Preying on ignorance

For the Art & Culture section of the Philippine Star, May 12, 2008.

After I submitted this for publication, I made slight changes to the fifth and sixth paragraphs to make the point about the Hemingway novella easier to follow.

For another, more trenchant, critique of the article in question, see Angela Stuart-Santiago.



In a recent column in The Manila Standard Today, Connie Veneracion wrote about her daughter’s struggle with a reading assignment in school (“The Birds of Prey and Batjay,” The Sassy Lawyer, April 29). What got Veneracion upset was that the required text — Mga Ibong Mandaragit (or Birds of Prey) by Amado Hernandez — turned out, when she volunteered to help her daughter, to be just as difficult for her. Curiously, Veneracion blamed Hernandez for giving her a hard time. She writes: “Had it [the novel] been written in English, the reader would easily get the impression that the writer had a thesaurus by his side and he intentionally sought unfamiliar synonyms for the more familiar words in order to sound profound. A case of substance muddled by incomprehensible form.”

As a teacher of literature, I’m no stranger to the resentment readers feel when they encounter a challenging text. I see it in my classroom all the time. Veneracion’s piece dismays me because it comes from an adult, not a seventeen-year-old, and a parent at that. For one thing, she fails to put the writer and his work in context. It is unfair of her to demand that Hernandez’s novel, written in the 1960s for a reader probably very different from herself, be as accessible to her as it may have been to those of an earlier time. Hernandez probably never thought of writing for readers in 2008, people more besotted by media stimuli than any generation previous. (Perhaps he even had no thought of pleasing his own contemporaries. The intentions of a writer can be hard to pinpoint.)

What is difficult varies through time and across cultures. Languages change, and so do literary conventions. The world changes, and so do we. We may find the sentences of Henry Fielding or the late Henry James or James Joyce more tedious than elegant. That is not the fault of Fielding, James, or Joyce; it is simply that we have become accustomed to shorter, simpler sentences, and it takes some effort for us to read writers of a previous age. (We haven’t even discussed the blank verse of Shakespeare.) They weren’t trying to be difficult; it’s just that they weren’t writing for us. We need to make allowances for such differences if we hope to succeed in understanding works of a different era.

And so I find Veneracion’s putdown of Ibong Mandaragit naive. Naiveté can be a wonderful thing. As a childlike openness to new experiences, naiveté allows us to learn. But for learning to occur, this naiveté should be coupled with humility. Veneracion’s naiveté is spiked with arrogance. Notice the ease with which she rejects the poetry of Jose Garcia Villa. (She remembers how, when she was in school, her own lit teacher made them read a poem of Villa’s consisting entirely of punctuation marks. Her verdict: the poem was “crap.”) And again, she makes no attempt to understand Garcia’s experiments with form. If his comma poems are crap, then are e.e. cummings poems that take similar liberties with grammar and syntax (“anyone lived in a pretty how town / with up so floating many bells down,” or “the greedy the people / as if as can yes / they sell and they buy and they die for because”) rubbish as well? Do we flush the modernist poetry of the twentieth century (TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens) down the toilet because they are not as easy to read as, say, Robert Frost?

(And to believe that Frost, or Hemingway — whose novella The Old Man and the Sea she holds up as the ideal counterpoint to Ibong Mandaragit — is easy to read is to be hoodwinked by his surface simplicity. Frost is, in Billy Collins’s fine terminology, “accessible”: it is easy to enter his poetry, but not necessarily easy to get out. A surface ease may hide a complexity of thought and feeling within. Think Chekov, Kafka, or Beckett, writers who used plain language to plumb ideas by no means simple.)

And about Hemingway’s novella: it is indeed a small masterpiece, but to hold it up as the summit of literary achievement is to reveal that one hasn’t climbed very far. It’s not that being ignorant is a crime. Most of us don’t know very much about many things. But ignorance should not assume authority. When Veneracion feels smart enough to dismiss Villa’s poetry as crap and Hernandez’s novel as incomprehensible — the works of two writers who, by the way, happen to be National Artists, an eminent distinction that seems to mean nothing to her — she goes too far. And this is perhaps the most unfortunate thing she neglects to do: question her own limitations as a reader.

Now, I myself confess to not having read Hernandez’s novel. My own exposure to his work came in high school, when we had to read his poem “Isang Dipang Langit.” As someone who reads, writes, and teaches in English, I’m aware that I risk a disconnection from my mother tongue. And no doubt I would, if I tried to read it now, find Ibong Mandaragit hard to read. But I think I would be sensible enough to trace my own struggle with the work to a flaw in myself, not to the writer or his work. I would feel embarrassed at being a poor reader in my own language, just as I feel embarrassed now to admitting it. And I wouldn’t impose on the work the obligation of making things easy for me. That would be disrespectful.

Veneracion asks, “What is so objectionable about the use of simple language in literature? Is literature naturally elitist and meant to be appreciated only by a few? Is it what makes it special? Is that what makes it good?” I ask, “Who are you to dismiss Villa and Hernandez? Why do you feel no shame in being unable to read, and worse, being so willing to denigrate, the work of some of the best writers this nation has produced? Why don’t you think it is important for your daughter to encounter a difficult but important product of our culture, an encounter that may in the end prove fruitful to her growth as a person and as a Filipino?”

Finally, there is what Veneracion leaves unsaid, an unarticulated belief that runs through her entire essay. It is perhaps the most important and dangerous idea in it: ultimately she objects to the novel because the assignment is one made for a subject that is Not Important. Worse, the assigned novel is in Filipino, a language she claims to speak and write “fluently,” yet she feels no shame in belittling the prose of a writer acclaimed as one of our very best in that language. If literature doesn’t matter, literature in Filipino matters even less.

This is the attitude that is in full display in Veneracion’s piece. Literature, especially Philippine literature, is simply Not Important. Filipino is a useless language, or at least one that does not have serious, intellectual uses. Literature itself should be a source merely of instant and superficial pleasure. If so, what then shall distinguish it from entertainment, which is quickly accessed, consumed, and dispensed with? Isn’t it one of the virtues of true art, literature included, that it resists our urge to reduce it to less than it is? True art flouts this contemporary culture’s valorization of easy pleasure. It resists our attempts to reduce it to mere entertainment.

While entertainment strokes our ego and makes us content with ourselves and the world we live in, art calls us to go beyond our comfort zone, to expand the limited spheres of our existence. It admonishes us to become more than who we already are. As Rilke’s famous poem on that sculpture of Apollo exhorts us, “You must change your life.” Art disturbs us into living. Which is why our schools teach literature and the other humanities — the subjects that help us fulfill our human potential, the very subjects we dismiss as Not Important in our increasingly utilitarian, consumerist, chase-the-money world — to our young. We want them to be human beings rich in thought and feeling and rooted in their own culture.

Ultimately, what Veneracion espouses is philistinism, an indifference, if not outright hostility, to the value of the arts and to the work of our own artists. To be ignorant and aware of one’s own ignorance is to begin to overcome it. To be ignorant and smug about it is to be beyond saving.