Stories Revisited: Reply to a Critic

By Cesar Ruiz Aquino

“Stories,” the title of my short story which was fortunate enough to get published abroad in
1990 and receive a nice word of praise from American novelist Kelly Cherry, got a bad critical
beating recently from—of all people—Dr. Edilberto K. Tiempo, my own mentor in English
through all the lean, romping undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate years at Silliman. Dr.
Tiempo’s commentary, reprinted in last year’s Sands & Coral, was part of a larger article which
served as the introduction to Mindanao Harvest, a fiction anthology compiled and edited by
Sillimanians now teaching in Iligan.
Dr. Edilberto K. Tiempo belongs to, in my opinion, the most achieved generation of Filipino
writers in English, a group that would include Villa, Joaquin, Arguilla, Arcellana, Santos,
Gonzalez, Alfon, Polotan, Angeles—the group that was father and mother to my own war
babies generation. Tiempo is one of our classics in the short story and the novel. But what most
people don’t know is that he is one of our very few competent practitioners in that rather
neglected, in the Philippine setting, field: literary criticism. What serious Filipino student of
literary writing can forget his fifties criticism of Nick Joaquin’s short story “The Summer
Solstice”?
I read his “review” of my story with mixed, but rather mild, feelings. Here goes my reply—
or is it replies—together with texts from Dr. Ed’s criticism.

The most difficult to write and the most ambitious in this collection is Cesar Aquino’s “Stories,” a
Palanca award winner.

Ahem. Thank you.

He begins with a wrong premise: “What I am about to set down consists of three stories which I had
originally wanted to write separately.” Actually there are four stories, not three: [1] that of the mad
woman whose baby was eaten by a dog; [2] the boy-husband Kip whose girl-wife disappears for a couple
of days while be is hospitalized for a disease the author has withheld from the reader; [3] William, an ex-
soldier and a CAFGU, who speaks Chavacano … who comes from Zamboanga; a few days later William
is murdered; [4] a mad woman … from La Carlota looking for Marj … Why he mentions, initially, only
three stories when there are really four, is one thing that invalidates his story-telling.

First: the author, who is neither omniscient nor completely the I-persona or speaker in the
story, did not withhold Kip’s disease from the reader. He did not know it himself, being only
the recipient of one of the stories—that of Rimando.
Second: if the I-persona, who is not necessarily a perfect duplicate of the author, has got
faulty arithmetic and thinks there are three, not four, stories—that is his fault, not the author’s.
What I mean is that the I-persona is a legitimate character in the story. If he is indeed the author,
one can say that he, the author, has become fictional, and resemblance to anyone is purely
coincidental.
But the truth is, even granted that, the I-persona’s arithmetic is not faulty. He expressly says
there are three stories because he treats the William story and the Esther Lim story as one, the
two incidents being linked together tenuously by his, the I-persona’s, jacket.
In the last paragraph the author says William the CAFGU might have sired the mad woman’s baby
devoured by the dog. The narrator’s black jacket which he had gallantly put around the shoulders of the
other mad woman Ester Lopez became she felt cold is now bullet-ridden on William’s body. How did this
happen? Had Ester Lopez given it to Williams, or had she asked him to return the jacket to Aquino? We
don’t know. Kip, the boy-husband, and his girl-wife—where and how do they come into the jigsaw
puzzle? In this last paragraph Kip is described as “hapless”; there is no indication about this
“haplessness” when we see him in the hospital; in fact the college girls who came to visit find him
fascinating. And then from nowhere comes Emy (“It served you”—the narrator refers to the narrator
—“well when Emy could not have loved you.”) Who is Emy? The first and only mention of her was
when the narrator said she was the only one who correctly answered that a baby’s gurgling laughter was
the best sound in the world. All the characters appear, as in a reprise, in this last-paragraph soliloquy that
is really a meandering sentimental drivel and that sounds ultimately meaningless because of the coercive
manipulation that found the material too diverse to coerce.

This is a mixture of keen detection and surprisingly careless reading on the critic’s part.
William’s siring of the mad woman’s baby is a playful, figurative play with ideas, and is not
meant to be literal by the author/narrator.
The black jacket could not have been bullet-riddled. William was not shot, he was stabbed.
After being stabbed several times, he managed to pull his gun out and fire a few shots.
After Kip’s short-lived happiness with his visitors (nursing students, not “college girls”
which would have been less specific), he lives through a bad time—two or three days—when
his girl-wife disappears, clearly pained with jealousy, and leaves Kip by himself in the hospital.
He weeps when she finally returns.
The narrator adds that he never knew what happened afterwards to Kip, whether Kip went
home cured or not.
Who is Emy? She is the girl in the narrator’s past whom he once loved and obviously
remembers with regret, and whom he obviously regrets not having won and married, now that
he is middle-aged and is spending his ripe years with a pair of very old, decrepit parents. I felt,
not I think unreasonably, that I did not have to bring in too many details about Emy. Minimal,
given the sort of experimental story I was writing, being optimal. (And Emy is mentioned three
times, not twice as the critic emphatically claims.)
The narrator was not referring to the narrator! It is William, the ghost of William, talking to
him. Inaccuracies like this, which rather abound, as I have shown, in his critical piece, convince
me that Dr. Tiempo was off form when he wrote his piece. Nevertheless he catches me
momentarily pale with the sharp observation that the story fails to account for the jacket being
worn by William when William is killed! I did fail to depict the narrator’s retrieval of the jacket,
which he has momentarily lent to Esther Lim. A close re-reading would reveal, however, that
there was no way the jacket could have found its way back to the narrator’s hands unless it was
returned to him that same night.
My ex-mentor’s real, really serious, missile is the perception that the author may have
coercively manipulated his material:

By coercing some metaphysical linkage he thought he could make four absolutely disparate situations
cohere... Indeed the last paragraph is a mumbo-jumbo attempt at meaning definition by coercively
melding four extremely disparate situations…

The angry old man of Philippine letters may be right! But I am hopeful it is an open
question. The saving point for the story may be that the author-narrator has himself become a
character in the story so that he can be allowed to maunder, wax and wane sentimental,
perhaps drivel, even somewhat—yeah—coerce. If this is so, then the story is all of a piece.

Experimentation within the story form (such as was find in “Stories” is always a formidable proposition
and is therefor to be applauded.