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Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition

N. V. M. Gonzalez

by Leonard Casper, L. M. Grow

Other literary forms

Although N. V. M. Gonzalez traveled widely and taught the craft of writing on several continents, his principal rapport was always with the farmers and fishermen of his homeland. For such folk, social change over the centuries has been minimal, and their daily lives are attached to unvarying natural cycles. In each of his collections of short stories, Gonzalez found a deceptively simple style appropriate to the tempo of frontier life and the peasant mind-set.

Many of his first stories in Seven Hills Away (1947) seem more like sketches, reproducing the quiet, sometimes desperate, static lifestyle of the Philippine kainginero. On the small islands of Romblon and Mindoro, south of Manila, the landless frontiersman regularly leaves the village barrio in search of land. The wilderness is his if he will clear it by slash-and-burn techniques; yet it can never be cultivated well enough, by these primitive means, to support a large population. The first and last stories in the collection establish an outward movement from a growing settlement by pioneers anxious to find one more uninhabited horizon. Even as the stress falls on small-scale self-reliance, however, the fulfillment of ancestral patterns in the process of pioneering becomes dramatically evident. The animistic minds of the kaingineros tell them that nature is unfriendly, but they meet each setback with a stoic lack of surprise and complaint. The style of these stories is stark.

In Gonzalez’s next collection, Children of the Ash-Covered Loam (1954), the potential for melodrama and self-pity is further undercut by reliance on children and plain women as narrators or central characters. The women are long-suffering and resilient; their own bodies’ rhythms have made them knowledgeable about the mysteries of nature. As for the children, they are experiencing at first hand the wonders of birth and death, the depletion of innocence, which slowly drains away, and the gentle pace of experience. Contrasted with the enduring virtues of these ordinary people is the sophisticated lack of feeling in Mrs. Bilbao, failed wife and mother, in “Where’s My Baby Now?” Too busy with city social obligations, she neglects her family.

A more elaborate contrast controls the 1963 collection Look, Stranger, on This Island Now as the restless peasants’ new horizon becomes the town of Buenavista, in Romblon, and later the commercial centers of the principal Philippine island, Luzon. Disconnected from nature, the townspeople suffer from loneliness and the tensions between their competing needs for companionship and privacy. At best, they achieve momentary consolations. Stories in the second half of the volume express the sense of exile among city dwellers who have left the rural lifestyle behind but who have no traditions to guide them in their new life. In Mindoro and Beyond (1979), the five stories added to sixteen selected from previous volumes still waver between these poles: integrity, sustained with difficulty among the peasant poor, and the insecurity and corruption that befall those who desert the land.

Very early in his career, Gonzalez wrote poetry. Although comparatively few and short, the poems appeared in prestigious publications such as Poetry magazine and the anthologies Heart of the Island (1947), Philippine Writing: An Anthology (1953), and Returning a Borrowed Tongue (1995).

Achievements

The paradox of N. V. M. Gonzalez is that he gained an international reputation for himself at a variety of intellectual centers, while identifying constantly with the uneducated but folk-wise peasant in the Philippines. His humor is far more subtle than that of Carlos Bulosan, for example, and his social criticism, though very real, is never doctrinaire, never polemical. For the pure portrait of the Filipino as frontier farmer—the dream of every landless tenant during centuries of oppression from Spanish overlords and now from estate holders who are his own countrymen—readers turn to the deceptively simple fiction of Gonzalez. Recognition of the honesty of these peasant images made both the author and his work necessary guests in many lands.

A 1949 Rockefeller Fellowship led to publication of Gonzalez’s stories in a number of distinguished American “little magazines”: Sewanee Review, Literature East and West, Hopkins Review, Pacific Spectator, Literary Review, and Short Story International. Gonzalez’s work also appeared in such anthologies as Stories from Many Lands (1955), Mentor Book of Modern Asian Literature (1969), Asian PEN Anthology (1966), and Asian-American Authors (1972), and, in translation, in anthologies in several countries.

Gonzalez’s tight control of form, contrary to florid Malayan-Spanish traditions, his reliance on a narrative’s ability to convey its own meaning without intrusion by the author, and especially his ability to find English constructions that, to the Filipino ear, retain resemblances to the native vernaculars of his characters: All these qualities have influenced numbers of younger writers, who occasionally refer to him as the Anton Chekhov or Ernest Hemingway of the Philippines. For his influence as a writer of fiction, as an essayist, and as a workshop director, he received the Republic Award of Merit (1954), the Republic Cultural Heritage Award (1960), and the Rizal Pro Patria Award (1961), thus fulfilling the earlier promise shown when, in 1940, his first novel won honorable mention in the Commonwealth Literary Awards contest, and, in 1941, his collection of stories, then called Far Horizons, shared first prize in the same annual contest.

Biography

Born in 1915 on one of the smaller mid-archipelago Philippine islands, Nestor Vicente Madali Gonzalez was taken as a child to the larger neighboring island of Mindoro by his father, who was a teacher. There he spent his youth among farmers and fishermen, figures who dominated his fiction. After graduating from the University of the Philippines, then in Manila, he turned to writing a newspaper column, as well as a novel and short tales about the people of Mindoro. He also was one of the Veronicans, a group of young writers striving for stark and striking imagery. The authenticity of his fiction won him national attention just before Japanese Occupation forces landed on Luzon. When English was practically forbidden by the invaders, Gonzalez and others wrote in Tagalog but brought to the native language new techniques, themes, and theories as an alternative to formulas in conventional literature.

Gonzalez’s chance for prominence came in 1947, when the Swallow Press in Denver, Colorado, published his prizewinning stories, Seven Hills Away. In 1949, a Rockefeller grant allowed him to visit several writing centers in the United States and to attend both Stanford and Bread Loaf workshops. On his return to the Philippines, he was appointed to the faculty of the state university, which had just been constructed in the temporary capital, Quezon City; he taught creative writing and comparative literature there for eighteen years. During Carlos P. Romulo’s presidency of the university, Gonzalez served as public relations assistant and speech writer to the former ambassador to the United Nations. Although Gonzalez held no graduate degree, he was tenured on the basis of his distinguished contributions to the national culture as a novelist and short-story writer, as well as editor of the eclectic Diliman Review and consultant to Benipayo Press and to Bookmark. Bookmark had risked nonprofit publication of Philippine literature in order to bring recognition and rewards to young writers. In 1964, he wrote in Rome and the Italian Alps on a second Rockefeller grant. In 1968, he held visiting professorships at both the University of Hong Kong and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Beginning in 1969, Gonzalez was professor of English, particularly developing world literature, at California State University, Hayward. In 1977, he served as visiting professor of Asian American literature at the University of Washington, and in the summer of 1978, after a long absence, he briefly returned to the University of the Philippines as writer-in-residence. One result of that visit was the publication of Mindoro and Beyond, a retrospective volume drawn from four decades of his stories, which initiated the Philippine Writers’ Series for the University of the Philippines Creative Writing Center. Gonzalez retired from university teaching in 1989. He died in Manila on November 28, 1999.

Analysis

The superiority of N. V. M. Gonzalez’s novels lies principally in their ability to provide social realism without submitting to sentimentality, at one extreme, or to any doctrinaire program of violent reform at the other. This same authenticity of character and situation acquits him of the charge of being a mere imitator, even though age-old struggles between peasant and proprietor, between barrio and city values, recur in his work. They do so not because of slavish adherence to literary formulas but because basic social patterns have persisted in Philippine culture for hundreds of years: It is to these patterns that Gonzalez is true, and in response to them that his vision has remained constant.

The Winds of April

Even in his autobiographical first novel, The Winds of April, written in his youth, Gonzalez presents attitudes that reappear in his short stories and later novels: an attachment to the array of creatures on land and sea, a respect for the men and women whose lives depend on nature’s whims and their own unflagging efforts, and a dream of surmounting these hazards without forgetting them, by moving to cities where opportunities for education and for writing about one’s discoveries and their implications abound. At the same time that The Winds of April describes the aspirations of the author from birth to young adulthood, it captures the hopes of a whole people on the verge of independence from the United States. Virtually all the copies of that novel, along with hopes for a smooth transition to national sovereignty, were destroyed during World War II.

A Season of Grace

What emerges in A Season of Grace, during postwar reconstruction, is a view less naïve but still based on the courage and determination of a people who find in hardship the same promise of life’s renewal that the rich volcanic ash of their soil offers their labor. They do not arise abruptly, miraculously, like the phoenix from those ashes, but their right to stand erect is wholly and undeniably earned, if only gradually, painstakingly.

The young married couple, Sabel and Doro, who leave the overworked plots of Tara-Poro and the fishing barrio at Alag to claim interior kaingins of their own on Mindoro, are in many ways like adult children. The cadences of Gonzalez’s prose resemble rituals of survival, marked by seasons of seedtime, caretaking, and harvest. The action encompasses slightly more than one year’s cycle in this couple’s efforts to restore a wilderness to its garden state, although Gonzalez knows well that slash-and-burn techniques can destroy more than they cultivate. Petty officials requisition several intricately and meticulously woven mats from them. Their merchant landlord, Epe Ruda, maintains the rule that debts double if they are not repaid in time. Yet after the year covered in the novel, Sabel and Doro are not quite so impoverished as before and they have two male children; they are likely to endure and prevail.

The year has not been one completely filled with favors. Their friend, Blas Marte, once debt-free, has become a sharecropper for a usurious rice merchant. Their own rice sack hangs empty for months, and there are nightmares, premonitions of death and disaster. Multitudes of rats attack their harvest, as greedily bent on taking what is not theirs as are the landlord, the treasurer, and his deputy. Even Sabel and her husband, Doro, come to blows occasionally, as a result of misunderstanding and exhaustion. She is the more resilient, gentle, contemplative, and naturally good-hearted. Doro is sometimes consumed by his own unending chores. When his wife is seriously ill, he is most concerned with how he will survive without her. He can be impatient, jealous without cause, more erratic than Sabel in growth toward maturity.

Yet a contrast clearly is established between these two and their materialistic, childless landlord. The implied emphasis on their compliance rather than on bitter complaint is a sign, from the author, of a resignation nearly religious, an elemental act of faith. At the beginning of a new year, Sabel and Doro begin still another clearing; their infant lies nearby like a seedling, very much part of the stream of the life-force. What seemed a relentless cycle of trial, progress, and frustration has become a slow and painful spiral upward, a combination of change and continuity, of improvement gradual but sure.

The Bamboo Dancers

The true polar opposite to the simple, instinctual peasant such as Doro is not his middle-class landlord but the ilustrado, the elitist intellectual portrayed in Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers. If the wilderness dominates A Season of Grace, wasteland imagery permeates the later novel.

Ernie Rama is a sculptor who tries to conceal his lack of creativity by wandering through the world. Such is his nature that, wherever he goes on his study grant in the United States, he keeps a distance between himself and others, in order to avoid facing and confessing his own self-alienation. The stargazer at the Vermont writers’ conference waves a message that Ernie avoids; the lonely U.S. Information Service girl in Kyōto whom he planned to meet, disappears; en route to Hiroshima, he is with an interpreter who stays mute; the Japanese switchboard operator and he are mutually unintelligible. Everyone remains a stranger, so quick is Ernie’s passage among them, like someone running from an atomic cloudburst. Despite its scenes in Hiroshima, the novel is less about the unspeakable horror of nuclear war than it is about this deliberate detachment, this maintained silence that aggravates differences and helps cause war.

In his travels, Ernie avoids even his own countrymen, especially the elderly, lest they place some claim on his social conscience. He resembles the barren Fisher King from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), who is doomed to sterility because of his lack of love, his inability to share. What Ernie fathers in an old acquaintance, Helen Reyes, who has turned to him for emotional warmth, is only a miscarriage. He is at best sexually ambivalent, actually preferring no intimacy under any circumstances with anyone. While Helen’s American fiancé, Herb Lane, is involved in the accidental death of a Chinese girl in Taipeh, Ernie is characteristically removed from the scene by sickness. When Herb is murdered as a result of that death, Ernie can only offer abstract sympathy. Persuading Helen to escape to Macao, where perhaps she can purchase rare cosmetics, he contaminates her with his own self-indulgence.

Even at the moment of near drowning, while fishing back in the Philippines, when he cries out to be rescued, it is unclear whether he has learned the importance of others except to satisfy his own impulsive needs. To some extent, the people of Hiroshima, who think exclusively of their own suffering but not of those who were their victims in war, represent this same egocentrism, so opposed to the traditional sense of brotherhood among Filipinos.

The great subtlety of this novel lies in the author’s strict dependence on a defective narrator, whose self-deception, contradictions, and confusions become evident through a recurring pattern of nonencounters, as well as through certain symbols. The principal symbol employed by Gonzalez is the national dance, the tinikling, in which the object is to maintain a rhythm of rapid movement that prevents the feet from ever being touched by the clash of poles. In the Philippines, the caste of “untouchables” is not the impoverished peasant but the elite leadership, on which society depends so much for patronage, but from which the masses more commonly have received indifference, cruelty, and betrayal of purpose.

In The Bamboo Dancers, as in his short stories and other novels, Gonzalez’s characters are discovered rather than explained. They present themselves without comment from the author. Such subtlety and disciplined self-restraint keep Gonzalez’s fiction far from the ordinary literature of protest, which often disregards credibility or complexity of character in order to engage in extensive polemics. Perhaps Gonzalez’s constant attentiveness to the manner of speech and even to silence owes much to his culture’s reliance, for unobtrusive communication, on courteous consideration of others and on wordless body language. Gonzalez’s craft is perfectly expressive of these Asian aspects of Philippine folkways.

Bibliography

1 

Bayuga, Rosy May. “Gonzalez’ Sabel: A Brown Madonna.” Philippine Studies 45, no. 1 (1997): 124-134. This article focuses on the characterization of Sabel, the female protagonist of The Bamboo Dancers.

2 

Casper, Leonard. “N. V. M. Gonzalez.” In New Writing from the Philippines: A Critique and Anthology. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1966. An incisive treatment of Gonzalez’s novels is included in this survey by a preeminent critic of Philippine literature in English. Includes a checklist of Philippine literature published in the United States from 1930 until 1965.

3 

Cheung, King-Kok, ed. “Filipino American Literature.” In An Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Gonzalez’s work is analyzed in this study of literature by North American writers of Asian descent. Includes a bibliography and an index.

4 

De Jesus, Edilberto, Jr. “On This Soil, in This Climate: Growth in the Novels of N. V. M. Gonzalez.” In Brown Heritage: Essays on Philippine Cultural Tradition and Literature, edited by Antonio G. Manuud. Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila, 1967. De Jesus presents a historian’s perspective, demonstrating parallels between Philippine society and the society reflected in Gonzalez’s novels as subsistence farming became industrialized. Includes a bibliography and an index.

5 

Espiritu, Augusto. “The ’Pre-History’ of an ’Asian American’ Writer: N. V. M. Gonzalez’ Allegory of Decolonization.” Amerasia Journal 24, no. 3 (1998). A profile of Gonzalez, discussing his personal background, career history, major literary achievements, criticism of his work, and his views on American colonialism in the Philippines. Reprinted in Recovered Legacies: Authority and Identity in Early Asian American Literature, edited by Keith Lawrence and Floyd Cheung (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005).

6 

Gonzalez, N. V. M. “Notes on a Method and a Culture.” General Education Journal 4 (1962): 87-94. An excellent analysis, revealing the author’s approach to prose fiction.

7 

Guzman, Richard P. “’As in Myth, the Signs Were All Over’: The Fiction of N. V. M. Gonzalez.” Virginia Quarterly Review 60 (Winter, 1984): 102-118. A lucid explication, particularly of Gonzalez’s characterization and style in his fiction.

8 

Tiempo, Edilberto K. “The Fiction of N. V. M. Gonzalez.” In Literary Criticism in the Philippines, and Other Essays. Manila: De La Salle University Press, 1995. A thorough, extended critique by one of the foremost prose writers of the Philippines. Includes a bibliography and an index.

9 

Zuraek, Maria Elnora C. “N. V. M. Gonzalez’ A Season of Grace.” In Essays on the Philippine Novel in English, edited by Joseph A. Galdon. Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila, 1979. Zurak comments on the two meanings of grace in the novel: a period of postponement or second chance and regeneration through sanctification by natural forces. Includes a bibliography and an index.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Casper, Leonard, and L. M. Grow. "N. V. M. Gonzalez." Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition, edited by Carl Rollyson, Salem Press, 2010. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSLF_12600140000173.
APA 7th
Casper, L., & Grow, L. M. (2010). N. V. M. Gonzalez. In C. Rollyson (Ed.), Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Casper, Leonard and Grow, L. M. "N. V. M. Gonzalez." Edited by Carl Rollyson. Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2010. Accessed September 19, 2026. online.salempress.com.