Achieving Happiness

(For Raymund and Pom,who read my blog.Douglas Coupland sez that to create art with the audience in mind is corrupt.I agree (not that am saying my ramblings constitute art, but you get the point.The act of creating,baga.Now that it’s been confirmed that people other than my husband read this blog,it’s become,well,kinda weird to write.Nova’s the one who sez other people read this,and it worried me a little bit.Not that others kayo ni Pom.I still don’t understand the principles of blogging.Am new at this. It’s like, well, being in a reality tv show (but not Pinoy Big Brother. Maybe Survivor in Payatas.)To readers of this blog, thank you for reading.Thank you for making me corrupt (hahaha. kidding).Anyways, I’ll forget about you now and move on to what’s bothering me.)

What is intellectual literature?

What makes a literary work ‘intellectual’ and what are the cases wherein intellectual work doesn’t necessarily mean ‘meaningful’ or ‘profound’ work?

I found myself in a bit of a debate with Miguel Paolo from Bayan Muna, and it surprised me to hear him make these distinctions.

For instance, we had differing views regarding the ‘intellectual’ nature of Milan Kundera’s works (such as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Joke, Immortality,etc), A.S. Byatt’s Possession and Luigi Pirandello’s 7 Characters (or is it six?) in Search of an Author.

Paolo described these works as ‘intellectual’ (perhaps interchangable with terms "cerebral’ or ’seminal?’), but he more or less dismissed them. "Too textured, clouded with images, the plots do not amount to much").

Now I was never one to defend Milan Kundera (who’s anti-socialist, anti-communist) and the politics of his work; but there is no denying his lyricism. He waxes philosophical on the little foibles of humanity, the nature of uniqueness, and the inherent quality of perpetual newness of usual gestures made by different people,and this is reason for me to enjoy reading him.

It’s as if he holds a magnifying glass and he trains it on the small things that lie between people — the expressions and gestures,the shared memory, the common percieved objects understood differently.

AS Byatt, in the meantime,does write with ‘texture’ as Paolo puts it. Usually naman kasi good prose is textured. Meanings layered gracefully on simple descriptions utilizing everyday words. But he didn’t like the texture. Am curious about this.

The plot of Pirandello’s play,however, I found interesting (well,in high school I did). The title itself yanks your interest,doesn’t? The existentialist search for self definition employing the voice of a different, seperate other. How our own lives are seen through the eyes of others.How our own words would sound and what they would mean if and when spoken by another.The uniqueness lies with the individual making the gesture; the meaning and weight of life determined by the one living it, and those who see this life being lived and how.

I suppose Paolo’s in a mostly tibak frame of mind when he reads. (Nevermind that he sez that the emotional is also often intellectual. I think he still chooses to separate one from the other when analyzing or deconstructing. But then again, magkaiba talaga ang paraan ng pag-analyze at pagdeconstruct ng creative writing pipol sa mga English or Comparative Lit majors. Ever witnessed or heard a debate between a creat lit and a comp lit major? On the difference between natural and real literature? Nakakahilo,pero exhilirating.)

In any case, how Paolo reads would be interesting to know.

(Hmm. Parang slumbook question: If you were a book, which book would you be and why. Utang na loob, nobody answer that you’d be the Bible) (But then again, the Bible is a good read. I was once scolded by my religion teacher in elementary school for reading the Old Testament as a novel. As in fiction. Revelations is scary.)

Ako kasi I’ve found it a little burdensome (as a reader,not as a writer) to carry my… activism with me when I read. It’s like an albatross around my neck. I would wind up being tired,exasperated and infuriated by every eight out of 10 books I read. The synthezing process, however,is different. This is when I’d gauage a book AFTER reading it on its actual merits and what I believe is its message is to the world (if any.Halimbawa, John Irving’s A Prayer For Owen Meany carries strong anti-Vietnam war sentiments; and his Cider House Rules,kahit i-deny nya,speaks of women’s rights to their own bodies.Stephen King - popcorn writer that he is - has written an eloquent discourse on the Machiavellian principle ‘the ends justify the means’ in The Dead Zone.These are books that will never win Pulitzers or Nobels, but in my estimation,the fact that they really made me stop and consider my own views on issues such as abortion, the US’ interventionist foreign policy, and my moral stand on political assasination, they’re books worth reading and discussing. ) 

I guess what it all boils down to is this: what literature means and what it implies often relies on the subjectivity of the reader; his/her biases, and her/his purpose for reading. Outside of the debate on the quality of language, the weaknesses or strengths of characterization, plot and logic of conflict and resolution, the coffee grounds are this: the reader decides,lays down the verdict based on his/her personal experience, learning, values and maybe politics (kung conscious yung reader.)

I’ve read books that would qualify as dumb (a few of those so-called chick lit books, Bridget Jones wanna-bes),but I’ve gained a few bits of insight from them about relationships and my own neuroses (I will not go into them here. Maybe if I were drunk.)

I also read science fiction (Stanislaw Lem, Isaac Asimov, Alan Dean Foster and those Star Trek books), but apart from the fact that there are science factoids there, and they employ scientific concepts, I would not immediately label all the works as intellectual. (But Lem and Asimov are freaking genuises. Arthur C. Clarke din and Phillip K. Dicke.) My husband who’s a physics nut, however, glazes over the scientific principles and goes do the the essense of the stories. Take away the technology, he sez, and what remains is still humanity — flawed and doomed to commit the same errors so long as people don’t evolve in terms of psychology and ideology. This, he sez,is what makes certain sci-fi intellectual –when they comment and philosophize consciously on the human condition.

I’ve always wanted to write a review of Ruth Firmeza’s Gera; but just thinking about it just about destroys me. The content (stories within individual but interlocking life stories, the larger socio-political context which created the plot which has, essentially no real beginning and no discernable end) is too close to where the essential me  resides. It weakens me to read Gera. But it’s only the content per se - but what stories and emotions the  story awakens in me, everything connected to my own life in the movement.

I wonder how other activists read and appreciate Gera? It must be a similar yet different experience. The conversation with Paolo has made me eager to discuss this. Gera or any other body of work in the Kilusan. The stories in Muog,for instance. Or kahit anong libro. How are we affected and influenced by literature? We are what we read, and what we read influences us to some degree or another or strengthen some aspect or another of our characters and personalities (I went through a Holden Caulfield phase once when I was 11. I had a friend in college who wanted to marry Neil Gaiman’s Dream. She really was a dark sort of person.)

In the first few scenes of the movie Before Sunset, Jesse played by Ethan Hawke is in the midst of a book launch - his own.The ending of his novel,it appears, is open-ended. The reporters ask him– ‘how did you story end?" He more or less answers that to reveal what he thinks is the story’s real conclusion "would take the piss out of the real thing."

He, however, turns the table on his interlocutors and asks them how they think the novel ended. If one is a romantic or optimistic type, one would hope for and believe in a happy ending and hope fulfilled. If one were mostly of a cynical bent, one would insist that the story ended in tears. If one were,well, unsure and uncertain of how he/she views life, he or she would continue being uncertain and unsure of how the novel ended.

I always wish for happy endings in other people’s stories; but in my own work, well, the endings are often sad. I am always hopeful that I will learn something for my own personal use and benefit from the books I read. Kahit trash.

The reader that I am is different from my self who writes. #

This entry was posted on Monday, October 24th, 2005 at 5:04 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.