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At the beginning of Miguel Syjuco's debut novel, "Ilustrado", the body of Crispin Salvador, an acclaimed Filipino author, is dredged up from the Hudson River. A devoted student and protégé of Crispin's, also named Miguel Syjuco, sets off for Manila to investigate the disappearance of Crispin's final manuscript. His quest is one of scholarship, genealogy and criminal sleuthing. Embedded in an immensely readable pastiche of letters, e-mails, blog posts, memoir, interviews and poetry is an epic spanning four generations. "Ilustrado" is a critique of modern-day Manila and the story of "Miguel", an aspiring young writer caught between cultures and alliances.

 

Miguel Syjuco combines disparate styles, tenses and points of view to evoke his native Philippines with modern candour and historical sensitivity. His prose is sophisticated, his form is mischievous, and he tends to narratives both big and small with equal care. Syjuco, winner of the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize, spoke with More Intelligent Life about his elaborate writing process, the trouble with hyphenated writers and the perversity of the Allman Brothers.

 

More Intelligent Life: How did you actually write “Ilustrado”? It’s bricolage, so did you work on each part separately? Was there a lot of rearranging involved? Walk me through the process.

Miguel Syjuco: Well, the first version of the novel was not a bricolage at all. I started it as part of my PhD, and it was monolithic and boring. I actually felt sorry for my advisors, and I quickly realised that if I was bored by it and my advisors were bored by it, the novel needed to change. About this time, I saw a documentary on Filipino textile weavers. They wove cohesive fabrics out of different coloured threads, but first they had to spin each thread individually. And something just clicked. My writing practice changed entirely, and I began typing in ten different Word documents. I developed each narrative thread separately and then wove them together to create patterns, just as I’d seen done in the textiles. But the process became too big after a while, so I had to develop my own system. I summarised each fragment in a single sentence as a way of synthesising it for myself. I colour-coded each fragment (pictured above) according to which narrative thread it corresponded with. I opened up ten file folders representing the ten chapters of the book. I printed all the fragments out, cut them into strips, backed the strips and the folders with Velcro, and physically rearranged the fragments to create narrative arcs within each chapter and in the context of the entire novel. This novel would have been impossible without copy and paste, and without that system I devised.

MIL: The excerpts from Crispin Salvador’s work are complex and rich in themselves. Was this an alternate novel you were working on, or did you write these parts as needed?

MS: Well, the books and articles and stories excerpted in the book weren’t entirely complete, but I did develop them at length. I ended up using only about 10% of what I wrote. I think when you exercise restraint, you’re left with work that’s imbibed with a really distilled sort of energy. I studied closely with the writer John Evans at Columbia, and he taught me this restraint, that you have to cut out a third so that the remainder is worth it. You get rid of the sand in the gears.

MIL: Virginia Woolf famously described “To the Lighthouse” as an “H”—that is that the novel’s shape was “two blocks joined by a corridor.” Does "Ilustrado" have a particular 'shape'?

MS: That’s interesting. I think of it maybe not so much as a shape than as something more like music. In jazz and classical, there’s a forward momentum pushed along by recurring thematic motifs. That’s how I tried to organise the book. I like rock music too. The Allman Brothers, you listen to them and you think the song’s going to end, but it doesn’t and then it doesn’t again. It multi-climactic, multi-orgasmic. I thought that would be great for a novel, because who doesn’t want multiple orgasms?

MIL: "Ilustrado" includes a lot of e-mails and blog posts. Do you read blogs? Do you keep one yourself?

MS: No. I don’t keep one myself, but as a Filipino author living abroad, blogs are really the best way to follow the news and politics of the Philippines. I’m pretty old-fashioned though. I read real books. Real newspapers. I don’t even have a cell phone. I’m kind of a Luddite. But for this novel, including blog posts worked well. I needed the didactic form to be able to convey the realities and history of the Philippines and the traditions I’m working from.

MIL: You live in Montreal now, but do you return to Manila often? Would you ever want to move back permanently?

MS: Oh, sure. Someday. But there are opportunities here for writers that don’t exist there. To be anonymous, to get grants, there’s more infrastructure in place here for writers to make ends meet. People ask, “why don’t you come back and teach?” But I’m still learning how to write, how can I teach? I plan on following the grants, the fellowships, the opportunities to grow as a writer. I don’t feel whole yet. I’ve only written one book.

MIL: At one point, in describing a character, you say, “identity was never really a quest for her.” Is this a book about identity? Is identity a big concern for you?

MS: I think identity is a really big barrier for Filipino writers. Instead of reckoning with the world, there’s a tendency towards self-absorbed analysis. I mean, at a certain point, you are who you are—just accept it for all its complications and many, often contradictory, facets. Asian-American writing, African-American writing, hyphenated writing of all kinds is obsessed with selfhood. It’s become a marketable trend, manufacturing a wallowing that will sell. Amy Tan did this 20 years ago, and it worked, but it’s time to move on.
 
MIL: Are there writers that you particularly admire, take inspiration from?

MS: Well, it was great to read Bolaño. I read Bolaño after I finished writing “Ilustrado”, and I took heart. He made me think: “My book isn’t so crazy!” But there are others of course, too. Hemingway, for the sentence, obviously. Nabokov, for the gamesmanship that leads you places dark and deep and delicious. Bellow, for the ideas. Borges, for the intellectualism at the heart of the playfulness. Barthelme once wrote, “The fragment is the only form I trust.” I tend to agree with that, especially in our fragmented, attention-deficit world. Then there are many Filipino writers I admire: Carlos Bulosan, Bienvenido Santos, Jessica Hagedorn, Jose Dalisay, Gregorio Brillantes, Jose Rizal.

MIL: Your protagonist is named Miguel Syjuco. A smart reader should be reluctant to assume he’s merely your alter ego, but it is tempting.

MS: No, Miguel’s not me, but I think that through him and Crispin, a lot of my worries and anxieties are revealed, sort of split between the two of them. There’s part of myself that’s afraid of becoming bitter and contrary—the exiled writer. But I’m also wary of being the lost, naive young writer, setting himself up for a fall. I named him Miguel to keep the reader guessing. There’s a sort of logic to it: if Miguel is thought to be real, then Crispin can be thought to be real, then what’s going on in the Philippines can be thought to be real. A novel should divorce you from all the noise of facts. That’s the truth we try to reach for when we talk about truth in fiction.

 

~ ALICE GREGORY