Sa mga Suso ng Liwanag

1. In U Z. Eliserio’s debut novel (or nobeleta, a novellete, as he preferred to call it) we find the narrative voice of a writer (who couldn’t find time to write) who’s also a teacher (who incidentally got his student-girlfriend pregnant). The postmodern play begins with the power of the name to produce uncertainties: is U the author the same as U the narrator? The play goes on when the last name Eliserio was given to the Lord Chancellor (Chancing Lord) of UPLB, the campus where U the narrator teaches, and U the author formerly taught. Because of the setting, the novel inevitably becomes an inquiry to the culture of the academe as symptomatic of the entire educational system in the country (with constant brownouts, the rise of the call centers, et. al.), and the culture of fraternity as metonymic to the societal violence.

2. The novel inevitably has metaconsciousness: it is aware of itself as a novel. And of other novels: The title clearly alludes to the classic Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag by Edgardo M. Reyes; We'd find U always carrying a book, or reading Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy; U also specializes on the novels of Jose Zembrano, an Aklanon.

It so happened that Chancing Lord Eliserio was also a novelist in English, and supposedly wrote one about a sculptor. However, U later on decided that amidst the unreasonable dismissal of faculty who were not in agreement with the chair’s policy, “the departmental politics was more important” than the novel, even if there were times when reality was seen as story material, and a source of humor, like when they were given a pamphlet about the Key to Paradise immediately after they had their dormitory key duplicated—a detail used by U’s friend JB (who also happened to be an obsession to the former’s) in a story that eventually won the Palanca!

3. Even if there were mentions of issues in reality (9/11, Mike Arroyo, Hacienda Luisita) as “characters’ topics for conversation,” kuko was clearly not suso. And so another concern of the novel was the issues on sexuality: “Titi ng Ama” was an expression/curse that U got from his own mother; U’d always pass by Pekpek Tower because it was just in front of the Old Hum; and how would he face the tension between the possibility of being a father and the consideration of an abortion? A chapter that graphically describes a sexual act (while talking and thinking about death: clearly, a play with eros & thanatos) would end in U farting to his own girlfriend’s face.

4. Because of a death threat that U got on his birthday, and because of the killings of Long Sleeves and Sando (two fratmen), the novel teases us into the genre of detective fiction, but it would not satisfy us with the expectations of the form; this was perhaps the homage to Auster's. The setting was also the time when sex video scandals proliferated—and so the camera at the ceiling of U’s room might be the only thing that could solve the crimes, but in turn would also reveal his sexual exploits.

Why did U leave the dorm and walked past the alley in the end of the novel—even if no one was literally running after him, unlike Edgardo M. Reyes’s Julio Madiaga in the end of his novel? Clearly he found something in the video, but the readers are not given access to that revelation. This was probably the novel’s final argument on what separates the novel’s reality to our reality: the readers can’t know everything a character had access to. Titi ng Ama.

~ After U Z. Eliserio's Sa mga Suso ng Liwanag (2006)