Through their publications, Filipino writers have endeavored over the years to expose their fellow countrymen to the successes, achievements, purges, reversals, and everything else in between that has occurred in their history. If you haven't already, you can add Miguel Syjuco’s 320-paged, postmodern work of fiction “Ilustrado,” to that list.
In “Ilustrado,” Syjuco has not only put Philippine history in the spotlight—or in the crosshairs—he has done so with a solid multigenerational, irreverent, and deconstructionist body of traditional literary biography interacting with an implicitly political murder mystery. Some would say that for any first-time novelist to contrive such an ambitious and demanding effort is a serious risk and quite possibly a bridge too far. But try telling that to Syjuco. His book has proven that he is a great observer of Filipino culture, history, and psychology.
You can tell Syjuco feels deeply attached to Philippine history just going by the title of his novel, “Ilustrado.” The Philippine ilustrados or “enlightened ones” of the late 1800s were a collection of well-educated, cosmopolitan, and progressive-minded intellectuals. Chiefly scholarly and reformist in their minds, the European-educated illustrados were nevertheless revolutionary in spirit. With an astute historical observation, Syjuco turns in a fair reading of the ilustrados by way of his story’s protagonist, Crispin Salvador:
“Those young Filipino bodhisattvas had returned home from abroad to dedicate their perfumed bodies, mellifluous rhetoric, Latinate ideas, and tailored educations to the ultimate cause. Revolution. Many dying of bullets, some of inextricable exile, others subsumed and mellowed and then forgotten, more than a few later learning, with surprising facility, to live with enforced
compromise.”
It’s not hard to miss Crispin Salvador in Syjuco’s story in which both the actual author and novelistic character of Miguel Syjuco beat a personal and literary drum for his esteemed counterpart. In the novel, Salvador had previously shot to fame in the contemporary Philippine literary scene as a result of his malcontented talent and unsettling boldness as a writer.
In “Ilustrado’s” prologue, fate strikes quickly as Salvador’s body is discovered by a Chinese fisherman on New York’s Hudson River. Here, Syjuco resorts to framing Salvador’s death in some of the most motley terms he can conjure:
“His body, floating in the Hudson, had been hooked by a Chinese fisherman. His arms, battered, open to a virginal dawn: Christlike, one blog back home reported, sarcastically. Ratty-banded briefs and Ermenegildo Zegna trousers were pulled around his ankles.”
The New York-based fictional Syjuco, also a Filipino-born writer in his own right, seeks the reason behind the death of Salvador, his friend and guide who had been living abroad in the United States. His quest for the truth pulls him back to his birthplace of the Philippines. The aim of returning to the islands is to find an apparently lost manuscript of Salvador’s, one that could provide a breakthrough in the investigation of the writer’s watery American demise.
Like the writings of other Filipino authors of the past, the thought of exile permeates the novel and Syjuco does anything but apply it prosaically to the character of Crispin Salvador. Syjuco uses contrasting words like “toothless” and “heroic” to illustrate the complicated exilic relationship that Salvador shared with the Philippines. In terms of being an honest writer, Salvador makes it clear that “you have to be away from home, and totally alone in life.”
It might be suggested that Salvador ideally wanted to believe that in his expatriate consciousness he could perpetuate a constructive emotional and intercultural dynamic that would circumnavigate back and forth between his sense of Filipinoness and respect for his adopted homeland of America.
But he could not defend this hope for long as existence in America turned out not to be its own justification. Life in America for Salvador was an alienating, postcolonial void where crass consumerism, the sacred cow of the bottom line, and hegemonic power relations adversely affected him.
Salvador returns home to the Philippines to accept a literary award. But he then makes his benefactors uncomfortable because of his characteristically “sudden flaring intensities” which translated into unbecoming pomposity. Indeed, as Syjuco writes “The biggest sin a Pinoy can commit is arrogance.”
Salvador’s perceived arrogance is reflective of the bifurcated sensibility encompassing his being born and raised a Filipino and how at the same time he has absorbed worldly influences and lexicons of high culture. The problem for Salvador however is that in his enlightened if putatively “quixotic” and “messianic” disposition, his sophisticated worldview does not resonate with the common Filipino everyman. If anything, Salvador can be said to be more like a distant and remote intellectual than Rodrigo Duterte for example, in having an uncanny ability to connect deeply with Filipinos.
With Miguel Syjuco the novelistic character, a perceptive reader can discern the near absence of his own coherent “Filipinoness” very keenly. On an adaptation of the theme of the Filipino immigrant experience in the United States and how it affects the emigrant, whatever profound notion of being a Filipino Syjuco harbors lacks structure and solidity. Syjuco’s Filipinoness is ghostly, liminal, ambiguous, and unstable at best. There is not more than a modicum of energy or force behind what little there is in him. Hence, Syjuco cannot truly connect with his roots in the Philippines.
“Ilustrado” is not the easiest novel to read. It’s overall themes are just clear enough to follow without too much effort. But Syjuco’s narrative is riddled with disorienting, centrifugal movements that are not comfortably navigable for the reader.
These spasmodic and irregular shifts and pivots in the story (Syjuco forms a larger mosaic out of these twists and turns by utilizing composed quotes from Crispin Salvador, emails, phone texts, blogs, wisecracks, and an assortment of other mediums) do enrich the history, humanity, and cultural and political psychology that shapes “Ilustrado.” Paradoxically though, they trample on an empirical reader’s hope to fully experience a wonderworld of literature sans undue complexity and laborious comprehension.
ALLEN GABORRO
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