By Nick Joaquin
Presented at the 1996 Magsaysay Awardees’ Lecture Series
Magsaysay Center, Manila
TO ALL OF YOU HERE: PEACE. AND GOD LOVES YOU.
Very grateful am I for the Magsaysay Award given me and I like to think that it honors both my work in journalism and my work in literature. In other words, that it honors both Quijano de Manila (that's me as journalist) and Nick Joaquin (that's me as litterateur).
I say this because many think I am a sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—although they're not at all agreed about which of me is Dr. Jekyll and which is Mr. Hyde. Some say that as creative writer I'm all right but that as journalist I'm strictly potboiler; others opine that'it's the newsman in me who's the true writer because the supposed artist is a fake. Of course, there are also those who believe that Nick Joaquin and Quijano de Manila are both equally hack. And I have this sinking feeling that it may be they who are bull's-eye; the others are just bull.
However, I bring me up as a Jekyll-Hyde split personality because my subject is Journalism versus Literature?—with a question mark—and I think that my own particular case can shed some light on that riddle.
When I first went into journalism, I had already done a bit of verse and fiction and was hailed as so "promising" that my admirers were shocked to learn that I had joined the Philippines Free Press, which was a newsmagazine. They all wailed that journalism would be the death of me as a creative writer. But I needed a good-paying writing job and I didn't have such exalted ideas of me as a "creative writer." If journalism was purely hack writing, as was the belief of the literary snobs of that time (I am speaking of the 1950s and '60s), I had this equally pretentious belief that I could create a journalism of my own, a new journalism as "creative" as any poem or novel. And so I did reportage like the "House on Zapote Street" and "The Boy Who Wanted to Become Society."
By the way, these efforts of mine antedated the "New Journalism" in the United States as my own "magic realism" ("May Day Eve," "The Mass of St. Sylvester," "Dona Jeronima," "Candido's Apocalypse," etc.) antedated the magic realism of the American Latinos.
Anyway, my journalistic writing developed in me an understanding of writing in general. You know, actors say there are no small parts, there are only small performers. So I say there are no hack-writing jobs, they are only hack writers. If you look down on your material, if you despise it, then you'll do a hack job. But journalism trained me never, never to feel superior to whatever I was reporting, and always, always to respect an assignment, whether it was a basketball game, or a political campaign, or a fashion show, or a murder case, or a movie-star interview. As J. D. Salinger admonished (but this ain't a verbatim quote) I was always shining for the fat housewife in the third row. I remember this young poet scandalized by this article I did on Nora Aunor. Wrote this young poet: "Nick Joaquin is writing about Nora Aunor! Nick Joaquin has become a bakya writer!" But that article lives as one of the best essays on Miss Aunor because she was not bakya to me and I did not go bakya on her.
So that was the first vital thing I learned in journalism: that every report must be done as if you were reporting on the parting of the Red Sea, or the Battle of Pinaglabanan, or the splitting of the atom. Good reportage is telling it as it is but at the same time telling it knew, telling it surprising, telling it significant. The good reporter should become so absorbed in the story that he becomes invisible in it and the story seems to be telling itself. That is the basis of an old, old maxim: Trust the tale, not the teller. I can claim in the Quijano de Manila reportage, you don't see Quijano de Manila at all. You see only the actual characters involved in the event that's being reported. So, as you read, that event is not just something being related to you but something happening right before your eyes.
This was the technique I learned in journalism that I brought over into literature when I began doing oral history and oral biography. I may have been the first Filipino reporter to use the tape recorder extensively. And I certainly am the first Filipino writer to use the tape recorder for literary purposes—if you are willing to grant that my essays in oral history and oral biography are literature.
I have pioneered in these two latter forms: oral history (for example: The Quartet of the Tiger Moon) and oral biography (for example: Doy Laurel in Profile) but, like all new inventions, these "novels" of mine have not been fully understood yet, let alone appreciated. One lady who figured in an oral biography of mine remarked that she had expected in it more "Nick Joaquin and his insights." But that precisely is what I try to avoid: a predominance of the Nick Joaquin presence. If I am writing about, say, Doy Laurel, then I want that book to be a portrait of Doy Laurel, I do not want that book to be a portrait of Nick Joaquin as biographer.
Now that is one illustration of how journalism influenced my literary work—and influenced it for the better. The so-called creative writer tends to be too subjective, too obsessed with him. That's why I think every aspiring young writer should spend some years as a news reporter, so he will be obliged to step out of his own private world and to experience the world outside. This will not only train him to be observant and objective, it may also save him from eccentricity, the danger that faces every creative writer. The newsman has to report who, what, when, where, why, and how as clearly as possible so that even people on the run can read him.
The newsman cannot afford to be eccentric.
Eccentricity is such a temptation to the creative writer because he tends to be self-indulgent. In the Philippines especially, where so few read him, he may be tempted to indulge in his fancies and foibles. He feels under no obligation to communicate clearly because he knows that his readers are mostly his own fellow writers and that he can play games with them.
But what journalism demands is responsible writing. The reporter is duty-bound to communicate—and to communicate as sensibly as possible. He must not play games with the reading public: communication is a serious business. But too many creative writers believe that, if communication is the business of journalism, literature is different, because the business of literature is expression—or, to be more specific, self-expression. And here the responsibility is only to oneself.
That egotism is the kind of sickness that tenure in journalism can very effectively cure.
On the other hand, the journalist is also sick who believes that he does not have to write well to produce good reportage, which actually thinks a graceful style is out of place in journalism. But if the responsibility of the writer is to communicate as clearly and sensibly as possible, then he must have as good a command of expression as any creative writer. A newsman who is careless with his grammar is being as irresponsible as a newsman who is careless with his facts. And the speed and enterprise with which he got the scoop cannot justify a reporter who cannot tell a news story coherently.
If the creative writer needs more training in responsible communication, the news writer needs more training in fine expression, even self-expression—especially today in the Philippines, when the news writers cannot even get the gender of their pronouns right. A breakdown in language means a breakdown in communication. Unless our news organs improve the quality of their expression, we are headed for cultural babel. The "New Illiteracy" predicted by Marshall McLuhan may get speeded up when the reading public, in sheer disgust and despair, give up on the newspapers and turn exclusively to the electronic media.
Myself, I don't believe that the death of reading will occur within my lifetime. I think that newspapers and books will continue to be prevalent in the 21st century, in the 2000s of Anno Domini. (I'm not saying I am expecting to be still prevalent then myself!) Nor do I think that the current ungrammatical period of the Philippine press signifies merely the decay of English in this country and not the decay of communication and expression in general.
It's the local press that shows itself irresponsible when it allows on its pages reporters who do now know how to report in correct language, copyeditors and proofreaders who do not know how to spot the errors in such reports, and editors who do not know how to edit.
As for the supposed decay of English in the Philippines, how is that possible at a time when the younger generation of Filipino writers in English is gaining recognition abroad, and Philippine English itself is being accepted in the English-speaking world as a legitimate voice in the chorus of international Englishes? And being accepted, what's more and at last, right here in the Philippines as a valid Filipino language.
I have little doubt that "Philippines 2000" will still is in English during the 21st century. And I have no doubt at all that by then the alleged emulation between journalism and literature will have been resolved. In fact, I can almost hear the referee bawling out the decision: "And the winner is ... journalism!"
It doesn't take a magus to discern that literature is taking a back seat to journalism. Poetry, drama, fiction—all these that we mean when we say literature—are obviously undergoing a change in life, a rite of passage. I don't mean they are on the decline. What I feel is that they are being reviewed, reassessed, reclassified. And I fear that literature has been taken down a few ranks and ratings. If it used to occupy the room at the top, it no longer does.
The demotion can be explained by a radical change in the human intellect. Until the 17th century the prime wheel in that intellect was what we call imagination. But with the 17th century came what T. S. Eliot called "dissociation of sensibility."
I will give this a graphic interpretation by picturing the mind of man as a bookstore. If a modern bookstore, it will have some shelves labeled "Fiction" and other shelves labeled "Non-Fiction." But if an ancient bookstore, it would have no such division: all the shelves would simply be labelled -"Literature," and side by side on them would be Plato and Cervantes, the Arabian Nights and the Letters of Saint Paul, the Mathematics of Euclid and the Travels of Marco Polo. In other words, that ancient bookstore represents the natural coexistence of poetry and science in the human mind until the so-called dissociation of sensibility, represented by the division of Literature into Fiction and Non-Fiction. Since then, the split has so worsened that the impending human mind will have to be represented by a bookstore in which a single solitary shelf is labeled "Fiction," and a thousand other shelves are labeled "Non-Fiction."
In other words, the mind of man is no longer synonymous with imagination. The chief wheels now in that intellect is what we call information. We do not want fancies we want facts. And to modern eyes, literature is mere fancy but journalism is brutal fact. And we want our facts as brutal as possible. We want straight news we want information.
This is abundantly demonstrated by the sex books of Kinsey and company and by the sex columnists in the dailies who discuss virtually everything (from penis dimensions to vaginal smells). The popularity of the so-called how-to books is another indication, as is the increasing number of desk—or even pocket—encyclopedias. And we know that the intelligentsia would prefer to read a critique of Jose Garcia Villa rather than read Garcia Villa himself.
But the popular press provides the best proof of this change in sensibility. We of the prewar generation were brought up on American magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, the Cosmopolitan, The New Yorker, and the various female home journals. In prewar days, each issue of these magazines carried at least four or five short stories, a couple of poems, and two serialized novels. So, the bulk of the contents of these magazines were formed by fiction, while the least important part was formed by the non-fiction, consisting of, at most, two articles.
Today the reverse is true. The bulk of the contents of these magazines is now formed by its reportage, its factual articles. Journalism has taken over literature has almost disappeared. No more poetry or fiction: the popular press is now exclusively devoted to non-fiction. Before the war, The New Yorker was famous for its cartoons, its poetry, and its short stories. Today The New Yorker is celebrated for its reportage, its profiles, its news-interpretive essays. It now limits itself to a single short story per issue, and the poetry it publishes might as well be prose.
This trend is even more marked in the Philippines, where the Sunday supplements of the newspapers have completely eliminated fiction and poetry, and "literature" survives only in the few weeklies still publishing verse and short stories.
According to what I hear, this is a worldwide trend. In every country, in every culture, the popular preference is for journalism, not literature. If people are still reading, they read, not for the magic of imagination, but for the profits of information. And the exceptions that prove this rule are science fiction and the Mills and Boon type of romances. Science fiction is not really a work of imagination: it is practically a news report on technology in progress. Nor is the Mills and Boon type of pop romance a department of fiction: it's actually a continuation of the old magazines called True Confessions or Real Romances, and is an extension of the newspaper columns offering advice to the lovelorn where distressed readers expose their love lives or describe their sex problems.
The sacrament of penance has been transferred to newsprint, and Dr. Kinsey and Mrs. Holmes today represent the true priesthood of. The old religion of Church and Scripture has been superseded by the new religion of news coverage and TV prime time.
The world 2000 will be the beat of journalism, the territory of non-fiction.
If I wasn't so honest (hey, my name is Candido!) I would claim that I spotted this trend and it's why I shifted from fiction to non-fiction. But actually in this racket you have to play it by ear—and most of the time you're just borne along by the current of events.
When I did my first non-fiction book I was borne along by the mighty current called Ninoy Aquino. This was in 1971 and Ninoy's purpose was frankly to have usable propaganda for his presidential campaign.
But he said to me: "Nick, you have always wanted to have your say on Philippine history. Well, here's your chance. This need not be just a book about Ninoy Aquino. What I want," explained Ninoy, "is a book of the Aquinos of Tarlac—and the history of the Aquinos embraces the Revolution; the American advent; the First, Second, and Third Republics; the Pacific War and its aftermath; and the Roxas, Quirino, Magsaysay, Macapagal, and Marcos eras. In other words, the book can be a history of the Philippines from the dawn of ilustrado activism in the 1870s to the dawn of youth activism in the 1970s."
That's how Ninoy Aquino described what he wanted from me and right away I saw the form of the book I would write, which I would subtitle: "A Study of History as Three Generations," because it's about Ninoy, his father, and grandfather.
But I did not write the book as history in the usual sense of the word. I was no scholar and I certainly did not want a scholarly treatise. I was a newsman and I wanted a journalistic account of those three Aquino generations. So I went about it in my usual newsmanly way: tape recorder and legwork. I interviewed as many people as I could who had the information I needed. So what I produced was a work of reportage.
But today I don't think of that book, The Aquinos of Tarlac, as reportage or journalism or history or biography. I simply think of it as literature, in the same way (but of course not in the same degree) that Gibbons and Spengler are today simply literature. When Virginia Woolf was asked in the 1930s about the state of the English novel, she replied that the English novel was being re-created by five men: James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, and D. H. Lawrence. Now of these five, only three are novelists. One, T. S. Eliot, was a poet and another, Lytton Strachey, was a biographer-historian. But in Virginia Woolf s mind, all good writing is literature and there are no barriers between fiction and non-fiction.
This is becoming the general attitude today. The literary snob's disdaining of journalism is a thing of the past, now that the greatest literary artists are producing reportage. Hemingway, who started out as a news reporter, ended up as foreign correspondent, and four of his books are reportage: Death in the Afternoon, The Green Hills of Africa, The Dangerous Summer, and A Moveable Feast. Norman Mailer has done reports on prize fights and election campaigns, while Truman Capote wrote what he called "a non-fiction novel"—In Cold Blood—that may outlive his actual fiction. Edmund Wilson was respected as a critic but may be remembered more as reporter of prewar culture and postwar politics. Following his lead, the top American writers of today, from Gore Vidal to John Updike, have been recorders of the passing scene, covering the global village as cultural and political journalists. In a reversal of the trend, we have fiction masquerading as reportage: I am referring, of course, to E. L. Doctorow and novels of his like Ragtime.
What all this adds up to is a transfiguration of the image of journalism. The classic image of it survives in a play like The Front Page, where every reporter is a wisecracking tough guy and every editor would sell his old mother for a scoop. The image today is not so romantic. Journalism has grown up; no more of the old braggadocio. Its fights are more serious now that it is seriously a faith, a freedom, a force. And it is therefore attracting the serious intellectual.
In the old days, a creative writer went into academe to earn his daily bread. Today he goes into journalism—and no more does he have to apologize for doing so. The Philippine press has found room for the brightest talents of Philippine literature, from Gregorio Brillantes to Wilfredo Nolledo to Jose Lacaba to Alfredo Yuson. That's a big enough indication that the Philippine press has deepened and widened and matured, if it can accommodate such wild, wild geniuses!
So, the question of Journalism versus Literature? No longer has to be asked. The old feud is over and the two rivals are now more or less on even terms. If journalism has been upgraded to literature, literature is being reinvented as a species of reportage. In the some five decades I have been in journalism, those are the developments that I find most moving—because my own writing career has moved in the same direction: from fiction to reportage, and from reportage to non-fiction as literature.
Even the Magsaysay Award just given me is a coming full circle. After some five decades of reporting news, I find myself, in a modest way, making news.
During this time of award-winning, the real newsmakers were Sarah Balabagan and Onyok Velasco and I have to admit I felt proud that even if only for a moment I was almost right up there with Onyok and Sarah. Not to mention Mari Mar. Sikat, ha! Not that I coveted the spotlight; I do not. And this ain't modesty. I'm just being practical. You see, I ride bus and jeepney, I eat at turo turo, I drink at kanto beer joints. And you can't do that if you have a spotlight trained on you, making your face recognizable even by strangers.
However, the good thing about the celebrity spotlight is that it is so fickle it never stays long. The longest it stays on any one person is fifteen minutes, or so the saying goes. And I know that even as I stand here to be applauded, that spotlight is already moving on, moving away, is already going ... going... gone!
So now I have had my fifteen minutes of celebrity.
And what a relief it is over.
Goodbye! Goodbye!
(And good riddance.)
Thank you. I have spoken.
