Alaman, Innah Johanee P.

CL 151 (WF 4pm-5:30pm)

Professor Jay Quintos
28 May 2015

Filipino Diasporic Return in the Pursuit of Nationhood

A Post-Modernist Analysis of Ilustrado

Miguel Syjuco’s award-winning novel, Ilustrado, revives the advocacy of

“Intelligentsia” or the “Enlightened Ones” over the past hundred years in its political
stance and outward rooting for social change. In Ilustrado, the characters in their socio-
cultural, political, and economic situation reflect the archetypes of Philippine’s national
dilemmas through the years. This time, Syjuco challenges the privileged class and their
role in restoring the country’s national identity amidst the insurgence of globalization and
Filipino diaspora. As a contemporary novel, Ilustrado contradicts fixed ideas about the
form and meaning of texts, thus exhibiting Post-Colonial and Post-Modernist tendencies
known as reactions against an ordered view of the world by the Westerners. This paper
will focus on key terms, major characters, and the novel’s nontraditional structure and
form.

In Philippine history, the term “Ilustrado” which also means “enlightened,” refers
to the Filipinos educated in Europe during the Spanish colonization. They were the
privileged elites, sons of wealthy families, landowners, and mostly mestizos. “The
Enlightened Ones” mainly include prominent historical figures like Jose Rizal, Emilio
Aguinaldo, and reformists who furtively published La Solidaridad. With the things they
have learned in Europe like the idea of liberation, freedom, and nation; they later fuelled
the revolution of 1886 against their Spanish oppressors. It was Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere
and El Filibusterismo that brought him to execution after awakening Filipino’s
nationalistic sensibilities.
 In Miguel Syjuco’s novel, the expatriate Crispin Salvador has his own "Ilustrado"
in his novel The Enlightened, a historical fiction work set during the Philippine
Revolution and the Philippine-American War.

Even before, “Ilustrado” in Philippine usage refers to Filipinos rather than to

Spaniards because educated Filipinos tend to stand out for they are comparably fewer in
number relative to the population of educated Spaniards in Spain. Besides, in the late
nineteenth century, obtaining education in Philippines or abroad puts an “Ilustrado” at
political risk of being called filibuster, a bandit or rebel against the Spanish government.
The term “Ilustrado” signifies varied connotations like “exclusive,” “the haves,”
“bourgeoisie,” and “upper class.” These labels not only associate people of their wealth
and social status, but also their access to authorities and power. This socio-economic
faction in the Philippines originated from “Divide and Conquer” rule where it
conditioned Filipinos to discriminate their “taga-bayan” or “taga-bukid” fellow
countrymen. In relation to this, “Ilustrados” as hybrids of two cultures, carry the burden
of being ostracized by the mass and the danger of being persecuted by Spaniards. Like
Jose Rizal, the protagonists Miguel and Crispin in the novel can either be argued as:

Janus-faced heroes or villains, celebrated for their contributions as the “brains of

the nation” and individual acts of patriotic self-sacrifice and heroism while being
vilified as a “class” for their “betrayal” of the revolution and their cooptation by
and accommodation with the colonial and postcolonial states. (Garcellano, 2010)

This is the contemporary trend in Philippine Literature where writers must resist against
alienation and marginalization as a conscience to one’s own race. Thus, a novel like
Ilustrado is a step toward retrieving the nation’s fragmented past and making it whole by
rewriting the story written by the conquerors so that we, the conquered, and our
descendants might know it and be healed.
Miguel and Crispin Salvador

Ilustrado portrays the lives of two expatriate Filipino writers, Miguel and
Crispin. The novel opens with the questionable death of Crispin Salvador who was found
floating in Hudson River. The police immediately consider the case closed after declaring
Crispin had committed suicide. This leaves his student Miguel even more baffled and
suspicious of foul play upon knowing Crispin was up to something controversial before
he died. To save Crispin Salvador's reputation and to look for his mentor’s missing
manuscript of The Bridges Ablaze, Miguel went back to Manila from New York. As
Crispin’s only friend, Miguel felt’s his duty to write his late friend’s biography; Crispin
Salvador: Eight Lives Lived.

Crispin and Miguel share a lot of things in common that it sometimes becomes
difficult to tell the characters apart on occasion. They are both expected to follow their
father figures’ political careers as well -- to the extent that: "before young Crispin could
speak or toddle he was already branded the 'future president for a future nation" (103).
From Salvador’s father Narciso and Syjuco’s grandfather Grapes, the two witnessed the
corrupt environment of politics in the Philippines. Both wind up going abroad to learn
and write despite their families’ disapproval of their leanings towards literature. Both of
them like eating meaty burgers, playing chess, and most importantly, both of them sired a
child they have never met before. In fact when Miguel looks for Dulcinea, he meets
Crispin’s unrelated aunt Ms. Florentina who often confuses Miguel for Crispin. Most
importantly, both of them are “Ilustrados” who left Philippines or voluntarily exiled
themselves to pursue studies in New York.

Crispin Salvador is a Spanish mestizo and son of a haciendero-politician. He is

characterized in the novel through Miguel’s biography of him, excerpts of his novels, and
most importantly, his memoir Autoplagiarist. It can be learned that Crispin is envied for
his unabashed ill-representation of Philippines as a diasporic writer that made him
internationally acclaimed. He is scorned by his fellow Filipino writers like Avellaneda
who called his life abroad “a metaphor for an anonymous death” (40). Despite his success
abroad, Crispin was infamous in the Philippines:

The Philippine Gazette and the Sun traded blows with Salvador’s own Manila
Times, debating the author’s literary, and indeed social, significance to our weary
country. The Gazette argued that Salvador was not “an authentic Filipino writer,”
because he wrote mostly in English and was not “browned by the same sun as the
masses” (15).

Though not despised nationally, Miguel is also viewed deprecatingly for writing
bad things about Philippines abroad. This presents age-old issues that are crucial to
Philippine literary discourse. Miguel, Salvador’s devoted young student writer, is a
grandson of a politician couple with business and political connections profitable enough
to yield wads of money to send Syjuco and his five siblings to school abroad, and keep
mansions in their home province and in Forbes Park, the Philippines’ toniest address.
Above all these contradictions is the set of questions, “On what, and for whom, does the
Filipino writer write, and why?” This is expressed when Miguel confronts his
grandparents and they replied:

“I’ve never understood why you can’t just write nice stories. Stories your
grandmother would like and can show off to her friends.Why can’t you write nice
things?” Her voice softened. “Why would anyone read your story and want to visit
our country?” You are always trying to shock. You have all this horrible stuff in
your work. Not very Christian things. Not very patriotic. And you say things that
are not yours to say” (139).
 Salvador and Miguel both had privileged upbringings – their exile has little in
common with that state as it is experienced by thousands of their fellow-countrymen, as a
hard fact of economic life. Though their politician families are wealthy in the Philippines,
Crispin and Miguel seek their fortune on their own in surviving in a foreign land and
sharing a conviction that creating national literature is a civic duty. They went abroad
willfully and their displacement let them view Philippine conditions in bigger and global
perspective.

Hybridity

The centuries of colonizing, mostly from Spanish and American colonizers, has
resulted in the hybridity of culture and identities. This is conveyed in the interspersed
comic jokes about Erning Isip who is perhaps is the most obvious hybrid character in the
novel. The humorous, simple, and light take of the lower-class learning American ways,
ironically reflects the acculturation of Filipino diaspora. Erning Isip, an AMA College
student meets his classmate who was called “Babylonia’s whore” by the elites from
Ateneo and La Salle. He follows his brother in U.S., he learns how to speak English little
by little, he paints a car pink because of miscommunication, he meets his American wife
and finally settles in America. Erning Isip soon becomes the forefather of the Bastos
Family, a more sophisticated hybrid and corrupt politicians who later rules in Philippines
towards the end of the novel.

On the one hand, Miguel, Crispin’s protégé in the novel left Philippines to pursue
Master’s Degree in Creative Writing in the University of Columbia, New York City. His
stay in one of United States’ city centers allows him to meet his ”Unfathomable Madison
Liebling.” He becomes a hybrid of American and Filipino culture, the former
overpowering the latter. He gains the idea and freedom to question his belief in God, his
choice to get high in drugs, have sex out of wedlock, become an environmentalist, and a
vegan with his girlfriend. The post-colonial result of hybridity allows the protagonist
Miguel and Madison to feel good about themselves by being politically correct in
America, where they are vocal in their criticism of “Capitalist Pigs,” and miserable
human rights record of starving countries.

According to fragments of Miguel’s backstory, he left the country to avoid the

position in politics expected of him. “Three more hours until I arrive. I almost said ‘at
home.’ It’s a trip I hate, both the voyage and the arrival” (75), implies that Miguel
doesn’t really want to come back if it wasn’t for Crispin. As the story progresses, Miguel
as the dynamic character, changes from the indifferent, elitist “balibkbayan” to a modern-
day “Ilustrado” affected of socio-political dilemmas in the Philippines. Miguel’s
bildungsroman climax features him saving the kids in the middle of the chest-high,
murky, and dirty flood water only to drown and die.

On the other hand, Crispin Salvador is also a hybrid who invents Miguel’s exploits
to reflect and to return to a Philippines that, in its comic and tragic complexity, is
something to which few works of imagination have done justice. Salvador is an
embittered, lonely hero in exile and whose last work was to be an angry "list of our past
sins" (1016).In creating a story behind a gadfly named Miguel who narrates his coming
of age while writing the author’s biography, Crispin already blurs the reality from fiction.
Readers need to render themselves receptive as they struggle to give this novel a form,
figure, meaning, and value by works of imagination, to help them induce a reading that
will make sense. The mist in this uncanny novel slowly thins out in the end:

“Through eyes made young—no, through his eyes—I saw what I’d become. An
angry man doomed to failure, a failure of a man damned to anger. To imagine the
mystery of his life, I started with the certainty of his death. The boy became a
man. A young man —a description that encompasses all the promises of living.
And with this fiction of possibilities, entwined with the possibilities of fiction, I’ve
woven in my own unlived life” (1040).
 Salvador depicts Philippine’s situation hopeless, in not letting Miguel find the
manuscript of The Bridges Ablaze that will expose the government’s darker nooks in a
corrupted system. The end of the novel clarifies the enigma between facts and fiction that
creates confusion about the duality of perceived truths. This part of the prologue explains
why Ilustrado must be told in such a fragmented style; having “fiction of possibilities,
entwined with the possibilities of fiction.”

Post-Modernism

Miguel Syjuco’s novel Ilustrado is well-famed for its disorderly design that
mirrors fragmented truths in a jammed and overstuffed age of information in this present
era. This multi-awarded debut novel exhibits Post-Modernist characteristics of Pastiche.
First, unlike parody, its purpose is not to mock but to honor the famous literary piece it
imitates. Like Jose Rizal’s Ibarra, Syjuco’s novel is a form of social protest. The
protagonists of these novels are “Ilustrados” who came back from exile and brought with
them the education that can be used to reform and establish nationhood in the Philippines.
This is a peculiar but a potent point that writers in their displaced existence generally tend
to excel in their work, as if the changed atmosphere acts as a stimulant for them. Second,
the apparent quality of the novel that qualifies this as a work of Pastiche is its complex
and creative structure that heavily rely on intertextuality. This includes excerpts from
fictional novels, made-up interviews, passages from books, articles, blog entries with
comments, news, gossips, jokes, real historical events and personalities, overheard
conversations, fabricated footnotes and the narrator’s increasingly hallucinatory dreams.
Simply, it’s the literary equivalent of a collage. It's not about creating something from
scratch but patching and combining things that already exists.
 Like the previously discussed short story “Doreen’s Story” by Rosario-Lucero,
the narrator of the novel Ilustrado is also unreliable and the point of view shifts from time
to time in third-degree narration. Both stories are told in unconventional nonlinear
narrative way and inconsistences done in purpose cloud the readers’ judgment in what’s
real and what’s not. This is a common feature of Post-modernism, where truth is relative
to how one perceives things according to what interests us, and therefore creating our
own truths. Both literary pieces also revolve around the theme of retelling history,
reconnecting the facts, and overlapping various interpretations.

The novel Ilustrado employs metafiction, a literary device used to self-consciously

and systematically draw attention to a work's status as an artifact. According to Engler, it
poses questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, usually using irony and
self-reflection (2004). In using metafiction, the author weaves the novel’s story about a
writer who creates a story. The novel also includes another work of fiction within itself,
the narrator intentionally exposes himself as the author of the story, and the characters are
aware that they are in a story. It is no wonder that Syjuco's creation of a fiction that
includes the work of fictions of his fictional character, Crispin Salvador, is a much-
celebrated literary work of Post-Modernism.

Despite the novel’s witty jokes and image of Filipino’s resilience, pessimism and
dismal mood dominate in the novel Ilustrado. There’s the early death of activist
Mutya Dimatahimik, the burning of the anticipated novel The Bridges Ablaze, the
culturati’s scorn for progressive writer Crispin Salvador, and the ascent into the
snare of the corrupt system by OFW daughter Girly Bastos. (Garcellano, 2015)

In the final analysis, the novel succeeds in challenging modern “Ilustrados” who
are capable and intelligent idealists to choose whether to get sucked into corruption or run
the risk of being gunned down for radical ideas that might change the world.
 Works Cited

Caroline Sy Hau, “Reflections on the Origins and Changing Meanings of Ilustrado,”

Philippine Studies vol. 59 no. 1 (2011): 3–54, accessed February 25, 2015,
doi:42.5/5994677.

Edel E. Garcellano, “The Ilustrado Revolution,” The Works of Edel Garcellano (2010),
accessed May 28, 2015, doi:10.1086/599247.

Engler, Burnd, “Metafiction,” The Literary Encyclopedia, accessed May 27, 2015.

Maira Salamat, “In Ilustrado and Eight Lives Lived, Which Life is Worth Writing
About?,” review of Ilustrado, by Miguel Syjuco, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September
25, 2010, Bulatlat.com, http://bulatlat.com/main/2010/09/25/book-review-in-ilustrado-
and-eight-lives-lived-which-life-is-worth-writing-about/

Miguel Syjuco, Ilustrado (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), Kindle edition.