Nadal, Paul (Princeton) - Importation of New Criticism Into The Philippines and The Search For The Great Filipino Novel

This is a manuscript draft. Please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission.
Paul Nadal
Princeton University
CHAPTER TWO
————————————
The Importation of New Criticism into the Philippines

and the Search for the Great Filipino Novel, 1946–1962
(Edilberto K. Tiempo, N. V. M. Gonzalez, Nick Joaquin)
In the previous chapter, I showed how the advent of realism in the Filipino Novel in
English before 1946 coincided with the growing view of the Filipino living overseas as
human capital and Philippine state efforts to repatriate such a capital for cultural and
economic ends; the problem of converting one to the other, I contended, not only constituted
the subject matter but also shaped the structure of Juan C. Laya’s His Native Soil (1941),
according to a formal relation of incompatibility against which the author adapted the
bildungsroman to develop a style of critical realism that could capture commonwealth
transition. This chapter aims to show how, after 1946, in the first decade of independence, the
Philippine anglophone novel developed in response to two new and seemingly opposing
demands: on one side, the Filipino English writer had to produce socially useful, edifying
representations of Philippine reality and history that could satisfy the growing nationalist need
for the “Great Filipino Novel”; on the other, the writer had to measure up to the aesthetic
standards and formal requirements of New Criticism, which—as a result of the systematic
recruitment of Filipinos to creative writing programs in the United States that began in 1946
and continued into the Cold War 1950s—had entered the Philippine literary milieu and
inclined a whole generation of writers to espouse a theory of literary excellence based on the
intrinsic qualities (rather than the sociological significance or extra-literary function) of the
work.
This tension between the desire for the Great Filipino Novel and the New Critical
preoccupation with literary form might at first glance seem to be another name for the
standard old realism-modernism opposition, given the difference of emphasis such a tension
might have implied for the Filipino writer’s attention: between the content of the work
rendered in a vernacular mode of social realism, on the one hand, and the form of the work
evaluated according to technical principles of writerly craft that were said to constitute the
distinction of a metropolitan Anglo-European literary modernism, on the other. This set of
normative values, conflicting as they might seem to the Filipino writer, did not, finally,
amount to an a priori incompatibility, a dead end, or “category mistake,”1 but to a productive
contradiction. I will argue that rather than seeing it as a form of “neocolonial tutelage”2 that
resulted in “the miseducation of the Filipino—a canonical interpretation of the legacy of New

1
J. Neil C. Garcia, “Translation and the Problem of Realism in Philippine Literature in English,” Kritika
Kultura 23 (2014): 99–127, 101. Garcia writes: “The century-old history of Philippine anglophone
literature has supposedly passed through its own ‘realism,’ as exemplified by the works of celebrated
writers like Manuel Arguilla, Bienvenido Santos, N.V.M. Gonzalez, Kerima Polotan Tuvera, among others.
And yet, we need to realize that realism in this case is a ‘category mistake,’ because realism as a critical
term presupposes monocultural verisimilitude in a first language” (101).
2
E. San Juan Jr., The Philippine Temptation: Dialectics of Philippine-U.S. Literary Relations
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 41.
1
This is a manuscript draft. Please do not cite or circulate without author’s permission. Paul Nadal
Criticism in the Philippines3—the importation of New Criticism into the Philippines was
instrumental in introducing a critical self-reflexivity in Philippine novel writing. It is a
reflexive structure whose enduring influence on Philippine literature, I will argue, lay in
having disposed anglophone writers to reorient formalist questions concerning “organic
unity” and “aesthetic autonomy” toward a vision of the novel as the social form of national
consciousness. In this respect, Filipino writers pursued their American training in the
formalist protocols of New Criticism to ends different than their original purposes, thereby
managing to establish the social relevance of foreign-mediated English-language texts in
nationalist discourse even as writers highlighted the contradictoriness and limits of such a
project. From the point of the Philippine state, the sending of emerging writers abroad was a
means to “import the tools” of the US as a “bulwark against complete external domination”
(Kramer 2009: 783).
The three major novelists of the postwar period, Edilberto K. Tiempo (1913–96), N. V.
M. Gonzalez (1915–99), and Nick Joaquin (1917–2004), emerged at a time when nation-
building efforts in the context of war rehabilitation, economic recovery, and industrialization
catalyzed its own literary nationalism: the search for the “Great Filipino Novel.” Tiempo,
Gonzalez, and Joaquin were seen as especially poised to write the Great Filipino Novel in no
small part because of the educational resources and social distinction, or what Pierre Bourdieu
termed “cultural capital,”4 provided by an American system of patronage: all three received
prestigious Rockefeller Foundation fellowships, which brought Tiempo to study creative
writing at the University of Iowa under Paul Engle, Gonzalez to Stanford University under
Wallace Stegner, and Joaquin to travel to Spain and the United States, wherein he completed
the expansion of one of his short stories into his first novel. By tracing the outlines of this
transpacific institutional network of patronage and overseas creative writing training, what I
will describe as a “new global educational exchange,” this chapter aims to establish the period
from 1946 to 1962 as the one in which the Filipino English writer can be grasped as emerging
within a “single but radically uneven”5 world-literary system. It is a world-literary system that
connected Manila to Stanford, Iowa City to Silliman, and enmeshed writers from the
postcolonial periphery in the uses of the humanities for the national-security ends of US Cold
War diplomacy. Filipino interventions into this Cold War world-literary system were not
uniform, as Tiempo, Gonzalez, and Joaquin would each develop their characteristic styles and
distinct approaches to literature. Whereas Tiempo’s literary criticism provided the critical
framework for thinking about the relation of literary form with national form in this period,
Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers (1959) and Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels
(1961), I argue, represent two contrasting, though complementary, prose forms that signify an
important literary-historical shift in the Filipino novel in English—the distinct styles

3
Jose Duke S. Bagulaya, Writing Literary History: Mode of Economic Production and Twentieth Century
Waray Poetry (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2006), 101. Bagulaya here alludes to
Renato Constantino’s famous polemic, “The Mis-Education of the Filipino,” The Weekly Graphic, June 8,
1966.
4
See Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of
Education, edited by J. Richardson (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986 [1983]), 241–258; and Pierre
Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1992).
5
Sharae Deckard et al., Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 49.
2
addressing differently the same question: How does one reconcile New Criticism with the
writing of the Great Filipino Novel?
Part One: Around 1958
The impact of New Criticism on Filipino writers and the search for the Great Filipino Novel
animated the now largely forgotten 1958 National Writers’ Conference, which was held in
Baguio City, Philippines, on December 26–29. The Baguio City Conference gathered
6
together over 170 Filipino writers, including Edilberto K. Tiempo and N. V. M. Gonzalez
(though not Nick Joaquin, who was abroad), as well as prominent local publishers, educators,
and ambassadors from the United States, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Funded by the 7
Congress for Cultural Freedom, UNESCO, and the Philippine Center of International PEN,
and patterned after the 1954 Rangoon Conference in Burma, the state-sponsored Baguio City
Conference can be seen symbolically as part of an emergent anti-colonial and anti-communist
Third Worldism in Bandung-era Southeast Asia. Such was the politicized context that
8
informed the Baguio City Conference’s examination of the role of the Filipino writer in
national growth—its explicit theme. Revisiting this conference thus helps us to investigate the
“importation” of New Criticism into the Philippines at a moment of heightened anti-colonial
nationalism; of the persistence of the belief in the causal power of literature to transform

6
The Baguio City Conference’s papers and program notes are collected in the 1959 first quarter issue of
Comment, a now defunct journal on Philippine affairs, which published them under the title, “Report on
The National Writers Conference, Baguio, December 26-29, 1958,” in F. Sionil José et al., eds., Comment:
A Quarterly Devoted to Philippine Affairs 8 (1959). The special issue contains reprints of conference
papers, photographs, and notes of conference proceedings.
7
Other notable writers and critics who attended the Baguio City Conference included Francisco Arcellana,
Miguel A. Bernad, Gregorio Brillantes, Amador Daguio, Sinai Hamada, F. Sionil José, Fred Mangahas,
Severino Montano, Alejandro R. Roces, E. San Juan Jr., J.C. Tuvera, Kerima Polotan Tuvera, and
Leopoldo Yabes.
8
On the anti-Communist (and not just anti-Western) Third Worldism in Asia, see Lisandro E. Claudio,
“The Anti-Communist Third World: Carlos Romulo and the Other Bandung,” Southeast Asian Studies, 4
(2015), 125–156. In contrast to contemporary historiography that sees Third Worldism simply as an
opposition to Western imperialism, Claudio’s argument foregrounds what he calls “the other Bandung”—a
Third Worldist opposition to Soviet Communism, specifically Leninist Boleshevism, which, significantly,
unlike the McCarthyism of the United States, was a movement that began from the political Left.
According to Claudio, Carlos P. Romulo—the Philippines’ most prominent diplomat—embodied the
“vision for a Third World that served as a dual negation of both the First and Second Worlds,” in which the
opposition to totalitarian communism “was not so much pro-Western apologia but a properly Asianist and
postcolonial position” (142, 145, my emphasis). While the Baguio City Conference program does not
formally declare the event’s explicit affiliation with, or direct endorsement of, Bandung Third Worldism, it
does include a citation from F. Sionil José that the Philippine Center of International PEN “unanimously
agreed” to seek financial assistance from the Asia Foundation, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and
UNESCO. José also remarked that “the conference [had] be[en] patterned after the Rangoon conference
sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom”; “We and They,” Comment, 12. On pan-“Asianism” in
the Philippines, see Resil B. Mojares, “Early ‘Asianism’ in the Philippines,” IDEYA: Journal of the
Humanities 11.1 (2009): 1–8. For a nuanced account of an earlier literary-ideological struggle between US
liberal pluralism and Soviet socialist internationalism, see Steven S. Lee, The Ethnic Avant-Garde:
Minority Cultures and World Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
3
national consciousness; and of the considerable degree to which the Philippine state itself
promoted the literary arts. The 1958 Baguio City Conference helps us to examine the
following questions: Why did the desire for the Great Filipino Novel emerged so forcefully at
this particular time? And how did Filipino writers versed in New Criticism respond to such
calls for the creation of a national literature?
The 1958 Baguio City Conference was galvanized by the belief that political
independence had given a sense that the Filipino had arrived but that Philippine literature—
belatedly coming into its own—was yet to emerge. “Literature can make a great contribution
to the solution of our current problems,” book collector Carlos Fernandez declaimed, “if it
were to address itself to the correction of the present shortcomings in our national character
and to reshaping the mind of our people by placing in it stimulants and compulsions
conducive to a national progress.” Chairman of the Philippine Center of International PEN
9
Alfredo T. Morales underscored this point by conjuring Cold War fears of totalitarianism,
calling on the writers of the nation to summon “new incarnations of divinity to rescue
mankind from the predominance of evil.” When one looks at the papers delivered over the
10
course of the four-day conference, their titles alone almost amount to a call to action: “What
to Encourage in the Arts and Letters”; “The Challenge of National Growth to the Filipino
Writer”; “Writers and Our Educational System”; “The Special Role of Filipino Writers in the
Nation’s Growth.” Some of these papers came from non-writers who affirmed the social
relevance of literature by defining the writer’s function in overtly prescriptive (and romantic)
terms: “to influence the imaginative and emotional life of our people” ; “to reveal the truth
11
and condition of the Filipino mind and heart” ; “to assist in the development of a new culture
12
in the Philippines.” 13
President Carlos P. Garcia, whose attendance at the conference doubtless endowed the
event with a sense of national historical importance, added to these exhortations, vivifying the
urgency of the situation by reminding his audience of the historical novelty in which the
Filipino writer now wrote:
We have been enjoying our independence for more than twelve years. But the
fight is not over, for while we have won our political freedom, yet we can hardly
say that we are now economically free. Therefore, we must now bend our efforts
toward this new objective of full economic freedom without which political
freedom would be empty. And so just as our writers in the past have used their
energy and talents in the effort to secure our political independence I now charge
our present-day writers to apply their energies to the new problem before our
people, that of securing our economic security, stability and independence.14
Underlining the fact that twelve years of independence had not yet brought about genuine

9
Carlos Fernandez, “The Patronage of Creative Writing,” Comment, 79.
10
Alfredo T. Morales, “Opening Remarks,” Comment, 17.
11
Alfredo T. Gonzalez, “The Special Role of the Filipino Writers in the Nation’s Growth,” Comment, 87.
12
Morales, “Opening Remarks,” 17.
13
Carlos Fernandez, “The Patronage of Creative Writing,” Comment, 79.
14
Carlos P. Garcia, “The Filipino Writer and National Growth,” Comment, 25, emphasis added.
4
economic freedom for the country, Garcia argued that writers played a special role in
addressing this discrepancy. In calling upon writers to ensure “our economic security, stability
and independence,” Garcia elevated the literary arts to the order of national policy. Although
he did not explicitly refer to it by name, the president, in his direct appeal to writers “to apply
their energies to the new problem before our people,” undoubtedly intended to call to mind
his “Filipino First” campaign, which Garcia had in fact ratified into law just four months
before the Baguio City Conference. As the name implies, Filipino First was a nationalistic
15
economic policy designed to prioritize Philippine industries over their foreign counterparts.
Following the example of other economic nationalisms in the region, from New Delhi, India
to Bandung, Indonesia, which called for “Asian countries to cease being mere suppliers of
raw materials to Western countries,” Garcia’s Filipino First sought to expand and strengthen
16
Philippine manufacturing through import and foreign exchange controls, which were intended
to mitigate the adverse effects of “free trade” relations with the United States. As a form of
state protectionism, then, Garcia’s Filipino First was an integral part of the decade’s industrial
policy that helped propel the Philippines into an import-substituting, rather than an export-
oriented, model of industrialization—the framework of which we shall examine in more detail
later. For now, what is important to note is that if we place President Garcia’s speech in the
context of Filipino First, we can begin to see how his programmatic statement about the active
role the writer should play in national growth, a statement which was itself predicated on the
idea of the restoration of the expatriate writer’s embeddedness in local social realities,
constituted a recapitulation of his administration’s economic arguments in a literary key. At
the Baguio City Conference, Garcia, in other words, was envisioning a work of literature—
national in character, purpose, and effectivity—that would extend the economic nationalism
of Filipino First. In a word, he was envisioning the Great Filipino Novel.
17 18
The two novelists who presented at the Baguio City Conference were Edilberto K.
Tiempo and N. V. M. Gonzalez. How they responded to Garcia’s call for the Great Filipino
19
Novel is especially helpful to examine because both writers were not only “imports” of a
certain cultural capital derived from their educational training in the United States; they were
also arguably the two most established English-language novelists in 1958, having produced
together three of the only seventeen anglophone novels published in book form from 1946 to

15
“Filipino First” was ratified into law on August 28, 1958, under the National Economic Council’s
Resolution No. 204. For historical details on “Filipino First,” see Michael McPhelin, “The ‘Filipino First’
Policy and Economic Growth,” Philippine Studies 8.2 (1960): 271–291.
16
Lisandro E. Claudio, Liberalism and the Postcolony: Thinking the State in 20th-Century Philippines
(Singapore: NUS Press, 2017), 92.
17
For a helpful discussion of the economic nationalism of “Filipino First,” see Yusuke Takagi, Central
Banking as State Building: Policymakers and Their Nationalism in the Philippines, 1933-1964 (Singapore:
NUS Press, 2016), in particular the chapter “The Central Bank and Economic Nationalism” (129–154).
18
One of the earliest formulations of the “Great Filipino Novel” comes from the short-story writer
Francisco Arcellana, in “Towards the Great Novel,” The Philippines Quarterly 1, no. 4 (March 1952).
Arcellana writes: “I think we have been slowly, steadily, and surely moving towards the great Filipino
novel. Why not? We have been at it long enough. Over twenty-five years. A quarter of a century” (36).
19
F. Sionil José and Kerima Polotan attended the conference but did not deliver papers. They were also
part of the younger generation of writers. Born in the mid-1920s, José and Polotan were seven to twelve
years younger than Tiempo, Gonzalez, and Joaquin.
5
1958. Other important figures belonging to Tiempo and Gonzalez’s generation include
20
Manuel Arguilla, Francisco Arcellana, Carlos Bulosan, Ricaredo Demetillo, Emigdio Alvarez
Enriquez, Stevan Javellana, F. Sionil José, Juan C. Laya, S. P. Lopez, Arturo Rotor,
Bienvenido N. Santos, Edith L. Tiempo, Kerima Polotan, and José Garcia Villa. In relation to
the development of the Filipino novel in English, however, they were either working in other
genres (Arguilla [short story], Arcellana [short story], Demetillo [poetry], Lopez [essay],
Santos [short story], Tiempo [poetry], Villa [poetry]), based in the United States (Bulosan,
Santos, and Villa), died (Bulosan and Laya), had only brief literary careers (Enriquez and
Javellana), or will not see their first novels published in book form until the 1960s (Santos,
Tiempo, Polotan). (As we shall see, Nick Joaquin’s entry into the fray, with the publication of
his novel The Woman Who Had Two Navels, in 1961, introduces a critical pivot in the
direction of Philippine postwar writing that had been so influenced by New Criticism.)
At the Baguio City Conference, Tiempo and Gonzalez pushed back against romantic
idealizations of Philippine literature such as those proposed by President Garcia. While
Tiempo and Gonzalez were generally sympathetic to the moment’s nationalism, they
questioned the conference’s premise that Filipino writers ought to contribute so directly to the
nation’s growth, and they did so by rehearsing the New Critical arguments that they learned in
US creative writing workshops. In examining their arguments, how might we understand
Tiempo as the one who introduced the general framework for connecting literary form with
national form, and Gonzalez as an early example of a writer who directly approached
Philippine creative writing within such a framework?
Edilberto K. Tiempo: The Philippines’ New Critic
“When the topic of this afternoon’s discussion reached me,” Tiempo began his conference
paper, “one thing was more than implicit in the topic [“the Filipino Writer and National
Growth”], and that was the assumption that it was the writer’s duty to get himself involved in
the problems of the country.”21 Citing earlier statements made by others about the need for the
writer to produce socially useful literature, Tiempo continued: “The writer’s acceptance of
utilitarianism as a primary consideration amounts to an explicit disbelief in the autonomy of
the writer’s art” (93, my italics). Tiempo maintained that such a view of the “utilitarian

20
By 1958 Tiempo had not only published his Iowa MFA thesis as Watch in the Night (1953) but also
contributed a critical introduction to T. D. Agcaoili, ed. Philippine Writing: An Anthology (Manila:
Archipelago Publishing House, 1953). N. V. M. Gonzalez had published two short story collections, Seven
Hills Away (1947) and Children of the Ash-Covered Loam (1951), two novels The Winds of April (1941)
and A Season of Grace (1956 [1954]), and was then working on finishing The Bamboo Dancers (1959).
Notable works serialized in magazines before 1958 include F. Sionil José’s “The Chief Mourner” and “The
Balete Tree” (both serialized in the Weekly Women’s Magazine, October 23 to December 25, 1953 and
March 4 to July 6, 1956, respectively), and Edith L. Tiempo’s “A Blade of Fern” (serialized in This Week
Magazine, February 5 to March 4, 1956, and published in book form in 1978). See the bibliography
included in Abdul bin Nabi Baksh Majid, “The Filipino Novel in English: A Critical History,” Philippine
Social Sciences and Humanities Review 35.1–2 (1970): 3–193.
21
Edilberto K. Tiempo, “The Challenge of National Growth to the Filipino Writer,” edited by F. Sionil
José et al. Comment: A Quarterly Devoted to Philippine Affairs 8 (1959), 91. Further page references will
be indicated in the main text.
6
function of literature” not only denies the writer’s autonomy, but also wrongly assumes that
the writer, in matters of national development, shared “equal responsibility . . . with the
businessman, the labor leader, [and] the politician” (92). Here Tiempo directly took a page out
of René Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature (1949)—the textbook he had read
with Paul Engle at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, in which Wellek and Warren spoke of
“utilitarians and moralists” as well as “statesmen and philosophers” usurping “the question
concerning the function of literature.”22 Not that Tiempo categorically objected to the uses of
literature for extra-literary ends or that he rejected the idea of literature’s social relevance. His
first novel, Watch in the Night (1953), about the Japanese occupation in the Philippines, drew
many of its scenes from his nonfiction work as officer-historian for the United States Army
Forces in the Far East, They Called Us Outlaws, a document whose testimonial evidence was
used after the war in the trial of Japanese war criminals.23 As Tiempo asserted in his Baguio
City conference paper (note the conditional):
If a literary piece must contain propaganda . . . then the propagandistic content of

the work must possess an internal relationship with the other artistic elements of
the work; the writer’s effort must follow the concept of necessity . . . it must have
intrinsic rather than extrinsic conviction. (92, emphasis added)
Thus, before Theodor Adorno theorized the relation of aesthetic autonomy to politics in terms
of art’s “double character” as both autonomous and social in Aesthetic Theory (1970),24
Tiempo in his own way was trying to reconcile literature with social reality. More specifically,
Tiempo was attempting to conceptually connect the New Critical insistence on the “intrinsic”
organization of the work with the “extrinsic” demand for a literature with national
significance.
Historically speaking, Tiempo’s endeavor to formalize Philippine creative writing in
terms of “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” demands, as well as his attempt to safeguard the writer’s
autonomy from the utilitarian viewpoint, follow as a critical response to two contemporaneous
developments: first, state-sanctioned uses of Philippine literature as pedagogy for national
consciousness; second, the local practice of literary criticism as moral criticism. Two years
before the Baguio City conference, José Rizal’s novels became compulsory reading by the
state, under the Rizal Bill of 1956, which represents, as Caroline S. Hau observes, “the state’s
effort to use literature to foster national consciousness among the Filipino people and make
‘good’ citizens of the Filipino youth.”25 That literature became expressly linked to the social

22
René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956
[1949]), 37.
23
Watch in the Night was reprinted for US publication in 1957 by Avon Books under a new title, “Cry
Slaughter.” Tiempo’s war novel, alongside Stevan Javellana’s Without Seeing the Dawn (1947), were
among the Philippine novels printed in the United States. Tiempo’s and Javellana’s novels satisfied the
contemporary demand in the US for World War II narratives. See Edilberto K. Tiempo, Watch in the Night
(Manila: Archipelago Publishing House, 1953); Edilberto K. Tiempo, Cry Slaughter (New York: Avon,
1957); and Stevan Javellana, Without Seeing the Dawn (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1947).
24
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 1997 [1970]), 7.
25
Caroline S. Hau, Necessary Fictions: Philippine Literature and the Nation, 1946–1980 (Quezon City:
Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000), 1.
7
cultivation of morally sound citizens contributed to the tendency of Philippine literary

criticism toward moral criticism, that is, the evaluation of literature based on a work’s
capacity for moral edification and its reflection of the author’s imitable character. Miguel A.
Bernad—Jesuit priest and then editor-in-chief of Philippine Studies, whose taste-making
reviews, like those of A. V. H. Hartendorp before him, were a formidable influence in
Philippine literary culture—represents the moral criticism dominant at this time. Father
Bernad did not shy away from making critical generalizations, and his presence at the Baguio
City Conference surely stirred conversations. Only a year before, he had published a
controversial essay that summed up his take on the Philippine literary scene in its title:
“Philippine Literature: Perpetually Inchoate” (1957).26 In that essay, Bernad argued that
Philippine literature was underdeveloped because it had yet fully to “draw vitality from the
soil, elegance from civilized art, and universality from Christendom.”27 When Bernad
reviewed Tiempo’s first novel, Watch in the Night (1953), he cited the novel’s unflattering
depiction of priests as the source of its artistic weakness: “The book departs from historical
truth in the picture presented of Filipino religious life.” Father Bernad continued: “Mr.
Tiempo, one feels sure, is a gentleman who would not deliberately distort facts to make
Catholics ridiculous, and very probably he feels that all the incidents recounted here about
Catholics are true.”28
If we situate Tiempo within his critical milieu, we can see how his adaptation of New
Criticism was intended to introduce an alternative both to Bernad’s moral criticism and to
state uses of Philippine literature. Against moral criticism, Tiempo advocated for a more
sophisticated, form-oriented practice of interpretation, what we would today recognize as
“close reading,”29 in order to move past the reading of literature for purely moral purposes.
Against state uses of literature as pedagogical instruments, Tiempo’s argument concerning
aesthetic autonomy was meant to thwart the total instrumentalization of the writer by
nationalistic propaganda. Significantly, Tiempo did not altogether bracket the question of
literature’s social relevance, as though he were conceding to the reality (and heteronomous
local market pressures) that said: What matters most and what will solicit the interest of
publishers and readers alike are works of literature that bear immediate social and national
significance, “great” Filipino novels not unlike Rizal’s. Indeed, it is important to recall that as
the 1956 Rizal Bill transformed college classrooms into training grounds for the production of
“good” Filipino citizens, the textbook anthology would emerge in the 1950s as the principal

26
Miguel A. Bernad, “Philippine Literature: Perpetually Inchoate,” in Pathways to Philippine Literature in
English, edited by A.G. Roseburg (Quezon City: Alemar-Phoenix Publishing House, 1966 [1957]), 190–
194.
27
Ibid., 194.
28
Miguel A. Bernad, “Review of Watch in the Night,” Philippine Studies 2.1 (1954), 64.
29
For a historical discussion of close reading, in particular its origins in the discipline of psychological
behaviorism, see Joshua Gang, “Behaviorism and the Beginnings of Close Reading,” ELH 78.1 (2011). On
how New Critical formalism distinguished itself from prior exegetical methods of interpretation, see Vicent
B. Leitch, American Literary Criticism since the 1930s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
“[R]eading for the New Critics,” Leitch writes, “involved technical rhetorical explication and literary
evaluation based on a distinctive set of preexisting protocols—with poetic complexity assuming a primacy
place in the hierarchy of both literary and exegetical values” (26).
8
means for disseminating Philippine literature in English.30 As an example of the way in which
practical contexts invariably shape the structuring conditions for the actualization of ideas,
Tiempo’s endeavor to introduce New Critical “close reading” at this particular time and place
in Philippine literary history was one that did not abstract texts away from social reality;
rather, it was an early disciplinary attempt on the part of a Filipino writer to begin thinking
literary form’s relation to social reality.31
Tiempo’s problem, then, was how to build a framework that could enable writers to
produce socially useful works without reducing their communicability to the transmission of
data, what the New Critics termed the “heresy of paraphrase”32 or what Adorno more simply
called “crude propaganda.”33 At the conference, Tiempo declared: “I categorically affirm that
our Philippine writers concern themselves with the local—the national—scene, but doing so is
only the initial step in the writer’s creative effort . . . What he does with his material is his
most challenging, his most important task” (92–93). Here we see how Tiempo discovered a
solution to the problem of overcoming the apparent contradictoriness between the autonomy
of the literary work and its social relevance by relating both matters to the question of the
work’s form, a word which Tiempo understood as what the writer “does” with his or her
material, the end product of the specific manner with which the writer has arranged the
elements of the story, which is to say, his or her craft. Tiempo suggested that the more the
writer concerned himself with social and nationalistic issues, the more important it was to
attend to technical matters of craft. Echoing Aristotle’s argument that “poetry” is more
universal than “history” because the poet arranges and gleans from particular historical events
their universal significance,34 Tiempo wrote: “The writer’s chief concern is that of interpreter,
of generalizer. Literature commonly follows in the wake of life and events, and the writer’s
task is to give them synthesis, to give them order and coherence” (95). Thus, for Tiempo,
autonomy and social relevance no longer were incompatible terms when they are related to an
idea of form as a kind of work or doing or, better yet, making (poeisis). In Tiempo’s critical
writings, this tended, however, to amount to a rather dogmatic mode of criticism, one which I

30
See, for example, Jose Villa Panganiban and Consuelo T. Panganiban, eds., The Literature of the
Philippines (Manila: Alip & Sons, 1950); T. D. Agcaoili, ed., Philippine Writing: An Anthology (Manila:
Archipelago Publishing House, 1953); and Leopoldo Y. Yabes, ed., Philippine Literature in English: 1898-
1957 (Quezon City: University of the Philippines, 1958).
31
Thus, Tiempo, three years after the Baguio City Conference, argued that “[w]hatever else he does, the
Philippine novelist, or any novelist, must hold artistry as his chief business. And when we say artistry, we
only mean that whatever material for propaganda or reform happens to be used in the work, the patiently
utilitarian material must be subsumed into the artistry of that work”; Edilberto K. Tiempo, “The Philippine
Novel from a Novelist’s Point of View,” Comment 16 (1962): 37–43, 39.
32
In “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” the last chapter of The Well-Wrought Urn (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, 1947), Cleanth Brooks objected to a purely referential theory of literature by arguing that poetic
language is distinct from scientific discourse insofar as poems resist being reduced to propositional
statements. As Leitch remarks: “The mimetic and cognitive dimensions of literature were fused in a more
fundamental textual, figurative domain. What made poetry different from both ordinary discourse and
scientific discourse was metaphor. Poetry is metaphor. Metaphor is poetry. . . . By virtue of metaphor,
poetry was the queen of human discourse”; Leitch, American Literary Criticism since the 1930s, 29.
33
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 329.
34
See Aristotle, Poetics, translated by Gerald F. Else (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), ch.
9, 1451a36-b11.
9
would describe as a social disciplining of craft, a neo-Aristotelian aesthetic evaluation of

socially relevant works based on the extent to which the writer has successfully balanced and
integrated theme with structure, a demonstrable organic unity in the text. For Tiempo, the twin
New Critical values of aesthetic autonomy and organic unity that he learned overseas
constituted a prerequisite for any and all works of literature, especially if they should contain
a sociological or political bent. A few years later, Tiempo, with his wife Edith L. Tiempo,
materialized this social disciplining of craft into a full-fledged program of their own, the
Silliman Writers’ Workshop, which they designed as a direct reproduction of their Iowa
Writers’ Workshop experience and as the institutional conduit through which to disseminate
New Criticism in the Philippines.
Before we turn to N. V. M. Gonzalez’s response at the Baguio City Conference and
examine how Tiempo’s and Gonzalez’s arguments illustrate two important ways Filipino
writers adapted New Criticism toward local ends, examples that, in turn, will help us develop
a critical framework for understanding the impact of New Criticism in postwar Philippine
novel writing (the latter exemplified by Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers and Nick Joaquin’s
The Woman Who Had Two Navels), we need first to ask some historical questions: How did
Tiempo come to be versed in the theory in the first place? What led him to Iowa? What were
the historical conditions that enabled Tiempo’s study abroad and his importation of New
Criticism into the Philippines? What is the significance of the fact that two of the most
important postwar novels, Gonzalez’s and Joaquin’s, were financially underwritten by the
Rockefeller Foundation?
Cold War World-Literary System
Edilberto K. Tiempo was the first Filipino to study at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but he was
not the last. From 1946 to 1962, before the time of the separate Iowa International Writing
Program, a long list of names from the Philippines would share the distinction of being “Iowa
graduates.” Filipino prose writers, playwrights, and poets helped Paul Engle realize his vision
of the Writers’ Workshop as an “international community of the imagination.”35 Filipinos’
overseas training in creative writing was made possible by funds from private institutions
such as the Rockefeller Foundation, whose own vision of “a world organization” aligned
squarely with Engle’s in their mutual aim to promote an “internationalist consciousness,”
without which, the Foundation forewarned in a 1947 report, “the atomic age will ride in on a
wave of senseless horror.”36
The story of how Tiempo first set foot onto Engle’s classroom, in the fall of 1946, two
months into Philippine independence; how Tiempo, alongside his classmate Flannery
O’Connor,37 learned New Criticism from taking a course on literary methodology, wherein

35
Quoted in Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 173.
36
Quoted in Eric Bennett, Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During
the Cold War (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015), 59.
37
In a 1956 letter, Flannery O’Connor wrote: “The other [influential book] is a textbook I used at Iowa. It
is pure textbook and very uninviting and part of the value of it for me was that I had it in conjunction with
Paul Engle who was able to breathe some life into it; but even without him, it might help you some—called
Understanding Fiction, Brooks and Warren.” See Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being: Letters of
10
Engle assigned the then newly-published Understanding Fiction (1947) by Cleanth Brooks
and Robert Penn Warren; indeed, how Filipino expatriate writers such as Tiempo came to play
a part in the rise of US creative writing, a period in American literary history Mark McGurl
has called the “program era”—all of this, in fact, can be traced to what I wish to call, adapting
a formulation from the Warwick Research Collective, a “Cold War world-literary system.”
A group of literary critics committed to historical materialist methods, the Warwick
Research Collective (WReC) seeks to redefine “world literature” as a “world-literary system,”
the hyphen underscoring “the dialectics of core and periphery that underpin all cultural
production in the modern era.”38 To replace “world literature,” in Goethe’s sense of
Weltliteratur, 39with “world-literary system,” WReC argues, is to proceed with the premise
that the “world” in “world literature” is not a smooth “virtual universe of circulating
languages and literatures, cultures and values,” but one thoroughly structured by a logic of
inequality: a world-literary space of “combined and uneven development.”40 A Cold War
world-literary system, then, in my usage, helps us to describe not only the general form that
this “one, and unequal” world-literary system took at a particular point in historical time
(1946 to 1962), but also to delimit the specific place of Philippine literary history within this
world-literary system’s formation: that is, how writers from the colonial periphery (the
Philippines), US creative writing programs (e.g., Iowa Writers’ Workshop), and private
granting institutions (e.g., Rockefeller Foundation) converged to create new contact zones of
creativity, competition, translation, and subversion. Eric Bennett, in his detailed study of the
Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Workshops of Empire (2015), writes:
Throughout the 1950s, [Engle] raised money for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop by
claiming it fought Communism . . . he recruited foreign students from around the
world, brought them to Iowa City on fellowship, gave them tours of Midwestern
towns and industries, and sent them home persuaded (he hoped and claimed) that
the American way of life trumped the Soviet.41
Hence, we ask: Who, exactly, were these “foreign students from around the world”? What did
they do? More important, what did they write?

Flannery O’Connor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979), 192.
38
Sharae Deckard et al., Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), 151. See also Franco Moretti’s adaptation of world-systems
analysis in “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000), 54–68. Moretti writes: “One, and
unequal: one literature (Weltliteratur, singular, as in Goethe and Marx), or perhaps, better, one world
literary system (of inter-related literatures)” (56). See also Franco Moretti, “World-Systems Analysis,
Evolutionary Theory, Weltliteratur,” in Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of World, edited by David
Palumbo-Liu, Bruce Robbins, and Nirvana Tanoukhi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 67–77.
39
See Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Some Passages Pertaining to the Concept of World Literature,” in
Comparative Literature: The Early Years, edited by Hans J. Schulz and Philip H. Rhein (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 3–11; and John Pizer, “Goethe’s ‘World Literature’ Paradigm
and Contemporary Cultural Globalization,” Comparative Literature 52.3 (2000): 213–227.
40
Deckard et al., Combined and Uneven Development, 25, 17.
41
Bennett, Workshops of Empire, 11.
11
The list42 of writers from the Philippines who attended Engle’s Iowa Writers’
Workshop includes, among many others, Edith L. Tiempo, Ricaredo Demetillo, Bienvenido
N. Santos, Francisco Arcellana, Emigdio Alvarez Enriquez, Ibrahim Jubaira, Carlos A.
Angeles, Virginia R. Moreno, Alejandrino G. Hufana, Emmanuel Torres, Ophelia Alcantara
Dimalanta, Cirilo F. Bautista, Manuel Viray, Wilfrido D. Nolledo, and Ninotchka Rosca. They
came to Iowa City on fellowships or grants, almost always from the Rockefeller Foundation.
If they did not go to the Writers’ Workshop, Filipino writers took part in creative writing
programs at other US universities, which were also during the postwar years in a period of
fervent program development. Or, Filipino writers were given funds to travel around the
world to lecture or to write. N. V. M. Gonzalez, for example, was not an Iowa graduate, but he
used his Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to spend one semester at Wallace Stegner’s
Creative Writing Program at Stanford University and a summer at the Kenyon School of
English in Ohio; between the two campuses, Gonzalez attended lectures at Columbia
University and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont.43 Nick Joaquin,
also a Rockefeller Foundation awardee, used his financial aid to travel in the late 1950s to
complete his first novel, The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961). Unlike Gonzalez and
Tiempo, Joaquin’s itinerary went beyond the United States: “I finished the first part, chapter
one, very fast in Hong Kong,” Joaquin recalls. “Then I got this Rockefeller grant and I went
to Spain. After my year in Spain I spent a year in New York. Part of the last part of the novel
was written in New York. And then I got a Harper’s grant to go to Mexico where I stayed
almost a year and the novel was finished.”44
When Joaquin says above, “Then I got this Rockefeller grant,” that phrase is key
because the financial aid that seemed to suddenly come to Joaquin, as was the case for many
postwar writers, was not the result of an individual grant application, but the direct
recruitment of Philippine talent by the Rockefeller Foundation—more specifically, by Charles

42
Enrollment records were not formalized until the establishment of Iowa’s International Writing Program
in 1967. I have gathered here names of Filipino writers who attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from
multiple sources, mostly from author biographies included in Philippine literature anthologies, such as F.
Sionil José, ed., Equinox 1: An Anthology of New Writing from the Philippines (Manila: Solidaridad
Publishing House, 1965); Leonard Casper, New Writing from the Philippines: A Critique and Anthology
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1966); and Estrellita V. Gruenberg and Florentino B. Valeros,
eds., Filipino Writers in English: A Biographical and Bibliographical Dictionary (Quezon City: New Day
Publishers, 1987). I have also referred to the oral histories of Filipino writers collected in Edilberto N.
Alegre and Doreen G. Fernandez, eds., Writers and Their Milieu: An Oral History of Second Generation
Writers in English (Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1987). For the official list of writers who
attended Iowa’s International Writing Program from 1967 to 1986, see Paul Engle, Rowena Torrevillas, and
Hualing Nieh Engle, eds., The World Comes to Iowa: Iowa International Anthology (Ames, IA: Iowa State
University Press, 1987), 283–291.
43
On Gonzalez’s year of study abroad in the United States, Espiritu, in Five Faces of Exile, writes: “Many
of Gonzalez’s teachers studied or supported New Criticism. These included Stegner, Katherine Anne
Porter, and Yvor Winters at Stanford; the so-called ‘Southern Agrarians’ (Allen Tate and his wife Caroline
Gordon, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren), Rene Wellek, and Herbert Read at the Kenyon
School of English; and Mark Schorer and Susanne K. Langer at Columbia University. Gonzalez was
exposed by the New Critics to Henry James and the importance of technique in fiction” (111).
44
Quoted in Caroline S. Hau, “The Filipino Novel in English,” in Philippine English: Linguistic and
Literary Perspectives, ed. by MA. Lourdes S. Bautista and Kingsley Bolton (Hong Kong: Hong Kong
University Press, 2008), 320.
12
Burton Fahs, who was then the director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Humanities Division.
“Charles Burton Fahs” may not be a familiar name in Philippine literary studies, but it appears
constantly in documents of the postwar period, and his influence was profound. (If you turn to
the dedication page in Joaquin’s novel, you can find Fahs’s name there, alone.) Gonzalez
himself recalls the phone call from Fahs this way:
Someone at the Rockefeller Foundation must have read the book [Seven Hills
Away] early in 1947 when it appeared, because one day . . . there was this
telephone call. An officer from the [Rockefeller] Foundation, it said, wanted to
meet me. We arranged to meet at a coffee shop at Avenue Hotel, I remember. It
turned out that he wanted to know if I might be interested in going to the U.S. to
study writing.45
So covert did Fah’s recruitment operation seem to some writers that they began questioning
his interests. Fast forward to the 1958 Baguio City Conference, looking at the transcribed
notes of its Q&A sessions, we read the playwright Severino Montano, in response to the
present symposium’s topic, “The Encouragement of the Arts by the State and Private
Institutions,” say: “The aid came to me like lightning from the clear blue sky”—adding that
when he received the phone call from Fahs, his first intuition was to ask, “What are the strings
attached?”46
As noted, the Rockefeller Foundation saw itself as a “world organization” that sought
to advance an “internationalist consciousness” through the cultivation of the humanities and
the literary arts. While it was part of a larger complex of private funding institutions, which
included the Ford, Fulbright-Hays, and Guggenheim Foundations, the Rockefeller Foundation
arguably played a more prominent role in the Philippines than any other such organization.
Activated by the passage of the Fulbright Act of 1946 and the Smith–Mundt Act of 1948,
which linked educational exchange programs to the US State Department’s self-defined goal
“to promote the better understanding of the United States among peoples of the world and to
strengthen cooperative international relations,”47 the Rockefeller Foundation’s international
outreach efforts focused on the decolonizing areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. I
propose to call this Cold War joint effort between private foundations and the US State
Department as constituting a “new global educational exchange,” to which the Rockefeller
Foundation’s activities in the Philippines formed an important part.
This was not the first of its kind in the Philippines. It was preceded by the Pensionado
Program of the American colonial period. The Pensionado Program was “an apparatus of
colonial education . . . allow[ing] for the probationary admission of high school and college
students of ‘good moral character’ and ‘sound physical condition’ into schools throughout the
United States.”48 The Pensionado Program was an important element in William McKinley’s

45
Alegre and Fernandez, eds., Writers and Their Milieu, 174–175.
46
F. Sionil José et al., eds., “Fourth Literary Symposium,” Comment, 202–203, emphasis added.
47
Kennon Nakamura and Matthew Weed, U.S. Public Diplomacy: Background and Current Issues
(Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 2009), 4.
48
Victor Román Mendoza, Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and the
Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899-1913 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 172. For
historical accounts of the pensionado program, see also Bonifacio Salamanca, The Filipino Reaction to
13
policy of “benevolent assimilation,” which funded study-abroad programs as a way to prepare

Filipinos, “America’s colonial subjects,” in the art of “self-governance.”49 (Juan C. Laya, as
we saw in chapter one, was part of this prewar educational exchange, his pensionado
scholarship taking him to Indiana University’s MFA program, wherein he began writing his
prizewinning novel His Native Soil in the late 1930s.) There is a critical difference, however,
between the Pensionado Program and the new global educational exchange. Whereas the
Pensionado Program emphasized the recruitment of Filipino bureaucrats and educators (Laya,
in fact, later pursued a career in education administration), the Rockefeller-backed, Fulbright-
system of global educational exchange increasingly turned its attention on Filipinos in the arts
and letters. With US creative writing centers looking to build more internationalist profiles
and the flush of newly available funds from granting institutions like the Rockefeller
Foundation, the new global educational exchange achieved a systematization and acceleration
of what was already then a half-century history of overseas Philippine “human capital”
development.
To be sure, the shift in focus from Philippine educators and bureaucrats to literary
writers reflects a broader shift in US Cold War foreign policy, which increasingly looked to
the humanities and the social sciences50 to foster a proto–multiculturalist global consciousness
conducive to stable global markets and world peace.51 But it was also a result, I contend, of

American Rule, 1901-1913 (Hamden: Shoestring Press, 1968), 90-92; Romeo Cruz, America’s Colonial
Desk and the Philippines, 1898-1934 (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1974); Alexander
A. Calata, “The Role of Education in Americanizing Filipinos,” in Mixed Blessings: The Impact of
American Colonial Experience on Politics and Society in the Philippines, edited by Hazel M. McFerson
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 89–98; and Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race,
Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006),
204–208.
49
Important Filipino bureaucrat-educators who were part of the earlier pensionado system include
Francisco Benitez (1887–1951), Maximo M. Kalaw (1891–1955), and Camilo Osias (1889–1976). On
Osias’ influence on Philippine education, see Lisandro E. Claudio, “Beyond Colonial Miseducation:
Internationalism and Deweyan Pedagogy in the American-Era Philippines,” Philippine Studies: Historical
and Ethnographic Viewpoints, 63.2 (2015), 197.
50
For a critical account of the Cold War–era development of area studies as a “peacetime information-
retrieval machinery,” see Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and
Comparative Work (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), especially 11-20. Chow writes: “In the
establishment of area studies, language and literature are rather tools with which to hypostatize the targeted
culture areas—Asia, Africa, Latin America, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East—and make them
more legible, more accessible, and more available for ‘our’ use” (15). See also Vicente L. Rafael, “The
Cultures of Area Studies in the United States,” Social Text 41 (1994): 91–112; Bruce Cumings, “Boundary
Displacement: The State, the Foundations, and International and Area Studies during and after the Cold
War,” in Parallax Visions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 173–204; and Lisa Yoneyama,
Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2016).
51
Bennett writes: “Huge portions of the budget went to initiatives overseas and to domestic allocations for
area studies. For educated Americans would do the world little good, the foundation men believed, unless
their education brought them closer to people of other nations. In this respect, the Rockefeller Foundation
shared a vision with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization created in 1945.
And the Rockefeller Foundation and UNESCO were but two of a host of groups and governmental and
nongovernmental organizations working on the shared assumption that the road to peace would be built
from internationalist consciousness”; Bennett, Workshops of Empire, 65–66.
14
the way in which the “internationalist consciousness” of the new global educational exchange
was in fact the implied antonym for Third World nationalism. Charles Burton Fah’s response
to the playwright Severino Montano’s question above, concerning whether the financial aid
had any strings attached to it, barely conceals the palliative function of the Rockefeller
Foundation’s mission vis-à-vis the potential political nonalignment of the Third World writer:
“To increase the happiness of humankind,” Fahs is reportedly to have said. “In whatever thing
you do, whether it will be writing or teaching or any other thing after this aid, if you get
results, so that you increase the happiness of a certain group of people, then we think that our
[financial] investment in this will be well counter-balanced.”52
But to suggest that the Rockefeller Foundation had its eyes on the Philippines because
it was part of a militant Third World does not answer why it was specifically Filipino writers
who were recruited. The shift in focus from Philippine educators to writers hinges on changes
in Philippine–US economic relations after 1946. Of course, one obvious motivation for
sponsoring Filipino English writers to US creative programs was to ensure the continued
cultural dominance of the English language even after official colonial rule. But another
motivation might be found in the fact that what was indeed remarkable about the post-
independence Philippine social milieu was the presence of a dominant literary nationalism. As
we saw in the 1958 Baguio City Conference, it was a literary nationalism that culminated in
direct proclamations by the Philippine state itself about the powerful and central place
Filipino writers occupied in national affairs, and these as voiced in the call for the Great
Filipino Novel, which was envisioned to be a work so great that it would not only bring about
national pride: it would signify economic strength. Seen in this light, if the Rockefeller
Foundation sought to achieve “an international order based on common interests [which]
would provide a bulwark against conflict,”53 the active recruitment of Filipino writers
beginning in 1946 appears as designed to neutralize the potential radicalization of an actually
existing Third World nationalism, a Filipino political consciousness that drew its force
precisely from a growing awareness of real economic underdevelopment caused by the
fundamentally unequal alliance between the Philippines and the United States.
An international division of intellectual labor thus comes into fuller view: as dozens of
Latin American economists were flown to Chicago, Harvard, and Columbia to be trained in
the various “modernization” theory under the supervision of liberal economists such as W. W.
Rostow and Milton Friedman,54 so Filipinos were placed in creative writing centers across the
country to initiate their professional training in the literary “modernisms” of the West.55 From

52
“Fourth Literary Symposium,” 203.
53
Bennett, Workshops of Empire, 59.
54
For a helpful account of the importation of Latin American economists into US economic programs, see
Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2003), 44–48. The early 1960s was a period that saw the rise of neoclassical
liberalism in economic theories of growth; see especially W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth:
A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961); and Milton Friedman,
Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
55
Arguing that New Criticism constituted the poetic analogue to US geopolitical strategy of Cold War
foreign policy, Mark Walhout writes: “Far from representing a simple aesthetic asceticism, [New Criticism]
popularized the skills of language analysis necessary for the successful conduct of geopolitics in the Cold
War and for the restoration of American spiritual superiority in the nuclear age”; Mark Walhout, “The New
Criticism and the Crisis of American Liberalism: The Poetics of the Cold War,” College English 49.8
15
1946 and continuing into the 1950s, the Rockefeller Foundation began subsidizing the careers
of Filipino writers. So extensive was its reach that it would not be an exaggeration to say that
the Rockefeller Foundation was the most influential institutional mediator in shaping postwar
Philippine literature. Into this dense web of Rockefeller grants and fellowships, where
thousands of dollars flowed from New York City to Manila, which funded, also, Wallace
Stegner’s lecture visit in the Philippines in 195156 and William Faulkner’s in 1955,57 we see
how the financial aid enabled Filipino writers in English (who were mostly in their late 20s
and 30s, early- to mid-career) not only to travel to Southeast Asia, Europe, and the United
States, meeting along the way a cosmopolitan group of writers, scholars, and publishers. It
also enabled writers to gain hands-on training in the New Criticism–inflected methods of
fiction writing at some of the most prestigious centers of American creative writing. When N.
V. M. Gonzalez looked back on his studies at Ohio’s Kenyon School of English, he wrote:
“How to read was still the problem, and the new discipline [New Criticism] taught me this . . .
I couldn’t have learned how to see my world without this training.”58
Although Philippine critics have not failed to note the presence of foreign patronage
and the increasing numbers of Filipino writers who were studying abroad during the postwar
period, they have left underanalyzed how this professional training influenced the practice of
creative writing in the Philippines, what kinds of fiction it produced, and how it altered the
landscape of Philippine letters and the direction of the Filipino novel in English. The
following is a recent, though typical statement of the last 50 years of criticism concerning the
influence of New Criticism on Philippine literature in English: “the aesthetics of the New
Criticism was propagated in the most prestigious academic institutions in the US and then
brought here by the Filipino ‘scholars.’ Thanks to the American scholarships and grants, the
reactionary aesthetics of the New Criticism was accepted, reproduced, and institutionalized
here for half a century.”59 Such an interpretation would read the Gonzalez quotation above as
yet another proof that the Filipino writer simply accepted “the aesthetics of the New

(1987): 861–871, 870. For an alternative assessment of New Criticism as originating in a tradition of
ideological critique of modern capitalist society, see Mark Jancovich, The Cultural Politics of the New
Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
56
For Stegner’s impressions of Philippine literary culture, see his essay, “Renaissance in Many Tongues,”
Saturday Review, 34 (1951). The Humanities Division, according to Bennett, allocated $10,000 for “a
series of seminars directed by Professor and Mrs. Wallace Stegner in the course of their trip to the Orient;
discussion of the problems of writing with groups of young writers in India, Japan, the Philippines and
Indonesia”; Bennett, Workshops of Empire, 70.
57
Part of his lecture tours in Asia, Faulkner’s visit to Manila involved interviews over a period of three
days by Filipino journalists, writers, and teachers. These interviews were tape-recorded, excerpts of which
were later published by the Philippine Writers Association as a pamphlet titled “Faulkner on Truth and
Freedom” (1956). This pamphlet is reprinted in William Faulkner, “Faulkner in Manila,” in James B.
Meriwether, ed., Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962 (New York: Random
House: 1968), 191–214.
58
N. V. M. Gonzalez, Kalutang: A Filipino in the World (Manila: Kalikasan Press, 1990), 21.
59
Bagulaya, Writing Literary History, 100, emphasis added. For an alternative account of New Criticism in
the Philippines, with a particular focus on Edith L. Tiempo’s poetry, see Charlie Samuya Veric, “The
Formal Is Political: Revaluating Edith L. Tiempo,” Philippine Studies 51.2 (2003): 256–283; see also
Conchita Cruz, “The (Mis)Education of the Filipino Writer: The Tiempo Age and Institutionalized Creative
Writing in the Philippines,” Kritika Kultura 28 (2017): 3–31.
16
Criticism.” How might we read Gonzalez’s American training otherwise? How did New
Critical ideas come to be part of the local milieu, reproducing themselves without however
being left unchanged?
N. V. M. Gonzalez: Philippine Literature as Public Works System
At the Baguio City Conference, eight years after his Rockefeller Foundation fellowship year,
N. V. M. Gonzalez was called to the position to clarify and defend the ends of his literary art.
Like Tiempo, Gonzalez expressed similar misgivings about formulating literature in too
simplistic a fashion. But Gonzalez’s critique concerning the total instrumentalization of the
Filipino writer took a different form. Whereas Tiempo focused on the autonomy of the work
of art according to the latter’s internal formal relations and intrinsic necessity, Gonzalez
turned instead to a heuristic conception of Philippine literature as myth. Ironizing the
conference’s theme of the “Filipino Writer and National Growth,” as well as President
Garcia’s programmatic vision of the writer’s central role in the “building of our national
structure,” Gonzalez wrote: “There must be vast watersheds somewhere, deep-running rivers
and wide lakes that call for development in the interest of the commonwealth [sic], so that
everyone can have water where he wants it.” “We have to harness,” he explained, “myth and
fable, fancy and intelligence, and create images pertinent to our present and future.” Lest
anyone miss the point, Gonzalez concluded his presentation by declaring that “[t]his is the
time-honored public works system that writers make.”60
For Gonzalez, the social relevance of literature lay in its capacity to represent cultural
truths, which he understood in terms of “myths,” the primordial and archetypal patterns of
human thought that is the mission of the writer to discover and render anew. In this respect,
Gonzalez not only echoed the myth criticism of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957),
but also drew on the Wellek and Warren textbook: “To speak of the need for myth, in the case
of the imaginative writer, is a sign of his felt need for communion with his society, for a
recognized status as artist functioning within society.”61 As it happens, Gonzalez met René
Wellek in 1950 at the Kenyon School of English, shortly after his studies at Stanford
University.62 In that same year, Wellek, as he was busy promoting the internationalism of the
discipline of comparative literature, was commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation to
handpick 2,000 books to be purchased for the University of the Philippines.63
More than an homage to his American teachers, Gonzalez’s use of myth criticism
suggests his specific approach to Philippine literature. Insofar as myths are the symbolic
representations of a people’s cultural past, they constitute the ground of authenticity from
which writers “create images pertinent to our present and future,” what Frye would call,
borrowing from Carl Jung, the “displacement” in the form of the collective unconscious.64 For

60
N. V. M. Gonzalez, “Re: A Department of Public Works,” Comment, 131, emphasis added.
61
René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956
[1949]), 192.
62
Espiritu, Five Faces of Exile, 111.
63
Alegre and Fernandez, eds., Writers and Their Milieu, 195.
64
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 136–
17
Gonzalez, the task of the writer is to excavate the remains of the mythical in Philippine
everyday life, that is, to mold into being, as Lukács said of “the really living content” of
writing, “life-symbols,” whose meanings “rise above the vulgar level of given facts and
experiences.”65 “Most writers deal only with the synchronic material,” Gonzalez said in an
interview he did years later, in 1985.66 “But there’s the other dimension, the diachronic.
Imagine it as a vertical pile of material that has culture, tradition, myth, history . . . every
sentence in the language, any language, must reflect its writer’s perception of both the
synchronic and diachronic.”67 For Gonzalez, this submerged, “diachronic” order of truth not
only helps return culturally the writer to a more authentic basis of experience; it is also where
“some of our best writing derived its energy.”68
Gonzalez understood the mythic dimension of literature not as way for the writer to
recuperate the glories of an ancient past, but rather as rich cultural resource for articulations of
Philippine national identity in literature. For Gonzalez, the task of the writer was to access
“culture, history, the collective unconscious, myth”69 and arrange them in such a way so that
the content became fully integrated with the form, thereby achieving what the New Critics
(and Tiempo after) championed as the “organic unity” of the text.70 That the holistic or
organic arrangement of the work was for Gonzalez linked to the belief in the truth-revealing
function of myths points to the underappreciated fact that the concept of organic unity had its
origins in the Southern Agrarians’ romanticized ideal of “organic community,” and that, in
this respect, Gonzalez’s appropriation of the concept constituted a specifically Filipino
adaptation of New Criticism.71 That is, Gonzalez sought to transfer the New Critical notion of

137.
65
Georg Lukács, “On the Nature and Form of the Essay: A Letter to Leo Popper,” in Soul and Form, edited
by John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis, with an introduction by Judith Butler (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2009), 23, 32.
66
67
Ibid., 164.
68
Ibid.
69
Ibid.
70
The New Critics understood the concept of “organic unity” as the basis of aesthetic achievement. They
held that a literary work’s “organic unity” was proof of the writer’s ability to produce aesthetic symmetry
by relating parts to the overall design of the work. Because “organic unity” emphasizes the internal
necessity of the parts to the whole, the concept implies an interpretative approach to the literary text as an
autonomous and autoletic object, in which form and content must be treated by the critic as inseparable.
Hence, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren argued that “in judging the various elements of a poem or
of a passage of poetry—rhythm, image, diction, etc.—one must consider not the elements taken in isolation
but in relation to the total organization and intention. That is, the elements must play an organic part in
them”; Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry (New York: Henry Holt and
Company, 1938), 23.
71
Edward P. Pickering, “The Roots of New Criticism,” Southern Literary Journal, 41.1 (2008) argues that
the New Critical concept of organic unity derived in fact from the organismic philosophy of the Southern
Agrarians, especially John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. According to Pickering, Ransom and Tate
developed the concept of “organic unity” as the critical mirror-image of social life under industrial
capitalism. Pickering writes: “The organic unity Brooks and Warren assigned poetry resembled the unity
the Southern Agrarians ascribed to an agrarian life. Just as Brooks and Warren decried the treatment of
poems as anything other than organic entities whose constituent parts could not be separated except at the
18
organic unity to a sociopolitical context (post-independence Philippines), whereby ideals of

organic community could inform a historical sense of Philippine national development. While
scholars of Philippine literature have remarked upon the prominence of the concept of organic
unity among the postwar generation, they have often understood it only as a sign of the
writer’s assimilation into a rarefied formalism, rather than as one of the generative sources
from which the literature of this period drew its characteristic motifs of wholeness and
cultural continuity. Nick Joaquin would thus employ the organismic metaphor when he spoke
of how Spanish colonialism introduced “the process through which [the Philippines] achieved
that integrity of being when history and culture, form and substance, [became] a whole.” Of
the American occupation of the Philippines, Joaquin said (exploiting the metaphor), “what the
Revolution took over [was] this ‘colonial’ idea of the Philippines as an organic whole that
could be diminished in territory only by a moral amputation.”72
The resonance of the New Critical ideal of organic unity with the organismic metaphor
of the nation as an integrated whole (vulnerable to dismemberment) also explains the place of
Gonzalez’s hometown, Mindoro, in much of his early work—from his first novel The Winds
of April (1941) to his second A Season of Grace (1956 [1954]) as well as to many of his early
short stories, such as “Pioneer,” “Owl in the Moon,” and “The Old Priest” in the collection
Seven Hills Away (1947) and Children of the Ash-Covered Loam (1954).73 (Gonzalez wrote
the latter during his Rockefeller Foundation fellowship year.) Critics have interpreted
Mindoro as comprising the “mythic tropes of native and native territory in Gonzalez’s
work,”74 as well as an example of his “nativist poetics,”75 or what critics of the postwar period
referred to as literary “Filipinism.”76 Gonzalez’s choice of a rural setting and his attention to

cost of violating the whole, the Southern Agrarians denounced the fragmentation of life under industrial
capitalism, which severed man from the soil and robbed him of completeness” (97).
72
Nick Joaquin, Culture and History: Occasional Notes on the Process of Philippine Becoming (Manila:
Solar, 1988), 130–131, emphasis added.
73
See N. V. M. Gonzalez, The Winds of April (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1941); N.
V. M. Gonzalez, Seven Hills Away (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1947); and N. V. M. Gonzalez, Children of the
Ash-Covered Loam and Other Stories (Manila: Benipayo Press, 1954).
74
Oscar V. Campomanes, “Filipinos in the United States and Their Literature of Exile,” in Reading the
Literatures of Asian America, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling (Philadelphia: Temple
75
Espiritu, Five Faces of Exile, 109.
76
On the concept of “Filipinism,” see Leonard Casper, The Wounded Diamond: Studies in Modern
Philippine Literature (Manila: Bookmark, 1964), 103; and Leonard Casper, “A Pluralistic View of
Filipinism in Literature,” Philippine Studies 27.1 (1979): 38–52. Casper defines “Filipinism” as the
“ongoing process of indigenization”; Leonard Casper, “Four Filipina Writers: Recultivating Eden,”
Amerasia 24.3 (1998), 145. See also Gertrudes R. Ang, “Rural Life, Folk Beliefs and Practices in the
Fiction of NVM Gonzalez,” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 3.1 (1975): 20–30. For a
genealogy of “Filipinism” (or “Filipinismo”) in early twentieth-century Philippine cultural nationalism, see
Resil B. Mojares, Isabelo’s Archive (Pasig City: Anvil, 2013); and Resil B. Mojares, “The Formation of
Filipino Nationality under U.S. Colonial Rule,” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 34.1 (2006):
11–32. For an example of a reading of Gonzalez’s work through the framework of “Filipinism,” see
Edilberto de Jesus, Jr., “On This Soil, in This Climate: Growth in the Novels of N. V. M. Gonzalez,” in
Brown Heritage: Essays on Philippine Cultural Tradition and Literature, ed. by Antonio G. Manuud
(Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1967), 634–647.
19
local scenery might also be understood as his means of imprinting on his work traces of both
Philippine and American influences: in relation to his US training, what the Southern New
Critic John Crowe Ransom defined as an “aesthetics of regionalism,” or the celebration of the
particularities of place whereby “nature” was no longer simply an abstract ideal but, as
Ransom argued, something “intensely localized”;77 and, in relation to Philippine literature, the
tradition of proletarian literature in works such as Lope K. Santos’s social realist Tagalog
novel Banaag at Sikat (1906) and Manuel E. Arguilla’s much-anthologized English-language
(and expressively Ilocano) short story “How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife”
(1934).78 Returning to his paper at the Baguio City Conference, we see how Gonzalez found a
way to uphold the social use-value of Philippine literature not so much by insisting on the
autonomy of the work of art (as Tiempo did) as by asserting literature’s integral
embeddedness in society. Hence, Gonzalez’s figure of Philippine literature as a “public works
system,” a metaphor that, in his hands, unfolded its own organismic life-symbol of Philippine
literature as cultural consciousness: a seemingly bottomless infrastructural water system that
will irrigate, nourish, and enrich the Philippine nation.
Part II: After 1958
The Long 1950s
So far, I have been suggesting that the Baguio City Conference illustrates how the importation
of New Criticism from US creative writing programs into the Philippines occurred at a
moment when economic and literary nationalisms mutually reinforced each other. N. V. M.
Gonzalez’s metaphor of literature as a “public works system” was part of a broader imaginary
of national development. Indeed, it was Gonzalez’s wry response to President Garcia’s
“Filipino First” policy and explicit appeal to writers to contribute directly to national growth.
To register just how much the Philippines at this time was everywhere gripped by the spirit of
nationalism, it would be difficult to imagine, for instance, President Eisenhower declaiming to
Hemingway and Faulkner what President Garcia said to the writers at the Baguio City
Conference: “As wielders of the pen you have the signal opportunity as well as the grave
responsibility to help in the unending task of nation building.”79 In a 1966 essay titled “The
Filipino and the Novel,” Gonzalez succinctly described these heady days of soul-making as
one marked by “[t]he insistence upon a new Rizal, a new Noli me tangere.” Gonzalez wrote:
“The much-sought relevance of history to fiction has become a special feature of the milieu in
which the Filipino novelists works. It is expressed in the call for the Great Filipino Novel, a
depiction, possibly, of private lives that would encompass the Philippine experience within
living memory.”80

77
See John Crowe Ransom, “The Aesthetic of Regionalism,” The American Review 2.3 (1934): 290–310,
295.
78
See Lope K. Santos, Banaag at Sikat (Manila: S. P., 1906); and Manuel E. Arguilla, How My Brother
Leon Brought Home a Wife and Other Stories (Manila: Philippine Book Guild, 1940).
79
Garcia, “The Filipino Writer and National Growth,” 26.
80
N. V. M. Gonzalez, “The Filipino and the Novel,” Daedalus 95.4 (1966), 961–962, emphasis added. For
20
In the same year Gonzalez wrote those words, the American critic Leonard Casper
looked back on the Philippine literary scene of the 1950s and described it as a decade marked
by “a literature in formation and a people in search of completion.”81 Casper argued that the
1950s was a singular time of national formation. In order to put into historical materialist
terms Casper’s suggestive literary-historical claim, I propose that we periodize the decade as
spanning from 1946 to 1962, a span of time I wish to term “the long 1950s.” It is a period of
sixteen years over the course of which Tiempo’s Watch in the Night (1953), Gonzalez’s A
Season of Grace (1956 [1954]) and The Bamboo Dancers (1957), and Joaquin’s The Woman
Who Had Two Navels (1961) were published. Periodizing the 1950s in this way enables us to
grasp a specific dialectic at work behind this era of national formation, namely, crises of
money. In so doing, I extend my earlier claim that literary and economic nationalisms
reciprocally illuminated each other (“Filipinism” and “Filipinization”) and suggest that state
efforts to manage the money supply were premised on asserting political-economic ideals of
“sovereignty” and “balance,” ideals which had as their literary analogues the New Critical
values of “aesthetic autonomy” and “organic unity.”
The long 1950s is bookended by the passage of the Bell Trade Act in 1946 and the
movement to devalue the peso in 1962.82 The latter marked the end of the era of import-
substitution industrialization in the Philippines. (After 1962, as I will explain in detail in
chapter three, “decontrol and devaluation” created the conditions for the rise of human labor
export under Marcos.) From 1946 to 1962, the Philippines experienced a stage of
unprecedented growth in domestic manufacturing, which reflected the transition from a prior
dependency on made-for-export agricultural production to what economic historians today
regard as the “Golden Age of Manufacturing.”83 Economists John H. Power and Gerardo P.
Sicat, in 1971, wrote that “[t]he period since the end of the second world war [sic] has
witnessed a more rapid state of industrial growth than any period of comparable length in
modern Philippine history.”84 In 1946, Philippine industrial activity could only be numbered

Joaquin’s own statement on literature’s relation to nationalism, see Nick Joaquin, “The Filipino as English
Fictionist,” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 6 (1978): 118–124.
81
Leonard Casper, New Writing from the Philippines: A Critique and Anthology (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse
University Press, 1966), viii.
82
On the significance of 1962 for periodizing Philippine economic history, see Sixto K. Roxas, “Exchange
Decontrol in the Philippines,” Philippine Studies 10.2 (1962). Roxas writes: “[1962] marked the beginning
of a new system of exchange operations with which this country has as yet had no experience, a system of
floating exchange rates” (183). See also Robert E. Baldwin, “Decontrol and Devaluation, 1960–65,” in
Foreign Trade Regimes and Economic Development: The Philippines (New York: National Bureau of
Economic Research, 1975), 50–64.
83
Walden Bello, “Confronting the Brave New World Economic Order: Toward a Southern Agenda for the
1990s,” Alternatives 14.2 (1989): 135–167, 144; see also Yusuke Takagi, “The ‘Filipino First’ Policy and
the Central Bank, 1958–1961: Island of State Strength and Economic Decolonization,” Philippine Studies:
Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 62.2 (2014): 233–261.
84
John H. Power, Gerardo P. Sicat, and Muhuan Xing, The Philippines: Industrialization and Trade
Policies (London: Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
by Oxford University Press, 1971), 30. See also Walden F. Bello, David Kinley, and Elaine Elinson,
Development Debacle, the World Bank in the Philippines (San Francisco: Institute for Food and
Development Policy ; Philippine Solidarity Network, 1982), 128.
21
by four factories, a few sawmills, a brewery, and two soft-drink bottling plants.85 Between
1953 and 1957, the Philippines gained over 700 new factories, producing a surge in the
physical volume of manufacturing output.86 This so-called Golden Age of Manufacturing, I
argue, was in fact a distinctly Filipino response to the series of monetary crisis engendered by
the vicissitudes of the Bell Trade Act of 1946, whose “free trade” policy the United States
imposed on its Pacific colony as a condition of political independence.
After 1946, what the country needed most was money. Japanese occupation of the
Philippines during World War II and the reconquest of the islands by American forces, led by
General Douglas McArthur, had left the country deformed and on the brink of economic
collapse.87 By war’s end Manila was one of the most devastated cities in the world.
Reconstruction became the number one priority for Filipinos. In 1946, a subcommittee of the
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) reviewed the Philippines’
domestic and overseas assets as well as its balance-of-payments position (that is, the total
balance of all financial transactions, including the number of imports and exports as well as
certificates in foreign reserves). The UNRRA concluded that the Philippines had ample means
to pay for reconstruction independently by utilizing available foreign exchange. The fact was,
however, that Filipinos had little control over the foreign exchange: Filipinos had no legal
authority over their own money because the Philippines’ foreign exchange resided outside its
territorial jurisdiction. As economic historian Shirley Jenkins notes, in her important book
American Economic Policy Toward the Philippines (1954),
[M]ost of the foreign exchange of the country was tied up in large currency
reserves, held in the United States, which were not available for relief purposes
because the Philippine government did not have the right to alter its currency rate,
which was tied to the United States dollar.88
Without access to its own currency reserves, the Philippine state’s reconstruction efforts
depended instead on war damage payments from the United States, specifically in the form of
IMF Marshall Plan–backed financial aid.89 Significantly, the US government tied the
disbursement of this aid to Manila’s acceptance of further free trade arrangements as well as
the former’s right to install military bases throughout the Philippines.90

85
Shirley Jenkins, American Economic Policy toward the Philippines (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1954), 102.
86
Ford Wilkins, “Austerity Is Called Vital as a Cure of Spending,” The New York Times, January 7, 1958.
87
See ch. 3 for a discussion of Philippine literary responses to the Japanese occupation of the Philippines
during World War II.
88
Jenkins, American Economic Policy toward the Philippines, 45.
89
The War Damage Corporation estimated that the total loss to private, public, and church properties in the
Philippines was approximately $800 million; quoted in Jenkins, American Economic Policy toward the
Philippines, 47. Other estimates of total war damage in the Philippines ranged from $700 million to more
than a billion dollars. Given these numbers, the proposal to set a maximum limit of $100 million was
criticized by Filipino representatives at the hearings before the Committee on Territories and Insular
Affairs (US Senate, October 1945) as too meager a sum.
90
In 1947 the Military Bases Agreement was signed, installing Subic Bay naval base and Clark Field air
force base in the Philippines. The US government saw the installment of these bases as vital to its supposed
22
The passage of the 1946 Bell Trade Act was predicated on the assumption that
Philippine postwar economic recovery depended on the stimulation of US capital inflow that
was said to result from continued free trade relations with the United States. The Bell Trade
Act gave US exporters duty-free access to the Philippines. The law also granted American
citizens equal rights as Filipino citizens in the utilization of “all agricultural, timber, and
mineral lands of the public domain . . . and other natural resources of the Philippines.”91 It
even invested the United States president with veto power over the Philippines’ monetary
policy. Philippine sovereignty was therefore subject to US political power and capital. When
President Truman signed the Bell Trade Act two months before the scheduled date for
Philippine independence, he had to confront the critical view that such an economic
arrangement contradicted the self-image of the United States as a non-imperialist.92
Meanwhile, in the Philippines, President-elect Manuel Roxas tried to assuage growing anti-
American sentiments by putting the matter more starkly to the Filipino people: “No Parity, No
Money.”93 Two months after Truman signed the Bell Trade Act, US Congress passed the
Philippine Rehabilitation Act of 1946. Over the course of the next three years, the United
States channeled $100 million in war reconstruction aid into the Philippines.94 This influx of
capital, however, created its own ironic externality. Because the Bell Trade Act restricted
Philippine control over its own national currency, the Philippine economy found itself ill-
prepared to absorb the dollar inundation.
The Bell Trade Act produced the conditions of its own undoing. By institutionalizing
preferential treatment of American products, the free trade program produced, in 1949, a
balance-of-payments crisis, which not only exposed the policy’s unsuitability to the internal
needs of the Philippine economy, but also aggravated anti-American nationalist sentiments
that undermined US Cold War diplomatic efforts in the Pacific. Imports so exceeded exports
(1,172.8 million to 507.6 million pesos95) that the then only year-old Bangko Sentral ng
Pilipinas (“Central Bank”) had no recourse but to address the trade deficit by stepping outside
of US legislative strictures. The Central Bank did so in order to give itself the authority to

fight against Communism in the Pacific. Historian Nick Cullather writes: “The Joint Chiefs considered
bases [in the Philippines] a ‘basic feature of U.S. strategy’ for general war, part of the defensive line
running from Japan to the Kra Isthmus. They were a crucial staging area for mobile ‘rapid response’ forces
that would be used in a limited conflict. Proximity to ‘Communist China, Japan, Taiwan, Indonesia, and the
countries of the South East Asia mainland’ made the Philippines ‘essential within this concept.’ The bases
provided training areas and logistical facilities to support operations through the SEATO area. They were
‘an essential part of a world-wide base system designed to deter Communism.’”; Nick Cullather, Illusions
of Influence: The Political Economy of United States-Philippines Relations, 1942-1960 (Stanford: Stanford
91
See Section 341 of the Philippine Trade Act of 1946, which outlines the so-called “parity clause.” This
part of the law caused significant resentment among Filipinos because “parity” rights did not in fact extend
to them vis-à-vis US resources.
92
For a discussion of the events leading to the signing of the Bell Trade Act, see ch. 3 of Cullather,
Illusions of Influence, 72–95.
93
Quoted in Jenkins, American Economic Policy toward the Philippines, 43.
94
Philippine War Damage Claims: Hearing before the Subcommittee on the Far East and the Pacific of the
Committee on Foreign Affairs (Washington, D.C.: U. S. Govt. Print, 1961), 42.
95
Jenkins, American Economic Policy toward the Philippines, 130.
23
defend the national currency.96 Aiming to achieve fiscal “balance,” the Central Bank made the
significant decision to maintain the exchange rate between the peso and the dollar at the
prewar parity rate of P2 per US1.97 By taking control of the national currency, the
government-owned Central Bank not only took steps to redress the country’s mounting debts;
it also introduced a system of import and foreign exchange controls whose adjustments in the
money supply helped to finance the capital outlays necessary for the Philippines’ growing
aspiration for industrialization. Thus, in its efforts to reverse the repercussions of the Bell
Trade Act, the Central Bank had managed to carve out a space for local credit to expand under
the framework of import-substituting industrialization.
Although import and foreign exchange controls were originally conceived as
temporary emergency measures in response to the 1949 balance-of-payments crisis, the policy
became “an explicit part of the country’s industrialization strategy until 1962 when controls
were lifted.”98 From 1949 to 1962, controls enabled the newly independent nation to develop
its nascent industries via import-substitution in two important ways: first, the P2 to US1
exchange rate raised the cost of imports, which restricted the inflow of imports from the
United States and protected Philippine domestic industries from foreign competition; second,
it reduced the cost of credit, which generated new incentives for private expenditures and
social investments in the protected industries, thereby producing the conditions for the
emergence of a new class of entrepreneurs and industrialists. By asserting the priority of the
domestic over the foreign in this way (via “Filipinization”), import and foreign exchange
controls became an important precedent for other Filipino strategies that sought to strip away
the coloniality of the national economy. In this respect, controls can be broadly construed as a
key feature of what Yusuke Takagi aptly calls the “transitional phase of economic
decolonization.”99
Economic decolonization took various practical forms over the course of the long
1950s: from Governor Cuaderno’s Central Bank, to President Magsaysay’s agrarian reform, to
President Garcia’s 1958 austerity program of “Filipino First.” However, what united them was
a shared ideological position, namely, to nationalize or “Filipinize” commercial activity and
economic production.100 Whereas Filipinism in literary discourse sought to assert indigenous

96
The Central Bank was established to gain control of the monetary policy, thus representing what
Amando Doronila calls “the switch from the dollar exchange standard to a managed currency system”;
Amando Doronila, The State, Economic Transformation, and Political Change in the Philippines, 1946–
1972 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1992), 50.
97
For a discussion of the monetary policy debate, see Frank H. Golay, “The Philippine Monetary Policy
Debate,” Pacific Affairs 29.3 (1956): 253–264; Frank H. Golay, The Philippines: Public Policy and
National Economic Development (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961); Antoinette Raquiza, State
Structure, Policy Formation, and Economic Development in Southeast Asia: The Political Economy of
Thailand and the Philippines (New York: Routledge, 2012); and Takagi, Central Banking as State
Building.
98
Gabriella Montinola, “Change and Continuity in a Limited Access Order: The Philippines,” in In the
Shadow of Violence: Politics, Economics, and the Problems of Development, edited by Douglass C. North
et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 158.
99
Takagi, Central Banking as State Building, 111.
100
One law that was especially instrumental in the Filipinization process was the Retail Trade
Nationalization of 1954, which prioritized Filipinos in obtaining business licenses over and above
foreigners, in particular Americans and the Chinese; see Remigio E. Agpalo, The Political Process and the
24
sensibilities, Filipinization in the economic realm sought to “replace non-Filipinos engaged in

commerce, both domestic and foreign, by Filipinos.”101 This resurgent sense of nationalism in
literary and economic discourse—emboldened as it was by the arrival of independence in
1946, and mobilized variously by an emerging Filipino middle class, on one side, and by the
Communist-led politicization of tenant famers under the Hukbalahap armed uprising, on the
other—constituted the social background for the symbolic importance that Andres Castillo so
eloquently ascribed to the creation of the country’s first central bank in 1948. Castillo
declared:
Filipinos cannot but hope that they have at last acquired an instrument for
liquidating financial colonialism in their country and for gaining complete control
of their national purse. No financial miracles are expected to result from the
establishment of the Central Bank, but with it the people can face the future more
confidently, heavily overcast though the economic skies may be.”102
The long 1950s is full of Filipino experiments in “liquidating financial colonialism,”

of securing the fiscal and financial needs of a war-torn Philippine Republic that struggled to
stabilize itself in the postcolonial nation’s integration into the capitalist world-system. As an
instrument for achieving internal equilibrium in light of exogenous forces, the management of
the national currency thus reflects decade-long contestations over “national form.” That is,
debates over the monetary policy were always symbolic of the territorial integrity and internal
tenability of the Philippine nation. “Filipinization” thus emerges in this context as a means of
“balancing” the fiscal and financial disequilibrium caused by free trade and capital flight. If
the public life of the Philippine peso was animated by the dialectic of debt and credit, how did
the latter also inform cultural ideas about what belonged inside and outside the nation? What
is the relation between financial form and national form? In the literature of the long 1950s,
how do we map out a relationship between politico-economic values of “sovereignty” and
“balance,” on the one hand, and New Critical values of “aesthetic autonomy” and “organic
unity,” on the other?
Gonzalez and Joaquin: Two Paths for the Filipino Novel After “Filipino First”
Rockefeller Foundation novels The Bamboo Dancers (1959) by N. V. M. Gonzalez and The
Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961) by Nick Joaquin were products of the Cold War world-

Nationalization of the Retail Trade in the Philippines (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press,
1962). On the general background of Filipinization, see Frank H. Golay, “Economic Nationalism: The
Drive to Filipinize,” Solidarity 7.2 (1972), 2–20; Frank H. Golay et al., eds., Underdevelopment and
Economic Nationalism in Southeast Asia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969), in particular 59–
71; and Patricio N. Abinales and Donna J. Amoroso, State and Society in the Philippines (New York:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), especially 186–189.
101
Golay, “The Philippine Monetary Policy Debate,” 256. In a later work, Golay defined “Filipinism” as
“the nationalization of alien enterprises and denial to aliens of access to activities they formerly
dominated”; Frank H. Golay, Ralph Anspach, and M. Ruth Pfanner, eds., Underdevelopment and Economic
Nationalism in Southeast Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969), 23.
102
Andres V. Castillo, “Central Bank in the Philippines,” Pacific Affairs 21.4 (1948), 371, emphasis added.
25
literary system that brought Filipino writers to study abroad. Published only two years apart,
both novels emerged after President Carlos P. Garcia instated his 1958 “Filipino First” policy,
an import-substitution program that sought to reterritorialize the national currency, reverse the
effects of US financial imperialism, and assert Philippine economic sovereignty. In light of
the social changes of the long 1950s, this section will show how economic and literary
nationalisms informed the shift toward narrative self-reflexivity in Gonzalez’s and Joaquin’s
novels.
Gonzalez’s third novel, The Bamboo Dancers, draws on the author’s Rockefeller
Foundation fellowship year. It follows the story of a 26-year old Filipino sculptor, Ernie
Rama, who has just completed his American fellowship year at the Harrington School of Fine
Arts in New York City. The novel charts Ernie’s post-fellowship journey home from New
York to Vermont, and then to Montreal, San Francisco, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Taipei, before
reaching his hometown Sipolog, Philippines. Along the way, the young artist drifts into the
company of fellow Filipino expatriates—graduate students, professionals, and writers—one of
whom, we learn, is attempting to write the “Great Filipino Novel” (B, 39). Indeed, Ernie is
everywhere surrounded by the creative writing pursuit, with most of the first third of the novel
taking place at a writers’ conference in Vermont. As a novel that arguably is based on
Gonzalez’s US creative writing training in New Criticism, The Bamboo Dancers can be read
not only as the portrait of the artist, a Künstlerroman, but also as a remittance fiction in
workshop novel form. The precedent here is Juan C. Laya’s prewar MFA-turned-novel His
Native Soil (1941). However, what distinguishes Gonzalez’s remittance fiction from Laya’s is
that the former reflexively calls attention to its textuality as fiction. For example, The Bamboo
Dancers places before us an epigraph from Henry James on figuration,103 waxes occasionally
about the nature of artistic and literary mimesis, and, as we shall say more below, employs the
framing device of a book within a book. All this produces the effect that we are in a world
rendered by a hand of an author highly self-conscious about matters of craft. The Bamboo
Dancers is an anxious novel, and so is nothing if not an early, midcentury example of a
serious attempt on a Filipino writer’s part to turn his American training on the art of
Philippine novel writing. This style of self-referentiality has endured in the Filipino novel in
English, taken up by later writers such as Miguel Syjuco, whose Man Asian Literary Prize
winner Ilustrado (2010) satirizes even more aggressively than its predecessor the Filipino
writer’s relation to literary craftsmanship. Indeed, Ilustrado turns the genre’s self-
consciousness inside out, layering fiction with fiction, in which Syjuco himself
simultaneously “autoplagiarizes” or self-narrates the textual production of the world he is
creating.104
Joaquin’s first novel, The Woman Who Had Two Navels, strictly speaking, is not a
workshop novel. Although Joaquin was also part of the 1950s global educational exchange
that took Gonzalez to Stanford University, Columbia University, and Ohio’s Kenyon School
of English, Joaquin’s Rockefeller Foundation money did not lead him to US creative writing
programs. Instead, Joaquin used the financial aid to travel abroad to Spain, France, the United

103
The novel’s epigraph is a line from Henry James’s introduction to the stories of Iván Turgénieff: “This
figure will always, probably, find favor . . . because it reminds them enough, without reminding them too
much, of life.”
104
Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).
26
States, and Mexico.105 Unlike Gonzalez, Joaquin moreover did not publicly identify with New
Criticism, preferring instead to take part in the local ferment about “literary form” not from
the side of writerly technique, but from a perspective more akin to a literary historian’s, or
what I would broadly describe as Joaquin’s interest in the historical genesis of artistic
forms.106 A contemporary of Tiempo and Gonzalez (Joaquin was the youngest, but all three
were within four years of each other),107 Joaquin represents an important counterexample to
the long-distance influences of US creative writing in Philippine literature. Unlike Tiempo
and Gonzalez, Joaquin developed his own “elective affinity with form,”108 less from the
precepts of New Criticism than from a reflection of the very nature of his subject, Philippine
history.
To describe the contrasting effects of program versus non-program fiction on Filipino
writers’ treatment of Philippine social reality, we might first take a look at how Gonzalez and
Joaquin begin their novels. After a prologue consisting of a set of letters used to frame the
narrative ex post facto, Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers opens thus:
Perhaps, I should begin by simply saying that during the early part of that summer
in New York I had a room all to myself in a place called Fairfield House. This was
on Riverside Drive, some distance from Grant’s Tomb. From my window I had a
wonderful view of the Palisades and of the sky over the Hudson, and beyond the
ALCOA and other signboards.109
Ernie Rama, the narrating “I,” begins by bespeaking an ambivalence about beginnings.
Ernie’s manner of speaking represents a new voice in the Philippine anglophone novel. In the
past, we had either more earnest first-person narrators (as in Gonzalez’s earlier The Winds of
April [1941]110) or authoritative third-person narrators (as in Maximo Kalaw’s The Filipino
Rebel [1930] and Fernando Castro’s Let There Be Light [1954]111). Ernie’s voice is something
quite different: it emerges from Gonzalez’s attempt to mediate the apparent antinomy between

105
See Resil B. Mojares, “Biography of Nick Joaquin,” Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation. 1996. Web.
Accessed July 10, 2016.
106
See, for example, Joaquin’s brilliant account of the historical transformation of Philippine modern
drama from the moro-moro to the Tagalog zarzuela to the latter’s usurpation by the Hollywood movie
industry, in “Popcorn and Gaslight,” in La Naval de Manila and Other Essays (Manila: Alberto S.
Florentino, 1964).
107
Their years of birth are as follows: Edilberto K. Tiempo (1913), N.V.M. Gonzalez (1915), and Nick
Joaquin (1917).
108
The phrase is from Rajeev S. Patke’s reading of the generative influence of New Criticism on the poetry
of Edith L. Tiempo (Edilberto K. Tiempo’s wife), in “Formalisms Revisited: A Reading of Angela
Manalang Gloria and Edith Tiempo,” Journal of English Studies and Comparative Literature (2015), 140–
159.
109
N. V. M. Gonzalez, The Bamboo Dancers (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1961 [1959]), 1, hereafter cited as B,
followed by the page number.
110
N. V. M. Gonzalez, The Winds of April (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1941).
111
See Maximo M. Kalaw, The Filipino Rebel: A Romance of the American Occupation of the Philippines
(Manila: The Educational Supply, 1930); and Fernando Castro, Let There Be Light (Manila: Tolosa
Brothers Press, 1954).
27
writing socially committed literature and the New Critical value of aesthetic autonomy he
simultaneously wished to maintain. The opening sentence announces the novel’s affinity to
the workshop novel genre. If we read the first seven words one more time—“Perhaps I should
begin by simply saying”—we see that they not only constitute a recognizable rhetorical
conceit of narrative uncertainty: they also suggest a classic trope of the creative writing
workshop itself, namely, the problem of beginning a story well.
As it turns out, “The Bamboo Dancers” is itself a kind of creative writing project, a
story the narrator-writer Ernie Rama had rendered in a self-consciously textual form. We do
not become aware that we are reading a book within a book, however, until we reach the final
sentence of the novel, when we learn that Ernie had intended his entire first-person account as
an encomium to Herb Lane, an American he met at the Vermont Writers’ Conference who, as
it happens, was expected to become the next Great American Novelist.112 Adding to the
novel’s creative writing machinery is Helen Reyes, a Filipina graduate student who herself
aspires to write what Gonzalez phrases as “the Great Filipino Novel . . . , the ambition of
practically every Filipino in school who had [any] literary inclinations” (B, 39). The Bamboo
Dancers is thus woven by at least three creative writing pursuits: (1) the narrator’s (Ernie
Rama’s) attempt to give posthumous form to Herb Lane’s “Great American Novel”; (2) Helen
Reyes’s aspiration to write the “Great Filipino Novel”; and (3) Gonzalez’s own attempt to
write it by bringing to bear his American training on Philippine novel writing. The fictional
Greenleaf Writers’ Conference and the character Herb Lane are allusions respectively to
Gonzalez’s time at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont and to his
teacher at the Kenyon School of English. Gonzalez’s teacher, Herbert Read, strikes a
homonymous resemblance to the fictional character Herb Lane. In an interview he did in the
1980s, Gonzalez cited Herbert Read as having the most profound impact on his writing.
“[Herbert] Read,” Gonzalez said, “showed me the distinction between one kind of paragraph
and another, how paragraphs are constructed, how narratives are constituted . . . and how to
differentiate between exposition and eloquence.”113
Returning to The Bamboo Dancers’ opening sentence, when Ernie Rama says,
“Perhaps, I should begin by simply saying,” he is not only making a self-undermining
statement; he is also holding to what Mark McGurl describes as one of the most famous and
enduring rules of postwar American creative writing, namely, to write what you know. Ernie
Rama doesn’t really know where to begin, a tentativeness which thereby leads him to write
about his once immediate surroundings: “I had a room all to myself . . . This was on Riverside
Drive . . . From my window I had . . . .” Note here how the emphatic placement of deictics—
this, from, beyond—underscores the primarily spatial orientation of Ernie’s narration. Yet, if
the injunction to “write what you know,” as McGurl suggests, entails an empiricist notion of
self-knowledge, such an emphasis on personal experience, I would argue, presents a set of
new challenges for the racially marked Filipino writer.114 This includes the problem of writing
what you know without devolving literary description into what Mary Louise Pratt calls

112
The novel’s final sentence reads: “I’ve set this down as a small tribute to what Herb Lane perhaps
meant” (B, 276).
113
114
McGurl, The Program Era, 95.
28
literary self-ethnography,115 or what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak more pointedly describes as

native informant knowledge production.116 Seen in this critical light, we might read Ernie’s
equivocation—“Perhaps I should begin by simply saying”—not only as containing a knowing
invitation to the reader to note the fundamental arbitrariness of all story-making. It also
expresses a reticence, even a certain uneasiness, on the part of the Filipino writer to give a
narrative account at all. In stylistic terms, Ernie’s reticence is a form of literary impersonality.
A method of indirection, literary impersonality in Gonzalez’s hands not only engages with
post-Hemingway sparseness and ellipticality, but serves as a way for the author to sidestep the
types of cultural essentialism demanded both by readers in the Philippines and the US alike,
and, more broadly, by the Philippine state itself.
Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels begins with a similar gambit about
narrative uncertainty, but it does so toward a completely different effect:
When [Connie Escobar] told [Pepe Monson] she had two navels he believed her
at once; she seemed so urgently, so desperately serious—and besides what would
be the point in telling a lie like that, he asked himself, while she asked him if he
could help her, if he could arrange “something surgical,” an operation.117
Whereas Gonzalez sets up the radical constructedness of narrative through an instance of self-
reflexive writing, Joaquin more parochially directs us to a scene of storytelling. The novel
opens with Connie Escobar, who has apparently just told a fable about herself, one which
Pepe Monson had instantly believed. We do not yet know her story entirely, or why it was
told, only that we should probably not share Pepe Monson’s gullibility (“he believed her at
once”). There is a paradox built into the narration of this scene: the third-person point of view
places the reader at a higher level of reality than the characters, thereby affording the reader a
perspective from which to discern the facts. Yet, to the extent that the whole scene is focalized
from Pepe Monson’s viewpoint—a focalization that is reflected in the grammar itself (“he
believed her . . . he asked himself”)—the reader is placed in his same credulous position. The
irony of the scene stems from the tension Joaquin exploits between our alignment with Pepe
Monson’s viewpoint and our remove as knowing readers. If literary ambiguity in Gonzalez
works primarily at a structural level (for example, a book within a book), it operates in
Joaquin at this more granular scale of the sentence. Specifically, the narrative uncertainty
inaugurated by Joaquin’s opening lines is based on what Namwali Serpell terms “mutual
exclusion”—or the “opposition between two explanations or sets of events, one tagged as real
or true, the other as illusory or false.”118 In Joaquin, mutual exclusion manifests itself almost
visually on the page:

115
See Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession 91 (1991): 33–40.
116
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing
Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); see also Deepika Bahri, Native Intelligence:
Aesthetics, Politics, and Postcolonial Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
117
Nick Joaquin, The Woman Who Had Two Navels (Manila: Bookmark, 2005 [1961]), hereafter cited as
W, followed by the page number.
118
Namwali C. Serpell, Seven Modes of Uncertainty (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
2014), 41.
29
. . . he believed her at once; she seemed so . . .

he asked himself, while she asked him if he could . . .
Typographically marked by the use of punctuation, Joaquin’s presentation of competing

simultaneous realities prepares us for what the novel will stage as binary oppositions between
good and evil, escape and responsibility, and dream and reality. If we read the sentence one
more time, we notice that there are two features that make it particularly difficult for
interpretation. First, the pronouns “she” and “he” seesaw in such a way as to produce a
mirroring or doubling effect, emphasizing not only conflict or tension, but also the threat of
substitution. And second, the whole sentence, from beginning to end, demands the reader to
put into chronological order what appear as multiple and shifting mental states and speech
acts, and these as they happen in an instant. The result is a formidable opacity in the first
sentence, one that signals the presence of a prose style unremittingly alert to the workings of
temporality. What the opening sentence announces, then, is Joaquin’s interpretative challenge
to the reader: he or she must grasp the workings of time in the syntax itself.
The two novels’ opening passages illustrate the reflexive structure through which
Gonzalez and Joaquin addressed their milieu’s ever-present demand for socially committed
literature. Whereas Gonzalez meta-fictionalizes the “Great Filipino Novel” by having a
literary character pursue it, Joaquin aspires to actually write it. In The Woman Who Had Two
Navels, Joaquin aimed to capture over half a century of Philippine history in its portrait of the
generation of Filipinos who grew up in the first decade of independence. Indeed, the sheer
originality of Joaquin’s first novel, I would argue, owes much to its unprecedented historical
scope and ambition. Joaquin set out to represent nothing less than the epochal flux of
Philippine history from the Spanish, American, and post-independence periods. To be sure,
novelists in the Philippines had taken up historical themes long before Joaquin, but they
primarily fixed their narratives on a single temporal frame: for example, the turn-of-the-
century transition from Spanish to American colonialism in Maximo M. Kalaw’s The Filipino
Rebel (1930); the onset of the Second World War in Stevan Javellana’s Without Seeing the
Dawn (1947)119 and Fernando Castro’s Let There Be Light (1954); and the Japanese
occupation of the Philippines in Edilberto K. Tiempo’s Watch in the Night (1953). In these
novels, Kalaw, Javellana, Castro, and Tiempo tended toward an idea of history as chronicled
event, which produced the narrative effect of history as a kind of “background” against which
to stage various national-allegorical themes of Filipino virtue and valor (Kalaw), rebellion
(Javellana), resilience (Castro), or redemption (Tiempo). In Joaquin, there is nothing of this
sort. The Woman Who Had Two Navels represents Philippine history not as background but as
the very internal frame through which the characters’ individual consciousnesses engage the
social world. I argue that the ingenuity of Joaquin’s literary treatment of Philippine history is
predicated on this idea of history as an omnipresent and omnipotent force. We will analyze
how Joaquin’s heuristic approach to the historical past becomes reflected in the syntax of the
narration itself, which breaks apart the sequentiality of time in order to represent the enduring
power of the past over the present. By distinguishing Joaquin’s novel from earlier examples of
Philippine historical fiction in this way, we can begin to appreciate how Joaquin’s sui generis
combination of narrative reflexivity and historical subject matter will develop into a major
form after 1962, finding resonance in later stylistically experimental historical fictions such as

119
Stevan Javellana, Without Seeing the Dawn (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1947).
30
Wilfrido D. Nolledo’s But for the Lovers (1970), Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War (1988), and
Gina Apostol’s The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata (2009), which are among the
best examples of the genre.120
Although The Bamboo Dancers and The Woman Who Had Two Navels are stylistically
different, they share an artistic ambition to depict “the truth of the condition of the Filipino
mind and heart.”121 Specifically, they are motivated by a desire to capture what is distinctively
modern about the Filipino after independence.122 In this respect, each novel speaks to the
contemporary desire for the “Great Filipino Novel.” It is less important for our purposes to
judge whether these works actually achieved the status of the Great Filipino Novel (an
aesthetic-evaluative criticism that, in fact, has long accompanied that ideal123) than it is to
consider how Gonzalez’s and Joaquin’s novels set in motion the nationalistic desires and
readerly expectations that such an ideal represented. This helps to draw out the critical
significance of one particularly conspicuous, though surprisingly underanalyzed, feature that
the two novels share: they are both set overseas—Hong Kong in the case of Joaquin’s novel,
the United States in Gonzalez’s.
Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels chronicles three dramatic days in 1950s
Hong Kong, when a young Filipina named Connie Escobar flees to the port city and becomes
entangled in the lives of a group of similarly young Filipino expatriates. They are “forlorn
aliens” living in a place that “was home and not home, that was birthplace but not native
land” (W, 78, 130). Joaquin characterizes this group as representing the new generation of
Filipinos who grew up after the American colonial period. Tormented by the belief that she
has two navels—Joaquin’s graven symbol for the perverse repetition of colonialism (first
Spain, second the United States), Connie must confront the challenge of remembering the
past. Although Ernie Rama of Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers roughly belongs to the same
generation as Connie Escobar, Ernie’s travel abroad is enabled by different circumstances.

120
See Wilfrido D. Nolledo, But for the Lovers (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970); Ninotchka Rosca, State of
War (New York: Norton, 1988); and Gina Apostol, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata (Quezon
City: Anvil Publishing, 2009).
121
This quote is Alfredo T. Morales’s description of the task of the Filipino writer vis-à-vis national growth
at the 1958 Baguio City Conference. See Morales, “Opening Remarks,” 17.
122
We might also include here Gonzalez’s own description of the impetus behind The Bamboo Dancers:
“In The Bamboo Dancers, my hope was to define ourselves today, to identify our frivolities (Rama speaks
of materials drawn from the ‘fripperies of our day’) and our moral emptiness—an emptiness that becomes
all the more depressing as we live our live our lives in the shadow of the A-Bomb”; in Gonzalez, “N. V. M.
González To Father Bernad,” Philippine Studies 8.3 (1960), 627, emphasis added.
123
For example, critic Leonidas V. Benesa, in 1965, judged Filipino novels in English published between
1941 and 1962 according to whether they achieved the status of the “Great Filipino Novel,” which he
defined as a work that “examine[d] the conscience of the race.” Benesa regarded Joaquin’s The Woman
Who Had Two Navels as “[i]ncontestably a GFN [Great Filipino Novel],” noting that “this Stonehill Award
book is remarkable, among other qualities, for its power of language and its narrative skill”; Leonidas V.
Benesa, “The Filipino Novel from 1941–1962,” in Literature at the Crossroads: 3 Symposia on the Filipino
Novel, Filipino Poetry, the Filipino Theater, edited by Alberto S. Florentino (Manila: Alberto S.
Florentino, 1965), 62, 67. Wilfrido D. Nolledo would similarly elect Joaquin’s novel as a “Great Filipino
Novel,” though in a completely different vein than Benesa. Rather than highlighting the novel’s supposed
anthropological function of expressing the soul of the Filipino race, Nolledo underscored Joaquin’s
idiosyncratic literary language; see Wilfrido D. Nolledo, “The Quest for the Great Filipino Novel (Or:
Mobile Tic - The Brown Whale),” Unitas: A Quarterly for the Arts and Sciences 46 (1973): 589–597.
31
Unlike Connie and the Filipino expatriates living in Hong Kong, Ernie took part in the global
educational exchange system that sent Filipinos to study in the US during the Cold War. What
Gonzalez emphasizes in The Bamboo Dancers is a narrative of return, one that is based on
Ernie’s post-fellowship journey home from New York, Montreal, San Francisco, Tokyo,
Taipei, to Sipolog, Philippines. Ernie’s cosmopolitanism here serves to underscore the
expatriate artist’s metaphorical distance from his cultural heritage. Thus, if Connie’s flaw is
that she has forgotten her past, Ernie’s is that he has disconnected himself from his cultural
roots. Both protagonists are fugitives of a contemporary moment overtaken by the search for
national identity. That Joaquin’s novel focuses on historical remembrance and Gonzalez’s on
cultural return is another way of saying that one novel concerns time, the other space—a
difference that I shall demonstrate will come to define the authors’ respective styles and
treatment of Filipino identity.
As “Great Filipino Novels,” Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers and Joaquin’s The
Woman Who Had Two Navels make the bold move of eschewing the Philippine nation
altogether, emplotting their young protagonists outside the territorial boundaries of the
Philippines. In so doing, both novels displace geography to highlight the “national form” of
the Philippines. We might describe this effect in terms of what Kojin Karatani, in his study of
the structure of critique in Kant and Marx, calls a “pronounced parallax,” or the perception of
a thing neither from one’s own viewpoint nor from the viewpoint of others but rather toward
“the reality that is exposed through difference.”124 To grasp the reality of something from the
structural gap or interstice between competing viewpoints, is of course, as Bakhtin has shown,
what the discourse of the novel does best,125 and the specific form this effect takes in
Gonzalez’s and Joaquin’s novels is the presentation of the Philippines less as a geographically
bounded entity than as an elastic and multisited process of cultural and social formation.
Gonzalez and Joaquin figure this plasticity and multisitedness of “national form” from the
vantage of the individual characters’ consciousnesses, which explains the orientation of their
novels towards the theme of reclaiming Filipino identity. At this juncture, however, how do
we more concretely describe the historical specificity of each novel’s effort to represent the
“modern Filipino”? In light of the fact that they were published towards the end of the long
1950s, how do we historicize Gonzalez’s and Joaquin’s articulation of literary and national
form in relation to the broader economic changes of postwar Philippines?
If the overseas setting allows Gonzalez and Joaquin to displace the national form of
the Philippines from its geographic referents in order to examine Filipino identity under a
new, more subjectivist light, such a parallax perspective, I contend, is more fundamentally a
function of the novels’ identical aim to represent directly what historically in the 1950s was
still only an inchoate, fragmentary, and dispersed social formation, namely, the Filipino

124
Kojin Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2003),
3.
125
Bakhtin writes: “For the novelist working in prose, the object is always entangled in someone else's
discourse about it, it is already present with qualifications, an object of dispute that is conceptualized and
evaluated variously, inseparable from the heteroglot social apperception of it. The novelist speaks of this
‘already qualified world’ in a language that is heteroglot and internally dialogized. Thus both object and
language are revealed to the novelist in their historical dimension, in the process of social and heteroglot
becoming. For the novelist, there is no world outside his socio-heteroglot perception—and there is no
language outside the heteroglot intentions that stratify that world”; M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic
Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 330.
32
middle class.126 Indeed, what we find in The Bamboo Dancers and The Woman Who Had Two
Navels are fictional characters from a segment of Philippine society that had been virtually
absent—precisely because it was historically unavailable as a social class—in the Filipino
novel in English. In addition to Connie Escobar and Ernie Rama, the novels’ proliferating cast
of young, urban, and upwardly mobile characters include writers, musicians, entrepreneurs,
artists, art dealers, doctors, pediatricians, and graduate students. At twenty-something, this
generation of Filipinos inherited a post-colonial Philippine Republic built by a political group,
as Joaquin put it in his novel, “that saw Americanism as inevitable and was willing to meet it
halfway” (W, 178).
Traditionally, members of the Filipino middle- and upper-classes were Spanish-
Filipino and Chinese-Filipino mestizos, who were part of, and had important links to, the
national oligarchy.127 But the vicissitudes of American colonial and military occupation shook
the land-owning elite’s political stranglehold. US-directed economic reforms under the 1946
Bell Trade Act did not always align with the interests of the Spanish-era mestizo owner
class.128 This had tremendous social consequences. The rise of English under US colonial rule
diminished the cultural dominance of Spanish, the language of the old regime, thereby

126
For sociological studies on the Filipino middle class, see Temario C. Rivera, Landlords and Capitalists:
Class, Family, and State in Philippine Manufacturing (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press
and Center for Integrative and Development Studies, 1994); Temario C. Rivera, “Middle Class Politics:
The Philippine Experience,” Journal of Social Science 45 (2000): 1–22; Cynthia Bautista, “Composition
and Origins of the Middle Classes,” in Exploration of the Middle Classes in Southeast Asia, edited by Hsin-
Huang Michael Hsiao, (Taipei, Taiwan: Program for Southeast Asian Area Studies, Academia Sinica,
2001); and Masataka Kimura, “The Emergence of the Middle Classes and Political Change in the
Philippines,” The Developing Economies 41.2 (2003): 264–284.
127
On the origins of the Philippine oligarchy, see Edgar Wickberg, The Chinese in Philippine Life, 1850–
1898, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965); Dante Simbulan, The Modern Principalia: The
Historical Evolution of the Philippine Ruling Oligarchy (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press,
2005); and Caroline S. Hau, The Chinese Question: Ethnicity, Nation, and Region in and Beyond the
Philippines (Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2014). David Wurfel has conceptualized the Filipino ruling
elite according to three categories, namely, the “landed elite,” “corporate elite,” and “syncratic economic
elite,” the latter, he argues, emerging out of the economic transformation resulting from import-substituting
industrialization of the 1950s; see David Wurfel, “Elites of Wealth and Elites of Power, the Changing
Dynamic: A Philippine Case Study,” Southeast Asian Affairs (1979), 235–239.
128
As the Manila Chronicle stated in a 1946 editorial: "The Bell Bill will certainly benefit almost
exclusively already vested interests here, and these are almost exclusively American and foreign." Quoted
in Jenkins, American Economic Policy toward the Philippines, 85. See also Jenkin’s chapters on “Policy in
Operation: 1945-1947” (97-109) and “Economic Conditions: 1948-1950” (123-139).
33
redrawing existing class distinctions129 and fanning new social groups.130 Above all the new
economic regime produced conditions of urbanization, which empowered non-hacienda
entrepreneurial capital and brought thousands of disempowered laborers out of the haciendas
and into the city.131 According to the 1960 Census of the Philippines, Manila’s population
between 1948 and 1960 grew from 1.6 million to 2.5 million. It was this urban social stratum
from which US creative writing programs recruited Filipinos, which professionalized them in
such a way that the forms of cultural capital they would acquire (and the Manila intelligentsia
they would come to form) threatened to revise an older calculus of social distinction largely
based on family inheritance and pedigree. Even members of the landed oligarchy could not
resist the pull of the capital city, diversifying their business activities into “urban real estate,
hotels, utilities, insurance, the mass media.”132
Postwar literature contended with these social changes, first in the short story, and then
in the novel in English. If we turn to the short stories published after 1946, we see that they
are marked by the preponderance of country-to-city plots and the introduction of teachers,
bureaucrats, office workers, professional writers, and other wage earners into the character-
system. Carlos A. Angeles’s “The Wonderful Machine” (1953), for example, captures
something of this new postwar urbanity in its self-mocking depiction of a Filipino poet’s new
day job as an office clerk for the US-affiliated Manila Bureau:

129
Emphasizing how language is never only a medium of colonial control but also a tool of resistance and
subversion, Vicente L. Rafael’s work has carefully and convincingly detailed the impact of the politics of
language on Philippine social formation, highlighting the cultural profundity of the Philippines’s linguistic
heteroglossia. For the Spanish colonial era, see Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian
Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). For
the American era, in particular as it regards the nationwide institutionalization of English, see Rafael,
Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2016). On the emergence of Taglish in relation to commercially driven popular culture,
see Rafael, “Taglish, or the Phantom Power of the Lingua Franca,” in White Love and Other Events in
Filipino History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 162–89.
130
Wurfel, “Elites of Wealth and Elites of Power, the Changing Dynamic,” 243-245. Benedict Anderson
helpfully supplements Wurfel’s tripartite schema by distinguishing the various emergent groups within the
Filipino middle class. In “Cacique Democracy in the Philippines: Origins and Dreams,” New Left Review
(1988), Anderson writes: “The huge expansion of English-language education produced three distinct,
politically significant, new social groups. Smallest was a radical intelligentsia, largely of bourgeois and
petty-bourgeois urban origins, and typically graduates of the University of the Philippines . . . Next largest
in size was a bien-pensant proto-technocracy, which also included graduates from American universities . .
. Largest of all—if not that large—was a wider urban bourgeois and petty- bourgeois constituency: middle-
level civil servants, doctors, nurses, teachers, businessmen, shopkeepers, and so on” (19). I will draw on
Wurfel and Anderson’s analyses below as well as in chapter three.
131
I discuss this historical process in more detail in ch. 3.
132
Anderson, “Cacique Democracy in the Philippines,” 16. See also Hutchcroft, Booty Capitalism: The
Politics of Banking in the Philippines (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998): “Beginning in the 1950s and
1960s, the closely held conglomerates of the major oligarchic families became highly diversified units,
commonly combining manufacturing, finance, agriculture, commerce, services, urban real estate, and so on,
all under one roof . . . As a result, they collectively came to share a certain homogeneity of interests on
broad issues of macro-economic policy; in short, there was a simultaneous diversification and
homogenization of familial interests” (38).
34
[I]n the busied hours, [the poet] would plunge deep into his work . . . working at
the mailers, sorting them out by balancing feature articles, financial tips, cinema
news, sports comments, British, Italian, Japanese and Mexican mailers, and sorts,
with just enough of each item, to a mailable ream.133
The social sciences also began to take interest in the new middle class. In 1955, when the
Philippine Sociological Society invited US-based scholars for their “observations of the
Philippine scene,” one sociologist remarked that American democracy had much to do with
the creation of Manila’s new middle class and that the latter was marked by a peculiar
hybridity: “Although the Spanish regime has come to end, it appears that the upper class had
retained important elements of Spanish culture and Spanish orientations. On the other hand,
American influence appears to have infused into and encouraged the growth of the middle
class in this society. Thus the two dominant classes [mestizo owner class and urban middle
class] appear to favor different cultural influences.”134
Contemporary readers of Joaquin’s and Gonzalez’s novels would have recognized in
Connie Escobar and Ernie Rama elements of the new middle class, whose spiritual compass
did seem to point toward the American metropole rather than to a bygone Spanish-inflected
Philippine cultural tradition. This cultural difference is emphasized by the novels in their use
of the trope of intergenerational conflict between parent and child. Although Joaquin’s Connie
Escobar and Gonzalez’s Ernie Rama come from landowning families, both youths are marked
off from the older generation in their display of “self-indulgence” (B, 73) and “combination of
primitive mysticism and slick modernity” (W, 40). Connie’s parents belong to the mestizo
nouveau riche (her mother, for example, always dressed “like one of those jeweled madonnas
in Spanish churches” [W, 25]), while Ernie’s family comes from a more modest, but still
landed, provincial petty-bourgeoisie. Historically speaking, the economic base of the
landowning class, as Benedict Anderson notes, “lay in hacienda agriculture, not in the capital
city.”135 But, as noted, the center began to shift after 1946 toward Manila. Whereas the short
story in English described these social changes in the early 1950s, the novel in English would
take a little longer. In fact, before the publication of Gonzalez’s and Joaquin’s novels in 1959
and 1961 respectively, the Filipino novel in English, I would argue, had as its primary referent
the hacienda-based agricultural economy. All available novels published between 1946 and
1959136 were oriented in one way or another around the agricultural economy, either from the

133
Carlos A. Angeles, “The Wonderful Machine,” in Philippine Writing: An Anthology, edited by T. D.
Agcaoili (Archipelago Publishing House, 1953), 18.
134
Bartlett Stoodley, “Sociological Theory in the Philippine Setting,” Philippine Sociological Society, 3
(1955), 15, 28.
135
Anderson, “Cacique Democracy in the Philippines,” 11.
136
A survey of available English-language novels published in the Philippines from 1946 to 1959 reveals
that writers mainly focused on barrio life and on literary characters who took part in the country-to-city-
migration but who were not fully part of the new urban middle class as described above. Emigdio Alvarez
Enriquez’s The Devil Flower (1959), published in the United States, traces the story of Ercelia Fernandez,
who left her village to complete her studies in Manila, after which she returns home to work as a
schoolteacher. Enriquez’s The Devil Flower continues a familiar trope in Philippine literature in English,
namely, the conflict between modernity and tradition; see, for example, N. V. M. Gonzalez’s earlier novel,
A Season of Grace (serialized in 1954), F. Sionil José’s The Balete Tree (serialized in 1956), and Edith L.
Tiempo’s A Blade of Fern (serialized in 1956), the latter novel set in a mining community in the southern
35
point of view of the owner class, the poor tenant farmers living in its shadows, or both.
Similarly, Filipino American literature continued to refer to this social order insofar as it
focused on those Filipinos who once belonged to the agricultural economy, but who escaped
to the United States as labor migrants. Hence, the dominance of the Bildung narrative of
ethnic proletarian consciousness in early Filipino American literature, the locus classicus
being Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1943), with more nostalgic and elegiac forms
of “Pinoy” life to be found in the short stories of Bienvenido N. Santos, for example, his
much-anthologized “The Scent of Apples” (1948), “You Lovely People” (1955), and “Brother,
My Brother” (1957).137
Situating the publication of The Bamboo Dancers and The Woman Who Had Two
Navels in relation to contemporaneous literary developments in Philippine and Filipino
American literature helps us to define the historical specificity of Gonzalez’s and Joaquin’s
object of novelistic representation. From our perspective, the overseas setting of The Bamboo
Dancers and The Woman Who Had Two Navels is neither incidental nor gratuitous. In shifting
the perceptual framework away from the Philippine countryside and bringing into focus the
segment of Filipinos living overseas—not for work, but for study or leisure—Gonzalez’s and
Joaquin’s novels cast new light on the postwar middle class. Increasingly less bound to the
land than to what Marx called “fictitious” capital,138 the generation to which Connie Escobar
and Ernie Rama belong—urban, Western-educated, and English-speaking—embraced a

islands of Surigao. Postwar novels also focused on World War II (for example, Stevan Javellana’s Without
Seeing the Dawn [1947] and Edilberto K. Tiempo’s Watch in the Night [1953]) or the Huk rebellion
(Donato V. Santos’s Filipino Valor [1956] and Fernando Castro’s Let There Be Light [1954] and The New
Light [1956]). Castro’s novels especially displayed a strong propagandistic intent, concentrating on the
poverty of Pampanga, one of the centers of Huk activity. Less well-known novels Benn M. Fetalvero’s The
Chill Seclusion (1955) and The Harvest of Thorns (1955) sought to idealize rural folk, while Edward
Albalos’s Outcast Island (1954) depicted in a less picturesque vein the outbreak of leprosy in the provinces.
137
See Bienvenido N. Santos, You Lovely People (Manila: Benipayo Press, 1955); Santos, Brother, My
Brother: A Collection of Stories (Manila: Benipayo Press, 1960); and Santos, Scent of Apples: A Collection
of Stories (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979). On Santos’s focus on Pinoy life, see Miguel A.
Bernad, “The Dancers and Bienvenido Santos,” Philippine Studies 16.4 (1968): 798–802; Maxine Hong
Kingston, “Precarious Lives,” New York Times Book Review, 4 May 1980; and King-Kok Cheung,
“Bienvenido N. Santos: Filipino Old-Timers in Literature,” Markham Review 15 (1986): 49–53. See also
Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973). On the social
realism of Bulosan’s proletarian fiction, see E. San Juan Jr., The Radical Tradition in Philippine Literature
(Manila: Manlapaz, 1971).
138
Historically speaking, the nationwide expansion of credit in the Philippines was reflected in the
proliferation of rural banks beginning in the late 1950s, which provided heretofore unavailable credit in the
provinces. The major players and organizations behind this dispersion are described in ch. 5 of Paul D.
Hutchcroft, Booty Capitalism: The Politics of Banking in the Philippines (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1998), 81–109. As Frank H. Golay noted in 1961: “Rural banks, subsidized by the government, were also
opened at a rapid rate, reaching a total of 120 by the end of 1958. Outstanding agricultural credit from these
institutions expanded from P4.1 million at the end of 1953 to P91.8 million at the end of 1957”; Golay, The
Philippines: Public Policy and National Economic Development (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961),
90. For Marx’s concept of “fictitious capital,” see Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III, translated by David
Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1981), 464-477. Marx argued that “[e]verything in [the] credit system is
doubled and trebled and transformed into a mere phantom of the imagination,” such that “[a]ll connection
with the actual expansion process of capital is thus completely lost, and the conception of capital as
something with automatic self-expansion properties is thereby strengthened” (464).
36
notion of Filipino identity based on the individual creative pursuit. Gonzalez’s and Joaquin’s
protagonists represent a mode of self-making enabled by the comparative prosperity that
resulted from the Philippines “be[coming] the most ‘advanced’ capitalist society in Southeast
Asia in the 1950s.”139
The “Golden Age of Manufacturing” thus displaced the long representational
monopoly of the hacienda-based agricultural economy in Philippine literature in English. The
1959 and 1961 publications of Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers and Joaquin’s The Woman
Who Had Two Navels, I argue, inaugurate new paths for the Philippine anglophone novel. In
terms of subject matter and character-system, Gonzalez’s and Joaquin’s novels are the first to
represent more directly the new middle class and the financial and industrial economy that
helped to create this social group. On the postwar middle class, sociologist Cynthia Bautista
writes:
The import-substitution program . . . promoted the expansion of an urban middle

class based on the growth of the manufacturing and service sectors. Many of the
manufacturers in the 1950s and 1960s originated from this class of salaried urban-
based professionals, white-collar workers and state employees. Thus, by the end
of the 1960s, traditional landed interests no longer constituted the bulk of the
elite.140
The novel in English would catch up to these changes. In 1958, Bienvenido N. Santos was
already working on his first novel Villa Magdalena (1965), which, as I shall examine in
chapter three, symbolized the decline of the older social order by postwar urbanization in the
figure of the dying aristocracy (the Conde family). Kerima Polotan, too, would pick up the
thread in her 1962 novel, The Hand of the Enemy, whose protagonist Emma Gorrez roughly
belongs to the same generation as Joaquin’s Connie Escobar and Gonzalez’s Ernie Rama.
Published a year after Joaquin’s novel, The Hand of the Enemy focuses on how Emma’s
definition of herself as a modern Filipina lies in choosing financial independence over her
family’s wealth, the latter apparently obtained from “own[ing] eight hundred hectares of the
best rice land in Luna.”141 If we turn to the scholarly discourse of the late 1950s, we see Frank
H. Golay, an influential Cornell economist and specialist of the Philippine economy, write
about the social consequences of urbanization in the following terms. In 1958 he wrote:
Social change is also accelerated by the concentration of activities associated with

commercial policy in urban centers. The potential Southeast Asian entrepreneur
[sic] who responds to the economic opportunity presented by ‘de-alienization’
[read: Filipinization] gravitates to the cities where he tends to shed traditional
values and loyalties which are widely recognized as obstacles to rapid economic
growth. The economist observing postwar Southeast Asia cannot but be aware of
the significant element of urbanized Southeast Asia with consumption patterns

139
Anderson, “Cacique Democracy in the Philippines,” 17.
140
Cynthia Bautista, “Methodological Notes of the Philippine Middle Class Survey,” in Exploration of the
Middle Classes in Southeast Asia, edited by Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, (Taipei: Program for Southeast
Asian Area Studies, Academia Sinica, 2001), 42.
141
Kerima Polotan, The Hand of the Enemy (Manila: Regal Publishing Co., 1962), 3.
37
and economic functions that are usually associated with the middle class in
Western societies.142
Notwithstanding the Eurocentrism of its comparative frame, Golay’s statement is significant

because it illustrates how he could then describe the new middle class only by analogy. It is a
rhetorical gesture symptomatic of the fact that this social group, in the late 1950s, was still a
demographic minority.143 Even more, as Gonzalez’s and Joaquin’s overseas settings
emphasize, it was dispersed. Golay’s statement illuminates how adumbrations of the new
middle class—whose development was accelerated and systematized by the Cold War global
educational exchange, which gave Rockefeller Foundation money to Tiempo, Gonzalez, and
Joaquin—began metonymically to stand in for a certain post-independence Philippine
modernity. In light of a peasantry brutally crushed by US-backed military campaigns against
the Huks in 1954,144 the Philippine intelligentsia sought to find, raise, and harness the
progressive elements and radical energies of the new middle class. Inchoate, fragmented, and
dispersed, this urban, English-speaking social group had little or no comparable
representations of themselves in literature. I argue that Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers and
Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels sought to address this lacuna. To further develop
this point, I ask: As one author approached the problem of Filipino “identity” from the angle
of self-referential workshop novel (Gonzalez), the other from historical fiction (Joaquin), how
did their contrasting uses of narrative reflexivity reorient the Philippine anglophone novel
toward galvanizing the social consciousness of the new middle class? In their mutual effort to
represent the ethos of the emergent generation, what motifs came into play?
Historicizing the theme of Filipino identity as the depiction of the new middle class
allows us to discern how the novels’ dramatic tension derives from the way this social group
was perceived to be structurally related but culturally distinct from the older social system.
Gonzalez and Joaquin stage this historical peculiarity of the new middle class by employing
the motif of family drama, more specifically, the intergenerational conflict between mother
and daughter (Joaquin), and father and son (Gonzalez). Submerged in the intergenerational
conflict is a certain class anxiety on the part of the parent generation about the fate of the
older social system and the latter’s ability to reproduce itself. Hence, the specter of abortion

142
Frank H. Golay, “Commercial Policy and Economic Nationalism,” The Quarterly Journal of
Economics, 72 (1958), 586.
143
“[T]he middle classes,” Caroline S. Hau notes, “though already in existence for most of the twentieth
century, have never been sizable. Their proportion to the total population has been relatively constant over
the post-independence period. Filipinos employed in middle-class occupations (professionals and
technicians, executives and managers, white-collar workers) constituted around 9.4% of the population in
1956 and 11.5% in 1965 on the eve of Marcos’s presidency”; Caroline S. Hau, “The Filipino Novel in
English,” in Philippine English: Linguistic and Literary Perspectives, ed. by MA. Lourdes S. Bautista and
Kingsley Bolton (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), 325.
144
The classical account of the struggle between landlords and tenant farmers and the latter’s political
formation into the Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa mga Hapon is Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). Around this time, Filipino American writer Carlos
Bulosan began writing his novel about the Huk rebellion, The Cry and the Dedication (published
posthumously in 1977 as The Power of the People); see the introduction to Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao,
Writer in Exile/Writer in Revolt: Critical Perspectives on Carlos Bulosan (Lanham, MD: University Press
of America, 2016), xv–xxx.
38
that repeatedly appears in The Woman Who Had Two Navels and the bold, if muted,
intimations of Ernie Rama’s homosexuality in The Bamboo Dancers. Father Bernad, in his
reviews of Gonzalez’s and Joaquin’s novels for Philippine Studies, commented on these
elements as nothing more than each author’s suspect representation of the modern Filipino. Of
The Bamboo Dancers, Bernad lamented the fact that the novel presented characters whose
“middle class life in America . . . do not exhibit a well-defined moral dimension”145; of The
Woman Who Had Two Navels, he dismissed the book as “suffer[ing] . . . from a confusion of
values.”146
The apparent spiritual decline of the new generation might in fact be the point.
Although Joaquin and Gonzalez persistently turn to effrontery, giving their novels their
modern feel, they nonetheless remain close to their moment’s romantic nationalism. Both
authors recognize—and are inclined to return to again and again—the tenuous nature of the
“new” Filipino that Connie Escobar and Ernie Rama represent. In Joaquin’s novel, the young
woman, for all her pitiable traits, and traumatized as she is by her two navels, is rarely given
high lyrical treatment; this is reserved more properly for the flashback scenes, wherein the
prose, as it mimes the temporality of memory, flourishes into a procession of long sentences,
the language there becoming more figurative and complex. It is a stylistic contrast that would
seem to mirror Joaquin’s critical attitude concerning the historical amnesia afflicting the new
generation, an allegorical psychological condition the author especially imputes to the young
Connie.147 Similarly, in Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers, Ernie Rama is so nearly emptied of
any actual psychic yearnings that he appears as a foil for a more authentic Filipino ideal self.
Ernie’s narrative reticence becomes Gonzalez’s figure for a certain political apathy.
Consummately modern yet somehow enfeebled, the two central characters—Connie Escobar
and Ernie Rama—are depicted as spiritually ungrounded, lacking in any metaphysical
confidence whatsoever. For Joaquin, this ungroundedness of the modern Filipino calls for the
cultivation of historical consciousness through the principle of remembrance. For Gonzalez, it
is a matter of culture; or, to put it in the myth-critical terms he favored, it is matter of
reintegrating oneself in tradition and myth. All this is to suggest that Gonzalez’s and Joaquin’s
novels—belonging as they do to a time so completely imbued by the desire for the “Great
Filipino Novel”—betray an underlying pedagogical purpose. They embody a utopian impulse
to redirect the ethos and social consciousness of an emergent social class toward progressive
ends. One might denounce the novels’ utopian-pedagogical function simply as an instance of
the utilitarian uses of literature. But we are reading the social motif as the form-defining
threshold against which the novels develop their distinct styles, and these as they relate to the
historical problem of national form. Thus the novels depict Filipinos living in a world turned
upside down: Joaquin’s Connie Escobar ever descending into a phantasmagoria of “dream-
worlds” (W, 295); Gonzalez’s Ernie Rama into a daily existence of “running away from one
whole generation,” his father’s (B, 255).
Joaquin’s mission to raise social consciousness works, in part, by caricature. The
Woman Who Had Two Navels is full of descriptions of the material excesses and moral

145
Miguel A. Bernad, “Filipinos Abroad,” Philippine Studies 8.2 (1960), 459, 460.
146
Miguel A. Bernad, Bamboo and the Greenwood Tree (Manila: Bookmark, 1961), 61.
147
See Bob Vore, “The Literature of James Joyce and Nick Joaquin: Reflections of National Identity in
Ireland and the Philippines,” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 9.1
(1995): 1–32.
39
decadence of the well-to-do class. Indeed, mother and daughter—the latter always in “black
furs and a black hat, with gray gloves on her hands and pearls at her throat” (W, 73)—are
fodder for the costume drama that Joaquin’s historical fiction also is. From beginning to end,
Joaquin restlessly pits the tragic with the comic, forming the melodrama, bombast, and humor
for which The Woman Who Had Two Navels is famous today:
Connie knew now that it was her mother’s lover she had married, and her
mother’s lover who had touched her and kissed her and lain beside her throughout
their year of marriage. And he had never stopped being her mother’s lover until
the day, a week ago, when, opening a drawer, he had found a box empty and had
seen the letters that were not there to be, indeed, “ancient history; something over
and done with, a long time ago.” (W, 20)
As the details of the love triangle unfold, the intergenerational conflict reveals itself as part of
the larger Manichaean struggle between good and evil, and between individual decisions
based on “an impulse of the heart” and those social forces that threaten to overturn them,
namely, “history in motion” (W, 122, 171). Connie’s angst becomes so great and so
irrepressible that it pushes the narrative into a confessional mode. In this way does the novel
suggest that it is only through a direct confrontation with the past that one can redeem and
remake oneself: “nothing could stop her now; everything had to come out, everything had to
be told: confession was a spasm as urgent as tears” (W, 304).
If we broaden our view to account for the structure of Joaquin’s novel as a whole, we
see that almost all the characters, at one point or another, undergo similar confrontations with
the past. In the novel’s moral universe, the only path for individual enlightenment (and peace)
is “to close a circle, to end a history” (W, 291). It is no accident that Connie Escobar is the one
who must endure most severely this reconciliation with the past. She represents that element
in the plot that aims to close the circle of what Bakhtin would call “national-historical
time.”148 This is so because Connie not only stands in for the new postwar generation; she is
also the daughter of La Vidal, whose own father and first husband, we learn, were
revolutionaries in the turn-of-the-century Filipino struggle against Spain and the United
States. This older generation is also the one to which Dr. Monson, Joaquin’s paradigm figure
of exile, belongs. Dr. Monson had served in “the revolution against Spain and in the resistance
against the Americans, and when both uprisings failed, he came and settled [in Hong Kong]
and swore not to go home, neither himself nor his sons, until it was a free country again” (W,
7-8). From the older generation’s perspective, the new generation that Connie represents
carries the task of their “unfinished” revolution, that is, of bringing about the Philippines that
should have been. The novel culminates in Connie’s confession of her personal failures to the
dying Dr. Monson, a climax that represents the novel’s most explicitly pedagogical scene.
Connie learns that in order to confront “truth and freedom” and achieve the “transfiguration or
growth of the spirit,” she must understand the past beyond chronological terms (W, 296, 314).
That is, she must learn to recognize it as the once lived present of a generation who had
carried their own anticipated (revolutionary) future. In other words, she must cultivate a
genuine form of historical consciousness.

148
M. M. Bakhtin, “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism,” in Speech Genres
and Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas, 1986), 25.
40
Literary criticism on the novel has not failed to note the allegorical significance of the
novel’s intergenerational trope, especially as it pertains to the representation of Connie
Escobar.149 Yet, the meaningfulness of history’s relation to the present is not only a thematic
conceit of the novel; it is more reflexively the structure of the narrative itself. Indeed, while
Joaquin’s vision of Philippine history is illuminated at the level of the plot, in the sequencing,
for instance, of Connie’s fall and renewal, it also works at the level of the sentence. A
Joaquinian sentence sprawls, sometimes stretching over entire pages, always however seeking
to encapsulate the dynamism of the present. Let us consider one of the novel’s flashback
episodes, when Paco Texeira—Joaquin’s “part Portuguese, part Filipino,” “guileless
cosmopolitan”—struggles to recall his father’s words (W, 28, 35). The passage comes after
Paco had just learned the news of his father’s death.
. . . [Paco Texeira] still could stir up no feeling for the grinning young man in the
tight striped suit dying on top of the piano. So he tried to remember what he could
of his father talking but though he heard his father’s voice very clearly no words
were distinct until he remembered that he and a crowd that included Mary and the
Monson boys and Rita Lopez had planned to go mountain climbing that afternoon
and was wondering if it would still be seemly of him to go along with them with
his father just dead when he suddenly heard his father talking very distinctly about
mountains. He had asked his father if he might climb the mountains when he was
bigger and his father had laughed and said that even a baby could climb these
mountains in Hong Kong; [the mountains] were so bald and wrinkled they looked
like old dogs that had lost their hair, and so small you could climb up to their tops
and down again in half and hour—not like the mountains back in the Philippines
that took days and even weeks to climb and were thick with trees and shrubbery
and dangerous with wild animals. Then he had begun to tell Paco about a range of
mountains just across Manila Bay that looked like a woman stretched out in sleep.
(W, 39)
Following the temporal shifts, we can see how Paco Texeira’s recall of his father’s words
comes to depend upon another recall, the retrospective remembrance of a future expectation,
one that had been made but forgotten, namely, the afternoon plan to go mountain climbing.
The whole passage pivots on the importance of the subjunctive. It is in remembering the
afternoon plan (prolepsis) that sets off past memories of mountains associated with his father
(analepsis). The passage evokes three discrete memory-images of mountains, each one
belonging to a different temporal order: the one Paco and his friends will soon climb, the
mountains in Hong Kong he had wished to climb as a child, and the Philippine mountains of
his father’s own memories. The juxtaposition of all three memory-images not only has the
effect of narrative compression; it is also intended to produce an uncanny effect, one that
develops into a pedagogical lesson about the enduring influence of the past on the present. In
a later moment of recall (within this same flashback episode), Paco remembers the time he
first laid eyes on Manila Bay, “when he had looked up and suddenly seen, with a shock of

149
For example, Regina T. Garcia, “A Reading of Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels,”
Philippine Studies, 15 (1967), 288–306. Garcia writes: “Nick Joaquin portrays Connie’s spiritual death and
regeneration in a melodramatic portrayal of her death via the four elements of earth, water, air and fire”
(304). See also Vore, “The Literature of James Joyce and Nick Joaquin.”
41
recognition, a range of mountains that looked like a woman sleeping” (W, 40, emphasis
added). This shock of recognition arises from the connection Paco makes between the
memory of his own sight of the mountains over Manila Bay and the words his father used to
describe them once upon a time. As the image of Manila Bay comes into fuller clarity in his
mind, so do the words of his father, the two memories short-circuiting in such a way as to
overwhelm and transform the meaning of all the previous others. Significantly, the “shock”
Paco experiences translates into a feeling of a kind of national pride: “The astonishment had
renewed itself all the time he was in Manila . . . and it changed the indifference with which he
had come to his father’s country into a stirring of clan-emotion—a glow, almost, of
homecoming” (W, 40). The entire flashback episode, then, encapsulates Joaquin’s
thematization of the relation of self and history through the syntactic manipulation of
narrative time. Joaquin has related past, present, and future in such a radically compressed
manner as though to visualize on the page their fundamental interconnection. By following
the shifts in narrative tense, we see that Paco’s recall is constituted by the recognition that the
past is not yet past, a recognition that is itself paradoxically enabled by a future event that is
not yet. What the passage thus exemplifies is Joaquin’s masterful dialecticization of historical
time, in which the syntax itself symbolizes the idea of the past as the once projected
anticipation of a future and the present as the always living possibilities of those “futures
past.”150
In contrast to Joaquin’s style, which critics have described as “lush,”151
“overwhelmingly florid,”152 “brightly burning,”153 “ornate,”154 and “verbose,”155 Gonzalez’s
workshop-novel treatment of Filipino identity assumes a more restrained and reticent form.
Like Joaquin, Gonzalez directs his attention to the dilemmas of the modern Filipino, the
moral-spiritual direction of the new middle class. But he does so with a marked shift of
emphasis from “history” to “culture.”156 As noted with regard to his myth-critical influences,
Gonzalez affirms a notion of culture as supplying the generative and ideal ground for
authentic Filipino literary expression. “Culture,” for Gonzalez, is “the rich metaphorical

150
The term is from Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2004). Koselleck develops a theoretical framework for conceptualizing the past
not in terms of chronological facticity but according to a structure of historical temporalization in which the
past, present, and future form together a dialectical continuum of possibility.
151
H. B. Furay, “The Stories of Nick Joaquin,” Philippine Studies 1.2 (1953), 152.
152
Buenaventura S. Medina, Confrontations Past Present in Philippine Literature (Manila: National
Bookstore, 1974), 195.
153
Laura S. Oloroso, “Nick Joaquin and His Brightly Burning Prose,” in Brown Heritage: Essays on
Philippine Cultural Tradition and Literature, ed. by Antonio G. Manuud (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila
University Press, 1967), 765–92
154
E. San Juan, Jr., Subversions of Desire: Prolegomena to Nick Joaquin (University of Hawaii Press:
Honolulu, 1988), 116.
155
Ricaredo Demetillo, “Nick Joaquin’s Flame of Grace,” in The Authentic Voice of Poetry (Diliman:
University of the Philippines, 1962), 287–293.
156
Of course, in an important sense, “history” and “culture” cannot be so easily separated, and indeed they
are not necessarily counterposing concepts in Gonzalez and Joaquin. But the analytical separation is useful
for our purposes here, as it helps us to account for how the emphasis of one over the other leads to different
formal requirements and stylistic effects.
42
resource” of Philippine literature.157 This emphasis on culture is represented by the fact that
Gonzalez has chosen an artist as the central protagonist of The Bamboo Dancers, whose
intellectual expatriation to the United States and subsequent alienation from Filipino culture
become that ideal’s antithesis. In this way does Ernie Rama become Gonzalez’s antithetical
figure of the “authentic” Filipino self. So isolated is Ernie from his country, people, and
culture that he becomes estranged from himself. Ernie is an example, in the author’s own
words, of an “essentially flawed character.”158 Indeed, the novel makes some way of marking
Ernie’s asociality, of his inability to relate to others and his lack of fellow-feeling. We learn
that Ernie is a person with “no vices except the major ones,” a financially-independent
Filipino living overseas who is occasionally struck by “mood[s] for national self-flagellation”
(B, 53, 27). Ernie’s personal shortcomings—his apparent aloofness in the world and, most
consequentially, lack of national pride—are stylistically heightened by the impersonal tone of
the narration, which is manifested in the self-undermining gestures that Ernie himself, our
first-person narrator, deploys. The effect is wholly ironic. Although Ernie is the novel’s
narrating consciousness, he is so obliquely rendered by Gonzalez that we seem only to be able
to look at him paradoxically as the object of narration, not its subject. Even though he is the
narrating “I” there seems to be little or no interiority in the character whose consciousness and
actions this “I” is supposed to represent. A contrast between Joaquin and Gonzalez thus
emerges: if Joaquin’s technique was to place the reader firmly inside the consciousnesses of
his individual characters, such that, as we saw in the case of Paco, the very form of historical
consciousness is grasped in the affective structure of remembrance itself, Gonzalez’s use of
literary impersonality appears as that technique’s opposite.
To more fully illustrate the contrast between Gonzalez’s and Joaquin’s artistic
methods, let us turn to a passage that characterizes Gonzalez’s use of literary impersonality
and how this technique formally shapes the prose. In the passage below, literary impersonality
is carried through a form of narrative deflection, which is underscored by the conceit of an
implied internal monologue:
We rather frequented the apartment of the Rices, it must be admitted. The

American couple rather enjoyed us thoroughly and for this we were grateful, I
guess. We found on 13th street practically all the cures of our world. It was hard
searching at times; in any case, the apartment was where the suffering Filipino
race got something of a clinical diagnosis, if only with the help of materials drawn
from memory and speculation. (B, 26)
The inverted sentences, the prevarication of feelings, and, above all, the understated prose
work together to construct a narrator who refuses easy access to his consciousness. The effect
is a seemingly blank or empty self, which is here clipped by a series of attenuations (“rather,”
“practically,” “in any case,” “I guess”), a nervous hum. This passage comes early in the novel,
when we are introduced to (the ironically named) Rices, an American couple living in New
York City, where Ernie has just completed his fellowship. We learn that the Rices had spent
some time in the Philippines as exchange professors in sociology and library science (they are
thus the fictional counterparts to those scholars who participated in the Cold War global

157
Gonzalez, “The Filipino and the Novel,” Daedalus, 95 (1966), 968.
158
Alegre and Fernandez, eds., Writers and Their Milieu, 193, my emphasis.
43
educational exchange system). Ernie wryly describes the Rices’ time in the Philippines as
having successfully produced in them “a truly touching love for the country, which emotion
was perhaps the hangover of forty weekends or so of lechonadas and tinikling dances” (B,
27). The Rices’ passionate attachment to the Philippines serves a thematic function: they stand
in stark contrast to Ernie’s apparent alienation from his own culture and discomfort around his
compatriots.159 But Gonzalez’s representation of the Rices is also obviously a satire. When the
novel brings our attention to the Filipiniana the Rices’ had brought back from their time in
Manila, including “a lamp that had been fashioned out of an Igorot wood-carving of a hill
woman with a huge basket of sweet-potatoes on her back” (B, 28), we recognize this as a
form of cultural fetish. Ernie calls them “Filipinophiles” (B, 27).
What is the relation of Gonzalez’s muted prose to his novel’s satire of cultural
consumption? The answer to that question depends on juxtaposing The Bamboo Dancers with
the novel that directly preceded it, A Season of Grace (1956 [1954]). The latter novel was
written soon after Gonzalez’s fellowship year in the United States—and the influence of myth
criticism is there everywhere apparent. A novel about the struggles of the kaingineros (slash-
and-burn Filipino farmers), A Season of Grace, as Gonzalez himself would later say, was
inspired by the aim to capture “a mythic urge for the recovery of an idyllic past that has been
destroyed.”160 Set in the author’s hometown in Mindoro, the novel’s pastoral rendering of
barrio or village life is premised on an organismic ideal of Philippine society, wherein life is
tied to the rhythms of the land. A Season of Grace belongs to a genealogy of Philippine
literature in English that looks to native folk culture as a counterpoint to a society dominated
by alien forces of modernization.161 If we compare Gonzalez’s two novels, the following
contrast emerges: Whereas A Season of Grace focuses on life in the Philippine countryside,
emphasizing the ideal of peasant resourcefulness and humility, The Bamboo Dancers looks
overseas, to the United States and to the spiritual waywardness of middle-class life among
Filipino graduate students seeking to find their way in the world.
The difference in setting and subject matter between Gonzalez’s two novels gives
further evidence to our earlier claim that the late 1950s publications of Gonzalez’s The
Bamboo Dancers and Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels mark a broader
literary-historical shift within the Philippine anglophone novel’s primary social referent from
the hacienda system to the new middle class. More locally, we can also see how the change in
subject matter and setting (from Mindoro to New York City) marks a development in
Gonzalez’s own evolution as a writer. Gonzalez’s novels differ in that one focuses on rural life
in the Philippines and the other on study abroad in the United States. Nevertheless, both
exemplify Gonzalez’s understated prose style. When A Season of Grace was published in
1954,162 Gonzalez was already known for his Hemingwayesque “plain” style, a style that

159
Ernie, for example, says: “I had gotten the notion, largely from hearsay, that one’s countryman in
America is a person to be wary about” (B, 22).
160
161
This is especially true for Filipino adaptations of the bildungsroman, for example, Juan C. Laya’s His
Native Soil (1940) and N. V. M. Gonzalez’s The Winds of April (1941), in which colonial modernity,
following Esty’s argument regarding the bildungsroman’s chronotopic dimensions, “unsettled the
progressive and stabilizing discourse of national culture by breaking up cherished continuities between a
people and its language, territory, and polity”; Jed Esty, Unseasonable Youth, 6.
162
A Season of Grace was first serialized in Weekly Women’s Magazine, from April 6 to November 26,
44
inspired both criticism and praise. Whereas Edilberto K. Tiempo, the Philippines’ New Critic,
complained that Gonzalez’s prose was rather too dull, Father Bernad praised it for its native
simplicity.163 Let us consider a passage from A Season of Grace to see how critics understood
the significance of the simplicity of Gonzalez’s style. The following passage describes the
activities of two kaingin woman, Nana Ina and Sabel. It is a slice-of-life scene:
Nana Ina drank hurriedly from one of the coconut shell bowls and then searched
among the buri baskets tucked in behind a bamboo post for her container for
chewing things. Meanwhile, Sabel cleared away the winnowing basket around
which they had sat. She gathered the bits of sweet-potato skin and the banana
leaves in the basket, and walked over to the dirt pile behind the hinagdong tree at
the edge of the yard. When she got back, the old ones were already sharing Nana
Ina’s piece of buyo leaf, her quarter of betel nut, and the tiny amber-colored gourd
which, at the tap of a forefinger, gave out a pinch of powdered lime.164
Displaying little of the paratactic density of a Joaquinian sentence, Gonzalez’s syntax is

“simple”: subjects cleave close to their verbs (“Nana Ina drank,” “Sabel cleared away,” “She
gathered”), suggesting a reciprocity of means and ends, a self-recursive causality. Even in the
longer forms, Gonzalez shows controlled use of coordination, as though to emphasize the
routineness of Sabel and Nana Ina’s activities. The passage is also replete with “local color”
detail: buri baskets, bamboo posts, banana leaves, betel nut, the hinagdong tree, sweet-potato
skin. Scenes like the one rendered here have been interpreted as exemplary of Gonzalez’s
literary nativism, or “Filipinism,” prompting one critic to label Gonzalez a “regional
realist.”165 In his review of A Season of Grace, Father Bernad cited an American editor who
had praised Gonzalez for his “absolute authenticity,”166 before going on to celebrate what
Bernad himself regarded as Gonzalez’s faithful depictions of “the sound of birds, the smell of
grass, the coming on of night, and the fragrance of ripened rice.”167 Two years later, when
Gonzalez’s short story collection Children of the Ash-Covered Loam (1956) was published,
Father Bernad would similarly laud the regional realism in those stories for achieving “a local
color that is authentic” and a “vividness” so real that it is almost “photographic.”168 In his
intention to represent the “mythic urge for the recovery of an idyllic past,” Gonzalez appears
to have produced Philippine fiction whose apparent nativism his readers took
anachronistically as an immediate reflection of contemporary society, an aesthetic judgment

1954, before it was published in book form in 1956.
163
See Edilberto K. Tiempo, “The Fiction of N. V. M. Gonzalez,” in Literary Criticism in the Philippines
and Other Essays (Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1995), 281–320; and Miguel A. Bernad,
“Gonzalez’s A Season of Grace,” Philippine Studies, 5 (1957), 340–42.
164
N. V. M. Gonzalez, A Season of Grace (Manila: Benipayo Press, 1956 [1954]), 47–48.
165
A. G. Roseburg, Pathways to Philippine Literature in English (Quezon City: Alemar-Phoenix
Publishing House, 1966), 113.
166
Miguel A. Bernad, Bamboo and the Greenwood Tree (Manila: Bookmark, 1961), 41.
167
Ibid., 47.
168
Miguel A. Bernad, “Review of ‘Children of the Ash-Covered Loam and Other Stories’ by N. V. M.
Gonzalez,” Philippine Studies 4.1 (1956), 111.
45
that involved reducing the work to what Adorno, speaking more generally on the infiltration
of culture-industry commoditization in the literary arts, called “a local-color
commercialism.”169 In aiming to achieve myth-critical literary expression, Gonzalez had
unwittingly invited culturally essentializing modes of reading.
Returning to our passage in The Bamboo Dancers, in which Ernie Rama is in New
York City at the Rices’ Manhattan apartment, we can now recognize the critical significance
of the Filipiniana souvenir. If we reconsider “the lamp that had been fashioned out of an
Igorot wood-carving of a hill woman with a huge basket of sweet-potatoes on her back,” we
see that it is the reproduction, in commodity form, of the same kaingin women described in A
Season of Grace. The Rices’ Filipiniana is Gonzalez’s mirror-image of the so-called authentic,
near-photographic literary depictions of native life for which he had become routinely praised.
In this light, we can view Gonzalez’s shift of setting and subject matter as resulting from his
efforts to rework his initial aims of producing myth-critical representations of Philippine
culture. Gonzalez’s apparent choice in The Bamboo Dancers to break decisively away from
the Philippine pastoral that had defined so much of his earlier fiction is tendentious. The
urban setting allowed him to unseat those norms of representativity that, by the late 1950s,
had come to govern the critical reception of his work in the Philippines. The satire of cultural
consumption in The Bamboo Dancers thus doubles as a satire of contemporary Philippine
reading practices. As a critique of cultural consumption, the satire issues from Gonzalez’s
manipulation of the gap between the two contrasting thematic extremes internal to the novel’s
action: the Rices’ fetishistic identification with Philippine culture and Ernie Rama’s supposed
disidentification from it. Here literary impersonality works narratively to amplify this
thematic contrast; it defines the ironic distance in relation to which the narrator rejects the
Rices’ cultural essentialism. As a critique of contemporary Philippine reading practices, the
satire works meta-fictionally. If Ernie Rama’s narrative was intended to be read as a product
of “creative writing” (a structural conceit belonging to the workshop novel’s self-
referentiality), his “inauthenticity” as a homodiegetic writer-narrator might be read as
signifying Gonzalez’s strong refusal of the writing workshop’s demands for literary auto-
ethnography, that is, of refusing to let the narrating “I” become a “native I.”170
What had been a certain “simplicity” in A Season of Grace is therefore adjusted in The
Bamboo Dancers as “impersonality.” In suspending immediate interiority, literary
impersonality in The Bamboo Dancers sought to hold in productive tension the “Filipino”
Ernie Rama was supposed to represent and the cultural expectations that readers held of such
a representation. In this respect, the impersonal tone of the narration can be said to negotiate
two norms, one literary and the other extra-literary, that shaped the composition of Gonzalez’s
Rockefeller Foundation novel. First, insofar as literary impersonality is a function of The

169
Theodor W. Adorno, “The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel,” in Notes to Literature,
Volume 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 30.
170
See Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession 91 (1991): 33–40. On the definition of
literary auto-ethnography, Pratt writes: “[It is a] text in which people undertake to describe themselves in
ways that engage with representations other have made of them. Thus if ethnographic texts are those in
which European metropolitan subjects represent to themselves their others (usually their conquered others),
autoethnographic texts are representations that the so-defined others construct in response to or in dialogue
with these texts” (35). On how this autoethnographic dimension shaped the postwar creative writing credo
of “Finding Your Voice,” see the chapter on “Our Phonocetrism: Finding the Voice of the (Minority)
Storyteller,” in McGurl, The Program Era, 227–272.
46
Bamboo Dancers’ self-consciousness as a workshop novel, it is a result of Gonzalez’s effort to

hold to the calibrations of “impersonality, technique, and self-discipline” that he learned
during his US training in creative writing.171 Second, the novel’s subject matter and first-
person narration satisfy, however minimally or only nominally, the demand back home for
socially committed literature. The dialectical articulation of the first “literary” norm with the
second “extra-literary” one, I argue, makes for the satirical bite of The Bamboo Dancers. For
Gonzalez, literary impersonality served to displace the unexamined culturalisms that
dominated the multiple social and intellectual milieux he inhabited—from the local and
metropolitan demands for so-called “authentic” auto-ethnographic representations of
Philippine culture, essentialized notions of Filipinoness in the contemporary economic
movement of “Filipinization,” and the racism of American stereotypes to which the creative
writing workshops themselves surely were not immune.172
The Impact of New Criticism
If “[o]ne of the central issues in Philippine literature,” as Caroline S. Hau argues, “has been
the question of whether literary texts . . . are able to fulfill the practical social function of
rewriting Philippine history by transforming collective consciousness and spurring political
action aimed at social change,”173 New Criticism, as it was understood and practiced by
Filipino writers in English, neither obviated this need for socially useful works nor did it
eclipse the question of the “nation” in discussions of literary form. As I have tried to show, far
from resulting in a turn away from politics—or what E. San Juan Jr., lamenting the
assimilation of Filipino writers to New Critical formalism, called a “reactionary
aesthetics”174—Filipino uses of New Criticism led them to confront and contribute
meaningfully to the “long-standing affinity between literature and nationalism.”175 While
anglophone writers of the postwar period did not exactly promote a revolutionary aesthetics—
for example, the kind that characterized the Propaganda Movement of the late-Spanish
colonial period or the one that will be advanced by the social realism movement of the 1960s
and 1970s—neither did they abandon the progressive elements of postwar Filipino
nationalism.
Convention has it that New Criticism in the Philippines introduced a formalism that
necessarily resulted in the de-historicization of Philippine literature. However, as I have
argued, the “importing” of New Criticism and the ascension of import and foreign exchange
controls in the 1950s came together to produce, and mutually reinforce, a broader discourse
about “national form.” On the one hand, postwar economic nationalisms such as Garcia’s
1958 “Filipino First” fueled the post-independence desire for the so-called Great Filipino
Novel, which embodied a set of extra-literary norms against which the writer produced his or
her work—what Edilberto K. Tiempo and others grasped as the question of Philippine

171
McGurl, The Program Era, 147.
172
See my discussion of Wilfrido D. Nolledo’s Iowa Writers’ Workshop experience in ch. 3.
173
Hau, Necessary Fictions, 10.
174
San Juan Jr., The Philippine Temptation, 41.
175
Hau, Necessary Fictions, 6.
47
literature’s social relevance. On the other hand, as a product of the Cold War world-literary
system that brought Filipino writers to US creative writing programs and back, a global
educational exchange program designed as an instrument of political pacification, the
importation of New Criticism into the Philippines resulted in the development of a critical
reflexive framework within which writers could work through those local and metropolitan
imperatives at the level of the form. I argued that N. V. M. Gonzalez’s adaptation of the
workshop novel’s narrative self-referentiality and Joaquin’s temporalization of national-
historical time are paradigmatic examples of postwar dialectical resolutions of literary form
and national form, in which Filipino “culture” and “history” were reconfigured and articulated
according to the concrete ends and social constraints of the authors’ time and milieu.
Thus, when literary critic Bienvenido Lumbera noted in 1976 that “[t]he existentialist
insistence on the problem of [Filipino] identity resulted in fiction and poetry that looked
inward and explored the fine intricacies of individual sensibilities,” thereby “prodd[ing] some
writers to see a parallel between the individual human being and the Filipino nation,”176
Lumbera might have gone on to observe that such “parallel” concerns and “existentialist
insistence” were in fact for postwar writers the problem of negotiating and ultimately
maintaining a formal balance between competing, though analogous, values of national form:
political sovereignty and financial equilibrium in the economic realm; and aesthetic autonomy
and organic unity in the literary realm. If, after 1946, Filipino writers in English were tasked
from one side to produce socially useful literature (the Great Filipino Novel) and from the
other side to measure up to formalist aesthetic standards (New Critical values of form), they
confronted these two seemingly mutually exclusive tasks not by negation, but rather by
reflexively articulating one as the object of the other.
This chapter tried to show that the dual entrenchment of New Criticism and the Great
Filipino Novel in the context of import-substitution inspired writers such as Gonzalez and
Joaquin to affirm the pedagogical-utopian potential of the Philippine anglophone novel, and
this by taking as its direct novelistic object of representation what had emerged—after the fall
of the Huk rebellion, in the mid-1950s—as a critical agent of post-independence national
formation, namely, the social consciousness of the new middle class. I showed that Gonzalez
and Joaquin aimed to represent the “identity” of this emergent social group by adapting the
conventions of the workshop novel and historical fiction respectively, adaptations that in turn
led to their formally contrasting, though pedagogically complementary, realist prose styles.
By historicizing the formal demands of New Criticism and the Great Filipino Novel as they
appeared in Gonzalez’s and Joaquin’s novels, I argued that the late-1950s publications of The
Bamboo Dancers and The Woman Who Had Two Navels constituted an important turning
point in the literary history of the Filipino novel in English: in representing Filipino middle-
class life overseas, Gonzalez’s and Joaquin’s novels signify a change in this literature’s
primary social referent from the hacienda-based agricultural economy to the industrial
economy that had consolidated itself in the credit-expansive, import-substituting era of the
long 1950s.

176
Bienvenido Lumbera, Revaluation: Essays on Philippine Literature, Cinema, and Popular Culture
(Manila: Index, 1984), 298, emphasis added.
48

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The Importation of New Criticism into the Philippines

Part One: Around 1958

Edilberto K. Tiempo: The Philippines’ New Critic

If a literary piece must contain propaganda . . . then the propagandistic content of

cultivation of morally sound citizens contributed to the tendency of Philippine literary

would describe as a social disciplining of craft, a neo-Aristotelian aesthetic evaluation of

Cold War World-Literary System

policy of “benevolent assimilation,” which funded study-abroad programs as a way to prepare

N. V. M. Gonzalez: Philippine Literature as Public Works System

organic unity to a sociopolitical context (post-independence Philippines), whereby ideals of

Part II: After 1958

The Long 1950s

sensibilities, Filipinization in the economic realm sought to “replace non-Filipinos engaged in

The long 1950s is full of Filipino experiments in “liquidating financial colonialism,”

literary self-ethnography,115 or what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak more pointedly describes as

. . . he believed her at once; she seemed so . . .

Typographically marked by the use of punctuation, Joaquin’s presentation of competing

The import-substitution program . . . promoted the expansion of an urban middle

Social change is also accelerated by the concentration of activities associated with

Notwithstanding the Eurocentrism of its comparative frame, Golay’s statement is significant

We rather frequented the apartment of the Rices, it must be admitted. The

Displaying little of the paratactic density of a Joaquinian sentence, Gonzalez’s syntax is

Bamboo Dancers’ self-consciousness as a workshop novel, it is a result of Gonzalez’s effort to

The Impact of New Criticism

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