Nick Joaquin’s Modern Myths: Blending Filipino Folktales and European Fairy Tales

In observance of UNESCO’s proclamation of 1979 as the International Year of the Child, a Philippine-based publishing company, the Mr. & Ms., released a limited-edition collection of children’s stories, written by the eminent Anglophone Filipino writer, Nick Joaquin. Two volumes —green and red— with five books each, were visually rendered by important Filipino artists such as the cartoonist, Jess Abrera. These little-known children’s stories are an understudied area in Joaquin’s oeuvre. His more famous fictional works often deployed Gothic tropes, not to evoke fear or terror, rather, to draw attention to the Philippine postcolonial situation. The Gothic, for Joaquin, offered a way to demonstrate the Hispanic influence in Philippine culture. Joaquin’s appropriation of the Gothic is usually misread as a failure to follow the conventions of realism. But if there was one thing that Joaquin was never good at, it was following conventions. His obscure children’s stories, then, become ripe for a postcolonial narratological analysis. This paper examines how Joaquin’s textual subversions problematize the Philippines’ double-colonial history in “The Amazing History of Elang Uling” and “Johnny Tinoso and the Proud Beauty,” his versions of Cinderella by Charles Perrault and Beauty and the Beast by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, respectively.