Published in 1946, Ginto Sa Makiling – a novel by Macario Pineda, is the first work of

note that appeared after the second world war. In plot, it hews close to the mode of
romantic fantasy traceable to the awits, koridos and komedyas of the Balagtas tradition.
But it is a symbolical narrative of social, moral and political import. In this, it resembles
not only Balagtas but also Rizal, but in style and plot it is closer to Balagtas in not
allowing the realistic mode to restrict the element of fantasy.

Two novels by writers in English dealt with the war experience: (Medina, p. 194)
Stevan Javellana’s Without Seeing the Dawn (1947), and Edilberto Tiempo’s Watch in
the Night. Both novels hew closely to the realist tradition. Lazaro Francisco, the eminent
Tagalog novelist of the pre-war years, was to continue to produce significant work. He
revised his Bayaning Nagpatiwakal (1932), refashioning its plot and in sum honing his
work as a weapon against the policies that tended to perpetuate American economic
dominance over the Philippines. The updated novel was titled Ilaw Sa Hilaga (1948)
(Lumbera, p. 67). He was to produce three more novels.Sugat Sa Alaala (1950) reflects
the horrors of the war experience as well as the human capacity for nobility, endurance
and love under the most extreme circumstances. Maganda Pa Ang Daigdig (1956)
deals with the agrarian issue, and Daluyong (1962) deals with the corruption bred by the
American-style and American-educated pseudo-reformers. Lazaro Francisco is a realist
with social and moral ideals. The Rizal influence on his work is profound.

The poet Amado Hernandez, who was also union leader and social activist, also
wrote novels advocating social change. Luha ng Buwaya (1963) (Lumbera) deals with
the struggle between the oppressed peasantry and the class of politically powerful
landlords. Mga Ibong Mandaragit (1969) deals with the domination of Filipinos by
American industry (Lumbera, p. 69).

Unfortunately, the Rizalian path taken by Lazaro Francisco and Amado Hernandez
with its social-realist world-view had the effect of alienating them from the mode of the
highly magical oral-epic tradition. Imported social realism (and, in the case of Amado
Hernandez, a brand of socialist empiricism), was not entirely in touch with the folk
sentiment and folk belief, which is why the Tagalog romances (e.g., Ginto Sa Makiling,
serialized in the comics), were far more popular than their work.

It was Philippine Literature in English which tapped the folk element in the
Philippine unconscious to impressive, spectacular effect. Nick Joaquin, through his neo-
romantic, poetic and histrionic style, is reminiscent of the dramas of Balagtas and de la
Cruz. His dizzying flashbacks (from an idealized romantic Spanish past to a squalid
Americanized materialistic present) are cinematic in effect, ironically quite Hollywood-
ish, serving always to beguile and astonish.

Francisco Arcellana, his younger contemporary, was a master of minimalist fiction

that is as native as anything that could be written in English, possessing the potent
luminosity of a sorcerer’s rune.
 Wilfrido Nolledo, fictionist-playwright growing up in the aura of such masters, was
the disciple who, without conscious effort, created a school of his own. His experiments
in plot and plotlessness, his creation of magical scenes, made splendorous by a highly
expressive language, easily became the rage among young writers who quickly joined
(each in his/her own highly original style) the Nolledo trend. Among these poetic
fictionists of the 1960’s were Wilfredo Pasqua Sanchez, Erwin Castillo, Cesar Ruiz
Aquino, Resil Mojares, Leopoldo Cacnio and Ninotchka Rosca. Of them all, only the last
two did not publish verse. Their non-realistic (even anti-realistic) style made them
perhaps the most original group of writers to emerge in the post-war period. But such a
movement that slavishly used the American colonists’ language (according to the
Nationalist, Socialist Tagalog writers who were following A.V. Hernandez) were called
decadent (in the manner of Lukacsian social realism).

Post-war poetry and fiction was dominated by the writers in English educated and
trained in writers’ workshops in the United States or England. Among these were the
novelists Edilberto and Edith Tiempo (who is also a poet), short-fictionist Francisco
Arcellana, poet-critic Ricaredo Demetillo, poet-fictionist Amador Daguio, poet Carlos
Angeles, fictionists N.V.M. Gonzales and Bienvenido N. Santos. Most of these writers
returned to the Philippines to teach. With their credentials and solid reputations, they
influenced the form and direction of the next generation mainly in accordance with the
dominant tenets of the formalist New Critics of America and England.

Even literature in the Tagalog-based national language (now known as Filipino)

could not avoid being influenced or even (in the critical sense) assimilated. College-bred
writers in Filipino like Rogelio Sikat and Edgardo Reyes saw the need to hone their
artistry according to the dominant school of literature in America of that period, despite
the fact that the neo-Aristotelian formalist school went against the grain of their socialist
orientation. Poet-critic Virgilio Almario (1944- ), a.k.a. Rio Alma, in a break-away move
reminiscent of Alejandro Abadilla, and in the formalist (New Critical) mode then
fashionable, bravely opined that Florante at Laura, Balagtas’ acknowledged
masterpiece, was an artistic failure (Reyes, p. 71-72). It was only in the early 1980’s
(Reyes, p. 73) that Almario (after exposure to the anti-ethnocentrism of structuralism
and Deconstruction) revised his views.

The protest tradition of Rizal, Bonifacio and Amado Hernandez found expression in
the works of Tagalog poets from the late 1960’s to the 1980’s, as they confronted
Martial Law and repression. Among these liberationist writers were Jose Lacaba,
Epifanio San Juan, Rogelio Mangahas, Lamberto Antonio, Lilia Quindoza, and later,
Jesus Manuel Santiago. The group Galian sa Arte at Tula nurtured mainly Manila
writers and writing (both in their craft and social vision) during some of the darkest
periods of Martial Law.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes on the printed page, oral literature flourished in the
outlying communities. Forms of oral poetry like the Cebuano Balak, the
Ilokano Bukanegan, the Tagalog Balagtasan, and the SamalTinis-Tinis, continued to be
declaimed by the rural-based bards, albeit to dwindling audiences. In the late 1960’s,
Ricaredo Demetillo had, using English (and English metrics) pioneered a linkage with
the oral tradition. The result was the award-winning Barter in Panay, an epic based on
the Ilonggo epic Maragtas. Inspired by the example, other younger poets wrote epics or
long poems, and they were duly acclaimed by the major award-giving bodies. Among
these poets were writers in English like Cirilo Bautista (The Archipelago, 1968), Artemio
Tadena (Northward into Noon, 1970) and Domingo de Guzman (Moses, 1977).

However, except for Demetillo’s modern epic, these attempts fall short of
establishing a linkage with the basic folk tradition. Indeed, most are more like long
meditative poems, like Eliot’s or Neruda’s long pieces. Interest in the epic waned as the
1980’s approached. The 1980’s became a decade of personalistic free verse
characteristic of American confessional poetry. The epic “big picture” disappeared from
the scene, to be replaced by a new breed of writers nourished by global literary sources,
and critical sources in the developed world. The literary sources were third world (often
nativistic) poetry such as that of Neruda, Vallejo and Octavio Paz. In fiction, the magic-
realism of Borges, Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie, among others, influenced the
fiction of Cesar Aquino, Alfred Yuson, and poet-fictionist Mario Gamalinda.

On the other hand, the poets trained in American workshops continue to write in the
lyrical-realist mode characteristic of American writing, spawned by imagism and neo-
Aristotelianism. Among these writers (whose influence remains considerable) are the
poet-critics Edith L. Tiempo, Gemino Abad, Ophelia A. Dimalanta and Emmanuel
Torres. Their influence can be felt in the short lyric and the medium-length meditative
poem that are still the Filipino poet’s preferred medium. Some contemporary poets in
English such as Marjorie Evasco and Merlie Alunan, derive their best effects from their
reverence for the ineluctable image. Ricardo de Ungria’s and Luisa Aguilar Cariño’s
poems, on the other hand, are a rich confluence of imagism, surrealism and
confessionalism.

The Philippine novel, whether written in English or any of the native languages, has
remained social-realist. Edgardo Reyes’ Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag (1966), for instance,
is a critique of urban blight, and Edilberto K. Tiempo’s To Be Free is a historical probe of
the western idea of freedom in the context of indigenous Philippine culture. Kerima
Polotan Tuvera’s novel The Hand of the Enemy (1972), a penetratingly lucid critique of
ruling-class psychology, is entirely realistic, if Rizalian in its moments of high satire,
although unlike the Rizalian model, it falls short of a moral vision.

Only a few novelists like Gamalinda, Yuson and Antonio Enriquez, can claim a
measure of success in tapping creative power from folk sources in their venture to join
the third world magic-realist mainstream.

But the poets of oral-folk charisma, such as Jose Corazon de Jesus, are waiting in
the wings for a comeback as astonishing as Lam-ang’s legendary resurrection.
Modernist and post-modernist criticism, which champions the literature of the
disempowered cultures, has lately attained sufficient clout to shift the focus of academic
pursuits towards native vernacular literatures (oral and written) and on the revaluation of
texts previously ignored, such as those by women writers. Sa Ngalan Ng Ina (1997), by
prize-winning poet-critic Lilia Quindoza Santiago, is, to date, the most comprehensive
compilation of feminist writing in the Philippines.