Siyasatin natin ngayon ang kanyang akda

And as far as book covers go, Khavn’s Ultraviolins (UP Press, 2008) is actually pretty good. Norman Wilwayco’s design is this great sleek modernist thing that I always have a love for, reminiscent of European socialist propaganda ephemera, an aesthetic primarily dictated by typography, the book’s initials—UV—spread across the front cover vertically, red on red, and the author’s name in white bold gothicky letters proclaiming, simply, “Khavn,” quite possibly like “Maui” or “Cher,” or, taking cue from the socialist echoes of the cover design, maybe something more like “Mau” or “Che?” There’s definitely a contrived “revolutionary pop” vibe to the cover—like a Che Guevara pop cola—likely in an effort to allude to a revolutionary spirit the book might contain.

Flip the book on its back and regale your eyes with five blurbs, two of which were written by no less than National Artists for Literature (F. Sionil Jose and Bienvenido Lumbera), one of whom even called Khavn’s book “kinky,” which is akin to your lolo in a beret complimenting how tight your tube top is. Jun Cruz Reyes’ blurb, the one line towering over everyone else’s, announcing that the book is the “first postmodern book ... in Filipino” which really is heady praise, is postmodernly enough negated by Reyes’ own words in his introduction for the book, saying “he isn’t the first,” the contradiction coming across as hopscotch canonising, and it really is undeniably canonising at work.

From the cover alone, I really hold this “rebel” book—“rebel” implied by the blurbs: “irreverent,” “defy easy categorisation ... dark ... crazy,” “rejects a greeting card heaven,” “special, unique, original”—suspect thanks in no small part to the blurbers themselves being pretty much a rundown of fogey canon-makers, effectively reducing to my ears the potential resonance of Khavn’s rebel yells. It is merely a controlled howl in a decrepit library. One of the most wonderful things about postmodernism is its capacity to destabilise the status quo—postmodernism’s irreverence for macronarratives, its reliance to a democracy of voices—nothing is true, everything is permitted—more or less assures us of the impossibility of it having a “true” canon—but what happens if the status quo you’re meant to destabilise pretty much says “yes, you are valid, yes, yes, we agree” and then proceeds to publicly fellate you intellectually? Or maybe, more importantly, what should you do? Stand up for your counterculture ideals, or settle for a compromise?

The book is more or less Postmodernism for Fogeys as everything about it is just about what one would expect to read in a book touted by fogeys—fogeys steeped in the postmodern “canon” of Baudrillard and Derrida—as “postmodern:” simulacrum, TV culture, disjointed narratives, et al, again, things more or less “expected” of Khavn as Khavn is generally more widely regarded as a digital filmmaker, even a pioneer of it here in the Philippines, and with film as we know it today being film as we know it today—digital or not—being purely a postmodern phenomenon in its creation and interpretation: the manufactured reality, the self-referentiality, the editing techniques, and in those things UV is all pretty much doing what is “expected” of it, and often times nothing much past that, essentially what the late great David Foster Wallace, in describing Mark Leyner’s works—Leyner whom I maintain is Khavn’s writing’s lolo (no, Sir Butch, I really think it’s not Calvino nor Brautigan)—called “image fiction,” image being all flash, all flash being the sparks flying to your curtains as your TV breaks down due to your incessant channel surfing.

And UV really is “image fiction.” It’s writing generated by a mind steeped on TV. It’s mainly experimentation for the sake of, imagery for the sake of, often times to the detriment of the story’s story. It’s interesting to note the fact that Khavn is a filmmaker in the Luis Buñuel school of film aesthetics because it really shows in his pungent prose, in his grimy imagery, even down to how he cuts his lines, but it’s not as a director or not even as a screenplay writer, but more like Khavn as an old school scissors-and-tape reel editor. In “isang gabi” Khavn begins the story

Wala nang bituin. Wala nang makain ang gabing gutom pa rin. Maliban sa buong-buong buwan. Ngunit alam ng itim na bibig na hindi sila talo sa puting pakwan. Alam niyang kapag nawala ang buwan, di maglalao’y susunod na rin siya. At hindi pa siya ganoon kagutom.

which is really very reminiscent of Buñuel-influenced Maya Deren’s silent surrealist camera obscura nocturnes, and the waning of the full moon to a crescent pakwan brings to mind the sloppy fade-in juxtapositions from Buñuel’s Andalusian Dog. Again, from “isang gabi”:

Limang bata ang naghahabulan sa lansangan. Hiyawan. Isang matandang posteng may hawak na bombilya ang gumagabay sa kanila. May nadapa. Si Rey.

and really in your mind’s-eye there is this filmic movement of an establishing shot showing the loud kids running around, and then a brief cut to reveal the light source of the scene, and then a cut to a close-up of a kid stumbling, followed by an extreme close-up to reveal the identity of the kid, and the clipped sentences, basically how Khavn cut the words, help facilitate the visual flow of that scene, and it’s really a very filmic way of writing, using the basic idiom of film editing to get the narrative flowing without using the jargon themselves, as a lesser writer would.

But the clipped sentences have their way of getting you down, truth be told. Often there is a sensation of a bus going forward and back in rapid jerks in Khavn’s prose, like an engine stalling again and again, the ignition not quite igniting, as it were, often merely coughing and sputtering, and either it completely breaks down altogether or the engine all of a sudden rears up and starts but you’re in the wrong gear so it gives off this awfully nasty growl before it grudgingly lurches to movement. There is no apparent “love” for the actual writing of these pieces, or if there is a “love,” it’s a sado-masochist’s love for rank cigarette burns on the insides of eyelids.

The stories themselves aren’t that particularly great, merely “okay,” frequently going for the usual safe sanctioned transgressions we all know and love: one piece, called “amerika” is an angry self-conscious meditation on the meaning of Amerika—yes, with the “k”—initially reminiscent of Ginsberg’s own long-form piece of basically the same name although Ginsberg’s anger in his is replaced with what comes off as misplaced sarcasm with Khavn’s and really from the first line alone you already know what it’s going to be about (SPOILER: it’s really about the Filipino experience [ditto.]) sapping it of whatever potential urgency it might have had. Another piece, “dedbol” is a series of disjointed dagli about random people—a serial killer, some kidnappers, a four-piece band, and girls on a shower party—converging for a split second in the Divine Intersection before splitting up again to conclude their narratives, borrowing Guillermo Arriaga’s narrative conceit from the seminal MaCondo movie Amores Perros only lacking in the social and political implications of the original. And another piece, “ang ipis sa loob ng basurahan” is a humanised depiction of a cockroach stuck inside a trashcan deciding to build a home for itself in the interim before its expected escape and sudden death by way of slipper-squashing, which is really Watership Down by way of Kafka, which isn’t as interesting as it sounds. And on and on.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, these safe sanctioned transgressions, how we are “given” only quite a few things to complain about—GMA, violence against women, corporate churchdom, globalisation—and how we are “given” only a few choice ways to complain about them. It’s the height of absurdity, a simulacrum of a rebellion—corporate punk—like asking for a mayor’s permit so you can rally against his ordinances. Of course with literature not a lot of people actually get hurt—maybe only a few bruised egos—but still, it’s quite sad that even in art, our mobilisations and demonstrations are cordoned off and maintained by the fascist thought police. Slogans in silk-screened shirts. Misbehave and you get a hose-down.

Aside from being a filmmaker and a writer, Khavn is also a performer of the Vim Nadera mould, that being outrageous and loud and scandalous and frequently fun and funny, and UV is more or less chockfull of Khavn’s “performed” pieces, either on stage or as film, but somehow all the zeal and zest and brio are lost in the translation from performance to page. One of the best things about watching/hearing Khavn perform his pieces is the particular phenomenon of how he tries the audience’s collective patience with either ugly smutty stuff or with long drawn-out spiels bordering on actual skat (albeit calculated skat) and the book really does a sour-frog-assed piss-poor job of re-presenting that. On page, everything just seems drab and dated and juvenile and—thanks are due to the terribly useless English translations of each and every piece of text in the book, essentially taking up half of the book’s +/- 220 pages—utterly awkward.

Having Jun Cruz Reyes (who is, like Khavn, also a filmmaker) blurb and intro the book is quite apt as UV really outs Khavn as a latter-day Jun Cruz Reyes himself, only in trendy sneakers and jeans and shirt with a lomo in hand. He is a satirist from the Seventies science-fictionally transplanted to the MidNineties and made to sit down and watch TV all day everyday to catch up on lost time but just really getting fascinated by breast enlargers on Home TV Shopping, with whatever political bite dulled by the Tourettey tendency to resort to unintelligible blather. It’s a good book, I actually quite honestly like it, and it’s all packed-up and dressed to the nines to go places, but sadly, it’s not there, yet. Almost, but not quite.

But maybe I shouldn’t be too brutal. If read against the majority of what passes for Contemporary Philippine Fiction nowadays—if it isn’t emo colegiala it’s genteel fantasia—I suppose you can say that Khavn is doing something partially “new.” At the very least, however compromised it might be artistically, the book is very honest about its politics. At the very least, it has that.

I do hope people would pick this book up and look past it being mere postmodern play and intellectual juvenalia and learn from its victories and defeats and ultimately allow them to create something more than just willfully playful staccato. I do hope one of them would be Khavn. Maybe in ten years’ time readers’ll rediscover UV and say Khavn was on to something and I’ve been pretty much talking out of my ass these past thousand words, but right now it’s still lost in the quagmire of incoherence that is, postmodernly enough, of his own making.