FORUM July-August 2011 9
Literature and Society
(Editor’s note: This is SP Lopez’s essay which won in the 1940 Commonwealth Literary Awards. Reprinted with the permission of Mrs. Adelaida Escobar-Lopez.) he word has soul as well as body. Writers who consider themselves keepers of the word may not ignore the fact that it has a physical body and possesses qualities of sound and color, fancy and imagination. But the word is more than sound and color; it is a living thing of blood and fire, capable of infinite beauty and power. It is not an inanimate thing of dead consonants and vowels but a living force―the most potent instrument known to men. Whoever uses speech merely to evoke beauty of sound or beauty of imagination is not exploiting the gift of speech for all that it is worth; he is exploiting it only in those qualities that are inherent in the word but external to the mind and soul of men. When a writer uses words purely for their music or purely as an instrument of fancy, he may claim that he is a devotee of pure art, since he insists on using words only in their strictly primitive qualities. In point of fact he is really a decadent aesthete who stubbornly confuses painting with literature and refuses to place words in the employ of man and his civilization. There is hardly any writer of importance who does not, sooner or later, come to a point where his readers will ask him: “Why do you no longer write as you used to do?” or “The lightness and the laughter have gone out of your writing; you now write almost exclusively on politics, as if life offered nothing besides human folly and the social struggle. Why do you no longer write of pleasant and beautiful things?” For the young writer is almost certain to start his career by writing mushy poetry and sophomoric philosophy, permitting his fancy to revel hedonistically among lovely phrases culled from books and sayings come down from the ancients―remnants of fascinating courses in literature and philosophy taken in college. Then slowly, almost imperceptibly, as the years pass, there comes over his writing a change not only in subject-matter but in general temper and attitude. Daily exposed to the headlines of the newspaper, his Olympian superiority or indifference yields slowly to the persistent hammering of the facts of his own experience and of contemporary history. Upon his sophomoric certainties is cast the shadow of terrible happenings―whole nations in the grip of terror, starved, maimed or killed through no fault of their own, pawns in the bloody game of men lustful for wealth and power, crushed under the heels of dictators. An amorphous idealism or, on the other hand, a precocious cynicism is no longer adequate to meet the vast problems which daily present themselves before his eyes. Did he use to write on poetry and philosophy, expatiate on the beauty of life and the splendor of human brotherhood? If so, he soon begins to realize that
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he was merely echoing what he had read in books, for the book of life conveys a different message altogether. In his heart is no longer merely the exultation over art and nature and living; in his heart is a deep compassion for the sufferings of the oppressed and anger at their oppressors. Not that he has become blind to the beauty of nature and the works of man; it is only that he has begun to relate his ideas and every important thing that happens to some definite principles of beauty and justice and truth. His eyes have pierced through the veil of deception with which so much of the face of life that is ugly is covered. He has begun to pursue truth instead of phrases. He is no longer a florist, scissors in hand, gathering lovely blossoms; he has become a tiller of the soil, spade in hand, digging into the roots of things and planting seeds. This is the usual course of a writer’s literary development. There is no more dramatic illustration of this process than the case of former Director Teodoro Kalaw of the National Library, who, like so many of the outstanding leaders of the older generation, started his career as a newspaperman. His autobiography contains a candid confession which shows the inevitable change that occurs in the attitude and temper of the sensitive writer as he grows older in experience and wisdom. Mr. Kalaw, it seems, was something of a “columnist” in the early days of his employment on the staff of that famous newspaper of the transition, El Renacimiento He writes: “I must have written my first news items very badly because Guerrero made innumerable corrections on them... My literary reading had not predisposed me to prosaic journalism, which I considered as ephemeral as a wind-blown leaf, but to writing as an art, as an expression of the beautiful. I soon became what today is known as a columnist; but my column was literary, and I made no attempt to comment on political and moral matters as is usual today. My column, written daily, contained short rambling paragraphs on philosophy, literature, love, dreams, illusions, and other such abstractions. To me, in those youthful days, the allimportant consideration was style―the discovery of the beautiful word for the beautiful thought.” Nor was he unmindful of the adulation of the ladies, for he admits with a disarming frankness: “In common with the rest of the journalists in the office, my secret desire was to have the young ladies avidly peruse my column, and in truth, the column was all the rage among our society girls, who considered my writing piquant and intriguing.” Yet it was not long before Columnist Kalaw outgrew his Flaubertian preoccupation over the discovery of “the beautiful word for the beautiful thought.”Soon enough he was drawn out of his Ivory Tower of “pure literature” into the social and political currents swirling about him. He says: “Sociological themes greatly inspired me to
more writings. We were then passing a period of real historical transition. Everything was being subjected to change―customs, laws, language, social practices.” Kalaw, the idealist, romantic and aesthete, had become aware that society had a claim on his attention, and he was not unwilling to oblige. He began writing seriously on political and social questions, criticizing what he believed to be the evils brought about by the American regime, bemoaning the degeneration of the “Filipino Soul,” attacking the abuses of the Constabulary. When, several years later, he became editor of El Renacimiento, he was one of the principal defendants in the most spectacular libel suit that this country has yet known. Growing out of the strong spirit of nationalism and the universal aspiration for independence from America, this celebrated case may be said to have marked the full intellectual maturity of the young literary journalist, fancier of beautiful thoughts couched in beautiful words. Having traveled the weary road from the Ivory Tower to jail, he had learned that the only true basis of lasting beauty in literature is―power. ---------There are two perilous roads open to the heedless young writer. One road leads to indifferentism and the other to misanthropy. The writer becomes a confirmed indifferentist either because he is ignorant and does know better or because, knowing better, he believes sincerely, if erroneously, that the things which men live by are beyond the interests of his art. And a writer becomes a cynic and a misanthrope because the waters of his spirit that were once clear and sparkling have become muddied by personal disappointment, weakness of will or intellectual confusion. Indifferentism is usually an inherent vice, and there is little that can be done to correct it. If it arises from ignorance, it may be possible to apply the remedy of instruction, but if it arises from a twisted point of view, the vice usually runs so deep that all who are thus afflicted may as well be counted lost to the cause of moving and militant speech. On the other hand, only those men suffer from cynicism and misanthropy who possess a profound and sensitive spirit and who, somewhere along the road, received some injury in the heart or in the will or in the mind. Their affliction is not necessarily incurable. Since it is almost certain to have been caused, in the first place, by a faulty understanding of the basic principles that underlie human existence, it can be cured by helping the writer stand firmly upon some indestructible faith. For a sensitive spirit is easily prone to cynicism and misanthropy unless it is reinforced by the steel on undeviating principle. Spiritual sensitiveness becomes a vice only when it is not married to toughmindedness. Although the dogma of “Art for Art’s sake” LITERATURE AND SOCIETY, p. 10
Photos from http://www.adb.org/media/Articles/2002/791_Philippines_STEP-UP_Program/Scan1868.jpg, http://nimg.sulekha.com/others/original700/philippines-poverty-2009-8-25-4-40-46.jpg, and http://streetkidspm.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/filipinos-in-poverty.jpg.
By Salvador P. Lopez