Father Solo, sex, and the wisdom of the Greek

When, for my book review for writing class, I plucked Isagani Cruz’s “Father Solo and Other Stories for Adults Only” off the bookstore’s shelf, I knew I was presenting myself with a daunting task. When you grew up in a deeply religious family and were educated in a staunchly Catholic university like me, the first impulse is to declare the literary work’s salacious content as gratuitous and therefore pornographic. My challenge was to fight all my prudish instincts and view the work as a literary critic would, unbiased and professional.

While my resolve to accomplish my task was firm, however, I had no idea where to begin. It was fortunate that while I was wrestling with Cruz for class, I had “Great Books,” a chronicle of “The New Yorker” film critic David Denby’s return to Columbia University some thirty years after his college graduation to revisit the works of the invincible writers of the western world, for my bedside reading. I was on his chapter on the tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides when it suddenly occurred to me to, as so many of our ancestors fumbling for answers had done, draw from the infallible wisdom of the Greeks.

Denby recounts the “Birth of Tragedy” wherein the young Friedrich Nietzsche talks about how the tragedy began as a celebration for Dionysus, the god of wine. The story of Dionysus goes like this: His birth, the fruit of Zeus’ affair with a mortal woman, arouses the hate of Hera, his father’s jealous wife, who then orders the Titans to ravage him and eat him raw. The doting father, however, destroys the giants and rebuilds the infant. The Greek celebration was made in honor of this god who was twice born, and was a highly bibulous and sexual affair in which the individual experienced liberation from the self and was, in essence, reborn. While this rebirth was manifested in booze and sex, however, it was certainly about more than just that. This liberation most of all pertained to enlightenment of the intellectual, spiritual, and cultural sort, with the Greeks fervently believing in Dionysus’ power to loosen their inhibitions so that creativity may freely flow. The thwarted human spirit was unleashed so that it may go back to its primal instincts and be reminded of its humanity, passionate and turbulent. Soon, as history shows, the frenzied feast was tamed into the tragic form and went on to father many of the world’s greatest works of literature. The tragedies reveal a culture of individuals who were so free they were extraordinarily aware of their subconscious, of their innermost fears and desires. They reveal a culture of individuals who had subjected themselves to the uprising of the self so that they may truly know themselves.

Throughout history, a number of books emerged to shock audiences with their unreserved sexual content—D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Jane Austen’s “Lady Susan” and Choderlos de Laclos’ “Les Liaisons Dangereuses”, for instance. Unlike the Greek tragedies, they were ruthlessly unappreciated and shunned during their time, primarily for their supposed barbarism and obscenity. Like the Greek tragedies, the sexual liberation of their characters represent a liberation of another kind, one that is more profound. Lady Chatterley’s libidinous affair with the gamekeeper is a breaking free from the stringent class system and loveless marriages. Lady Susan, for all her cunning and deviousness, sets the woman free from the obedient and acquiescent stereotype. Laclos’ masterpiece, finally, is a merciless exposé of France’s depraved aristocracy. Years after these books were published, I remember my eighteen-year-old self reading them and then being utterly disturbed by their impure themes, even as I joyfully unraveled their indispensable sociopolitical insights. Perhaps the role of the books’ salacious content is to introduce unrest within me so that I may be in the disposition to discover the other discords in the stories—from the merely priggish like my discomfort for sexual themes to the legitimate like the world-changing predicaments of society.

Isagani Cruz’s “Father Solo and Other Stories for Adults Only,” perhaps comes from the same seditious tradition. The book is a collection of five stories about different things written at different times, but which are bound by the subtitle “For Adults Only.” Each story in the anthology is shockingly carnal in its content and represents a liberation of some sort. Cruz begins with “Father Solo,” the tale of a priest who projects his fixation with his penis onto the members of his church. In order to atone for his sin, regardless of the day’s gospel, his every sermon is about the evils of masturbation. In his exposé of the weaknesses of this man of god, the author begins to loosen the death grip the inordinately puritanical clergy has on society.

“Once Upon a Time Some Years From Now” is an imagination of the Philippines of the future. Here, the woman president, Cory Fernandez, is a mere figurehead, sexual orgasms are facilitated artificially through the portable orgasm machine (POM), books are obsolete, the poor hail from Forbes Park, the civilized follow “Dolphy’s Book of Etiquette” and Americans rule the country. When the president has to make the agonizing decision whether to make POMs illegal or not, she consults the wisdom of Imelda Marcos. “According to Imelda’s Theory, the one patterned after the philosophy of Sigmund Freud, sex starvation leads to political unrest, something long accepted since the First Dictatorship forced people to see sex films in order to deaden their political desires during pre-Accident days.” What is especially remarkable about the story is that these fantastical situations are rooted in actual events in our history, thus making this imagined Philippines a very cogent possibility. The story, in its daring foresight of the consequences of our current mistakes, attempts to liberate the country from a dreadful fate.

In “Termination,” a doomed relationship finds closure in passionate sex. The story starts like a passionate love affair. She is running after her boyfriend in the bus when they stumble upon each other in the rain and their hands touch unexpectedly. They go to a motel room to let their clothes dry, but they make fiery love instead. He recounts, “She was unbelievable. We started in the shower, did it there, moved still wet to the bed, did it again, moved to the floor and did it again. And again. And again. I lost count after her thirtieth orgasm.” When the sex is over and the characters are revealed to be lovers and he is revealed to be the adulterous boyfriend whom the girl is running after at the beginning of the story, the girl decides that their relationship is over, too. After thirty orgasms, the girl finally liberates herself from a relationship that has the sexual intensity of a one-night stand but also its lack of fidelity.

“What I Did Last Summer,” which chronicles the sexual encounter of a girl with a certain B.T., frees the female from the stifling stereotype and instead portrays her as the dominant person in the act of sex and the master of her craft. In the story, the girl is able to skillfully please herself and achieve orgasms while B.T. struggles to keep up while raving about a certain book he likes—which in the end, turns out to have been written by the girl herself.

“Picked,” finally, is about a beautiful lesbian who goes to urban Manila to experience freedom from the conservatism of her province but is instead disillusioned. When a down-on-his-luck former corrupt official helps her when she is pick-pocketed, she is given not only money for her jeepney fare but also a bit of faith in the humanity she has learned to violently distrust.

What is notable about Cruz’s anthology is the absence of the villain in all the stories. Father Solo could be heartless, true, in his neglect to attend to the parishioners’ spiritual needs, but I feel pity and not hatred for him because of his helpless imprisonment to his bodily desires. The conceited lesbian and thieving government employee in “Picked” are hardly laudable, but I can see that they, too, are only trying to survive in this world. In the book, no one is truly good and truly bad.

In “Father Solo and Other Stories for Adults Only,” there is no morally right and wrong. The world of the anthology is not one that makes moral sense—the stories and characters are at odds with themselves. Jess, a man notorious for pre-marital sex and abortion, comes on to Father Solo. “ I fuck [women] at night and you forgive me in the morning. I realized tonight, while I was fucking the abortionist, that I have never been happy with a woman. They have all seen my prick, but only you have seen my soul.” At this confession, the priest is conflicted, and when he is later raped by Jess, he finds it pleasurable. Cruz does not, however, portray this scene as right or wrong. He depicts it not as abhorrent and disgusting but neither does he tolerate it. Perhaps this is because the goal of the literary work is not of erudition and the imposition of rules of conduct, but merely to ruffle my feathers. What is right and what is wrong does not matter. What matters is that the social order be disturbed for it has been stifling. It is up to me to sift and weigh. Like the writers of the tragedies and Laclos, Lawrence and Austen, Isagani Cruz introduces unrest in a world that is highly mechanized and where I am constantly overwhelmed by, as Aristotle puts it, “the hubris of excessive rationality.” When I am allowed to go back to my primal instincts and reminded that I am a passionate and turbulent human being with fears and desires, I am reborn. Now that I know myself truly, I can transform myself like so.

While researching for this review, I found myself becoming especially aware of the current reemergence of erotic literature in our bookstores. There is the highly popular “Fifty Shades of Grey,” for one, and the reissue of Anne Rice’s risqué version of the Sleeping Beauty story. Perhaps, I thought, this phenomenon is a response to the sociopolitical climate of the times. In “Once Upon a Time Some Years from Now,” the president’s lover recounts how the suffocating conditions of the Martial Law provided fertile ground for the birth of the Bomba film industry. Society cries for liberation, and the sexual freedom of the movies represented a freedom that transcends the libido. Perhaps the current order could use a bit of shaking; perhaps society is craving to be unchained. From what exactly, I am uncertain, but seen from this purview, the existence of erotic literature in bookstores’ shelves is ennobled—be they the work of a pantheon of Philippine literature like Isagani Cruz or something seemingly pedestrian like “Fifty Shades of Grey.”