Prof. E. San Juan, Jr. delivers keynote lecture at the Nick Joaquin Centennial Forum Series Part II in UST

By Nicole R. Tablizo

Last year’s birth centenary of National Artist Nick Joaquin was celebrated by UST in a forum titled “Portrait of a National Artist: Nick Joaquin Centennial Commemorative Lectures and Panel Presentation on Cultural Studies,” held on February 14, 2017 at the Thomas Aquinas Research Center (TARC) auditorium and led by the Research Center for Culture, Arts and Humanities (RCCAH) as part of the Research Fortnight. The centennial lecture title, “Nick Joaquin: Magus and Millennium” was delivered by Charlson Ong, while Joselito Zulueta delivered the commemorative lecture with the title “The Catholic Imagination in Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels.” This celebration commemorated the great contribution of Nick Joaquin to Philippine Literature.

This year, the celebration and commemoration continued with the Nick Joaquin Centennial Forum Series Part 2 held on February 24, 2018. The keynote lecture was delivered by Prof. Epifanio San Juan, Jr. whose comprehensive studies on the oeuvre of Nick Joaquin are collected in a book Subversions of Desire which is slated to be a special reprint edition to be published in UNITAS. The said book, a collection of essays, was first published in 1988 and is currently the only book-length in-depth study on Nick Joaquin’s various works written by a single author.

The Nick Joaquin Centennial Forum Part 2 was held on February 24, 2018 at the TARC auditorium. It also featured panel of speakers including Dr. Gabriel Jose Gonzalez, SJ, of Ateneo de Naga University, Dr. Vincenz Serrano, of Ateneo de Manila University, Dr. Lily Rose Tope of the University of the Philippines, and Mr. Joselito Zulueta of the University of Santo Tomas. The forum is part of the Research Fortnight led by RCCAH.

Last year, Penguin Classics published a collection of Nick Joaquin’s works The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic to also mark his birth centenary. In his Foreword to the UNITAS Special Reprint, Prof. E. San Juan, Jr. notes that this event confirms Nick Joaquin’s status as “transnational writer, planetary artist.” The publication by a major international publishing house canonizes Nick Joaquin as a representative writer of the Philippines in the larger literary production market. Nick Joaquin was described, in the book spiels, as similar in style to the Colombian Nobel Prize-winning writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez whose name is often linked to magical realism. He was also likened to another Nobel Prize winner, Latin American Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, in dealing with the nation’s history through his works.

On the other hand, the drawing of similarities between Nick Joaquin and the two big names of the Latin American Boom could be perceived as a way of making Nick Joaquin familiar, marketing him to an international audience who is already acquainted with magical realism and the exoticism it conjures and the magical realistic portraits of a post-colonial country that had been under tyrannical regimes. This may have the effect of homogenizing Nick Joaquin’s literary style, lumping him as secondary, an off-shoot or a similar reading under magical realism or post-colonial satirical writing. Scholars, however, have argued that Nick Joaquin does not write in the manner of magical realism but in his own distinct style called “Joaquinesque” or “Joaquinesque Filipinism.”

Prof. E. San Juan, Jr.’s introduction in his keynote lecture titled “Nick Joaquin’s Apocalypse: Women and the Tragicomedy of the ‘Unhappy Unconscious’” in this year’s forum dealt with Nick Joaquin’s works through the lens of what Walter Benjamin called “The Storyteller, one who communicates and passes along wisdom through stories. For Benjamin it was specifically the novel form which could revitalize epic memory. According to Prof. E. San Juan, Jr. what is at stake in judging Nick Joaquin’s relevance today is his evocation of “memory, homeland, the narration of collective experience, shared fate” as may be drawn from his novels The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Cave and Shadows. The keynote lecture read Joaquin through Hegel’s ideas in order to reflect on the question of whether or not Joaquin succeeds in his project of re-inventing the national allegory of the Filipino as Subject through his works.