Remaindered Life of Citizen-Man, Medium of Democracy

東 南 アジア 研 究
49 巻 3 号
Mojares argues, was the renewal of known ideas and sentiments rather than the discovery of
new ones, the formal ideal for the short story, as articulated by Edgar Allan Poe and assiduously
pursued by these writers is “an organic structure that creates a single unified impression or
effect,” which required an efficiency or regulated economy of expression [Mojares 1985: 78]. 15)
We might say that early Philippine writing in English, particularly the short story,
exemplifies a striving towards the self-evidence of the modern, technical image and a
transparency of the mediation of writing, towards the invisibility of the formal device. Charges
of didacticism, sentimentality, verbosity and artifice, abounding in literary criticism up to the
present moment, might on this view be seen as disciplining measures (or what Flusser refers to
as human “feedback” for the system) against the exhibition of the instrumentality of the word
and the extrinsic sources of value of literature, which this instrumentality betrays. Criticism of
these qualities of flowery, didactic, sentimental expression deemed backward (and characteristic
of outmoded writing as well as dramatic and musical arts of the Spanish era) place emphasis,
in contrast, on “natural” expressions that do not betray their rhetorical status or for that matter
the status of language and literature as media. And criticism of unrestrained, outbursts of
emotion demonstrate the effort to ward off a violence that was everywhere the condition of the
sentimental project of liberal humanization that this literature was tasked with carrying out. 16)
Status of the Image
What is upheld in the new literary striving is a new model of perception and experience, a new
order of sensibility evident in the naturalist photographic depictions of the visible, physical
surfaces of characters and their material surroundings. Such an order is marked by the
production of representational objects as bearing a primarily symbolic (rather than, say,
allegorical) significance (eg. dead stars, the small key), and the relegation and efficient
containment of their potentially excessive, sensuous materiality to the symbolic work of
synechdoche or the creation of, as Paul de Man puts it, “the sensorial equivalence of a more
general, ideal meaning” [de Man 1983: 190]. No longer reference to a metaphysical realm of
significance to which representational objects correspond; instead an identity between matter
and meaning, a continuity between material perception and symbolic imagination, symbol as
part of the totality that it represents.
We have to view this transformed status of the representational object with respect to the
changing character of the image in the context of the mass production and explosion of colonial
15) Lucilla Hosillos argues, “Poeʼs method of achieving a single intended effect through organic unity lies
deep in the Filipino short story. This basic single influence in the formative period of the Filipino
short story in English has endured even in the Filipino short story in the vernaculars” [Hosillos 1984:
94].
16) Leonard Casper praised Manuel Arguilla for the subtlety and restraint shown in his “oppressed
labor” stories: “Except for brief outbreaks of violence, even these are noteworthy for their welling
but not yet overflowing emotion, their silent threat” [Casper 1966: 40].
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