel. Every variation or double of a character was a composite character. Every plot point was plot point he wanted to insert into the fictional fabric. Because we are actually reading the novel he was trying to write, because he was stitching  the story he was at great pains trying to unleash into being. Because character. Because novel. Because story.

Thence, Daniel's self-absorption became the archetypal portrait of a young artist, the clichéd search for one's identity, one's place in the world. Again, to his credit, Edgar Calabia Samar used the (my) favored framework of spontaneity to tell his storyteller's story. He used language as a distancing medium to temper the contents of (or answers to) what practically amounted to long form slam book.  

It was difficult, not being able to drag other people into this world of his.

By his own admission, Daniel recognized the limitations of his "experiential" storytelling even as he marched on to tell what he had started, what he had set into motion by dreaming up an unwritten novel and attempting to carve it out from blank page after blank page. He took Murakami Haruki as his literary model, even quoting the writer, "But life is, more or less, a waste of time." Their aesthetic was certainly similar. Daniel even copied elements in Murakami's fiction such as cats, wells, and twins.

Like Murakami, the narrator was holding up the trivial and the non-political. Like his own protagonist, Samar is providing an alternative reading material, or an alternative template of the novel, that resisted the themes and preoccupations of "great torrential works of art".

He just needed to eat, to sleep. To write. Sometimes, to be able to write is enough. But when did politics seep into the way he saw things? And did this really happen? The truth was that he thought of little more than his own life, his own survival. Everything revolved around his own life. No social forces, no class struggle. His life would not have failed the realistic criteria of the great works. Unlike the great novels of the Russians in the past centuries.

Perhaps that was why he found it hard to write. He had turned his back on the material conditions of his life. He lived exclusively in the world of the imagination.

However much he extolled the freshness and rawness of stories children tell as opposed to stories by adults whose stories are already "whole", Daniel would soon discover that it is very hard to escape the politics of existence. And so one can not escape from the tyranny of history and adult experience. And it would indeed be very bleak and boring to only celebrate the trivial and the ordinary. And fragmentary or not, raw or formulaic, stories are a whole unit of feeling. And the writing of a novel is not an act of writing but a discovery of soul.

I read the English version of the novel a year after reading its original, Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog. The two collaborating translators—Mikael de Lara Co and Sasha Martinez—successfully reproduced the tone and lyricism of the original work in English. But I thought Daniel is a bit more likeable and less self-absorbed in the English translation than in his original counterpart. They were not really the same person even though they were immersed in the same story they set out to know and discover. Because reader.