OF TEXT, STYLE, AND METHOD: EDEL GARCELLANO’S DIALECTICAL CRITICISM

Abstract

In his essay entitled Philippine Hermeneutics and the Kingpins of the Hill poet, fictionist, and critic Edel Garcellano talks about the “depoliticization of literary discourse” which, he says, serves as “a strategic/tactical interpellation to allow certain modes of unity and, in effect, certain philosophies to function as though literature were outside social, economic and political imperatives in human discourses” (59). This line underscores not only the apparent failure of dominant modes of critical practice to address exigent literary issues but also the systematic marginalization of Marxist/ dialectical criticism in favor of the “non-ideological” methods of textual analysis such as American Formalism/New Criticism whose logic of operation is best exemplified in T.S. Eliot’s essay The Function of Criticism (1923), where he explains that the role of the critic is “the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste” (24). French philosopher and literary theorist Pierre Macherey, in his book, A Theory of Literary Production, calls those who share Eliot’s dictum as “technicians of taste,” and exposes a fundamental flaw in the interventions of critics who perform their textual readings with the idea of correcting artistic taste in mind, primarily, by sticking to defining and explicating, they necessarily fail to engage in the production of knowledge: “in the attempt to define the average realities of taste they are always inevitably mistaken because their work evades rationality and does not produce a knowledge in the strict sense of the word” (14). Furthermore, Macherey argues that such a form of criticism “treats literature as a commodity” and hence, could only but establish “rules of consumption” (14).

While Edel Garcellano was not the first and certainly not the last critic to go against the New Critical tide and combat the critical formulations of the so called “technicians of taste,” his sustained engagements with the works of the leading proponents of belles lettres is significant because his critiques take the form of highly theoretical, politically reflexive, and most of the time defiant and belligerent critical essays that sadly elicited from his contemporaries not similarly theoretical ripostes but outright silence.

This paper is an attempt to engage with Garcellano’s critical oeuvre by examining the following: his notion of the text (the object of literary analysis) vis-a-vis the formalist notion of the text, the writing style prevalent in his works, and the possibility that as a committed critic who has produced four books of criticism in his more than three decades of practice, a programmatic method of literary criticism could be derived from his critical project which could help guide the new generation of literary critics and even casual readers in their foray into the locus of literary production and interpretation.