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In Madison, Wisconsin, we had a professor who said in our “Recent
British Literature” class that there was a Liars Club on campus.
It was spring and the students were looking out longingly on Lake
Mendota where others were flexing their bodies rowing or sailing.
One of us deigned to ask who constituted the Liars Club. Those who
had read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, the teacher said.
Thus did we realize (with relief) that this
experimental novel, Finnegans Wake, which needs a key (a book
thicker than the novel) to unlock it, would not be part of our texts
on Irish writers. A few would later claim Club membership.
I am reminded of this incident whenever I meet
somebody who claims he has read Karl Marx’s Capital—usually one
who exudes an air of “been there, done that” and extols the
virtues of Adam Smith. Well, people usually interchange the
Communist Manifesto (easier to read) with Das Kapital, and I won’t
claim membership in the Club of readers of esoterica.
My late ‘40s and early ‘50s generation had
easy access to the USIS (United States Information Service) library
in Escolta where we were fed a diet of Cold War books like The God
That Failed and other works of disaffected Left writers like Max
Eastman, Richard Wright, and Arthur Koestler. In our sophomoric
compositions we were adept at using the rhetoric of the “Free
World” in its struggle against “godless communism.”
But there was also the Popular Bookstore (at
Doroteo Jose) which carried radical publications including the
Manifesto and Capital together with the The Wealth of Nations and
Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead found in USIS shelves. Also available were
books on New Criticism by John Crowe Ransom, William Empson, Allen
Tate, Mark Schorer, and Cleanth Brooks—promoting formalist reading
which Terry Eagleton said later had the effect of insulating
students from “the contexts of literature, possible only if
historical or Marxist criticism were employed.” New Criticism then
was used as a Cold War tool in the academe.
The prescribed text for Introduction to
Literature was Approach to Literature, by Brooks, Purser and Warren,
which accounts for the prevalence of formalist reading in U.P. for
decades. My M.A. thesis on the “Filipino Short Story in English”
was refused by a faculty critic on the ground that it did not
conform to the current “textual criticism.” I did use a bit of
context in that thesis, thanks to my adviser Leopoldo Y. Yabes who
appreciated the proletarian trend of the Philippine Writers League
during the Commonwealth period covered in my study.
During the McCarthyite witch-hunting and
Military Intelligence Service surveillance on campus in the ‘50s,
liberal-minded students were challenging red-baiting students of the
UPSCA to read Marxist texts. I have known persons in the Left
movement who admitted they were former UPSCA members. One of them
wrote a primer on Karl Marx’s Capital and another formed his own
Marxist-Leninist group before martial law. Both went through torture
during detention.
My intro to socialist thought was through
literary works like Christopher Caudwell’s Illusion and Reality,
Stanley Hyman’s The Armed Vision, and Edmund Wilson’s To the
Finland Station bought at the Popular. From what I remember,
Wilson’s book traces the growth of socialism from the cooperatives
and communes of the “utopian socialists” in the early 19th
century to “scientific socialism” starting with the 1848
Communist Manifesto, the works of Engels, the 1872 Paris Commune,
the anarchism of Bakunin and Kropotkin, to Lenin who returned from
exile to Russia in turmoil through the Finland station in St.
Petersburg to lead the October 1917 revolution.
The ‘50s was a heady decade of grappling with
ideology, of nationalist professors and students surveilled and
blacklisted on campus, and of having one’s picture in the Sunday
Times Magazine as one of U.P. faculty whose names were given to an
MIS agent as Red suspects. Somehow I was still able to leave for
Madison in 1957 for graduate study.
By then the students who counted were a new
breed. Initially their banner was academic freedom, and they
launched a big demonstration to protest the congressional Commitee
on Anti-Filipino Activities (CAFA) probe of “communist”
professors. The students linking up with labor and peasantry would
resuscitate the Left movement in the 60s. A few of the advanced ones
would do more than what the Parisian students did in the barricades
of May 1968—late that year.
As Rolando Simbulan put it, with a revitalized
Left, the Philippines was never the same again.
eaordoñez2000@yahoo.com
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