Plane of Cleavage: Plural Past/Multiple Self
The imagery of return … [is consistently present] in the fiction of Bienvenido Santos. Yet, how the sense of humaneness which is Santos' trademark elevates this return into ritual, without becoming sentimental, is in some ways best illustrated from his poetry…. Appropriately, the voice of Bienvenido Santos' fifty poems, entitled The Wounded Stag (1956), is elegiac, scraped raw by havoc—yet heroic in its acceptance of the need to be responsive, to be responsible. It is the sound of endurance, denying that it must drop into silence unheard. Consequently, there is dawning vigor in each dying phrase.
In his introduction to this collection, Manuel A. Viray identifies three specific periods in Santos' life which correspond to the range of these poems: the Sulucan years of youth in Tondo slums; the wartime exile in America; and the return to a devastated native land. It is true that most of these poems are too heartfelt, too committed to human eventfulness not to have had long histories in the man's personal feelings. Yet it is a more important fact that the author himself has not attempted to arrange his work chronologically, according to those three "stages" in his life—perhaps to indicate that they were not stages after all, but rather replicas of one another. The earliness or lateness of Santos' poems cannot be distinguished, because evidently his life as poet has been marked not by development-in-time but by constancy-of-vision. The experiences of deprived youth, exile, and repatriate presumably were unitary, since the poetic theme now is seen to be singular. Over and over, whatever the changing circumstances (and sometimes these are made quite foreign and displaced, as if to test the personal vision), the feeling is that of human expenditure, waste and the fatal wound, of weariness, of terror among the loveless and the lost, of spiritual drought.
Almost as a fugue, certainly as something more compelling than mere accompaniment, the imagery of physical corruption is pursued by imagery of the great betrayals of religion…. The poems are populated with frantic gods and with calvaries. But this very placing of one in the other's context—human and divine pain—instead of multiplying the feeling of depression, exhorts man to make of his exile a pilgrimage, to offer him suffering for his own redemption, to inspirit each otherwise meaningless daily gesture.
Nevertheless, such juxtaposition is not made from complacency; the Christian myth is not to be swallowed like some modern-day "happy pill," according to "Footnote to Wis-dom." There poems are petitions, equivalents of prayer; they are a horizon of ripe, not naive hope, at the near margin of despair. Santos' knowledge of the depth of man's dilemma—he must sink to rise—is shown in "Father and Son."… (pp. 117-19)
In a world where survival itself keeps man busy, belief in purpose is difficult. Each man, like the Tantalus of "In Fair Exchange" or the novitiate seen in the deserted terminal, is tempted to grow weary of trial. Christ at least knew that he was not forsaken…. (p. 119)
[The poet] is restless because he is dissatisfied with the sight of himself or any other man dying-alive spending his hours "blowing into swollen entrails." Beauty, uncloistered and experienced and nevertheless unviolated, dying intact, does not die. There is bitterness and cynicism in "The Eyeless Saying Yes," yet however deep the sense of outrage, mankind is not confused with its own unkindness. There is no retreat, from the truth of evil—nor from the truth of good. Faith is the good of the poet.
The same courage, the same confirmation through hardship revisited, springs from the images in You Lovely People (1955).
In the moving histories of others—deprived youths, exiles, repatriates—Santos can see again his own varied selves revealed. (pp. 119-20)
The wrenching power of the book lies in its understatement, acknowledging the quiet desperation and yet almost iron gentleness of these expatriates who, in crisis, felt welling even in themselves the sentiments which made a Philippine nation, already independent in fact because independent at heart, inevitable. (p. 120)
It is of this Filipino Dream, not of himself, that Santos has written: the character of the narrator is deliberately left incomplete. Sometimes the story-telling function passes over to men like poker-faced Ambo, of the trembling hands, or to others more anonymous, until a few sections of the book are even told from the omniscient point of view, that is, tell themselves. Withdrawal of the narrator actually permits the reader, suddenly naked and abandoned in a crowd, unmediated experience: the discovery of himself in the ghost and flesh, the dream and reality of others. (p. 121)
Only a small part of You Lovely People has absolute continuity; unique rhythms, in pace and perspective, arranged through mobility of setting and the quick-change artistry of narrators, make a puzzling motion (fit for the wounded, the wondering); but the reverberating theme, which perhaps finds its finest symbol in Ambo—the trembling hands of need which idealizes memory, the poker-face of realistic perception of the present—makes this a book with a singleness of voice, though a variety of echoes.
More than any other character, more than Ben himself, Ambo emerges monumental and memorable—but not separable from the rest. He embodies the Filipino Dream. (p. 122)
The stories collected in Brother, My Brother (1960) are largely prewar stories; but just as wars epitomize whole periods which precede them, so too only slight changes in surfaces—mainly stylistic—distinguish these stories from You Lovely People. More significantly, both volumes are linked by the dramatized theme of homecoming. (p. 123)
The journey is not for the roast pig or cooled beer with which, remembering our failures, we console each other at the end. It is not for reputation, for the distribution of little gifts. It is to confront ourselves in others. (p. 124)
That so many of these earlier stories, in Brother, My Brother are told from the point of view of the personal "I" indicates Santos' compassionate share in the experiences related. The identity of that "I" fluctuates; but such is the occupational hazard and glory of any author. Entering person after person, perhaps looking for himself, he finds and for a while becomes them: for although self as essence must stand separate from others, self as existence depends on their company. This is the dialectic of human history, the drama of rejection and embrace, departure and return. (pp. 124-25)
[Homecomings provide a thematic continuity and also] a special comment on the human quest. After seven years the first protagonist finds his father living; after seven, the last discovers his is dead. Essentially these are the same person; nor has time elapsed. Told in these tales are simply two versions of the same occasion; alternatives, in a sense—since how and when a man returns are partially his own responsibility…. Sometimes he is uncertain until his return whether the seven years of absence have been lean or fat; whether he has been captive in an alien land or has merely extended the boundaries of his first home; whether he will find a garden or a grave.
All of the stories are informed by knowledge of this dilemma and are disciplined by its dramatic counterforces. When, occasionally, a character wavers in thought towards sentimentality, event snatches him erect again. Here the control-through-irony that shaped You Lovely People is already visible. Again and again, therefore, the elements essential to tragedy are apparent, the merely pathetic is transcended…. (p. 125)
This sifting, winnowing technique of Santos as writer, his failure to be false, is authority for saying that the source of his deep and conscience-driven concern is not social, in the school-book sense….
For him, truth has become more important than desire: he is the person/nation in direct confrontation with himself. (p. 126)
Leonard Casper, "Plane of Cleavage: Plural Past/Multiple Self," in his The Wounded Diamond: Studies in Modern Philippine Literature (copyright 1964 Leonard Casper), Bookmark 1964, pp. 92-144.∗
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