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[av_heading heading=’ MY LIFE AS ART ‘ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=’30’ subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”]
BY PETER SOLIS NERY
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Monday, October 30, 2017
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XIII. NOVEL
Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyer (The Voyeur) was awarded the 1955 Critics’ Prize but part of the jury thought that it was not a “novel” at all. Robbe-Grillet, representative of nouveau roman, said of the New Novel, “It is not a school, but a convenient label applicable to all those seeking new forms for the novel—forms capable of expressing, or of creating, new relations between man and the world; and to all those who have determined to invent the novel—in other words, to invent man.”
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The children’s version of Lola Ceding’s bakunawa story, “The Legend of Isla PulangPasayan,” was fairly decent.
But the full story that really won her honor and prestige, the magic realist novel Love in the Time of the Sea Monster, continued with the great Bakunawa pursuing the shrimp for three days and three nights.
Only, he could not himself rise out of the water!
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He groaned as he gazed at the moon by the sea, as the moonlight on the waves shimmered in iridescence.
The bakunawa has the power to swallow the moon.
It is a moon-eater, with its big mouth (as big as a lake).
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Yes, sure, her novel would have sounded better if it were called Love in the Time of the Moon-eater.
But the creature she needed for her story was not interested in the beautiful full moon, but in beautiful girls.
She also wanted to celebrate the sensuality of an almost forgotten mythical creature with a beautiful name—Bakunawa!
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She did not care for commercial or critical success while writing her novel, only in telling a story, and retrieving from oblivion the rich cultural heritage of Hiligaynon folklore.
Her novel was subversive.
It was short, only 108 pages, way less than Hemingway’s 1953 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Old Man and the Sea (the shortest novel to win the Pulitzer, 140 pages in its first edition).
The novel was also questioned for its form.
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Love in the Time of the Sea Monster was written in lines, like poetry.
But it was hardly poetry, because the lines were pretty prosaic.
Very much like the tribal chants that tell of the almost extinct stories of the Sulodnon, the indigenous people in the hinterlands of Panay.
Prose poetry?
Novel in verse?
Indigenous literary genre?
What was it?
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My focus was, Mercedes explained, brevity, and a lack of ambition to produce epic poetry in prose.
My style, obviously fresh, plain, and straight-forward.
New, novel, original.
My story was interesting, if not arresting.
It was anchored in folklore, made relevant by late 20th century local context.
My heroes were neither good nor bad; one learned through their actions, not by imitating them.
If that’s not novel enough for you, I don’t know what is.
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To address her controversial win of the country’s biggest literary prize in history (some said the intrigue was fueled by the scandalous one million pesos awarded to Mercedes), she agreed to a radio interview.
I am not from the academe, she said, but I believe that the ideal novel should be an individual version, and vision, of things.
It should subordinate plot, character, even form, and all other old-fashioned criteria to the details of the world rather than enlisting the world in their service.
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Her last word on the matter, No! I am not returning the prize.
I am keeping the money for myself, and for charity organizations of my choice.
I deem the judges’ decision irrevocable and final.
She ended up giving half of the money to an orphanage, and the rest to subsidize the publication of the children’s version, “The Legend of Isla Pulang Pasayan,” for mass distribution in public elementary schools nationwide.
Mercedes kept her vision.
She told her story of the bakunawa that could not rise out of water, except on the third night. (To be continued)/PN
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