2. I sadly missed the lectures that Syjuco gave (in Ateneo & at the Filipinas Heritage Library) when he launched the books in the Philippines, but I made sure to grab myself a copy of the Philippine edition by FSG at the National Bookstore the other day. The book is prologued by the fictive Miguel Syjuco who used an equally fictive epigraph from a newspaper, the content of which set the novel's thematic gravitas: death, home/country, name, remembrance. The mention of Crispin's own Dulcinea paid homage to the novel form's comic beginnings, that was further developed when Syjuco introduced Erning Isip, the trickster-hero of popular Filipino jokes ("our true shared history," Salvador claimed), as character. There was a one-sentence paragraph in Syjuco's prologue that suggests he might have seen Salvador dying, if he was not directly involved nor complicit to his mentor's death at all.
3. The first few pages recalled a famous statement from one of Donald Barthelme's stories: "Fragments are the only forms I trust." Excerpts from a biography in progress, blog entries, interviews, sections of Salvador's previous works intervened with the character Syjuco's narrative of his own return to the Philippines (in order, probably, to run away from "the toothlessness of exile")--but Syjuco paradoxically presented his choice of fragments here that become suspect. The character Syjuco is also a writer who wanted to "talk about things that go untalked about," much to his family's disappointment. His digest of Manila as history & geography, of its development & stasis, upon his airplane's landing showed Syjuco the novelist's aesthetic concentration & power.
Everything changes, nothing ends. The character Syjuco said that this was Ovid's aphorism that Salvador shared with him--the words of another being passed on as an act that is potentially endless in itself, especially now that Syjuco just also shared it with us.
Even from the start, it was clear that I was holding a metabook. I wondered if the book could ever regain its "unconsciousness of itself," when the form would not speak for/of itself. It is the kind of amnesia that might surprise & excite me as a reader in the novel's post-postmodern era, or whatever we might call this age of writing that Syjuco's Ilustrado somewhat anticipates.
4. Miguel the narrator, also called our protagonist in the italicized third-person narrations of his story, grew up in a "modern, ancestral home" they called Ourtopia, which pushed him to take "simple acts pertaining to movement, to locating [himself] in the world." This constant movement would eventually lead him out of the country, making him awkwardly unable to reply when someone asked him, "How can you write about the Philippines?" Miguel, in the third person, thinks in another section that "the thing is to write a straight narrative. Go back to basics. Emulate A Passage to India." This is clearly to question the very nature of Ilustrado itself, self-mockery being sometimes a byproduct of self-consciousness that characterized postmodern novels: the hope that political questions can sometimes be addressed by formal decisions in art.
5. Young Miguel's introduction to Filipino writers in English such as Nick Joaquin, Gregorio Brillantes and Paz Marquez Benitez, became a way for the world (thanks to the guaranteed international readers of Ilustrado) to acquaint itself of this country's much-neglected body of works. Years later when Miguel went back to the Philippines he saw the literati of his country as "the merry, mellowed, stalwartly middle-class practitioners of the luxury of literature in the language of the privilege." These are the same people who would dismiss each of Salvador's works in a word: it was either elitist, Manila-centric, provincial, polemical, to name a few. Sometimes in our hypocrisy our imagination of the center is not even in the margins of the world's consciousness. In a long section where Miguel changed channels one after another, we were made to realize how texts come as assault, even those images that wanted to be modern archetypes of personae that populate the contemporary Filipino imagination: the religious leader (Reverend Martin), the hero/antihero (Lakandula), and the actress-mistress (Vita Nova).
6. Miguel's introduction to Crispin Salvador's works was through the latter's "One Stone for Two Birds" where the protagonist was named Miguel by coincidence. These incidents of name-mirrors in texts being written and read became the novels motif on questions of identity vis-a-vis fictionality. When we were allowed to read from excerpts of Salvador's works, we knew that these "interruptions" act as foils--that we did not have to read them for themselves but for the way they created harmony or acted as counterpoints to the "real" narrative. Every main character in those works was either a Salvador or a Syjuco.
In the end of Chapter 6, after Miguel's dream of Salvador writing the former's story, their positions as subject and writer being confused, conflicted, which by now became almost the novel's habit, Miguel recounted his long walk by the river of Salvador's death. It was quite a determined mentor-mentee moment where Salvador shared his thoughts on writing, the nation, and the past, where the call is "to change the country by changing its representation." Of course, it somehow foreshadowed the book's major turn in the end, which made me think how Syjuco's project would have been different if we knew it all along, if it was not presented as a last narrative trick. Perhaps I was just worried that conversations about the book would only revolve ultimately on Syjuco's decision to have that twist (which I won't say what; you have to finish the book yourself), diluting the gravity of its concerns content-wise.
