The Wing of Language: Franz Arcellana

In Francisco Arcellana’s story “The mats,” written in 1938, the Angeles family lives in an unnamed city. Two of the places the children’s itinerant father Jaime have been to are named: Mariveles and Lopez, from where he takes the Bicol Express to bring home the bounty he has promised them by letter. After dinner and a cigar, he finally unfurls his pasalubong, one by one and ceremoniously: a sleeping mat for every member of the family, each hand-embroidered with their name. For the children, there is also a figure woven into the mat that signifies their individual lives: for example, a lyre for Marcelina, who is a student of music; the staff of Aesculapius for Antonio, who is a medical student. 

“You are not to use these mats until you go to the university,” Jaime lectures his children again and again. After all, besides his wife Emilia, there are six children to be bestowed upon. But after the slow roll call, he produces three more mats—for the children who are no longer with them.

There was no symbol or device above the name, Franz writes, only a blank space, emptiness. The emptiness envelops the Angeles household and strangles them in a tight bundle of unfamiliar hurt. Except for the father, Jaime, who defiantly calls out the names of their dead children: “This is for you, Josefina!” “And this, for you, Victoria!” “And this, for you, Concepcion.”—his words ‘exploding in the silence.’

The names which were with infinite slowness revealed, seemed strange and stranger still, the colors not bright but deathly dull; the separate letters spelling out the names of the dead among them, did not seem to glow or shine with a festive sheen as did the other living names. 

—from “The mats”

 

In what is arguably Franz Arcellana’s most well-known story is woven the language for which he is known, mesmerizing with repetition and tone like an incantation, beating the air with a poetic cadence, as if generated by its own energy. Language as letters appearing on a mat, speaking on its own, formulated on its own, and for no one. 

In 1939, the year after he published “The mats,” Franz graduated from the University of the Philippines with a degree of Bachelor of Philosophy. Though he had entered the university a pre-medical student, his literary life quickly overcame him. He had published his first short story when he was 16, still in high school. He found his groove in his college days, with the publication of his work in The Literary Apprentice and his recruitment into the UP Writers’ Club by Manuel Arguilla, whose own experimental work in language had made him a literary beacon on campus, and of the times.

Franz would maintain a correspondence with Jose Garcia Villa, who liked his work enough to include 14 of his stories in his annual “roll of honor” from 1928 to 1939. Later, along with Cornelio Reyes and Lazaro Espinosa who were his schoolmates at Torres High, Franz led a group called the Veronicans, a flock of writers and artists concerned with the avant-garde.

The Veronicans named themselves after their intent to “make their writing bear the imprint of the Face of the Philippines, just as the cloth of Veronica bore the imprint of the face of Christ”—or so confesses Fr. Herbert Schneider, professor of Biblical Studies at the Loyola School of Theology. Plausible, sure, but what is certain is that the Veronicans pushed through the middling crowd and created a courageous and transgressive imprint on the literary landscape.

The Veronicans’ 13-person membership included writers N.V.M. Gonzalez and Estrella D. Alfon, and visual artist H.R. Ocampo. Hernando Ocampo sponsored the stencil print runs of their publication, called Story Manuscripts, which the Veronicans sold in front of the PECO building in Escolta. Franz himself reports how the publications—early zines, if you will—earned much attenti0n, and even compelled other writers to form their own groups, such as the Ravens, who counted Adrian Cristobal, Alex Hufana, and Virgie Moreno among their members.

The Veronicans wrote primarily in English, and were considered to be on the bleeding edge of experimental writing. In the pre-war years, Filipino writing in English was very young; in fact, Franz is recognized as a pioneer in the modern Filipino short story in English. His fascination and concern over the short stories written by his fellow Filipinos is evident in his numerous columns detailing his appreciation for the trove of stories regularly published in magazines and journals at the time, where he describes in detail stories published by writers like Kerima Polotan, William J. Pomeroy, Stevan Javellana, Bienvenido Santos, and N.V.M. Gonzalez. 

But his stories stand quite apart. His particular love for innovation is clear not just in the structure and the flow of his own work, but also in its very sonic signature.

In Franz’s writing, we see nothing of the flat, regulated, and almost legislated signature “American workshop” style and structure that pervaded our literature in English at the time—and continues to do so, even in the market-driven language of our other arts.

In many of his works, we feel his language before we understand it, we feel it as we hear it, we feel it as Filipinos: the warmth and unspoken feelings inherent in the Filipino family in “The mats,” the unquenchable love for the unattainable Catholic school girl in “A story to speak,” and the brother who exiles himself from his disintegrating homeland in “Letter to a friend-in-exile now living in the island of Majorca.” 

In another magazine column, he reports on a literary symposium proposed by Literary Apprentice editor Armando D. Manalo on “Filipino Writing in English: 1949,” in which one of the project questions is:

How does the postwar generation of writers differ from the “old guard”? Do they show an interest in experimentation possess a greater mastery of craft? What influence do our expatriate writers exert on them?

—from “A symposium,” Sunday Chronicle Magazine, 1949

 

Shall we ask the same question in our many actual symposiums and forums today? What does this mean for our current writing in English, for our English, our borrowed and bogarted language, for the English that is written here, within our boundaries and on our territory?

This is a question to be answered partly in the classrooms, which Franz himself famously declared to have “disappeared into” later in his life, as he told Alfred Yuson in an interview, but of course the answer can only be completed in the work Filipino writers produce today.

Franz’s concerns and realities reach us across time and closely shadow our own. In a another column for Sunday Chronicle Magazine, Franz confronts the “bankruptcy that drains” the Filipino writer in English just when it seems he is “getting set to do real work.” 

Has it something to do with the language? With the fact that the language is not ours but an adopted one? Do we find it difficult, not to say nearly impossible, to sustain ourselves beyond a certain level of performance, beyond a certain bulk, of work done in a language from the reality of which we are twice removed?

—from “There’s no giving up,” Sunday Chronicle Magazine, 1948

 

That was in 1948, two years after the Americans just granted us some kind of independence that, four generations later, we find ourselves unsure about. It seems, as well, that the Filipino writer writing in English today finds themself even more times removed, for better or for worse: they find themself more dislocated from the action and the situation.

As a student of his at the University of the Philippines, I found refuge in his class. I was a pre-med student myself, just like Franz and Estrella Alfon had been. “A doctor is the thing to be,” Franz had even assured me one time, out of nowhere.

And even though my first published work had been in Filipino, I had always felt at home in English, by way of my parents who had migrated to Manila from Davao and who therefore found it easier to adopt English rather than Tagalog as their second language, and by way of my grade school and high school education at the Ateneo de Manila.

In that class, Franz taught poetry, not fiction, and one day he upheld one of my poems, whose every line I remember to this day and continues to make me cringe, as an example of something that must be given what he called a “syntactical reading.” 

I was young and I was thrilled. He was 74 or 75, and at the end of the class he gave me a good grade and a copy of The Francisco Arcellana Sampler for a keepsake. In its pages I discovered that in 1934, when he was 18 years old, he published a story in Expression, Manuel Arguilla’s quarterly journal of experimental writing, called “A story to speak,” which begins: 

And now all is well again and I am writing again. After so long not writing and now writing again and now all is well again. And now writing again but not falsely or fearingly or happily but writing truely and bravely and very sadly again. 

I was so long not writing and I was frightened and I was very unhappy so long not writing but now all is well again and I am writing again and I am writing truely and bravely and very sadly again.

—from “A story to speak”

 

It was the 18-year-old Franz that had given 20-year-old me, across time and space, a lesson in the syntactical possibilities in and of and caused by English—from a story he had written less than a decade after what is generally understood to be the first “successful” story in English, Paz Marquez-Benitez’s “Dead Stars.”

It’s good to write, I said, and I thought how the flowing had stopped for good and forever and how I had not been writing and everything ended. And there was a girl, I said. And Amador said, Was that Lita? Not Lita, I said, but Lina. Lina, she is my girl, I said. That was a lie.

—from “A story to speak”

 

This was his English. This was Franz-speak. This was his French. It is also somehow understood from the syntactical reading of “A story to speak” that Lina was a real girl and a real source of suffering in Franz’s young life, it is she who is reciting the poem of Rizal in the story, it is she whom he cannot have. In fact, he wrote another entire story a year earlier, in 1933, called “Lina.”

 

What I needed was the voice of her voice. What I needed was the laughter of her laughter.

—from “A story to speak”

Indeed, this was the language of his language: it tore into the heart of our English and brought it out into the light, refracted into a craft that was as personal as a name whispered into a mat-maker’s ear and announced with impunity.

The Manila of those pre-war days, too, was a place of impunity. As a financial center and a globalized commercial hub it summoned urban migrants to its gates and its enclaves. As the seat of the Commonwealth’s capital it commanded—or attempted to—the rest of the country in English. The first Filipino short stories were written here, even if their writers had mostly not been born here. Manuel Arguilla was from Ilocos, Estrella Alfon from Cebu, Marquez-Benitez from Lucena.

It was Franz who was the local, born in Sta. Cruz, Manila in 1916, to Jose and Epifania. He was the fourth of 18 children, six of whom did not survive—whether it was the war, or disease, or their birth. He was bred in Gagalangin, Tondo, where he attended Torres High School and wrote for the official school paper The Torres Torch. After the War years, he quickly picked up on his writing. He worked his way up from transcriber to bureau manager at the Manila Bureau of the International News Service. He wrote his way up from columnist to editor and finally to literary editor at This Week, the Sunday supplement of The Manila Chronicle. He began teaching at the University of the Philippines. He wrote a column called “Art and Life” that appeared weekly in Herald Midweek Magazine and then later on, in the 1960s, a column in The Philippine Collegian called “Memo Pad.” Perhaps his best-remembered work as a columnist is “Through a Glass, Darkly,” a series written in 1949 for Sands and Coral, which his son, the poet Juaniyo Arcellana, highlights for faithfully chronicling “the intramurals and the tampuhan between artists and writers.”

Manila reverberates in his columns and his stories. 

In “The wing of madness (ii): the yellow shawl,” the setting of an apartment building may as well be the blueprint to the writer’s soul, described in careful detail from the number of steps between floors to the precise placement of a large mirror in the vestibule of the apartment that a man enters, where he waits for his beloved to arrive. 

The man is confused by the mirror; for a fleeting moment he thinks it is another man approaching him, he takes off only his shoes and lies in bed, he quickens at the sound of every car that passes on the street outside, and he rushes to the window when she finally arrives and exits the taxi, Hollywood-style: shoes first, then the hem of her dress, and finally, that yellow shawl. It is Manila, 1953.

The point of view shifts to the woman’s, whose yellow shawl she has hung on the wall, above the man. “I can’t get you out of my heart anymore: I can’t unlove you,” he tells her. The yellow shawl, now a trembling wing soaring over his image in the mirror, throws her back to nine years before, of the same shawl, then her mother’s, in another room, with another man—her father. Her mother has been taken away by the Japanese, her violent suffering under their hands is only projected to the readers through the sound of her screams, and through her father’s helpless agony.

“The yellow shawl” is a story of mirrors, and images, and the vivid wisp of pain that threads them, through quietly shifting its viewpoints and positions—all accomplished with the trick-mirror of language that very few have mastered.

When I pushed the door in, he writes in “the yellow shawl,” I saw in the wall facing me, even as the door swung open, another door opening, swinging outward, toward where I stood, out in the hall before the apartment. The doors came to a standstill simultaneously. I noticed the man before the farther side of the inner door. I stood and waited. It seemed the man could sustain silence and stillness longer than I could, so I decided to call out to him. Before I did so, I stepped over the threshold. When I saw him stride through the inner door the same time I crossed the threshold, I realized it was a mirror before me. 

—from “The wing of madness (ii): the yellow shawl”

 

The language reverberates in reality, too, much like in the startling mirror in that apartment vestibule. I remember someone reporting how Franz had shouted in the halls outside the headquarters of The Philippine Collegian: “The Americans are fucking us, and we fucking love it!”

That was quite rich, coming from someone who had enjoyed the benefits of a Rockefeller Foundation Grant, undergone a fellowship in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa, and participated at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference—all plum prizes and, many have said, plums strung with strings and secret messages, sponsored by the U.S.A.

In the “The Pride of Fiction,” a lecture Franz delivered to the 8th Silliman University National Writers’ Workshop in 1969, he seems to be aware of such dark and complex mirrors in real life: 

The truth that otherwise we cannot stand, the reality that we cannot bear to see, our truth and our reality, are made bearable to us in fiction—we dare look without fear of petrification.

—from “The pride of fiction,” a lecture at the Silliman University Writers’ Workshop , 1969

 

For another literary occasion, he writes: 

For man can only betray himself, he cannot betray language… Everything is in the language, in the mirror, in the mirror image. It would not be such a large leap to think that he had been referencing the story he had written years and years before, as well as the story of his life and his craft.

 

Of the life and craft of the Filipino writer, Franz had much to say as well.

Are we a generation rather short on original force, he asks, without the drive and the tension necessary for finding and digging, for digging, and then building, for building and for keeping on building?

 

—from “There’s no giving up,” Sunday Chronicle Magazine, 1948

 

He makes reason after compelling reason for this weakening.

A man falls into the commonplace of marriage, family, life, fatherhood—does this mean that his goose is cooked or his star is down? Does this mean that his creative life is done with and over?

 

—from “There’s no giving up,” Sunday Chronicle Magazine, 1948

 

Franz himself was a family man, married on the eve of the War, and producing six children: Francisco, Jr., Elizabeth, Jose III, Mayi, Juaniyo, and Emerenciana II. I remember visiting him at his home on Maginhawa Street, listening to him talk about his family, surrounded by the clutter of everyday households.

I also remember him suddenly standing up at the U.P. Writers’ Workshop and pronouncing, repeatedly, “We are not obliged!”—in response to someone saying something. Not obliged to do what, exactly? Not obliged to pause and explain our silence, not obliged to just justify? The question has long been forgotten, but Franz’s non-compliance continues to be urgently learned and respected. And I believe that it must be expected of the Filipino writer. 

…no, he writes, he has not given up, not in his secret heart of hearts; he is only biding his time; he is really working towards a time when he shall be free to do all the writing that he feels he has in him to do; he is only priming himself for that time and when that time comes, hey; they will sit up and take notice! Just watch his smoke!

 

—from “There’s no giving up,” Sunday Chronicle Magazine, 1948

 

What remains, despite everything that has happened to us, and is still, and will happen, is the compulsion to write. “When something happens to me,” Franz said in an interview, “I can’t go and start hitting people. So what will I do? I go sit down and write… When a writer writes, what he’s really saying is that he’s alive.” 

In one of his later stories, “Letter to a friend-in-exile now living in the island of Majorca: evangel & epistle & apocalypse,” published in 1971, the narrator writes someone he addresses as “pare ko” a lengthy, loopy letter that is also a piece of speculative fiction. The story is about a man writing a friend about the death of their collective state mother—or perhaps the death of motherland itself—after a long debilitating illness. 

Barely had your 777 lifted from the ground, when the bulletin of her last illness began, he writes, a full 24 years before the first Boeing 777 ever lifted off from the ground. He writes of giant screens and a “State announcer” delivering a broadcast from a fictitious “Fortress-on-the-shore,” of a Big Brother, who is also referred to as Kuya, delivering the sad, sudden news of the death of “my mother, our mother, the mother of us all.” 

Ang ina ko, ang ina natin, ang ina ng bayan, Franz also writes in the same story, in Filipino this time. In his letter to his kabarkada in exile, he reminisces about the good times back home, when it was all fun and games until their nation mysteriously fell under the dictatorial regime of the boy who became Big Brother, who thrived as long as his mother was alive.

Now that his friend has left him and his country to their fate, what will happen to the nation? …who is there to take the mother’s place? he writes, where is there a mother to mother him? Who will be mother?

Perhaps, for Franz, that mother was all the unspeakable things he wrote of: Jaime’s dead children whose names still deserved to be written, the little girl’s mother who is taken away from her sight and violated by Japanese soldiers, the yellow shawl that was also a dark wing held aloft by memories of oppression, which he continued to fight, in his own language—as a writer for whom every story soared like a poem, for whom language was the story and the poem itself.

In 1952, many years after the War, he published a poem called “Sonnet:”

 

Squat, crafty little guy

sat a long time on my chest

shut out all I know of sky

fed upon my thinning breast

 

broad, heavy, fateful sword

swept the air above my head

was master, sovereign, lord

of both my quick and my dead

 

but heart was body’s merit

and godly soul proved able

kept secret sky of spirit

breast was endless table

 

            to arrest, still the sword

            I held banner of the word.

 

“A poet trapped in fiction” was how the late National Artist Amelia Lapeña Bonifacio described Franz—as though he were a bird trapped in a cage. But it is clear that Franz did not see fiction as a cage. For him it is the bird itself, taking the imagery and lyricism of poetry farther than the average fictionist could see. 

This was how he “disappeared into the academe”—by heading straight into the horizon and the sky. His academic career, which saw him rise from instructor to professor. He was the chairman of the first UP National Writers’ Summer Workshop in 1965. He became the first and founding director of the UP Creative Writing Center in 1979, and taught in 14 of the 15 workshops under the program.

As a teacher, he did not disappear—he atomized into the work of those he taught. 

In 1989, the University conferred upon him an honorary doctorate in humane letters, and the year afterward, he was proclaimed National Artist of the Philippines in Literature.

Now let us take a look at the figure before us, without the glass: Franz as a figure in full, stepping through the threshold of history, coming home to us today like a letter to the future, like a ribbon of memory that cannot be erased. As writers, we must remember him today for what he was, because that is what a writer must be: an enfant terrible—unconventional, sometimes badly behaved, but always brutally honest. As readers, we must read him today for what we can be: a nation that knows and remembers where it came from, and how far it must go.

Across his stories, poems, essays, columns, and letters, Franz Arcellana did not capture the zeitgeist—as much as become its point of reference, setting the pace by disturbing the peace. He fought hard against oppression, against other writers. He fought hard against language itself, wresting and lifting from it his own language, his own self, and therefore our language, and our literature.

This essay was originally delivered as a public lecture for the UP Likhaan Institute of Creative Writing, in coordination with the National Commission of Culture and Arts, The National Book Development Board, Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino, and Proverbsville School, Inc.