Critical discussion

The Week of the Whales and Other Stories.

By Leoncio P. Deriada.

Quezon City:

New Day Publishers, 1994.

In his third collection of short stories, Leoncio P. Deriada tackles, with uneven success, a variety of subjects. Here are stories of private sorrows, of seemingly quaint, yet persistent and potent, folk manners, of social inequity and exploitation. Here are boys on the brink of manhood, feeling the awakenings that are its heralds, parents reading announcements of their sons' death, idealist teachers helpless in the face of ruthless realities, a Jesuit tremulous be- fore the sight of man-flesh under the shower, an exiled First Lady listening dreamily to the exclusionary sounds of a conch. These diverse characters share an experience hinted at in his preface, where Deriada writes that six of the 14 stories were completed while his wife was furiously but fruitlessly fighting cancer. This experience is loss and its child, pain. 

Both 'The Hawk" and "The Slaughterhouse" depict a mother's grief over the loss of her sons in "a war she could not understand," a war neither she nor her sons caused or have any use for. The mothers in the stories, each in her own way, bravely confront their grief, the one shooing away the hawk that preys on the chicks of her backyard, obvious symbols of the war and her sons; the other, after a prophetic dream, daring to look at a cow being slaughtered from across her house and to receive the portentous telegram. In contrast, the father in the first story stays silent, "crying in the dark"; the father in the second shields himself from the awful truth of his son's death behind trivial news about visiting "Russian ballerinas and "RP beauties."

There are other kinds of loss i n the collection. Love lost and chance squandered are depicted in "Bus Ride." On a bus ride to the city, the protagonist- teacher meets a man who could have been his father-in-law, Mr. Jaena. Although the past seems to be behind them, it smolders beneath their surface but nonetheless sincere pleasantries. Neither character is spared from the bitterness of loss-not the protagonist, who was too poor instep beyond "the base of the stairs" to court Mr. Jaena's daughter, nor Mr. Jaena, who now can only admire the protagonist's generosity and regret, in private, his daughter's elopement with a libertine. 

If the trip to the city in "Bus Ride" takes the protagonist back to his past, the puma from the city leads Bogey Ascalon in "The Priest" to a harrowing discovery. A model student in college, an idealist eager to in the priesthood, Bogey loses his innocence when Fr. McNeil tries to engage with him sexually. However, the priest is perhaps more than a bugger (a possible pun on "Bogey") for he, too, suffers a loss. Torn between his innate attraction for physical beauty and the austere demands of his vocation, he seems a man more seduced than seducing. Far more painful than the force of Bogeys kick in Fr. McNeil's side is the discovery of his failure to be the spiritual father for which he had sacrificed his dream to become a sculptor.

If the spiritual father fails, the stepfather in "For Death Is Dead In December" succeeds. Set in Christmas, this is Deriada's most optimistic, if also most stylistically contrived, story. Dario, 17, spume by his crush Nena, resentful of his stepfather, world-weary and morose, wants to die. At the end, however, when Dario's stepfather calls him by his name, he realizes that his stepfather truly loves him. Dario quits his self-induced melancholia and schoolboy agonizing, and decides, "I'm going to midnight Mass."

These stories of private pains are balanced by stories with more sociopolitical content. "Chicks in the Snake's Cage" shows the political initiation of David, a college student, as he witnesses and then takes part in a strike of the workers of Sarmiento Enterprises, a company owned b y the parents of his friend Chuck. "Imelda of the Islands" recounts a fictive life of Imelda Marcos before her rise to power and after her exile to Hawaii. Actual events, personalities, and objects are alluded to, such as the building of the CCP, the Aquinos, and the 3, CKlO pairs of shoes. The title story 'The Week of the Whales" is about the encroachment of Japanese industrialists upon the pristine Punta Sungay and the futile attempts of Mr. Faraon, a bachelor-teacher, to stop it. While Deriada shows his political leanings in these stories, he does not sacrifice the personal drama altogether. "Chicks" is as much a story of a boy's discovery of the proverbial feet of clay, the cracks on a marble surface, in a seemingly perfect friend, as it is an indictment of injustice. "Imelda," even as it shows what "Imeldific" means, is a study of the mentality of the ambitious but (or because) deprived; and while it does not justify the ways of such people as Imelda, it does call for an understanding of how and why they behave the way they do. Finally, Whales," with its final I’m a doleful Mr. Faraon and Miss Justin a walking hand in hand away from Punta Sungay + image reminiscent of the close of Milton's Paradise Lost, affirms the belief in personal consolations in the midst of social defeat, an idea perhaps not too palatable to more radical critics or writers.

Less ambivalently political is "Dam," which recounts, with delicate detail A la Manuel Arguilla, how a native dams a river only to have Christian settlers, "without even asking if their presence was welcome," hoard the fish "wriggling in the fine sand and in between exposed stones." The native's loss, however, is paid for by the settlers' lives. 

The other stories in the collection are" Coming Home," "Rabid," and "Of Scissors and Saints." In the first two, a young man returns from the city only to find that he has lost his "primal sympathy" with his boyhood haunts. Ricardo does not come home as much as arrive in what for him has become a prison, and like a character from Joyce, feels frustration and constriction as he realizes "for the hundredth time-that he is the son of a simple banio folk who would like to share his most profound thoughts but cannot because he has chosen a foreign language to express these thoughts." The narrator of "Rabid," after 14 years in the city, is repelled by the fact that the barrio folk still rely on the witch doctor to cure an illness they do not know is rabies. Deriada is equivocal in this tension between the urban and the rural and in the end one wonders whether the "enlightenment" the city offers--the poems in a foreign language, the pills and tablets-are of any real value in the country.

"Of Scissors and Saints," about a missing ring and a fortune-teller aptly (or perhaps ironically) named Epifania who plays detective, is an odd piece. The title suggests an essay, and the narrative, full of vivid and comic descriptions of barrio manners and magic, reads like an excerpt h m an auto- biography. Taking it as such, one is amused; taking it as a mystery story, however, one feels cheated by its facile resolution.

In these stories, Deriada employs a number of styles-but not always with success. In "Bus Ride," the juxtaposition of dialogue with internal monologue underlines the isolation of the characters and the regrets they nurse beneath their happy fade. In "Dam," the absence of dialogue heightens the reader's perception of' the tension between native and Christian which the dam

symbolically suppresses, as well as emphasizes the antipathy either party has for each other. The shift in point of view in 'The Priest" recalls Sherwood Anderson's adept use of it in Winesburg, Ohio.

Where Deriada fails is in his employment of a 'litanid' style in "For Death Is Dead in December," probably the worst story in the collection, in a desperate attempt to create a somber atmosphere:

It was December and Dario said, I want to die.

But his friend Leo said, dream Dario dream. For death is dead in December.

.........
For Dario was 17 and did not know what it was to be young. . . For Dario was 17 and Nena said she didn't love him.
For Dario was 17 and his father was dead. Long ago. 

The multiple ellipses in the story effect mawkishness reminiscent of that made by greeting cards and prosaic verses. Aiming too hard at profundity, Deriada arrives at a puerile parody of Gregorio Brillantes: "Tonight God is born.Death is dead. Dream Dario-." Furthermore, the repeated lines and images, at- tempts too obvious and artificial at unity, only call attention to themselves.

Deriada disappoints us even more in his symbol making. The images are cliche-ridden and their meanings obvious. For instance, the strikers of Sarmiento Enterprises are symbolized by the chicks in a serpent's cage that David finds in the laboratory. The chicks are given by, who else, but Chuck Sarmiento. The other symbols in the collection-the cow ("The Slaughter- house"), the whales ('The Week of the Whales"), the hawk and the chicks ("Hawk"), the "base of the stairs" ("Bus Ride"), the sky which "seems higher now" ("Coming Home"), the sandcastle ("Imelda of the 1slands"bhave significations as obvious and pat as those in a medieval allegory. If any- thing, the stories have the merit of being especially teachable.

Deriada's diction is also awkward in several places. In "The Priest," Bogey "was awed by the fact that the mellifluous expanse was the Pacific Ocean itself." In the title story, Mr. Faraon puts his "wordy possessions . . . in the pedicab." Some of his dialogue are too stilted to be read without wincing (or even sniggering):

"I'm angry at something."
"Are you angry with us? Because we are the owners?" "No. I'm angry at the inequality of men."

("Chicks in the Snake's Cage")

One may try to elide the gender insensitivity (not to mention the self- contradiction and triteness) of that exchange, but then there is also plain unidiomatic diction; e.g., Imelda's "well-bodied men." 

The Week of the Whales and Other Stories is an uneven collection. While the stories do not completely repel-some like "Coming Home" are almost touching they are marred by excessive sentimentality and a style commensurately unsubtle. The insights these stories declare fall short of genuine profundity and sound somewhat trite, though not totally untrue. One recognizes echoes of Joyce, Andason, Brillantes, and Arguilla, masters all of the genre, but perhaps these are too faint and feeble, not too well played, to make one feel their full power. It remains to be seen whether Deriada would write to be a master like them, but like his own Dario, one can dream that he would.

By: Jonathan Chua InterdisciplinaryStudies Program Ateneo de Manila University

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