What is literature? Editorials, essays, and mixed genres for the building of a nation
It is not uncommon when publishing a book on Philippine literature that reviewers read the chapters and ask why editors chose to use the word "literature" for the title instead of "texts" or "writings". The problem is usually that the genres of the works under review do not seem to correspond to the classical literary genres, i.e., prose fiction, poems, and theatre plays.
Despite the fact that most contemporary Philippine literary works can be frequently classified as poetry and narrative (specially short stories), we often find texts that are difficult to classify.
The reason for the presence of so many formally unorthodox texts in Philippine literature is that, as Miriam Lay Brander explains, literary genres were established in Europe in the 18th century from classical genres (i.e., those from Greece and Rome), and they basically consisted on narrative, epic, lyric and theatre (Lay Brander 2018, 9). However, if we stick to these classical genres, we leave out of the literary canon all those forms of expression that do not fit into the European literary taxonomies, such as oral literature, political writings, or folkloric theatrical performances. Being outside the canon, they are considered “bad” works of literature from the colonial point of view (see Barrantes 1889), so if anyone studies these texts, it is anthropologists or historians.
"Magtiis ka" by Jacinto Suban
"My Blind Old Yaya", autobiographical short story by Ramon Soliman
"Aves de rapiña", editorial cum political short essay by Fidel Reyes
There is a debate about how the categorization of literature into genres has been rendered obsolete in postmodernity by phenomena such as intertextuality, anti-literature, and different ways of understanding literature. Today, we are witnessing, for example, a boom in autofiction, a hybrid genre between autobiography, testimony, and novelistic fiction. In fact, the preference for borderline or hybrid genres in expressing transnational encounters is nowadays a global trend. In the case of Philippine literature, we also see numerous hybrid genres that respond to the expressive needs of writers in a colonial and postcolonial context, which are totally different from those of eighteenth-century European writers.
For instance, as Bienvenido and Cynthia Lumbera state, “the essay as a literary form found a congenial time to develop during the campaign for reforms”. They mean essays written in newspapers such as La solidaridad, that is, at the end of the 19th century, and often in editorials. Nowadays, if we think of editorials and opinion sections in newspapers it would be difficult to match them with literature. This is because political texts have been declared to be lousy literature at their best. To give an example, Harold Bloom, the so-called father of the Western Canon, praised the autonomy of the aesthetic in literature and called those involved in political-related literary criticism, or those trying to deconstruct the Eurocentric view on literature, the school of resentment (Malik 2019). In this way, a genre so necessary to spread ideas on how a country should be, such as the journalistic editorial, would not be considered literary by some.
An account of the murder of teacher Buenaventura Bello by Japanese soldiers
On the contrary, the running idea from the 20th century on in the Philippines, a country trying to free itself from the colonial burden and to imagine itself as an independent nation, is that it should not simply imitate Western literary forms. Philippine literature in all languages had frequent differences from Western literature because of the influence of precolonial writings,”in terms of outlook, theme and technique”, according to the Lumberas (1982). This oral literature had, “the mark of the community”, in the sense that it talked about creatures and objects of nature, for instance, or that it provided a mythological explanation for daily phenomena.
Regarding form, pre-hispanic literature was mostly oral. Therefore, some traits of oral literature, such as formulaic repetition, stereotyping of the characters, musicality or rhythm, and the Talinghaga–analogies or metaphors–also emerge in contemporary genres, such as poetry, or the testimonial literature that emerges after World War II to express pain and trauma.
Biography of Josef Stalin
In the process of formation of a new nation, the heroes of the homeland were a crucial element. They were foundational and idealized characters which the nation identified with its struggle for independence. In a country made up of more than 7,000 islands, with more than a hundred native languages, the fact that the inhabitants had elements in common was very important for the formation of a national conscience. So, in searching for the way to convey the driving forces of the homeland and the examples to be followed, literature answered by means of biographies. The biographical genre came into vogue after the death of Jose Rizal in 1896, although former narrative genres included biographies (buhay) as central topics. Based on these two, we frequently find laudatory poems to characters, such as Marcelo Hilario del Pilar, Apolinario Mabini or Tandang Sora, in the newspapers. However, the admired characters did not even need to be Filipinos. For instance: in 1912 Mariano Ponce published the biography of Sun Yan Set, the founder of the Republic of China, whom he considered a model leader. Another example: in 1936 the magazine Ang Sosyalismo Ngayon devoted long pages to writing a vivid biography of Joseph Stalin.
The truth is that biography has also been rarely considered literature according to the traditional genre classification: not being fictional, it has been normally studied from the point of view of history. In the case of Philippine biographies, they would enter the category of what Shirley Mangini has called “outlaw genres” (1995), those in which narrative inventions are linked to social struggles, not purely with aesthetic experimentation. These are genres that sometimes combine literature and history and thus distance themselves from individual expression. The term fits very appropriately in the context of Filipino literature in Spanish, which emerges and develops with a very intimate connection between history and politics. Outlaw genres serve in a colonial context as weapons of political protest or expression of the desire to create a new social space. This actually occurs in various genres, from the novel to the travel book to the journalistic essay and, of course, the editorial.
Bibliographic references
Barrantes, Vicente. El teatro tagalo. Madrid: Tip. de M.G. Hernandez, 1889.
Lay Brander, Miriam. Genre and Globalization Transformación de Géneros En Contextos (Post-) Coloniales/Transformation Des Genres Dans Des Contextes (Post-) Coloniaux. Hildesheim: Georg-Olms-Verlag, 2018
Lumbera, Bienvenido and Cynthia Nograles Lumbera. Philippine Literature: A History and Anthology (English ed). Pasig City: Anvil, 2005.
Malik, Kenan. “Harold Bloom was right to extol great literature, but was often blind to who was neglected”, The Guardian, 20 October, 2019.
Mangini, Shirley. Memories of Resistance: Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War. Yale University Press, 1995.
Ortuño Casanova, Rocío and Axel Gasquet. “Introducción. La cultura letrada hispanofilipina y el desafío de la modernidad”, in El desafío de la modernidad en la literatura hispanofilipina. Brill, 2022: 1-30.
Ponce, Mariano. Sun Yat Sen: El fundador de la República de China. Manila: Imprenta de la Vanguardia y Taliba, 1912.