LITERATURE and how it intersects with culture and other disciplines such as the sciences was the focus of “Inter/Sections: Crossroads and Crosscurrents in Literatures and Cultures,” a three-day national conference on literature organized by the UST Graduate School recently at the UST Thomas Aquinas Research Complex auditorium.
Quoting the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, UST Acting Rector, Fr. Rolando De la Rosa, O.P. said in his opening speech, “a turning wheel that causes no motion in other places is not part of a machine.”
He called on literary practitioners “to give literature its moral anchor,” to counteract the escapist and fantastic works that abound today.
Making those present aware of the power of the written word, the Rector urged writers to create an audience that “seeks meaning in the triviality of the present,” and to “convince everyone that there are absolutes.”
The keynote address was given by Reynaldo C. Ileto, an internationally known Filipino scholar and the author of the seminal work of cultural scholarship, Pasyon and Revolution (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1997).
Ileto stressed a kind of erudition grounded in what Father De la Rosa termed as “social capital.” “Scholarship should be attuned to your surroundings,” he said.
Taking his own intellectual development as an example, Ileto discussed the conflicts in historical thought that were triggered as a result of his unorthodox take at cultural history.
“History is really about the present,” Ileto said.
National Artist for Literature and Varsitarian alumnus F. Sionil Jose stressed the importance of literature in reinforcing the country’s sense of nationhood.
“To this very day, we are not yet a nation. I come to literature because the truth of the matter is that literature by itself can create that sense of identity of which the nation stands,” he said.
Jose believes that history is literature that is lived, and that “it is in literature that we enshrine memory.”
“If we have memory, Imelda (Marcos) and her children won’t be back today groping in media and wallowing in their billions,” he said.
Film and literature
In the plenary session, “Film and Literature,” National Artist for Literature and Varsitarian alumnus Bienvenido Lumbera spoke about the close relationship between literature and the movies.
“Here in the Philippines, film and literature go hand in hand,” he said.
“During the ‘20’s, directors based their works on popular novels. And even after Martial Law, writers of literature were the ones called upon to make movies,” he said.
But Lumbera cited a prominent rift between letters and the movies.
“Literature is unifying the individual experience of the author with that of the reader while films focus more on the experience of the public,” he said.
Lumbera added that despite intersecting, literature and film are sovereign in their own domain. A novel adapted for cinema becomes film, not literature, and the director and producer are free to translate the book into cinematic terms.
“The director and the producers have that privilege,” Lumbera said, citing the case of the late National Artist for Film, Lino Brocka, who changed a character from Edgar M. Reyes’ novel when Brocka did Maynila: Sa Kuko ng Liwanag.
‘Post-humanism’
Tackling the philosophical roots of literature was Faculty of Arts and Letters professor Florentino Hornedo in the plenary session, “Literature and Philosophy.”
For Hornedo, readers of today often lack the critical ability in reading stories because of their tendency to focus too much on the characters.
“Students focus too much on humanistic stories. They fail to see that the world is more than the human person,” he said.
Hornedo added that readers have a “humanistic tendency” to create meanings out of similarities.
“The meaning can also come from the difference of things. We seem to create the world but it creates us,” he said.
Hornedo urged readers to draw away from the persons in stories and turn their focus on the things that lie beyond.
“The human is not the keystone. He is just a part of the jigsaw puzzle,” he said.
In the plenary session on Literature and Journalism, Varsitarian alumna and University of the Philippines vice president for public affairs Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo urged the audience to take advantage of technology to promote their own works.
Meanwhile, in her plenary talk on “Literature and Religion,” Ophelia Dimalanta, director of the UST Center for Creative Writing and Studies and a Literary editor of the Varsitarian in the 1950’s, juxtaposed the religious and the erotic aspects of her poetry.
In the parallel sessions, UST professor Floro Quibuyen discussed “How (Not) to Read Rizal’s Novels” while poet Paolo Manalo explained the esthetics behind Jose Garcia Villa’s comma poems in his talk, “Commas in the Human Present.”
Meanwhile, the little known Ulahingan epic of the Manobos of North Cotabato was the focus of the talk by Earl Jude Cleope from Siliman University.
There were also roundtable discussions on “Teaching Multicultural Literatures,” with US-based Varsitarian alumnus and fictionist-teacher Paulino Lim from the California State University recounting his experience as an Asian teacher before Americans; and on “Icons and Iconoclasts,” featuring well-known literature pedagogues such as UST professor emeritus Milagros Tanlayco and top poet-critic and former Varsitarian staffer Cirilo Bautista. K.J.L. Dabbay, R.C.R. Loveria, A.R.I. Parel and R.L. Reyes
