At just thirty-two, Miguel Syjuco — who contributed a new short story, “Stet,” to The Walrus’s Summer Reading issue — has written one of the most inventive, challenging, and entertaining novels of recent years, Ilustrado. And now it’s a bestseller, too. He spoke with The Walrus in Toronto this spring, a few weeks before the book’s publication.
To start, can you tell me about how Ilustrado formed, and how it’s developed over the years you’ve been working on it?
The book came to be, in my head, when I was doing some fact-checking at The Paris Review and living in New York. They were putting their Writers at Work series online, so they wanted to make sure whatever was in their archive was right. They had us freelancers hitting the library stacks, and I was looking at all sorts of different sources — literary biographies, interviews, profiles, articles, introductions to the authors’ books. Say for example I was doing Jack Kerouac, and I was finding out all these really interesting things about him, from the factual — where he was born, when he died — to his writing style, everything. And I thought, that’s a really interesting way of getting a portrait of an artist. It struck me as a method that was really organic, because our way of grasping reality today is precisely through fragments of sources. When you find out about, say, the Icelandic volcano, you hear from friends, someone text messages you, newspaper articles, internet, blogs, whatever. So I wanted to write a book that did this, in a sense. But I didn’t know how — it’s my first novel.
I was writing Ilustrado as part of a PhD at the University of Adelaide — it’s the creative component. So I thought, I’ll make this portrait of an artist, Crispin Salvador. I’ll create all his work the best I can, and I just did it linearly; it wasn’t as fragmented as it was now. But I couldn’t crack it — it was thick, it was difficult to get through, and it was 200,000 words. I pity my poor PhD supervisor. I didn’t know how to do it. I just kept writing, and writing, and writing. It didn’t feel right.
One day I was watching this documentary on a VHS tape I have from the Philippines. It’s about the weavers in the southern Philippines, in Mindanao, and I saw how they make their textiles. They’re spinning individual threads, and they gradually come together to make a pattern, then become one cohesive textile. And it just clicked in my head: that’s the way to do it. So I went to the computer, opened up ten Microsoft Word documents, and I took apart the fabric of the book and developed each narrative thread separately. I knew full well that most of it wouldn’t get in, but it needed to be there. What would get cut would somehow resonate. Once the threads were developed, I went and wove them through together. And that took about four years, from the very beginning. I started in February 2006, and finished the final revision last February.
There were some problems that I felt writing the book in this way could address. Problems with Philippine literature, specifically. We have a very complicated literary history in English. Like many postcolonial traditions, we suffer from mimicry, and didacticism, trying to explain our culture to a Western reader because that’s where the market is. We exoticize ourselves or over explaining ourselves. By writing it this way, academically, mixing in blogs, by having these genres and forms that are naturally didactic, then I can talk about Philippine history, explain jokes, explain all these things, without it feeling like… explaining.
What did the formal conceit disallow you to do? What did it make difficult for you?
Well, it was tough for me to wrap my head around the whole thing.
The book changed in the sense that when I finally got an editor, at FSG, he felt, and my other editors felt, that because there’s so much going on, I had to make it more linear in terms of the narrative threads. Before it wasn’t even chronological. It was all over the place. The European editors seemed to like it that way, but you have to strike that balance for the reader. So I did do that, but I had to take the book apart.
I devised this system. I summarized each fragment in the book in one sentence. I colour coded each narrative thread. Then I printed them all out on thick paper, cut them up into little strips so that I had every fragment represented, backed them with Velcro, and opened up a file folder corresponding to each chapter. I had ten file folders, one for each chapter, and this pile of fragments in front of me. And I just kind of played with them. It was very tactile, but it was the only way I could wrap my head around everything — it was really tough.
Well, that tactile component has to come through, because the reader is being presented with the work Miguel the narrator has done in sifting through Salvador’s work —
It was literally bricolage, yes.
Tell me about Crispin Salvador. He strikes me as a rather ingenious creation, because you can embed so much in him, in his successes and failures. What was your relationship with him like as a writer?
He was everything I’d like to be, and everything I’m afraid of becoming. He’s an audacious, dedicated, angry writer, but at the same time he’s also embittered and prone to hubris, and he turned his back, essentially, on the Philippines. I liked creating him because I could write all the books that I wish I could write without actually writing them. And writers like to — you know, when we’re in the shower, or making excuses not to write — we like to think of cool titles, so it was perfect. I was able to use him to satisfy that [desire], but I was also able to use him to really examine my own feelings about being an expatriate writer, about being a Philippine writer trying to write in the world. It’s funny, because there’s almost more of me — or as much, at least — in Crispin as there is in the Miguel Syjuco character.
What is the relationship between history and the novel’s formal approach? It’s been said that Ilustrado is a novel about 150 years of the Philippines. How does writing like this allow you to access the past?
I think it works in service of writing about history. It’s almost like those accordion file folders. Because it was all fragmented, I could really just expand it and put in stories according to wherever they fit. I did that chronologically, but I also felt it was important to do it thematically. There are these big themes that resonate throughout the book, and they crop up across the borders, within all the linear narratives — responsibility, nationalism, fatherhood, heroism, all these different things. I knew that the book, at least in the beginning, doesn’t rely on the whole Aristotelian plot structure — there’s no climax, etc. — and I wanted the narrative momentum to rely on themes, in the same way that classical music or jazz music does, motifs. I wanted to experiment to see if that could be the forward push.
There’s an early passing reference in the book a group of literary characters, including John Shade, of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a book that I had much in mind while reading Ilustrado. What other books were important to you — as inspirations, blueprints, or examples of what to avoid — while writing?
One of the things I really wanted to do in the book is to pay tribute to the fact that this comes from a literary tradition that really is both Philippine and international. That’s why I mentioned all those books that are the forbears, but also to add another layer of fictionality to this book — this is fiction layered upon fiction layered upon fiction. The fact that you have an ostensibly real character reading “The Approach to Al Mu’tasim” from Borges just calls attention to the fictionality of this book. Because I think the reader goes back and forth — is Crispin Salvador real? And they’ll go check on Wikipedia. The ficitonality was important to me. Pale Fire was an important book; [A.S. Byatt’s] Possession was important. Borges, in a very big way. Barthelme. Don Quixote. Robbe-Grillet’s work, for example. I like this formal play, and I figured, if I’m going to spend four years working on this book, I might as well have fun with it.
These references also expand the text itself, and situate it as a small text within a larger tradition. It also expands the text, so it’s no longer just a single, solitary world it has created — it’s a world that’s grounded in real life, as well as in our collective fictional imagination.
One of my favourite things about the novel is its long-running joke series about Erning Isip and his descendants. In the piece you’ve written for The Walrus’s Summer Reading issue, there are some really funny ones, too. What’s the importance of jokes for you? Crispin says at one point that jokes are the hardest thing to translate — yet the reader here feels that they carry a sort of cultural freight.
I’m learning French, and people have told me when you can get another culture’s jokes, you can understand that culture. And I thought, if I’m trying to get people to understand Philippine culture, then the best way to do it is through jokes. They represent the things that embarrass us, our greatest hopes —
It’s like all the dreams and pettinesses of a society, right there.
Exactly. Boy Bastos, for example, is the proverbial “guy walks into a bar.” He’s a big character that you tell jokes about since you’re a kid, learning about dirty jokes. But I didn’t want to start off with Boy Bastos, I wanted to explore his back story, that’s why Erning is his father, and so on.
On another level, the book is about coming and going and leaving and returning to the Philippines. So I had that, but I still felt I was able to incorporate the jokes. For me, what’s funny about them, what made me laugh when I was revising them, isn’t the punch lines — it’s the setups, the absurdity of them all. I never thought of myself as a funny guy.
We as a race — humans — are absurd. I think if you’re honest with yourself, once in a while you’ll find yourself in a situation where you look at yourself and say, “What the fuck? What am I doing here?” That’s the stuff of life. These jokes are the story of ourselves.
At one point in the novel, the narrator Miguel is recalling a conversation with Salvador in which Salvador says “I think you’ll find even literature has limitations. That will be a good thing, if you discover that.” What did writing this, your first novel, teach you about those limitations?
I’m writing literary fiction, and I come from a background where my father is in politics, I come from a poor country where grassroots movements are really the only way to make change, because government has become so petrified in corruption and traditional politics. So I have no illusion that all of a sudden people are going to read my book — the poor farmer, or the masses in the Philippines — and try to change things. But I do hope that maybe I can change some people’s perception of the Philippines. People think of the Philippines and think of Imelda Marcos, and maids, and that guy who shot Versace. I want to show people that we’re all of those things and far more.
Literature is the story of our selves. So in that sense, I’d like to think I’m doing something worthwhile. But what keeps me going — I could just go on writing literary fiction in Montreal or wherever and live a good life. Ryszard Kapuściński was being interviewed by Bill Buford once, and Kapuscinski said, “You know, I’ve been through all of these war zones and famine stricken lands and coups d’etat, and in all of these troubled areas I look around and there are aid workers and soldiers and victims and reporters. But you don’t see a single novelist or poet or painter or playwright. But this is the stuff of life — this is real! Where are they? And then I go home,” he said, “or I go to an award ceremony in France, and they’re all congratulating each other for stories about domestic troubles and boy meets girl and the same stories we’ve had for centuries.”
That’s the fire under my ass. I’m fortunate that I come from a country that has a lot of stories that need to be told. And it shakes me up and reminds me that I can’t get too comfortable as a novelist. I would one day like to write nonfiction. The only reason I like fiction more — well, one of the reasons is that I hate transcribing. And I would also like to be able to try and write about things that aren’t Philippine. For me, the effectivity of literature does end after a while. And sometimes you need to take a more hands-on approach. As a writer, what can you do? There are other things you can write — journalism, nonfiction. Maybe one day I’ll go home and teach. Maybe one day I’ll go home and run for politics. But the idea that literature has its limitations, despite it being limitless — that’s the whole paradox of it — keeps me training and trying to run as quickly as I can.
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