You are what you read

All this past week I’ve been haunted by Tess of the D’Urbervilles. It started when I published a reader’s e-mail about the practice of changing movie titles for Philippine release. I noted that the film adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure was retitled Bare, and that the film of Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles somehow escaped being shown locally as Disgrasyada!

A few days later, my friend Kevin (who nearly killed Joan Collins with a shrimp — it’s a long story) e-mailed me an article by Lucy Kellaway in the Irish Times about why CEOs will never choose to read novels.

Kellaway argues that chief executives would benefit from reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The next day, Scrat (who survived English boarding school food) mentioned that Tess of the D’Urbervilles is one of his all-time favorite books. And then I read an article about the new James Bond movie Quantum of Solace, which noted that one of its stars had recently appeared in the title role in the BBC series, Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

Clearly, Tess was demanding to be discussed.

I first heard about the Victorian nov-elist and poet Thomas Hardy in high school, from a decidedly non-Victorian source: The Catcher In The Rye by J.D. Salinger (although Scrat would argue that Salinger’s novel begins at a boarding school). Salinger’s narrator Holden Caulfield, 16, is kicked out of school again for flunking all his classes except English. Holden reads a lot, and when he really likes a book, he wishes that the author were a friend of his so he could call him up.

After reading The Return of the Native, he wishes he could get its author Thomas Hardy on the phone.

Now that I think about it, I read a lot of books just because they were mentioned in The Catcher In The Rye. So Salinger was not only my favorite author, he also prescribed my reading list and is therefore responsible for how I turned out. But I digress.

Around this time, Roman Polanski’s movie of Tess of the D’Urbervilles opened in Manila. Tess attracted a lot of attention not only because it was nominated for Oscars, but because its director could not set foot in the US because of a statutory rape charge, and Nastassja Kinski, who played Tess, had been famously photographed wearing only a snake. The movie was beautiful and sad, and it killed me. I wrote a pompous review for the school paper, and then I read the novel for my English term paper. The book made a powerful impression on me and my world-view. Tess taught me that 1) Fate is cruel and 2) Love stinks. I got an A on my term paper — I got mediocre grades in all my subjects except English.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles is about a pretty young country girl named Tess Durbeyfield. She comes from a poor family and her father drinks too much. One day, he runs into the parson, who addresses him as “Sir John.” He demands to know why the parson keeps calling him “Sir John.”

The parson explains that while looking into the family trees of his parishioners, he discovered that the Durbeyfields are descended from a line of famous knights called D’Urberville. Little does the parson know that this bit of historical trivia is going to screw up Tess’s life forever.

There’s a wealthy landowning family called D’Urberville in another county; Tess’s parents conclude that they must be relatives. What they don’t know is that the rich people are not really D’Urbervilles — they only bought the name for social-climbing purposes. The Durbeyfields — who are the real D’Urbervilles — decide to send Tess to their “cousins” in the hope that they will help her find a good job or a proper husband. This is the part in Tagalog movies where the parents decide that their pretty daughter is their ticket out of poverty. In any case, her leaving means they have one less mouth to feed.

So obedient little Tess goes off to meet the fake D’Urbervilles. What do they do with their supposed cousin? They hire her as a maid. The D’Urbervilles’s son Alec, who is sort of attractive but a heel (cad, walanghiya, manyak), takes one look at Tess and that’s it, she’s doomed. Guess what happens next.

The pregnant Tess goes home to her parents and has the child. The baby falls ill and dies, and Tess buries him in the dead of night. (This would be the big dramatic scene in the Tagalog movie — the weeping mother in the churchyard in the pouring rain, clawing at the earth with her bare hands, the darkness slashed by lightning… it is pure Nora Aunor.)

Tess goes to work at a farm, where she meets and falls in love with the handsome, spineless Angel Clare. I should mention that I loathe the Angel Clare character with a passion, and prefer nearly everyone in English literature to him. Sure, Sauron in The Lord of the Rings was evil evil evil, but he knew it. Angel Clare is a clueless wuss.

Tess and Angel had already met early in the novel, but he doesn’t remember. He’s a vicar’s son, which puts him in a higher social class than Tess, but he thinks he’s the kind of man who can defy convention. (Oh please, you’re not even a man.)

He asks Tess to marry him, and she refuses at first, but he wears her down. The girl’s in love, what’s she going to do?

Angel Clare has no idea that Tess had a child out of wedlock, and Tess is too honorable to keep this from him. She tries to tell him about her “past” (“ang kanyang nakaraan”... cue portentous music) but she keeps getting interrupted. On the day before the wedding, she writes him a letter telling him everything. As in everything. Then she slips the letter under his door.

It gets caught under the rug. He never sees it.

Aargh, I can’t stand this, I’m going to have to read the novel again.

Maybe it won’t be as painful, maybe it’ll be worse. That’s the thing about a great book: every time you read it, it’s different, because you’re different. You’ve changed since the last time you picked it up; things have happened to you.

By the way, we’re only halfway through the plot and it really picks up after the letter. If you want to know how it ends, read the novel.

It’s in your school library, in bookstores everywhere, and you can read or download it from the web for free. Go.

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