Is Wattpad Literary?: Opinion ng isang di eksperto

I started using Wattpad somewhere in high school, not to publish anything there, but to see and mock the jejemon love stories of my high school classmates under their jeje pennames like, for example (my favorite), “mhisz.szupladhita.” (Jeje-days!)

I was ashamed to admit that I published two love poems, hoping that someone would discover my poetic talent after I saw in the TV show Jessica Soho that some people get the attention of publishers by just writing on the website.

When I was reading Lourd de Veyra’s Little Book of Speeches I was absorbed by one of his speech entitled “Pop goes the lit.” It was a speech that makes you think of what is “popular literature.” This question eventually branched more questions in my mind like: Is Wattpad literary? Is Marcelo Santos III literary?

Literature, like any other art forms, has no strict rules, and in fact, artists tend to fuck up mainstream ideas. So I guess the requirements of a work to be considered as “literary” must be based on what critically acclaimed literary works are. And critically acclaimed literary works have at least one of the traits mentioned below:

1. Subversion—breaks mainstream ideas.

2. Innovation—suggests development of an idea or a way of literary expression.

3. Offers ideas worthy of debate and discussion.

4. Exposition of real life and humanitarian condition.

5. A nice expression of ideas.

6. Influential.

And here are some critically acclaimed works that are considered “literary” that have at least one of the traits mentioned above:

1. Jose Rizal’s novels Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo are subversive works that exposes the poor humanitarian condition of the Filipino people under Spain. It influenced and sparked the Philippine Revolution.

2. Niccolo Machiavelli’s Il Principe offered the new idea of political realism, as opposed to political idealism that is mainstream in his time.

3. Charle’s Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, although not intended to be literary, was acclaimed to be an excellent example of scientific literature because it expressed a new evolutionary theory with a non(or at least, less)-nauseatic language, unlike any other nauseatically serious scientific works in Darwin’s time.

4. Bob Ong’s Bakit Baliktad Magbasa ng Libro ang mga Pilipino (the only work in his corpus that I actually liked and I consider as literary) offers ideas worthy of discussion among Lay Filipino people.

5. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was a philosophical work that offers new ideas and a new way of expressing ideas. One might find that the book is not literary because of its unusual style, which makes it actually literary. There were no arguments, as you might expected from a philosophical work, but only declarative and self evident statements that identifies the relationship between language and reality. Here is the brief first chapter of the Tractatus:

1 The world is all that is the case.

1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.

1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.

1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.

1.2 The world divides into facts.

1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same.

6. Prof. Ambeth Ocampo’s essays offers a new perspective of the life of our national hero Dr. Jose Rizal and 19^th century Philippine history with a popular taste, making it non-boring, as a typical student might expect.

Now let us go back to the question: Is Wattpad and Marcelo Santos III literary? Before we answer that, we must first analyze what Wattpad works and Marcelo Santos III works are. So for Wattpad works, we have Diary ng Panget, Talk Back and Your Dead, She’s Dating the Gangster and all that stuff. For Marcelo Santos III’s works, we have Para Sa Broken Hearted and all that stuff. They are all about love. Not about philosophical investigation of love, but only, sorry for the term, stupid words on relationships, like “May Forever.” If you will read them you can see that these works are just all about teaching the youth to flirt. It is not only useless, for it has no any new revolutionary ideas to offer nor any idea worthy of discussion, but it also does harm in the society. So, obviously, Wattpad and Marcelo Santos III are not literary. 

Don't make it hard, isa lang itong opinion ng isang di eksperto.