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The first time I saw Franz was at a junior faculty lecture in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. This was sometime in 1991. I had just entered the UP as an instructor, and while I cannot remember just what exactly the lecture by a young and pretty colleague was about--all I can recall is that it was extravagantly long, “post-structural” and full of polysyllabic word--what stands out in my memory is the image of a lanky old man, standing up at the very end of it. Shouting, “Turn your back on the void!” he promptly walked out of the room. “That was Franz,” the person beside me carefully whispered. Franz: Francisco Arcellana, named National Artist for Literature by President Corazon Aquino only the previous year, and author of the stories “The Mats” and “Divide by Two” which I’d read and loved while in university a city away, the famous man of letters after whom the room we were sitting in was named. I was dumbfounded. What he said sounded mysterious then, but reading up on contemporary literary theory for my MA I soon realized how true it was. Post-structuralism and its allied theories do traffic in and celebrate the void: because language is a differential play of empty signifiers, meaning is consequently indeterminate; there’s a failure of communication, an “aporia” or undecidability inherent in every text; thus, the author as originator and guarantor of textual meaning is dead. In other words, in all of this, there isn’t so much meaning as a whole lot of demeaning going on. Franz, who was not only an author but a teacher of creative writing to several generations of writers in the university, simply had to stand his ground and say, Excuse me, but no. As he had said No from the very beginning. In an essay that appeared in the Herald Mid-Week Magazine in 1940, Franz writes: “The artist is he who knows how best to live... The artistic activity is in itself a reaching towards meaning in life... Life is Art only when it is life as it should be lived at its best, heightened, intensified... Art is the dream made flesh.” It is clear, then: for Franz, to live as an artist is to live ethically. In his scheme of things, the artist is someone who continually turns his or her back on the void. Reading that essay, as well as all the other “well-wrought” pieces of prose and poetry in The Francisco Arcellana Sampler, one clearly senses the strength of his commitment to his vocation, the finicky love with which he fashioned his every lyric utterance, the faith he professed in the artist’s sovereignty, his passion for the life of the mind. And it was not a naive but a self-critical passion, as his insight into “Filipino writing in English” reveals: “The language came with the conquest--the soldiers were our first teachers--and then afterwards proved to be the most powerful weapon of that conquest.” But after summarizing the astonishing accomplishments of Filipinos writing in English for half-a-century, he concludes that the “job” of writing is two-fold: to understand ourselves better, and to be better understood by others. While the Filipino writer in English may not be helping much in relation to the former, he or she is certainly doing the latter well: “the effort to be better understood; to interpret us to others.” Writing with uncanny clairvoyance in 1960, Franz ends his meditation thus: “And in time, at the rate the world is shrinking and boundaries are disappearing, this part of the job of writing may be the more important part after all.” Always the deliberate person, Franz “meditated” on everything he held dear in his art. In an interview, he was asked what the “unifying thread” was in his stories, and he answered: “Death, the family, and of course, love--and the relation of love to madness.” Explaining further, he added that “as soon as you have glimpsed the face of beauty, you are forever, you are forever dedicated to the thought of death.” And also: “family... is a very strong force in Filipino life... that holds us Orientals together.” Asked his opinion concerning “socially committed writing,” he said that the more important consideration is honesty: “To do it just because everybody is doing it is a kind of dishonesty... They wanted everybody to write proletarian literature, even if you didn’t know a damn about it...what could you possibly write about honestly?” And yet, at the same time, he believed that literature must be written “to change people... [because] a poem can change everything.” Scattered throughout this life-work of a book are many other “verbal gems”--Franz’s seemingly random and always compelling thoughts about language; about how it is to be fully human, a poet and, of course, a writer of stories. On language: “It is our doom that we can work only with nothing more or less than words. It is our sad fate that we have no other means, no other end. Words are not necessary to love.” On poetry: “Poetry is the only way we have to fairly approach the work of art: with poetry we feel we are not so helpless; in fact, with poetry we feel that we are armed, that we are adequately armed.” On being a fictionist: “The fiction writer creates a world; creates, to populate it, people who love and hate, suffer and die... moves and shakes the world and people in happenings he alone makes to come to pass. In other words, he behaves exactly like a God.” On the joy of writing: “Happiness is working out a story idea, fleshing out a story line. I cannot imagine a state more desirable! With the possible exception of swimming, I cannot imagine an activity more pleasuring. On the pride of fiction: “The pride of the fiction writer [is that] he has a story to tell, a story that is his alone and nobody else’s. He tells it because only he can tell it in quite the way it should be told: if he does not, nobody else will.” What all this proves is Franz was one of those rare writers whose quotes are eminently quotable: he just had a nice way of putting things. Even Nick Joaquin, writing in the program notes of the National Artist Awards in 1990, simply had to allude to Franz’s fanciful idiolect: “Franz himself has been reported as saying: the griffin is no good unless it is galloping--not just trotting, cantering, prancing or standing still... A monster of a very artist indeed: he himself has been heard to say, An artist of a very monster!” In the same program, Joaquin “gossipingly” writes that Franz was the fourth in a brood of eighteen, that his family lived by turns in Santa Cruz, Tondo and Paco; that he had always loved to walk, admired most and wanted most to be like Arturo B. Rotor, loved to swim and watch tennis; that he cartpushed vegetables in Divisoria during the Japanese occupation, worked as a proofreader in the Evening News, joined an ad agency with head offices in New York City; that he became a transcriber and Manila correspondent of the International News Service before finally being invited by Dr. Vidal A. Tan to become UP’s first-ever Press Relations Officer and a member of the faculty. It was in UP where I met Franz, founding director of the Creative Writing Center, professor emeritus and avid supporter of young writers, teaching with much gusto and intelligence, well into his 70s. It was in UP where I read some more of his stories, essays and poems, where we became colleagues and, soon enough, friends. While I was a fellow at the UP National Writers Workshop in the summer of 1992, Franz had this brash bit of advice to give the aspiring fiction writer: Get real! For many years, in my own creative writing classes, faced with the “youthful” manuscripts of students who could not yet understand that they must write about what they knew, I would find myself recycling Franz’s pithy imperative now and again: Get real! Writing this essay now, I am acutely aware that I cannot ever say these words, cannot ever think of Franz again, without also being sorrowed: yesterday, just a little before noon, Franz passed away at the Intensive Care Unit of the National Kidney Institute, after a month-long bout with pneumonia. He would have turned 86 on September 6. About such things there are no words to say. But perhaps there are... Franz himself thought about this once. In a “Letter to a Poet” that appeared in the University College Journal in 1962, Franz surprisingly intuited poetry’s most important role in this life: to attend to its silences, to help us approach the unapproachable, things like the Sublimity of Nature, the Beauty of Art, God, life’s irreparable losses. Full of humble hope, he writes: “with poetry we feel that we are adequately armed.” As though he already knew, even then, how grappling with the unsayable entails a form of violence, a harrowing struggle. And so I am ending this essay with poetry, as Franz presciently counsels. The poem’s occasion, strangely enough, was a lecture. This time, I was the one giving it, and because it took all of one hour I can only imagine how “extravagantly long” it must have felt to the thirty students who were required to sit in it, to the three or four fellow-teachers who yawned cavernously through it, and to Franz, to dear Franz, who sat there and listened and very kindly stayed. Not that there was something he might have particularly fancied about my topic, which was--of all things--drag-queens! Whatever interest he had, I understood that he was there primarily to show his support, to lend his presence, to compassionate with me. At the end of it, everybody was in a hurry to leave. Everybody except Franz, who came up to me and said: “Neil, always remember that it is a greater thing to love than be loved.” Yet again, I was dumbfounded. But not for the same reason. I was overwhelmed because I realized I was being given gift, and I wasn’t sure I’d done anything to deserve it. The following poem was, is my attempt to deserve it. Three years ago I wrote this poem for Francisco Arcellana, Art’s lovely dreamer who died yesterday. The dream lives forever: long live Franz! ------------------------------------------------------- For Franz Everyone
is born naked and after that, everything is drag. You
sit to listen to me talk URL: http://www.up.edu.ph/franz.htm
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