Dr. Isagani R. Cruz
Conferred AY 1988-1989
Professional Profile:
Excerpt from the Introduction: Isagani R. Cruz and the Big Book … of Inter/Sections. 2010. Inter/Sections: Isagani R. Cruz and Friends (Festschrift in honor of Isagani R. Cruz), ed. by David Jonathan Y. Bayot. Manila: Anvil Publishing Inc. for De La Salle University-Manila.
On the occasion of the launching of The Lovely Bienvenido N. Santos in 2005, I introduced Cruz and called him “the lovely Isagani R. Cruz.” In my short remarks, I said:
Through these many years of connecting with my mentor-guide, I must say that Dr. Cruz possesses three very interesting features of an existence, which friends and foes notice at random, proceed to forget, only to recall them, likewise at random. Since he is a divine provision to me, I made it a point to present those features to you in quantifiable terms, and that is my way of counting my blessings.
First, Cruz loves narrative to the hilt. That’s why despite his being better known as a critic, he has produced plays, biographies, short stories all prize-winning — all to keep the narrative flame burning. He loves to tell stories inside and outside the classroom, and between genres. He tells them and stretches them to such a wide extent, that oftentimes I’m no longer certain if his stories — oral or written — are to be taken as fact or fiction, story or plot, narrative or prosody. Sometimes, I have a feeling that the genre of creative non-fiction is named for him, after him, or in honor of him. Or at least, it must be in his blood!
Second, his statements always carry a lot of surprise if not shock value to a point that you may wonder if the phrase “you sure get more than what you asked for” is in fact an understatement to honor Isagani Cruz. His controversial statements on Philippine literature and literary history, as to who are major and minor writers, among many other topics, not only sent waves of defamiliarizing shock to members of academe, but foregrounded, as well, a poetic violence to unaccustomed souls. The book we are launching this afternoon is surely a testament to this value of surprise and shock. Way back in 1991, I saw the drafts of this book. It was cast in the scholarly form of critical theory and literary criticism. The next time I saw it, the manuscript was on its way to fulfilling the prophecy of biography as creative non-fiction. Today, we have here a critical book and a biography that is interspersed among genres, and finally, crisscrossed in the form of, what he calls, “a creative non-fictional biographical play.”
After a round of remarks in the form of such rhetorical questions like “Is he serious?” I must say, a third feature is brought to the fore. Cruz is one of the few who can bear to answer serious accusations with a hearty laugh accompanied by one of his hallmark comments, “Really? Did I say that? I can’t remember having said it.” And in other instances, his answer couldn’t get more unnerving and annoying. He can reply with a straight serious face no one can imitate, and states, “Actually, I can’t even remember why I said it!”
During my younger days, I oftentimes found his ambiguities, his polysemys, his open-ended texts, his memory’s fictions and creative non-fiction, his intergeneric adventures, and his resistance against fixity and certainty — all of these as evidences of my mentor’s hamartia or tragic flaw. I often thought out loud that, with his gift of mind, he could probably be less tentative and be more grounded. Now, after almost two decades of extensive education in life and theory, I realize I have been wrong. I consider my earlier views of Cruz as manifestations of my own youthful hubris. After all, I am as vulnerable as any ephebe to what Harold Bloom canonized as the anxiety of influence.
His narratives, his surprises and shocks, his ambiguities, his refusal to be pinned down to a title, a category, a critical position, a genre — these are in fact living embodiments of paradigm shifts in action. He perpetually looks beyond the established, acknowledged horizon of expectations to check out the other, the other other existence of possibilities, and thus, he strains — to the consternation of many — the logic of plausibility.
How should we define Isagani R. Cruz in serious terms? The other question is, “Does he take life seriously at all?” To this second question, I’m afraid my answer is in the negative. I don’t think Cruz takes life seriously, but that is only because he does not take living lightly. That, friends and foes of Isagani, is what makes Cruz perpetually different and deferential. And that — ladies and gentlemen — is what makes him the lovely Isagani R. Cruz. (pp. xv-xvii)
