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 19th
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.