A student not long ago asked me: ‘Do we have serious criticism in our literature, sir?”
I blinked. That was long ago, the Filipino playwright Alberto Florentino’s exact remark, except now in the interrogative, once upon a time in the 60s: Nobody takes literary criticism seriously in this country.
Florentino was visiting the Silliman Writers Workshop, home of confident New Criticism under the guidance of the Iowa-trained Tiempos, and made this remark to young me while lined up for lunch at the Silliman Cafeteria.
“Serious criticism, no; serial criticism, yes,” that young man, now very old, said. “We avidly keep up, then discard as trend dictates, whatever the fashionis in USA and Europe. Cultural lag makes this, at the moment, deconstruction which means it seems to me our critics should wear helmets instead when they talk through their hats.”
This was not in a class so I felt free to improvise. From here on, moreover, lack of resemblance to the facts is deliberate. But wait. Let’s cite some nonfiction — from the Wednesday Reading Circle that, if the MetroPost reader will remember, Ian Casocot wrote about some issues back.
With no intention to clash, two members (perhaps count us in to make carambola) somehow collided this way: Ian held a Deconstructionist position; Simon Stack of Valencia cum New York dissented.
Ian: “I think… it … a game of language and meaning-making, where the ‘meaning’ of a text is unmasked and deconstructed, which is the only point post-structuralism wants to make. (It even hesitates to even posit meaning!) Post-structuralism… is fascinating because it bares how absurd things can be, especially when they start being absolute about their ‘essences’. I admire that fascination with absurdity. And it is really just a game.”
Simon: “Any analysis… that ‘hesitates to posit meaning’ is, of course, going to stick in Bloom’s craw, as in mine…. If it doesn’t have meaning, why on earth would we bother with it? (I realize, Ian, that you yourself are not making the claim that literature does not have meaning — I would never accuse or suspect you of such silliness — I understand that you’re sticking up for the post-structuralists. And I agree with you that they are admirable — it’s their influence that concerns me.) I think it would be a …huge mistake to dismiss them [Lacan, Derrida or Foucault] lightly, if one is at all interested in 20th century criticism or philosophy.
Me: George Steiner, like Mr. Bloom a polymath…‘concedes that deconstruction is unassailable within its own terms.’ That is, Steiner my guru accepts defeat at the hands of Ian’s poststructuralist gurus— acknowledging the catastrophic crack between language and world — cosmos and logos. Yes, Sawi, there is no meaning to a text except what the reader finds.
Hmm.
A professor from Europe is stranded on some island in Tawi-Tawi, and after days of wandering in the lost but fruit-rich land has set the bottle drifting. The message, written in impeccable if baroque English, gives his coordinates in words that are neither direct to the point, nor point to the direction. You have to agree that the deconstructor who picked the bottle up won’t do for the rescue job since it is the deconstructor’s basic principle to eliminate the author and arrive at a reading, as exhaustive as possible, of the text, the result of which is, since the text is more obscure than Hart Crane and Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens put together and yet is king — in fact, king of kings — the rescuers will head for Siquijor.
