Abstract: Literature is always history, and history the events captured and pinned to a textuality is not always literature. The best histories have been written by literary men, from Machiavelli, Rabelais, Boswell and Young, to Churchill, Rizal, and Agoncillo. It is an axiom, both on the aesthetic and practical planes, that the creative writer has necessarily a profound sense of history, since he deals with phenomenological and sociological materials, shaping them into linguistic formalities variously called poetry, fiction, and drama. Literary realities are inextricably linked with historical realities so that consciously or unconsciously, the writer transforms history in his given literary mode and history, in turn, transforms his artistic perspectives. The historical coda, to be meaningful and appreciated as an individual utterance with national signification, must include not only the interplay of human ideas and human affairs, but also the harmonium of text, aesthetics, and grammar. The literary historian, in effect, reverses the machinery to codify the historical coda within the literary framework. In that new coda, the restriction of events is loosened to accommodate intellectual and material exigencies apart from those that determined such events; there, taboos are deconstructed to expose their implication for and ramification into human progress; there the historian puts on the clothes of the artist to delineate flourishes that will animate and clarify the text. Using this framework as a model, much of Philippine literature in the most recent times can be perceived as actually illuminated history. With imagination and a displeased social conscience, the poets, novelists, and dramatists recorded and decoded historical events and situated them in the locus of the nation's Imagination which is the un-
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-05-23
Language: en
Type: article
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