64 JOSE Riza

unnatural and agonized. Given a choice, Rizal might well have been wilii, fe
wade rank and fortune for a normal man’s ability to accept the world , nd
adjust himself to it. The young Rizal’s dedication to athletics was an Attempt to
make himself normal. He did not quite succeed, to our good fortune The
mature Rizal’s determination to excel in as many fields of endeavor as Possible
—science, art, medicine, literature — was a compensation for his feeble physique:
he would show the world hewas as capable, as tall, as the next man. He proved
he was very much taller, by ising above himself. If there had been no need ip
do so, if he had been of normal height and with normal capacities, he might
have led a normal life, might have accepted the world as. he found it and
adjusted himself to ic And the nation would have lost a hero.
Rizal’s career illustrates the challenge-and-response theory of progress
Rizal soared because his every response overshot the challenge. With each achieve.
ment, whether in science or letters or scholarship, he added one more cubit to
his stature, until he need no longer decry himself as small Even in that mas.
intimate incapacity that Radaic speaks of, Rizal managed to achieve a measure
of success. His last emotional involvement, with Josephine Bracken,is no longer
justan affair but is a mature relationship, a marriage.
5 Why Was The Rizal Hero A Creole?
Says Radaic:
“The fights Rizal mentions in his Memorias, with boys bigger than he,
against whom he thrust his little body as though to assure himself and show
others he was not so weak, are but compulsions to compensate for his inferior
build, as if he would thus attain the physical heipht natuce had denied him. Hs Dis Rizal novels, so morbid of matter but so comic in manner, defy
fights express his complexes, are an aspect of his timorousness, 2 imorousness Sconization. The Bible of the race won't toe today’s line on the race Like the
turned inside out Hebrew sexipeures, fsom which its peiestly editors vainly tied to purge a mass
‘Tormented by eternal feelings of inferiority, Rizal made a career of of polytheistie myth, the Rizal novels contain clements our stricter sensibilities
ascension. The struggle between his complexes and his ever more ambitious I would Purge away.
lifted this extraordinary
man to the supreme heights of perfection and hums dd a figure of Maria Clara, for instance, continues to scandalize us. ns
endeavor. His career is that of the lesser sons in the fairy tales, who the 4l choose for heroine a mestiza of shameful conception? The reply 0
wonders and win princesses. A Rizal well formed of body might nevet ha* = 30s was thatMaria Clara was no heroine to Rizal but an object of satire
found in himself the force needed to raise himself so high for the sake of his Pie) that wreaks havoc on the meaning of satire, besides being vehined by
country.” iat OF the novels, which reveals a Rizal enraptured by his heroine: Today’
rclsts have got atound the dilemma by simply rejecting Maria hseae
been, at least duting the writing, taken inby her; we are not. Whe

of “Fetoine to him or not, she is no heroine to us; and all

the folk notions
they Clara as an ideal or as a symbol of the Mo ther Country, must be
Saigon YOU we purify Rizal
Rizal of his heroine:

> ~~

Scanned by CamScanner
 66 lose Riza,
“Poor girl, with your heatt play gross harids that know not
of it, elie
fibers.” But
;
having disposed of his outrageous heroine : o Asia of Europe,
, we are stil] Confrontey
by his- equally impossible hero, impossible because he offends our racia) Pride
Why should the hero of the Great FilipinoNovel be, not an Indio Filipino, bus
4 Spanish “Filipino,” with the quotes expressing Out misgivings? Fo, Juan
Crisostome Ibarra belonged to that class which alone bore the name Filiping;
those days bur from which we would withhold the name Filipino today, th
most of the Philippiné Creoles (and the Rizal hero is an example) had More
native than Spanish blood.
A Creole class in the pure sense of tlie term never existed in the Phir
pines. The Spanish didn’t come here in such numbers as to establish a
enough community that could intermarry within itself and keep
the blood
pure. What were their most numerous progeny — the friar’s bastards ~ inevitg
bly vanished into the native mass within a generation. But even the Spaniards
who
did establish families could keep them Creole for, at che most, three genen-
tions. The exceptions are rare, The Rochas (Malacafiang used to be theirmanor)
are probably the most durable, dating back some two centuries; the Teusts
have endured about a century and a half but have sunk into obscurity; the
Elizaldes (of very mixed bload) go back only a century, or some four genera
tions. The commoner process was followed by such families as the Legardas
and the Aranetas, which now seem purely native principalia but began
Creole. This process was arrested and reversed by the great tribe that may be
called the Ayalas in peneral, though it includes the Sorianos, Zobels, Melians,
and Roxases. By the time of the Revolution, this Creole tribe was already
headed
by an Indio, Don Pedro Roxas, and seemed on its way to becoming as “nt
tive” as the Legardas and Aranetas: but succeeding generations restored the
tribe to Creole status with heavy infusions of European blood. ’Tis said that the
sons of the tribe are sent to Europe as soon as they reach puberty and are not
allowed to come home until they have married “correctly” abroad. ; have begun, in the 1850s, with Father Pelaez, asa Creole campaign against the
Up to around midway of the 19th century, however, the Philip
p"
Creoles had no such scruples about blood purity and were distinguished asa
ches apart, as “Filipinos,” not so much by the amount of Spanish blood"
fete veins as by their culture, Position and wealth. So, a friat’s bastard by#
eel girl might look completely Spanish but would have no status .
ae while a mag like Ibarra, already two mixed marriages away fro de
panish prandfather, would still be a Creole because a landowner
and.ge"
man. He was an Ibatra far mote than he was a Magsalin — and there’s sign’
>
THE RIZAL HERO A CREOLE?
wry WAS 67
whic!
cance in
voces Wathis ind
Indio surname, which means to pour, to tra nsfer, to tran
eed a translation int slate, for
Or, possibly, the other
way around.
© The question is: Why did Rizal make this “translated Filipino” his hero?
Was Rizal trying to identify with the Creole? Are the illustrators right who ive
the tall, hairy, high-nosed and red-cheeked Ibarra the smaller, smoother features
of Rizal? ‘
A great writer is always writing about his times, even when
he seems to
be writing about something else; and Rizal’s novels are historical parables, though
we have never quite related them to their particular period. We know the
novels
are subversive, that they arc about revolution, but we assume that Rizal meant
the Revolution of 1896, to which he was looking forward as a
prophet; and
we are therefore dumbfounded that Rizal, when the Revolution came, chose to
disown it and to enlist on the side of Spain. We secretly suspect a failure of
nerve in the man who had so vigorously prophesied that Revolution.
But was Rizal prophesying? Might he not have been talking about another
revolution altogether, a revolution he was more sympathetic to? The novels
were, after all, written about a decade before 1896; and we know that the
events that most influenced Rizal, that must haveshaped those novels, were the
events with which he grew up, that impelled a change in name, the translation
from Mercado to Rizal — and from the Philippines to Europe.
The clue is in the dedication to E/-Fitbusteriro:
“To the memory of the priests, Don Mariano.Gomez, Don Jose Burgos
and Don Jacinto Zamora, executed on the gibbet of Bagumbayart on February
28, 1872.”
Throughout the years he was growing up, Rizal was aware that a revo-
lution was going on in his country, a revolution inspired at first by the person,
then by the memory of Burgos the Creole, and in which the people most
involved belonged to the Creole class, for the Propaganda may be said to
Scanned by CamScanner
Peninsulars. Rizal also knew that Spain was overthrown in America by the
Various uprisings of the Creoles there (Bolivar, San Martin, Iturbide) — thatis,
by the class that had the education, money, talent and prestige to conduct a
‘evolt with success. (The revolutions of the Indios would come later, aswith
Juarez in Mexico.) During Rizal’s youth, it looked as if what had happened in
limes would happen in the Philippines: the Creoles wete nok oe
5
& were apparently headed for an open clash with the Peninsulars.
£n Rizal wrote his novels, he was writing about an actual movement, an
 68 Jose Riza,
writing to animate it. He was not looking forward to 1896; he was Jo,
back to 1872 and all its subsequent repercussions. He was chronic Ooking
Creole revolution in the Philippines.
ling the
The Creole
F, or 200 years — through the 17th and 18th centuries thie Philippine
Creoles were Filipino-in the sense that their'lives were entirely devoted to the
service of the country: to expanding or consolidating the national frontiers and
to protecting them. Their great labor, their achievement, was keeping the Phil-
ippines intact through two centuries when, it may be said, there was nota single
day that the islands were not under threat of invasion: by the Chinese, the
Japanese, the British, the Dutch. For two centuries the country was under con-
stant siege. The Dutch Wars, for instance — a crucial period in our history-
lasted fifty years. A single slip in the vigilance and our history would have been
different; there would be, to stress a paint now invisiblé to us, no Philippines at _
all: we would be a pravince today of Indonesia and nobedy would be arguing
about whata Filipino is.
During those 200 years the Creole faltered only once, very briefly, with
the British invasion, but he quickly recovered balance. The conquering Amer-
cans of the 1900s would sneer at Spanish empire in the Philippines as inept,
against all the evidence of history; for if the prime duty of a mother county (0
a colony is to protectit from invasion, then we'll have to admit that Spain, in its
almost 400 years in the islands, acquitted itself with honor, especially when we
remember that within fifty years after the American occupation, the Philippines
fell, and fell unprotected, to an invader, while the Ameticans looked the athet
way, toward Europe. Another point: the Tagalogs and Pampangos who fought
with the Creoles to defend the islands during those centuries of siege, We now
sneer at as “mercenaries” — but is it mercenary to fight for one’s country?
The labor of defense was so exhausting it partly explains why there#*
no really old Creole families in the Philippines. For his pains, the Creole might
be rewarded with an encomienda, which did sor mean possessing the lan
entrusted to his. care but merely gave him the tight to collect the tribute there for
the space of two generations: his own lifetime and that of his heiz. The hea!
tribute was at first cight reales (or peso), was later increased to ten reales, then
THE RIZAL HERO A CREOLE?
way WAS eo
ed to four. In return, the encomendero pledged himself |;
a defense of the folk under his care me ssieaik paren:
rnoment to be called fe military service anywhere in the country) ne
also Z
theis religious instruction; fmt he was forbidden to stay within his encomienda
or even to sleep two consecutive nights there, to prevent him. from turing into
alittle local tyrant.
The encomienda system lasted but briefly; and the Philippine Creole
depended more for subsistence on the Galleon trade and on mining. He worked
the iron mines of Antipolo when the Philippines still had a cannon foundry
industry and, later, the gold mines of Paracale. As a gentleman, manual labor
was forbidden him; he could enter only the Army, the Church and the Govern-
ment. The Creoles formed our first secular clergy, our first civil service, Only
late in Spanish times, with the relaxation of the restrictions on land-owning, did
the Creole turn to agriculture, dedicating himself to sugar culture in Negros and
Pampanga, to abaca culture in Bicolandia, to cattle culture in the various rancherias
in the North.
All this time the Creole — and the Philippine colony in general - lived in
isolation from Spain, and the neglect fostered the autonomous spirit. The
Creole was a “Filipino,” nota Spaniard. He controlled the government, Madrid
was represented only by the governor-general, who was so detested as a
“foreigner” he had to make an accounting of his stewardship before he could
retum to Madrid. The voyage from Europe to the Philippines was so long and
80 expensive and the mortality among passengers so high that only the hardiest
of Spaniards reached the islands, and once here they had to cast in theirlot with
the country forever, since a return trip was next to impossible. The immigrating
Spaniard, therefore, broke with Spain forever when he came to the Philippines.
If we further consider that many of those who came here were Basques and
Catalans — that is, folk with a tradition of rebelliousness against the Madrid
Bevernment — the temper of the Philippine Creole becomes evident. Rizal
Scanned by CamScanner
made his Ibarra the descendant of a Basque.
With the revolt of Spanish America and the opening of the Suez Canal,
Madrid came claser to Manila: and the quicker cheaper voyage NOW brought to
the Philippines, as Rizal’s Teniente Guevara observed, “lamas perdido de la penin-
Sula,” 4 : idered themselves several cuts
These peninsular parasites, however, considere rope him out of
above the “Bilipino” ‘ d be to
pino” — that is, the Creole — and began ; had
Army, Church and Government. The war between Creole and Peninsular
the 19th century, when
This was during the first three quarters or so of
70
JOseE Rizay
THE RIZAL HERO A CREOLE? .
way WAS "

a practically autonomous commonwealth found itself becoming a Spanish
colony in the strict sense of the word. The previous centuries of Spain j
the Philippines had been years of Christianization, unification and develo i
ment, but only the final century, the 19th, was
a period of hispanization,
and how effective it was displayed by the fact that within less than a centun,
the hispanization campaign had produced Rizal and the ilusteados, men so
steeped in Spanish and European culture they seemed to have a thousand
years of that culture behind them. The campaign to hispanize the islands
was intensifying when the Revolution broke out: the government was open-
ing normal schools for the training of native teachers to spread Spanish
throughout the population.
Meanwhile, the Philippine Creole was rising, stirred into insutgence by
the example ofa Mexican Creole of the Manila gartison. The Novales revolt
in the 1820s planted the idea of separatism. When Mexico, having success.
fully revolted, seceded from Spain, the treaty between the two counties
permitted the two imperial provinces that were formerly ruled through
Mexico, to choose between joining Mexico or remaining with Spain. The
Philippines thus got the chance to break away from Spain in 1821, for the
Philippines was one of these two imperial provinces dependent on Mexico,
the other being Guatemala, which then comprised most of Central America.
Guatemala opted to join Mexico, but the Philippine government — or its
Spanish governor-general anyway — chose to keep the islands under Spain.
However, the revolt of the Mexican Creole captain Novales — who was
proclaimed “emperor of the Philippines” one day and executed on the
cathedral square of Manila the next day — shows that there was a segment
of Creole opinion in the Philippines that favored joining the Mexicans in
their independence. Local Creoles had heard that, in Mexico, a Creole
(Iturbide) had been proclaimed “emperor,” aftet a revolution that had, for
gale Filipinization of the clergy. Pelaez petished in th
¢ Cathedral during
me arthquake of 1863, but he left a disciple who wo uuld carry on
the
his work:
Jose Burgos. /
With Burgos, zi =
we are already in Rizal country. He and his: mentor Pelaes
_ Hike Rizal himself — were what might be called “eventual
ists”. they believed
that, with sufficient propaganda, reforms could be won eventually, autonomy
could be gained eventually, and the hated Peninsulars could be ejected without
firing « shot. Burgos ts the Creole of the 1870s, resurgent if not yet insurgent: a
Liberal in the manner of Governor-General De la Torre; and
already con-
scious of himself as a Filipino distinct from the Spaniard. His counterpart in the
secular sphere is Antonio Regidor (implicated in the same Motin de Cavite that
cost Burgos’s life) who replied to the Peninsular’s disdain of the “Filipino” by
showing, in his own person, that a Filipino could be more cultured than a
Peninsular. It was in this spirit that the Philippine Creoles would vaunt that 2
Filipino, Ezpelera, had risen to the dignity of bishop and that another Filipino,
Azcarraga, had become a government minister in Madnd.
The fate of Burgos (the garrote) and of Regidor (exile) put an end to
the idea of eventualism. The Creoles that come:after ~ mostly educated on the
Continent and affiliated with the Masonic Order —are alrearly frankly Glibusteros
—thatis, subversives ~ and their greatest spokesmanis Marcelo.H. del Pilar, the
Creole who undoubtedly possessed the most brilliant mastery of Spanish a
Filpino ever wielded but whose talent got deadened by journalistic deadlines,
But the extremest development of the Creole.as filibustero was Trinidad Pardo
de Tavera, a man who came to loathe both the Malay and the Spaniard in
himself so intensely he became the first of the sajonistas and, as a member
of
the Philippine Commission of the 1900s, fought for the implantation of En-
Blishin the Philippines, in a virulent desire to upro
allot
traces of Spanish culture
from the islands. For good or evil, Trinidad Pardo de Tavera, whom we hardly
“member, was one of the decidets of our fate.

Scanned by CamScanner
one of its aims, equality between Spaniards and Creoles. :
The curtent of mutinous opinion swelled and, two decades after tht Gruhn Rizal novels probe these two phases of the Creole ain
Novales revolt, erupted mysteriously in the Conspiracy of the Palmeros, ° we aret,
and a Tangen Pelaez and Burthe
stil in the epoofch gos events :
affair that involved a Creole family so prominent (it was related to the mein tra, who believes that education and propaganda will eventually ab

Stel npg hin ei Bunn

Azcarragas) all records of what appears to have been a coup attempt have ‘SOF reform, follows the fate of Burgos even to the point of being, re
been suppressed — though the Rizal student should perk his ears here, ov
family close to the rulers of the state it’s trying to undermine sugges Simoun Ste in the petiod of Del Pilar and Pardo de Tavera; and he Bt
figure of Simoun, the sinister eminence behind the governor-general. Compe, te ocked and long-bearded, is no longer * on of the
ifest
A decade later, in the 1850s, the Creole revolution becomes man" ip tn 24 craves not only the fall of Spanish rule but the
hispaniz ‘tion movement.
in Father Pelaez, canon of the Manila Cathedral, who started the propaga"
zi OSE seq,
Ibarra
The family of Rizal’s hero traces the evolution from Spaniard to
Creole to Filipino. The great-grandfather still bears the original Basque name,
Eibarramendia, which his descendants abbreviate to Ibarra. Don Pedro
Eibarramendia is a Manila businessman; when his warehouse burns down he
accuses his bookkeeper of having started the fire and thus ruins not only the
hapless bookkeeper but all his descendants, the last of whom is the tragic Eliac
Don Pedro is a fearful figure, with his deep-sunken eyes, cavernous voice, and
“laughter without sound,” and has apparently been in the country a long time,
for he speaks Tagalog well. He suddenly appears in San Diego, is fascinated by
a piece of deep woods in which are thermal waters, and buys up the woods
with textiles, jewels and some coin. Then he vanishes as suddenly as hehas
come. Later, his rotting corpse is found hanging on a balite tree in the woods
Terrified, those who sold him the woods throw his jewels into the river and his
textiles into the fire. The woods where he hanged himself become haunted.
A few months later, his son Saturnina appears in San Diego, claims the
property, settles in the village (where still roam deer and boar) and starts an
indigo farm, Don Saturnino is as gloomy as his father: taciturn, violent, at times
cruel, but very active and industrious; and he transforms San Diego from “a
miserable heap of huts” into a thriving town that attracts new settlers and the
Chinese,
In these two initial generations of Ibarras, contemporaneous with the
early 1800s, we see the Creole turning, after two centuries of constant warfare,
from arms to plow, from battlefield to farm and shop. Don Pedro and Don
Saturnino have the gloom of the frustrated, of warriors born too late for
knight-errantry and forced into grubbier tasks. One goes into business and ends
up a suicide; the other tums into a frontiersman, bringing the qualities of @
soldie — violence,
r cruelty, vigor andzeal—to the development of a farmat the
edge of the jungle. Rizal is fair; he sees the latter-day Creole as engaged ”
another conquista, this time of the soil. As long as the Creole was merely
defending the land as empire, the land was his but he was not the land’s. But whe"
he began to work the land himself, he became possessed by what, formerly, he
had metely possessed. The change shows in the third-generation Ibarra, Don
Rafael, the hero’s father, who is already graduating from Creole to ee
pail
Don Rafael outrages the Peninsulars because, though of Spanis
he wears the native camisa. He is loved by his tenants; he sends
his only so” °
nar was THE RIZAL HERO A CREOLE? hn
study in Switzerland; lie has been influenced bythe Liberalism of the 1860s. He
subscribes [0Madrid newspapers and Keeps a picture of an “executed priest,"
What gets him into trouble is almost too blunt
4 Projection of the clash be-
Creole and Peninsular. The Peninsular in this case exemplifies the worst
of the Spaniards that poured into the Philippines with the Opening of the Suez
Canal: heis illiterate but has been teats a taxcollector, and the natives laugh at
him. When he punishes a child who's mocking him, he is knocked down by
Don Rafael, breaks his head on a stone and dies. Don Rafiel is thrown into jail,
where he rots. When his son returns from Europe the old man has died in jail
The fourth-generation Ibarra, Juan Crisostomo, has a proper Victorian’s
faith in education, science, propaganda and the excellences of Europe. He has
inherited a quarrel with the Peninsulars that he does not care to pursue, beinga
avilized man. He has also, but unknowingly, inherit a quarreled
with the Indios,
which provides the Nod Me Tangere with its sardonic humor; for Ibarra’s life is
—_ thrice sayed by Elias, who, ir tuens out, is a victim of the Ibatras, a victim of the
i Creole. Rizal was making an ironic comment on the alliance between Creole
' and Indio; yet he makes Elias die to save Ibarra the Creole; and it’s Ibarra, not
| Elias, who becomes the revolutionary,
| He is forced to become one, though all he wanted to do was elevate the
| masses by educating them. At times he even sounds like a reactionary:
_ “To keep the Philippines, it’s necessary that the friars stay; and in the
| union with Spain lies the welfare of our country.”
| Rizal repeats the Creole-vs-Peninsular theme by making Ibarra’s nval
for Maria Clara a Peninsular: the newcomer Linares. And when tragedy befalls
| him, Ibarra the Creole finds the Peninsular society of Manila ranged against him
| and decrying him precisely because of his Spanish blood. “Tt always has to be
the Creoles}? say the Peninsulars upon hearing of Ibarra’s supposed uprising.
“No Indio Would understand revolution!”
| th In the accurst woods where his Spanish ancestor hanged himself,
Sc anner
| “embittered Ibarra ceases to be a naive Edmond Dantes and becomes a
Svolent Montecristo,
j
5
™oun
Cam
=}
: a isto of Dumas. The
Simoun of Risilis mukeppe ion ek ie ie cana die darkest creations
74 JOse R24,
way WAS
THE RIZAL HERO A CREOLE? Ps

of literature, a man who believes salvation can come only from total com,
*T have inflamed greed,” he says. “Injustices and abuses have mul tiplied
I have fomented crime, and acts of cruelty, so that the people may bec
inured to the idea of death. I have maintained terror so that, fleeing eae
they may seize any solution. I have paralyzed. commerce so that the coun .
impoverished and reduced to misery, may have nothing more to fear, I hive
spurred ambition, to ruin the treasury; and not content with all this, to arouse 4
popular uprising, I have hurt the nation in its rawest nerve, by making the
vulture itself insult the -very carcass that feeds ir!”
Simoun is beyond any wish for reform, or autonomy, of representation
in the Cortes.
“I néed your help,” he tells Basilio, “to make:the youth resist these insane
cravings for hispanization, for assimilation, for equality of tights. Instead of
aspiting to be a province, aspire to be a nation . . . so that not by right, nor
custom, nor lanpuage, may the Spaniard feel at home here, not be reparded by
the people as a native, but always as an invader, as.an alien.”
And he offers Basilio “your death or your fature; with the government
or with us; with your oppressors or with your country”; warning the boy that
whoever “declares himself neutral exposes himself to the: fury of both sides”
— the most poignant line in the novel; though Rizal, when the moment of
choice came, did not exactly declare himself neutral.
But Basilio, even when finally converted to the revolution, shrinks from
Simoun''s corimand to exterminate not only the counter-revolution but all who
tefuse to rise up in arms:
“Alll Alll Indios, mestizos, Chinese, Spaniards. All whom you Gind-with-
out coutage, without spirit. It is necessary to renew the racel Coward fatten
can only beget slave children. What? You tremble? ‘You fear to sow death?
What is to be destroyed? An evil, a misery. Would you call that to destroy?I
would call it to create, to produce, to nourish, to give lifel” . Mec
: e.
high i final chapter is beautiful but unsatisfactory, The NoéMeT;
acied te naivete of the zeformist the futof collaboration B/ Pe
aah therefore, have unequivocally justified revolution
— Gra it takes ner
ones,
chapter what it pushed forward in the preceding
ihe BnalWhat had happened?
The Creole revohition had flopped.
A few decades before, Sinibaldo de Mas had predicted the impasse:
“Among the whites born in the colony, there
arise local interests op-
to those of the mother country and which end by arousing the desire
for
independence. A Filipino Spaniard may be called a Spaniard but he has never
been to Spain and has neither friends nor relatives there. He has spent his in-
fancy in the Philippines; there he has enjoyed the games of childhood and
known his first loves; there he has domiciled his soul, The Philippines is hig
mative land. But the Filipinos (thatis, the Creoles) ate continually snubbed. Their
resentment when a boat from Cadiz arrives in Manila with alealdes mayores.of
military and nance officers is so obvious one must close one’s eyes and even at
times one’s ears to avoid noticing it.
“However, much as the Spanish officials may suppose the Filipino
Spaniards to be disloyal and desperate, it was not possible for me to be-
lieve that it would ever occur to them to rise up and arm the natives (be-
cause the Creoles are) much less loved than the Europeans by the Indios,
without the support of the friars, without capital, and too weak a minority
to subdue the more than 200,000 rich, active and intelligent Chinese mesti-
70s and the three and a half million natives. In case of a break, the Spanish
Population rooted in the country stands to lose most; the Europeans can
feturn to Spain, but the Filipino Spaniards will be uprooted, lose all and
‘i to search for another homeland. Yet can these individuals inquestion
stupid and blind if they favor separation from Spain when We

Scanned by CamScanner
Unlike Montecristo, Simoun fails. Dying, he flees to the house beside the see 'Y tead in the history of popular uprisings that the most sil
Pacific where lives Father Florentino; and through Father Florentino, Rizal seems
fubpecting eae Ott puside
to annul what he has been saying so passionately, during the novel, through nei § tora moment that & they
sewolutls
will fall cooing
victims of fethe ae vee masnese
revolting
Simoun. What had sounded like a savage sneering at reform becomes * ey Incite to revolt?”
celebration of reforms, of spiritual self-renewal. Salvation cannot come =o
corruption; garbage produces only toadstools. In Durnas, the lastwords J We joined cuted was what more or less happened. Ase inmens CE
been: Wait and hope. In Rizal, the last words ate: Suffer and toil. And the| ; and ne the rising native ilustrados, initiative MPT to
with which Simoun had thought co fuel the holocaust, Father Florentino b imi the +e,adioCf®Ol€ got cold feet with the though ofa might happen
what might
should rise up in arms. For the Creole might Ido, ico
into the ocean, there to wait until a time “when men need you for # holy © revolt of Filipinos against the Peninsulars; but to the Indio,

a
 JOse
16 Ray

ne oe Se between one set of Spaniards and another set of s,,..

sets quarreled, the Indio snatched back his land, Sri
Burope, while king and bishop squabbled, the bourgeoisie slipped throy ghang
seized ae" abortive Creole revolution did create a climate
of subversion,
that extent, Simoun had succeeded. There’s a clear line of development ftom RES BONIFACIO
1872 to 1896, as we acknowledge by accepting Burgos as a national hero By November 30, 1863—May 10, 1897
what happened in America did nef happen here. An actual Creole revolt dig i
break outs the Indio beat the Creole to the draw; and when the hour of reck.
oning came the Creole sided with the hated Peninsulars — though he later some.
what redeemed himself by joining the second phase of the Revolution, the wa,
against the Americans. When that, too, collapsed, the Creole returned to the sid
of the imperialist: the Partido Federalista was the Creole party. The failure of
that party removed the Creole from the mainstream of the national life _
though, ixonically, the very failure led to the realization of the old Creole
dream: it was a Quezon that took possession of Malacafianp,
The modem descendants of the Creoles have had no one fate. The very
tich ones, who were, in the 1870s, becoming more and more Filipino have,
6 The Eve Of St. Bartholomew
today, become more and more Spanish. The poorer ones have had, as Sinibaldo
de Mas predicted, to search for a new homeland, Australia being the current
goal of their exodus. Others, as a modern Creole observes, emigrate to San
Lorenzo Village: “Go to the Rizal Theater any night and you'd think you were
in a foreign country.” But thete’s another segment that seems to be reviving S. Bartholomew the Apostle was, according to the Gospels, from
what might be called the Spirit of 72 and which may be studied
in an Emmanuel Cina of Galilee and, according to tradition, the first preacher of the Faith in
Pelaez or a Manuel Manahan, tentative Hamletish figures that baffle us with Aubia and “India,” meaning the Near East, where he is supposed to have
their scruples, theirmilitancies, their enigmatic “honor” Are they Ibarra or Simoun? suffered a particularly atrocious form of torture: he was skinned alive and then
Are they resuming an unfinished revolution of their awn, the revolt of the ‘cheaded. For this reason, his images carry a large sharp knife, the
Creole? instrument ,
ofhis martyrdom. The religious wars in Europe were to associate him with
The jewels of Simoun wait in the sea. oo hortor: the massacre of the Huguenots in Pazis in 1572, on an August
Or are they surfacing at lact? which is St. Bartholomew's Day.
The saint with the knife is the patron of Malabon town,
where he has,
sik the Centuries, like all our patron saints, acquired a Filipino look. He
ho aes bolo, for one thing, and on his feast day the main street of
s mes two dense rows of impromptu stores where one may buy
bog, to on size and kind, from small balisongs, to kitchen knives and farm
tes the hoje ns eutcher’s cleavers. Through this chilling display of cudery
te month, f Wielding saint, his martyr’s robe of crimson the very mood of
Or August, in Philippine folk culture, is a red month, the amok
 The Fiction of a.Knowable Community oe 49

community in temporal (by providing a political chart of the progress of

the human condition) and spatial (by adumbrating the external and in-
CHAPTER™ Two ternal conditions of the nation-state) terms. Rizal's literary project of
conjuring up the Philippine nation is alsa one of the most important and
influential attempts by a Filipino to address and think through the “prob-
lem of modernity” that is central to nationalist discourse and practice.
The “problem of modernity” is concerned with the question of freedom
in a historical context seen as increasingly secular, technicized, and “in-

TheFictionof —
ternational” (Bearsdsworth 1996, 49).
Philippine literature attests to Rizal's effort ta invent the “Filipino” in

a Knowable Community
ew-novels exercise as gripping a hold on the Filipino nationalist imagi-
" nation as José Rizal's Noli me:tangere and El filibusterismo. Not sim-
ply touted as Filipino masterpieces, they are “master-narratives” which
haye attainéd an extraordinarily exalted status—not unlike that of the
nineteenth-century “national novels” of Latin America (Sommer 1991, 4)
as “originary,” if not founding, fictions of the Filipino national community.
For his role in tracing the contours of nationalist thought and determin-
ing the substance of some of its most important debates
postindependence Philippines, Rizal has been called the “First Filipino”
(L. Guerrero 1963, 492),
conjure up More important
howith did he pe rect Communitingy ddthisRizalcommunit
80 of abimplications? y, by what means, and
out represent This chapter focuses
two respects. First, it narrates this effort of invention and makes the ef-
fort one of its key subjects, Second, Philippine literature valorizes this
theme of inventing the Filipino through the concept of thé singular text.
Rizal’s Noli, for example, calls itself a “Novela tagala,” or Tagalog ‘novel,
and its critical reception as a Filipino literary work is deeply informed’ by.
presuppositions regarding the privileged status of its author, the “Filipino”
patriot José Rizal. The emphasis on the singularity of the text, the novelty
of its vision and its presentation of ideas, and the creativity of its author
has greaily contributed to legitimizing Rizal’s public authority as a writer.
This public legitimation highlights: the intimate and privileged relation-
ship between the author and his work, thereby investing the author with
the public authority to influence, through explication, the interpretation
of his work. Standard literary criticism of the Noli draws on the “special”
relationship between Rizal and his novel, anid uses Rizal's letters and other
writings to explain how Rizal shaped his novel. His declarations concern-
ing how his novels were to be interpreted (that is, as an accurate depiction
of “Tagalog” society viewed as a microcosm of Philippine society), there-
in
fore, deeply inform readings of his novels.
Rizal anchors his literary invention of the “Filipino” national commu-
nity in his narrative project of forging a concept of modern nationhood.
ut of the vicissitudes of colonial rile. For Rizal, the problem of repre-
sentation involves not only fictional representation, in the. sense of

Scanned by CamScanner
with what kind
on the complex the sense
Process through which the. Noli speaking about the nation, but also political representation, in
me tangere emerged as the founding tet project of using narrative
of speaking in the name of the nation. The
of Phill pine nati .
onalism. It addresses the ways in which Rizal approached the inevi-
language to make sense of Philippine colonial society entails
mmunié ifically through literary procedures, a Philip: table, but nevertheless difficult, acknowledgment that writing itself means
as he involved eect h "was different and separate from Spain, eve? @ position. The very act of constr
writing from ble,” ucting @ Filipino commu-
nial government's evils © equally arduous task of exposing the colo- nity as “knowa therefore, is never just a matter of artistic ee
Rizal's novels construcre tion al viol“Fil
ence, but an ethical and political decision to speak of “the Philippines he S
F—and
low Filipinos.” This ethico-political decision that claims to speak
Ploying a Narrative of — kno wable ipino” community. by de-
; Opment defining the ao “modern
 The
50 w_Necessa Fictions ;
r, attended by an ineluctable : Fiction of a Knowable Communit
y cm 51
risk,
h
that the one who speaks
can always and only from Rizal himself. The Comisién Permane:
nte de Censura subsequently
f .
gining a com submitted a report that recommended a ti otal
mess: jon.The challenge e ‘of ima a ban on the importation,
_ ey jess than adopting @ eel attitude publica tion, and circulation of the book.
Although Rizal once told fellow reformi
e, nds F that community as ipi : st Mariano Ponce that the Noli
munity, , therefor dema ae wt 4c obpe was “written for the Filipinos, and it
is necessary that it should be read
by the Filipinos” (1938, v, 2, 29), the fact that the novel was written in
‘the Modern” e Spanish would seem to undermine Rizal's declared purpose from its in-
— ao the publication of Noli me tanger ception because few “Filipinos” in Rizal's time—and since—unders
in August 1887, five months the Philippines. He had spent the last and used Spanish.” Rizal acquired considerable notoriety
tood
not simply be-
inj Berlin, | J José Rizaleidreturned
studyingto in Europe, and something of his genera
l
cause of the spirited discussion and arguments generated by the
ned from the account with which ne later eee Noli,
five years travelin but because of certain, and in retrospect, important “misunderstandings
“Half of the Noli, ”
iinerary om bo ells concerning the novel’s writing. that collected around his name.’
ter of it in Paris, and
oe written. in Madrid; =one quar
For rumors, indeed, played a role in disseminating Rizal’s—and
stated, . “ha'
Rizalee
=
. ; the Noli’s—proper name among those who had no access to either Rizal
Germany” (Bonoan 1994, 92, aie ‘
for Rizal, Oe or his book. Almost immediately upon his arrival in the Philippines, Rizal
= ms os iia was of particular significance
ia cient ifica ) (1938 , v. 5, pt. 1 was caught in a swirl of rumors about himself and the Noii. In a let-
“my saute homeland” [mi patr st its peop i ter to Ferdinand Blumentritt, Rizal enumerates the various stories that
the “peculiar calm” that livin g amid
at aie their pee d reached his: ears: “They take me for a German spy; agent: of Bismarck,
of hope in
hard-working, studious, well-governed, full . Protestant, freemason, wizard, a half-damined soul, etc.” (5 September
own destinie s"—e xerc ised on his imagination an
master of their eon 1887, 1938, v. 5, pt. 1, 202, and 216; Retana 1907, 144). In this respect, the
Rizal because *h
writing.’ Germany held a special attraction for importance of the Noli resides not so much in the impact it had on “the
seat of scient ific learn ing and philo sophy . More over , German scl 0 ae
Eee eg few who have understood it” as in the effect it had on those who could
on the Philippines was relatively untainted by Germany's not and did not read it! puts fa ~
dating from the 1880s, in the European imperialist scramble for coloni ~The fantasy about the nation that figures in the Noli is tied to a certain
and by its outright political and military intervention in Africa and parts fantasy about Rizal himself that has figured in the reading of his novels.
of the Pacific. Until the nineteenth century, Germany had been consid- The question at the heart of both the iriternal: drama of his novels and
ered a fragmented and backward country, and its subsequent unification the critical drama—the controversy over meaning, language, and.context—
and meteoric accession to the world arena must have seemed, to Rizal, that these novels have subsequently provoked in Rizal's time and
an inspiring example of what any country, no matter how disadvantaged, beyond, is a question not only of what a Filipino nation is or should
and willpower.
could achieve edby dint of atalent, diligence, ve, be, but also of how this nation is actualized. The question of substanti-
Rizal arriv in Manil in time to obser s
firsthand, the reactionto
ating the natlon is principally posed as a question of appropriating
his novel (Schumacher 1973, 82-93). Since only a small number of copies “modern” ideas and practices identified as having a “foreign” (from the
had found their way into the Philippines—the rest being held. up at cus-

Scanned by CamScanner
toms—the Nol? was much in demand, and copies changed. hands at viewpoint of Rizal’s subsequent Filipino critics) and “external” (from Rizal's
escalating prices. The rector of the University of Santo Tom4s appointed viewpoint) provenance. ;
@ comm ittee that submitted a Teport condemning hlealeecite then, must be understood not only as a specific conjunc-
the novel for being
“heretical, impious and ture of world-historical forces, dating back to the seventeenth century,
mele scandalou: which were instrumental in shaping Philippine history through ee
antipatrioti c, subver i$ in the religious domain, 2 3
sive of poli of European colonialism. One might also understand it as a form . nate
tical order, offensive to, the Government of
ing about that period of history. This thinking concerns ee tech:
“how and wherefore of human freedom in an increasingly secular,
 4 worth 1996, 49) . As a discursi ‘ive i Fition ofa Knowable Community cw 53
jen ears uman freedom, modernity not The various, often. conflicte:
i
equally important normative colonial life experienced it x ‘he ce wars et
t Ste at
history and their promise of freedom and baneosie
races oe
al of colonial life imposes particularly recalcitrant cloned c —
{1 long time served as commonsensic ona d
one haseval 3andSo
ony his novels erms—of the emergence of the Fiji.
TE symballc and practical capacities of the colonized to
realize tents a
underscores the need for Rizal's imagined nation is one pecul
markers—in historical and He aiscussion also
iarly fraught with hope and eae
cause its conception of the ethical imper
Rizal, his novels, and
pino nation, but the a ; the relationship between
ative of development and ne
Rizal's is tied to a recognition of the vicissitudes
examining more ae elped imagine, but bring into being. relat
and contingencies Pe ik
ionship between and among rulers and ruled.
tive of development This is bo ae =
en nation by deploying 4 narra
"a the uestioned, the universal norms that define a spe- Rizal's adoption of an inside-outside narrative
perspective in ie
novels CT es tangere, a narrative double stance registering a
al terms. This the presence of an “excess”
co cnatiatt in both temporal and spati of competing cognitive standpoints that derive
i lly~~
cifica Oat: sents my own reading of Rizal
repre and should not from the colonial experi-
ence of various inhabitants in the Philippines, and compl
icate the ack
position.
prac as his explicitly acknowledged rhetoric of universal historical development, change, and
progress
ing the major theme of Rizal’s novels How did Rizal deal with this “problem” of freedom and
fg and its peri and
0 f thinking through the “modern” how did he and his novels, in doing so, end up prefiguring this ptobl
can be considered Rizal's way are “modern” em
es. That Rizal and his novels in a way that differs from, and potentially challenges, most of the subse
implications for the Philippin of history: Yet this view of |, quent critical appropriations of Rizal and. his works?
-
to any Filipino stu dent
ons the assum ption of the mod
ularity of the novel ~\ “To be sure, Rizal’s contemporaries and contemporary Rizal biogra-
S e
Rizal’s mode rnness restsane ity~ -
o f their flexibility and adaptabil phers have
I strikingly similar preoccupat
\pations.
i Although separated by three
and nation forms, that is, the idea cts
origin. As dominant artifa republics, two world wars, and three foreign colonizers, the reactions of
to contexts different from their point of
“the West,” the novel Rizal’s contemporaries dovetail with the critical reception of Rizal by
of the modern age with specific associations with
technical
and the nation provide the form and content—both the subsequent generations of. Filipinos insofar as they are concerned with
“Rilipino’s” the idea of the “modern,” as well as its implications for the present-day
means and substance—of Rizal's attempts to determine the
understanding of community in relation to existing “colonial,” “interna- Filipinos’ capacity for transformative thought and action. This idea of the
tional,” and “technical” processes. It is in the space of thinking through modern, with its notions of radical transformation and emancipato
a Philippine modernity that Rizal located the political possibilities of Capacities, crops up with monotonous regularity. in almost all discussions
nationhood. of Rizal's novels. Not only is Rizal often depicted as an epitome of the
Rizal's novels may be read as attempts at describing a historical con modern (Renaissance) man, his literary feat of imagining a Filipino com-
text in which the nation form had already achieved normative status in munity is itself considered a characteristically modern gesture. To speak

Scanned by CamScanner
of Rizal is already to speak of the modem.
other places as the principal mode of social organization and political
This peculiar identification of Rizal with modernity needs to be ad-
imagination. But in reflecting upon the possibility or impossibility of dressed. After all, Rizal is a rather unusual choice for national hero. He
Filipino freedom in a secular, technical, and interna tional context, Rizals had spent nearly nine years traveling abroad, and both the Noli me tan-
novels had to deal with the problem ating
of formul o
a notion of Filipin
ot based on the narrative of progress, development, and change gere and El filibusterismo were written ‘and published in Europe (the latter
in Ghent in 1891). It seems strange that someone who lived most of his
practices ee aly « gainst the assumptions, disciplinary power, and adult life elsewhere and wrote books that very few people in his time could
idea of a certain an ee the Philippines, but also against the read would end up being the national hero of his country. .
peting European Noah internationalism wrought by the existence of com This mystery is usually glossed over by the argument that Rizal's fre-

1964, 154-62), and silts powers (“The Philippines a Centur

y Hence
emergent socialism as well,
‘quent absence did not change the fact that he did return to the Philippines
SN the hand The Fiction of a Kno
wable Commu
X n ular
and resistance
martyrdom against
in the hands of : ~~ 55
nt persecutio
e the colo. could be something else
, Filj pinos who
t his subseque . P were me mbers of a
helped uaa | was an American-sponsoreq tion” (496), Having thu Filipino. Na-
s dec
ae sane “First Filipino” by virtue of
also been argu
‘na 6 o contain the recalcitrant, revolu-
his accomplishments,
nizers. It has led to add that Rizal “is als
o
hero, the product of America® ae ‘he better to implement American These statements mean hearts of the Filipinos” (497
),
anes energies of the ae ae (Constantino 1982; Constantino ang to account for Rizal's extr
the imagination of his cou aordinary impact on
colonial rule oe the islan shan iuminate the gue ntrymen, but Guerrero mer
of-han: d in his effort to expl ely affects a sleight-
975). ‘ ain Rizal's influence, for
description for explanati he substitutes
aor explanations tend to eal establish a reputation on. Rizal is, in other word
s, influential because
tion of Rizal's influence, stent potential rallying point of forces
that, even in his time, aa movements? Such a question necessarily tional hero, his biography is, in
that coalesced into Pan reputation cutting across several sections of the final analysis, not very different
from
invokes a notion of . Indeed, Rizal was known beyond the circle those against which he wrote.
of Since Guerrero does not provide
social life and classes. agitated for reforms in Manila and Europe. Rizal influence, we will need to seek.
an adequate explanation of Rizal's
the answer from Rizal himself. In
hispanized Filipinos whe ag ar” the Noli created (1961d, v. letter to Blumentritt, instead of Rizal's
a discussion generated by the circulat
i aboot the “great deal if Wait ion
a
1, 135). aeIn the sam ¢ letter, ' Rizal
f the treats us to. an“Youaccount of f his iis meeting :
Philippines
of the Noli among the reading public, another form of circulation that,
have written a nove precedes the act of reading is at work and takes the form of rumo
rs.
nk Sa
used mui ela ' * Rizal reported
aa the governor
o as saying,
ate “they Proscription by the
colonial state and especially by the
friars made
the book controversial, and perhaps
effectively impeded the further
A4 cat sits into dissemin ation of the ideas expounded and embo
ol me e Sceeeae
above e a eee
quotation from baie baer
’ died by the novel. Most
people in Rizal's time had no access to the nove
the sain of ths novel and of Rizal's reception. The eee ee obtain access secondhand, that is, by |hearsay,
l and had perforce to
about the novel and the comments it elicited, then he wile , a ‘The state and the clergy
had not counted on the effect that their-censorsh
cath
demands, to read it It is indicative of the novel’s I’s p poor
) circulation cies ip would have on pub-
lic reception of the novel, for, rather than curtail the circulation of the
Rizal himself had to admit to the governor that he did not Pa se
novel's ideas, censorship made possible the production
of his own book at hand, and had to go around town looking a a of a specific form
of reading that sidestepped proscription but permitted, neverth
(1961d, 135-36), In his biography of Rizal, Leén Ma. Guerrero SOT ack eless, a
the factors that worked against the dissemination of the Noli and its i = relaying of the novel's “content.” This specific mediation of the Noli
took
the form of rumors.
by the usual means of circulation among the reading public. oe The most interesting aspect of these rumors is, of course, that they
had two thousand copies of the Noli printed, but, as mentioned al ve
are repeated in supposedly reputable newspapers. The fact that these
only a small number of these copies found their way into the Philippin
Tumors were: taken to be the truth by everybody, including the so-called

Scanned by CamScanner
Official censorship, the exclusivity of the language in which the Nol a indios, appears to have greatly disturbed the writer of Epoca:
written, the vehement condemnation of the religious orders, and Rizal
own amateuri sh handling of the distribution all ensu En tales circunstancias llegé 4 Filipinas, procédente de Alemania, el
= d only be read by a small number
woul red that the novel
;
of people, mostly Spaniards d calambefio José Rizal, quien reunié de seguida a lo més ganado de
cated Filipinos.3 4” su pueblo, y entre aquellas sencillas gentes divulgs con pertinaz
Yet, for all these obstructi insistencia ideas rabiosamente. opuestas A los espafioles, ae
most extraordinary thi ons, Guerrero acknowled
ngs about the Noli is ges that “one ou autoridades y en particular 4 los religiosos, 4 cleneta sasiraniae a
history of a nation" that withal it change
(1963, 148), d los que debieran impedir tales predicaciones. Rizal ha —_ ne
tion i for this conundrum,
Rizal's influence lay
‘ m umiing it
subsum Ct sus paisanos odio 4 la religion catélica; y sus mas adep
in the f; act
oe that he “taught
hisi argut aa
his
ends on countrymen that they
55 Ma
Fltions semeniecon The Fiction
of a Knowable
sw 57
ee asa, C aon antipatia profunda 4 los of his travels through Germany,
toda practica of his power and tea
bandonado ; that nation, of how he would t influence (!) in
novela o: de ellos que son los explotad-
ensefia en su bring a German fleet ("), of how
i
n h de sp re st ig iéndolos y dicien rci6n de cosas por el estilo,
he is
: a ¥ otra :
del indiode Calamba, sino también para todas las
ee nico: is
para los domi
aie no ya digamo de como pinta 4 la raza tally disturbed
dades, ¥ nada those People
ue comuni effective) way that, in Calamb
in such
a (ridiculous, absurd but most
les. a, those who follow Rizal are tagg
ed “The
ilo, pues con Party of Germany, ” and those loyal to the Dominica
e si ese germandf
oe bilidades tiene sobr muchos de sus “The Party of the Friars" (my trans
n fathers are called
a producir mil dis
gustos 4a
*
lation),
wus teorfas ha venido *, de
de Rizal,
. sino de los triunfos
a no sé habla Although the article writer expresses the fear that
paisanos! En Calamb
Rizal's novel would
rr i Alemania; ry grandes influencias (1) en stir up opposition to the Spanish clergy
and the government, he is more
q: de que : alarmed by the idea that Rizal's rumored association
sala ee ie se va oS o cacistra stems appears to be generally believed by one and
with the Germa ns
edad de la ao a ae all. La Epoca concocts yet
oie a ae paisanos la propi ae
tries to contain the rumors by decanting them into
a Calamba that threat-
Beep c
de que allf se ha de constituir un gran Estado, arta — a
ens to dissolve into factions like the Party of the Friars
and the Party of
aen oe
En fin, mil paparruchas que tienen app Germany. But the unexpressed fear is that this factio
nalizing can very
s ue es ridiculo y a 1 ,
easily spill over and inundate other parts of the country and other
el parti do de mem-
pene siguen 4 Rizal se les apoda bers of the Spanish civil and ecclesiastical orders. Tronically, by repeat
4 los padres dominicos se les llama ing
Alemania, y 4 los que son leales these rumors, the newspaper may have done more to lend credence to
)
el partido de los frailes. (quoted in Retana 1907, 141-42 them just by the mere fact that they were printed at all. Furthermore,
Rizal's “scientific homeland,” Germany, becomes a signifier of potential
In such circumstances, the Calambelio José Rizal arrived in the Philip-
Opposition to the Spanish authorities because of the vilification the Span-
pines from Germany, and immediately joined the most select of his
iards heaped upon it. Retana comments that Spanish anxiety regarding
people. And among those simple people, he popularized with tireless
persistence Ideas that are rabidly opposed to the Spaniards, to the the dispute with Germany over the Carolinas at that time explains the
virulence directed toward the novel that, “as was natural,” was suppos-
authorities, and, in particular, to the religious, to the learning and
efforts of those whose duty it was to impede:such preachings. Rizal edly more pronounced in the Philippines than anywhere else.
The vehemence with which Rizal's detractors attacked him is equaled
has inspired hatred among his countrymen, toward the Catholic reli-
gion, and his closest followers have abandoned all practice of religion, only by the avidity with which the “natives” received Rizal himself. Writ-
h in his novel Noli me
he teaches ing to Blumentritt, Rizal describes a Mount Makiling outing that quickly
faithfully complying with that whic

Scanned by CamScanner
tangere, (namely,| profound antipathy to the'clergy, deprecating them spawned rumors that he had planted the German flag-at the summit and
proclaimed German sovereignty over the Philippines (1938, ¥. 5, pt. 1, 202
and saying of them that they are exploiters of the indio of Calamba, and 216; Retana 1907, 144; L. Guerrero 1963, 174). What could account
and things of that kind, insulting things, not only as concerns the for the ease with which Rizal attract ed followers (if only for an outing)
Dominicans, but also all the other orders, not to mention how he
from among the indios? Guerrero suggests a religious reading of the or-
Portrays the Spanish as a race.
dinary people's enthusiasm for following Rizal around: “How else are we
How much responsibility does this Germanophile to explai:
n why the peasants should follow him on his continental-style
bear, with his theo- 2 He himeelf
ties which have produced a great deal of revulsion among his Outings at dawn to admire scenic views from a mountain:tOp!_1 Bs
ee In Calamba there is no talk save that of Rizal’s triumphs, might believe that he was only leading a party of i a round him,
Promises, of the welcome afforded him by the sages (?) of Europe, Leitmeritz; the simple men, women and children ga
 5g cw _Necess4 nator’ The Fiction of a Knowable Commun
‘ani d Sermo n on the moun
ano aiigeesina ves,
fas
tation of a seco
cnt surmise, in the expec umacher has als
one might 175). Historian a ns the lenses of Reynaldo Hleto's

folk reception of Rizal which analyzes the masses notions

rar
pa inet Pasyon and fos
revolution of the religious, idiom of the Passion
in 1989; Hleto 1982b, 278-337). Guertero's and
of Jesus Christ (1991, 188; aad thus confer on Rizal the ae parteti,
whic he is a doctor, and a fore
e igner. The tao's disappoin
ae aura fom
Christ-like ‘ reinforced by his martyrdom) wi fore, signifies a moment of ted “oh, that,” there-
knowledge: the indio who app
and in one version eve ears before him,
appeared in folk es way of appreciating the complex inlay of n answer s to the foreign-sounding
Yet there may be an Name Doc
Rizal’s stay in the Philippines, a way of draw. f us.” The exclamation of dis tor
representations eee already encapsulates a set of a appointment
connection. Austin Coates and Carlos
ing attention back to oe nae report an anecdote concerning the what is “foreign” and what is about
no it; yet it also encodes
Quirinsna's bi aphi ’ es
o’s biogr of Rizal a kind of desire, a
lished as a a “German docto
doc’ r”: soon after he t needs to be known. The tao
is curious
one “modern,” where “modern”
opened a ion ue. Here is Quirino’s version (1940, 135): here as secular (Doctor Uliman
is not a priest), technical (Ulima
is defined
‘D i z
* a Tagalog corruption doctor), and “international” (Do n is a
[Rizal] became knawn as the “Doctor Uliman, ctor is “Uliman”),
ae Rizal's arrival thus takes on the dra
of the bela wordfor Gertrian. Among [the’sea ma and excitement of the appear-
were whis ance of the modern. In his ove
nd rtiong and tales of his mitaculous cttres rcoat and derby hat, pale from year
s of
living in a temperate climate and
a iat a tno stood outside the Mercado home, undecided already afflicted with prickly heat rash
and furthermore believed to hav ,
wether or not to.conte in, Rizal saw‘him and asked him to come up. e recently arrived from German
y and able
to ‘successfully cure people of thei
r eye ailments, Rizal lent himself to
"I want to see, sir, the Doctor Uliman,” said the peasant. species of rumor mongering that incor a
porated the Oppositional connota-
Rizal revealed that he was not an wliman although that, was the name tions of Germany (Protestant, enem
y of Spain) and applied them to an
they called him. indio. Moreover, rumors about the subve
rsive content of the Noli, as well
as news of Rizal’s reception by the autho
“Susmartosep\" exclaimed the surprised tao, crossing himself. “So, it's rities, did nothing to dispel the
“misunderstanding” of Rizal.
only you—thank you very much, sir—don’t bother.” If the anecdote is indeed true, it would seem
that most people went
to see Rizal hoping to see a white man, and
In Coates’s version, Rizal is merely pointed out as “Dactor Ulman were surprised that “Doctor
, Uliman” turned out, miraculously, to be an indio. This
and the man, who comes from another town, exclaims “in very rough disappointment,
however, does not explain why the people around him woul
Tagalog ‘Oh, that!’ and goes away d follow him
in disgust” (1968, 130). The anecdote is around, and still call him “Doctor Uliman” anyway. |

ostensibly about a certain kind of colonial, mentality—the man hears of
ve miraculous cures performed by a “German doctor,” who turns out t0
:
OI weed on. whathimself. But if one suspends this judgm
exactly it was the man had expectedentof “Docto
and fo-
r
* then the moment the uliman dissolves into an indio appeals
se ae gen of colonial Mentality, but rather, as
weak an implicit expec
curlosity about what Doctor Uliman represents.
These
of a kind of popular di essed on for generations, offer a telling glimps?
“iscourse in which the “modern” becomes an object
Scanned by CamScanner
But perhaps this. incident explains more successful
ly the expectations
of Rizal's biographers, for we need to ask why the biographers chose this
incident as illustrative of Rizal's reputation in the Philippine Rizal
Ogtaphers have repeatedly remarked on his metamorphosis into the
s. 's bi-
miraculous “Doctor Uliman.” Guerrero and Coates, for example, both dwell
on Rizal's “foreign” appearance during his execution. Guesets writes:
“How strange he must have looked, in his black European suit and ae
derby, facing the eight Filipinos [sic] of the firing-squad bis ikatiy
Campaign uniforms and straw hats. It was almost as it 20)
60 ~~ _Nec ; had been indeed a foreign agent
i Fiction of a knowable Community se _ 61
domestication of Rizal’s “foreign” (and modern) attribu
n the two jamp:posts his: executioioners the true
: de. tes, but in the high-
lighting, indeed naturalizing, of it—a showcasing of his
connections to
oi ~ Baga Ane
‘i
Coates: “Aged thirty-five, the modern “outside.” Rizal hovers between
onths ‘
in prison, he was.
: impeccab
5 ly the foreign and native, and

jack sult, spodesdy white shit and and ows how unstable an appellat
and how powerful and influential
ion

wearing i a black derby ahats "°°"

a iar mg at and taste cientoe
sormality pe erstwhile indio had become, less
term “Filipino” to encompass the
than a century after his novels
published and proscribed. were
appearance was a es ‘accounts, Rizal hovers in that aa - wee in ce
aan and
the foreign na nativ ¢; i for tionalism
both Guerrero
hingesans sacs
on his access to theier
Europe's The Nove] and Nation as Modern Artifa
cts
formation of Philippine ae to translate and appropriate su . i s in Far from being an idiosyncrasy, the inten
se preoccupation with the
“modem” ideas and his ab Ca symbolic descriptions of Rizal's for- foreign condensed in the Doctor Uliman anecdote
figures prominently in
the Filipino Eades be read as scholarly versions of the a numb er of literary studies on Rizal. Like the biogr
eign appearan
aphies that turn the
the momen
on ee rec-
t ofpeat national hero's life story into a case study
Doctor Uliman anecdote, because doe Betuie of nationalism and its roots in
the question of what is modern and how the
colony can be imagined as
ognition, of transformation 7 ee For a “native” to be taken for a modern nation, the main insights of some of the
that one can be both native and Se fee antes? comm be "nedets” that ary studies on Rizal's import in Philippine litera
most influential liter-
a German doctor, it seems, proves na seid tesing rmuitiaiy exchislen. ture hinge on the same
Eieahs identification of Rizal with the modernity of nation
the two terms are not, as the colonizers wal i alism.
a In his pioneering and comprehensive study
himself, characterizes Rizal's achievement in terms of the novel form, Resil
es of Philip- Mojares situates the Noli me fangere within
ability to seem a
ailey m and thereforeNes relevan t to the realiti
eiral's cawli: the context of a cultural
3 nationalism that emerged out of specific historical and technologi
ine histo! e resent time. The ideas expressed in izal’s cal
developments in the Philippines, notably the formation of an incipi
ioe ee ee to his modern sensibility: It is Rizal’s eee ent
print culture and the rise of a hispanized class whose scions were edu-
tance,” in Coates’ assess ment, “of the inevitability ofAsia devel ue ig
cated in Europe. Crucial to the novel’s development was the furthe
in the full utilization of the science and technology of the West ne r
crystallization of empirical and mimetic tendencies alread
gives him the sense of modernity he conveys today, rendering him 0 y at work in
colonial prose narratives before the nineteenth centur
the national leaders of Asia the most considerable, balanced, and far- y. Mojares is con-
cerned with locating Rizal’s novel in a native prose tradition
seeing” (1968, 355). already
In the biographies, as in the rumors, Rizal assumes the stance of tending towards a synthesis of empirical and fictional stances in writing
(Mojares 1983, 150). At the same time, he states that Rizal's novels repre-
someone who comes both from inside and outside, who crosses the sent a “dramatic and qualitative leap” in the development of the novel.
borders of colonial distinctions with apparent ease. The main difference,
however, is that in the rumors, curiosity about Rizal stemmed from the Thus, Mojares sees Rizal’s novels as a “culmination” of developments in
local literature leading up to 1887 as well as a “full demonstrat
fact that the people believed Rizal was, indeed, a “Doctor Uliman ; ion” of the
novel form as it was being used canonically in Europe. He writes
Whereas in the biographies, there is never any doubt that “Doctor Uliman : “In-
deed, with Rizal’s works the fully developed novel as it is known in Europ
more accurately, a “Bilipino”), or that an indio comes upon the local scene” (137). The language of Mofares’s observation
e
could take on the “mod
i Da is strongly reminiscent of that used by Guerrero, and Coates to describe
Rizal’s arrival ini Manila after five years’ absence,
Mojares rightly states that the Filipino novel emerged at a time when
the: novel form itself was already fully developed in other
countries He
Hotes that the specificity of the Noli’s textual history—“w
ritten and pub-.
 i Faction of a Knowable Community cw _63
i noulses of a broad European
Pp
the Noli to Ninay (1885), a novel written
aped by the impv ® ee a lack of continu- by Pedro Paterno, a fellow re-
lished 00 ae
soil,oan
account why yOthere een
appeas
Rizal's£° novels and later novels
formist and friend of Rizal's. Typical of the costumbrismo genre,
Ninay
interweaves a melodramatic plot with descriptio
tradition’ cou! tof the gente ~ d the turn of the century. The ns of scenes and customs
from Philippine life (L. Guerrero 1963, 128-36). Schumach
ity in the develope” ar langua of the Phili ippine
literary tradition— substance of Ninay could have taken place in some European
er writes: “The
written in the f str and s - characteristic of colonialism under country
ik just as well as in the Philippines. No one can say that of the Noli.
n developme m to account for the tentative- pre-eminently,
It is
as Rizal proclaims it in the subtitle, ‘Novela tagala,’ even
century,
‘bite d ini pathb earngly twenstieth
thereaki if it be written in Spanish, In it we find Filipino life at its worst and best,
mae novel set (225). written unmistakably by Filipinos and directed to Filipinos”
(1991, 122).
“the most important Le6n Ma: Guerrero also has a low opinion of Paterno’s
thstandin
g the - Rizal's novels remain con-
novel, calling
Me Mojares observes a a Fili ae writer, animating Filipino Ninay an “illustrated travelogue” (1963, 134). He notes the similarities
works produced by atte standards no Filipino writer: can the rather melodramatic plots of the Noli and Ninay
in
literary but is at pains to
sciousness to
this day, “ gn novels with portraying 4 society in point out that the political message of the Noli, as well as its revealing
ignore” (137). Mojares. credits ent
ing atof power are already pres descriptions of the “‘realities’ of the country” through vivid character
which the imp era tives fora restructur Is’ avowed inten t of “goli ng] sketches, is what distinguishes the two novels. For if the plot were the
In sim ila r ter ms, he explains the n paral le | devel - main basis of evaluation, according to Guerrero, then the Noli
(143), ss" in terms of “would
dow n to the roo ts Italy, Fran ce, and other rank with ‘Ninay,’ or worse with ‘Maria Nun’ and other slanders
oeconcerimin of sc
ns es Ge on the
opments in the cultural ‘mysteries’ of convents” (130-31). For Schuriiacher, Guerrero, and Mojares,
). ;
European countries (119 , “is the degree to which Rizal's the Nolfs ability to depict—if not actually politicize the depiction of—
s, t h
The thorny question forMojare p' rovenance and implica- Filipino life made it influential. Thus, the publication of the Noli is
d ipino,” giveni their
novels can be considere “Fil heralded as a watershed event in Philippine history in that it not only
Mojares argues against the
tion in “fore: ign” spaces and contexts. a illustrates but, more importantly, signifies the emergence of nationalist
as emerging airvia
commonsensical treatment of Rizal’s novels consciousness.
from the head of Zeus” (137) and instead stres ses that the nove s =
reinforce s q Now, if it is the (political) content that separates Rizal’s Noli from
the “native, developing tradition” of prose narratives. To tavelogues and “slanders,” how are we to think about the novel's form?
an
that Rizal's novels are Filipino, Mojares splits the novels into form Unlike Mojares, both Schumacher and Guerrero leave out any consider-
content analysis. His basic argum ent is that the novel “in the Ses ote
“the ation of the possible mutations the European realist novel form can
nineteenth century sense of this form” is nevertheless Filipino in
undergo in the articulation of a “Filipino” content, focusing, instead, only
particularity of motive, subject and content” (150). on the way the European novel form determines Rizal's portrayal of the
John Schumacher, in his analysis of the Noli, makes a similar, but more country’s “realities.” In doing so, they actually establish a dichotomy
problematic move. Like Mojares, Schumacher uses Rizal to mark the between form and content. Nationalism is, for all purposes, a question of
convergence of material and {deological forces instrumental in defining

Scanned by CamScanner
essence, a content that fills a basically “foreign” form. The overly simpli-
the aspirations of native “Filipirios” in nationalist terms. He thus consid-
fied dichotomy that Guerrero and Schumacher establish in discussing the
ers the Noit as a “charter of nationalism for Filipinos,” a catalyst of transplantation of western forms like the modern novel, nation, and
revolution (1991, 91-101). According to Schumacher, Rizal provided the
most “thoughtful” articulation of the Filipino struggle for unity, colonial state to the colony, resolves through simple evasion the issue of
equality, what happens during the process of translation or adaptation. It operates
and freedom, and in this sense, the 1872 native clergy’s aspirations that on a hidden assumption that opposes a “native” content to. a foreign
preceded Rizal's were but p recursors whose incipient visions awaited “form” in a commonsensical, a priori way without posing the question of
and mature articulation by Rizals
The Noli how these terms relate to each other, and what effect the interaction
relation to na Provided a “new direction in Filipino art and literature da
tlonalism,” writes Schumacher. As evidence between the terms would have on the terms themselves.
, he compares

sai as
 The Fiction ofa Knowab
ie
cc ino” novel an d nation What
ont? Whi
fer 65
. «o have 2 ‘Filip’ ino” onsens
“ under the cloak of Religion, came among
is would a ae cadinnalle us to
But what does it an ize us; I have distinguished the true Baligt on i to brutal-
is the ‘ ane
sve ee novel oT el, the “Spanish nine.
neat Bi ovel,” superstitious, from that whi , from the
pana S can speak 0 ee ee the nineteenth-century realist money, to make us believe in foolishness which Catholicism
at if it had knowledge of it
Thave qnvetled would blush.
novel. * The : © unveiled
and
,
the in is—but, alas, an often
and Bilipinoness forms the Basis” deceptive and brilliant words of our government;
what lay hidden behind.
:
‘ ce Rizal's novels occupy in é T have told our a
compa-
novel, the nation, triots of our faults,
faults, our vices, our culpable and sham
unexamined basis—of me wet ecaty history, For both fields with these miseries” (1963, v. 2, bk. 3, 83-8
eful complacence
Philippine history, as well ae _-the question of nation and the role 4),
Here Rizal sets out primarily to do two th
of inquiry—literature and bis a the nation are sine qua non. Yet it is the colonizers heaped upon his people, and
ings: answ
er the calumnies
mmonsensical, is not elaborated fully. portray the country’s re-
culture played in the a alities to propose a “cure” by example. Rizal's favor
of the
om,onWaves
the itquesti ite metaphor for
the novel,ee when
ts Wen ofNe sswiththovig
ee ned
conjoi the writing process and motive—one not unex
They questio
puosiad pected given his profes-
Sat what ite the consi: sion—is clinical diagnosis, In dedicating the
nation, inevitably provokes a debate on content. Bul ae Noli to the “Motherland,”
: ake on a “Filipi no” Rizal writes:
European) ssc a very question is posed as a problematic dichotomy ‘
sat ee ca What makes the novel a particularly canofir vehicle . Registrase en la historia de los padecimientos humano
s en cancer de
~~ “ . un Caracter tdan maligno que el menor contacto le irrita
sama hough Are Rizal's novels really, ON aera re y despierta
en él agudfsimos dolores. Pues bien, cuantas veces en medio
“Filipino” way of pro
/ Or is there another de las
civilizaciones modernas he querido evocarte, ya para compati
ee erent of the western novel to the — arme de
fur, al oe tus recuerdos, ya para compararte con otros paises, tantas se me
What do our attempts to answer the above questions tell us, in Presenté tu querida imagen
the relationship between literature and history, fact and fiction, na
con un cancer social parecido.

tion? . Deseando tu salud que es la nuestra, y buscando el mejor tratamineto,

:
me 21 March 1887 letter to Blumentritt, Rizal called the Noli “the
first impartial and ‘bold book about the life of the Tagalogs. The ie al
will find in it the history of the last ten years” (Es el primer libro imparc!
y atrevido sobre la vida de los tagalos. Los filipinos encontrardn en él la
historia de los dltimos diez aos) (1938, v. 5, 96-97), In a magical feat of
extrapolation, Rizal tums a novel about Tagalog life into a history hot of
the Tagalogs, but*of the last ten years.” He goes on to explain the motive
behind the writing: “Here, 1 answer all the false conceptions that they
[the govern ment and the friars) have written ‘against us and all the in-
sults with which
haré contigo lo que con sus enfermos los antiguos: exponfanlos en
las gradas'del templo, Pata que cada persona que viniese de invocar
4 la Divinidad les propusiese un remedio.
¥ 4 este fin, trataré de reproducir fielmente tu estado sin contem-
Placiones; levantaré parte del velo que encubre ¢) mal, sacrificando # la
verdad todo, hasta el mismo amor propio,
tambien de tus defectos y flaquezas.
pues, como hijo tuyo, adalezco
In the annals of human adversity, there is etched a cancer, of a breed

Scanned by CamScanner
they have tried to humiliate ws” (Aqut cantesté todos 10s SO malignant that the least contact exacerbates it and stirs in it the
os
concept falsas que se han escrito contra nosotros y todos los insultos con sharpest of pairis. And thus, so many times amidst modem cultures
I have wanted to evoke you, sometimes for memories-of you to keep
me company, other times, ta compare you with other nations—many
‘eae Sst propose to my countrymen an example with which to strugsl¢ times your beloved image appears to me afilicted with a saciil cancer
of similar malignancy.
rope, as a tin ao can present my fatherland to proud oe Desiring your well-being, which is our own, and searching for the best
education" (291-82). To this etfere society after she has completed h cure, I will do with you as the ancients of old did with their afflicted:
> “Thave unmasked the hypocrisy which

i nti i
 =
the temple so that ee ccna ho would
Ww.
=
=

them onpomp ft
of would propose a cure ior ut .

tne faithfully reproduce your condition

And to this end, I veil attempt © f the shroud that conceals your
without much ado. ES s my own self-respect, for
th everything, éven mY ©
illness, sacrificing to O™ r
your defects and failings.
as your son, I also suffe in
worth noting here. One, Rizal
establishes
There are ee el body and the social condition, =e
an analogy pecan emed by certain laws that, a gia ee ;
that both entities A body and society, are basically knowable,
nomena such as the human f
ion o the country to a diseased body,
: :
and
the country’s problems is by diagnosing f the present that wou
suggests eater unavailable in ethnograp ld have been
: 2 in hy. How, Precisely, does the
the first place. tional quality allow its Prac novel form’s fic.
titioners to. do something
me an Ca hinges on the question of truth, of accuracy depict: contemporary affa more than simply
irs, a feat that, had it bee
ese aca his tacts?and alsehenln ight, Thm
can be pro- ethnography, would have n attempted in
made the writer much mor
charges of Partiality? e vulnerable to
Se
determination of io
causality isnithusee
an impor tant
“ component
ay of the
aie toliatda Yet, perhaps the answer coul
d also very well have been that
analysis. Knowing what causes the disease is already a colonial and precolonial nati both the
ves hardly left any historical
thanks to the missionaries’ reli documents,
gious zeal; the few surviving acco
ee ie Rizal refers to himself in the text, and a Precolonial and colonial life were unts of
written by the Spanish colonize
Ufies both with the doctor who diagnoses the social cancer, a we : be sure, Rizal did turn to ancien rs, To
t documents when he published
with the patient who suffers from the disease. The novel's founding act annotations of Antonio Morga's Suce
sos de las Islas Filipinas (1609) in 1890
his
based on a double consciousness split between one who knows and one @ year before his second novel El] ,
filibusterismo appeared in print. But
who is, or who submits to being,. known. this account of “the last moments of our
ancient nationality” (los tiltimos
More tellingly, however, Rizal proposes to use a set of literary proce- momentos de nuestra antigua nac
ionalidad) (1962, v) has to admit the
dures, associated, with the novel form, to create a discourse that is, in an mediation, albeit relatively untainted with racial bias, of the
colonizer, so
important sense, scientific, and therefore, not “really” literature. Rizal that the account of precolonial Philippi
nes also becomes, at one and the
wrote the Noli at a time when journalism and history were already held Same time, the account of its conquest
and vanishing (1962, vii).
to be distinct from literature, as nearly a century of development sep@- Reynaldo Ieto has argued that ilustrados like Riza
rated these “fields” of discourse from a previously l operated on a

Scanned by CamScanner
general and i eteenth-century European conceptio of
n “total history” that purported
fo account for differences between soci
Imented
Is most evident in“novel/news" discourse.”
a letter he drafted Rizal's attitude toward the Noli
on March 1887, them
eties by reading and subsuming
under the sign of a universal system of
probably intended values,
for Filipino painter Felix Resurreccién Hidalgo: “The incidents
(in the Noli view, According to Ieto, it was “[t]he lack of a contin a coh erent world-
that) | relate are all true and they happened: uous, uninterrupted
I can give proofs of them. history of Filipino consciousness [that] lay beh
ind the ilustrad
o nost
algia
My book may have—and it. efects from the artistic or aesthetic point for lost origins” (1982b, 280-85). This nostalgi for
a lost origins is, there-
: ~_ oe oy it; but what cannot be questioned is the impartiality fore, inherently contaminated by the sense of a “Fal
l” of pre-Hispanic
hati
ve culture, a fall that was blamed not only on
but on the natives who, in their ignorance, “haste Spanish colonial rule,
oncee
the ard © vere ore
merits of the Noli,hisRizal
Tesponse to Vicente Barrantes’ atta
Wrote scathingly: “And as I did n° ned to abandon what
Was theirs to take up what was new.”
Me nor to be admitted to the Porter's lodge of the Academy
gg cw Necess® Fictions ‘
ttempted to fill the gaps of history —_—i Fiction
— ofa Knowable
— Community «69
not only ot instead of a glorious past; they nity, and the knowable communi ty generates
literature that describes it
4 focusing on the. de pre: re in relation to the literary traqj. as a knowable community. Rizal's treat
ment of the telationship between
ffect a coll literature and history takes the relation between
« did not simply want to repeat» the two to be one of
; aed " ferous
but which they to the Noli showed precisely the
reaction reciprocal interaction. Writing to Pablo Pastells
, Rizal takes thé: relation-
spanish clergy’s Vo taken as a source of local and independent ex. ship one step farther and links the truth-generating capacit
y of his work
novel's success oe ae + explain this by saying that the novel was to its active intervention in shaping the “future”: “
What I had were a clear
vision of the real situation in niy fatherland, vivid
i images of what was
pression. One mi road, and that perhaps Rizal's
f personal
aahambj- going on, and enough skill to diagnose the disease, so
much so that not
eeeecho! a
tion oa the hispanized
Spain thatsought.
for recognition inhilippines only was J able to portray what took place but also foretol
d what was to
ees iinet gemini come.
native and mestizo middlesee oe
Inasmuch as at this very moment I see the story of my ‘novel’
unfolding itself with so much accuracy I can really say 1 am
The Spanish nae csi Cortes, and because they were watching,
and at the same time taking part in, the performance of
Philippines eT sphere of the colonial and imperial centers, my own work”
(Bonoan 1994, 139).
denied access oe a recognition in the cultural field. The only space For Rizal, the basic problem of “knowing” a community took the
form
Oe as the “universal” realm of culture. It was in the cultural of finding a position from which a community can be known, Moreov
er,
in the normative cul- this position had to be convincingly experienced by his reader
a i dhe Nos could claim participation ae knowable community to be Known as such. But known to whom?
s for the
and
fact ming which claim constituted the prbary means And by
a ons 7 whom? The usual answer would. be: by the Filipinas.
available for proving themselves the Spaniards’ “equal
ppine
120-21). Like the situation in most Third World countries, Phil
Yet the term Filipino itself poses the challenge of differentiation and
integration. Who, indeed, counted as Filipino? Rizal’s selective appropria-
nationalism took root first in the religious, cultural, and political arenas,
while remaining, for the moment, separate and distinct from the domain
tion of the hitherto restricted term Filipino to encompass creoles
; natives,
of the state. mestizos, even the infidel sangley, is partly based on the notion of affec-
tive ties to a territorially bounded, indeed determined, entity, Las Islas
Ironically, because the narrative ended up working too well, thereby
binding Rizal to the thoughts and characters of his novel, Rizal was forced
Filipinas. It is also obvious, however, that Rizal was writing to address
non-Filipinos. Answering the Spaniards’ calumnies and insults. would have
to invoke the fictional quality of his novel to dissociate himself from the demanded addressing the Spaniards themselves, answering representa-
charges that critics like Vicente Barrantes made regarding the ideas the
tion with representation.’* The opening chapter of the Noli actually comes
novel expressed: “I don't know, Most Excellent Sir, if the academicians right out and names its own putative readers:
ambarum domorum have already laid down as law that the ideas ex
pressed by the characters in the novel have to he precisely the writer's Since no porters or servants ask for the invitation cards, let us go up.
own convictions and not what are suitable to them O,-you who read me, friend or fog (oh tii que me lees, arnigo 6 enemigo),
considering theit”
circumstances, beliefs; habits, education and passions...Does Your Excel- if you are attracted to the sounds of the orchestra, to the bright lights,
Jency by chance persist in your opinion that the characters of a novel
or by the unmistakable tinkling of glass and silverware, and wish to
must all conform ta the convictions of the author?” (1964, 183, 191)-
know how parties are in the Pearl of the Orient—I would find it more
lai eo sg we explain the seemingly. contradictory move Rizal made in pleasurable to spare you the description of the house, but this is, just
in ~ ee simultaneous veracity and fictionality of his novels? Implicit 5 important, (underscoring added, modified translation)
Pacity i ‘i cenl. the assumption that literature has the © In the opening chapter, the narrative persona actually functions a6 a
; to help construct it.“ For Rizal, literature
patton in of its own in history, but it is also history. Literature kind of guide, an insider-who leads his reader (whether friend or eneiny,
insider or outsider) through the Philippine natural and social terrain. na
phrase ils te ough its exposition of a “knowable community.” This stance the narrative voice takes may be characterized as a kind of double
"ead two ways: literature depicts the knowable commu:
 Fictions
Jo _Necess@ The Fiction of a Knowable
a Comm
t an d outside looking in. This
cw FT
i common with the notion of idealo;
a aden and outsiders, so to speak
address, of being both inside eda By. For example, the imagined com-
devic e that Rizal munity is both imaginary and
decided to real, and in fact, expl
jous double ade ssed as a narrative Co sition. Rizal con. dichotomy between fact and
ficti ‘on. Like ideology,
oits and obscures the
cannot be ney Noli. For the nT signs in order to appear free; the nation naturalizes
Meet Universal,
adopt on@ viele participant-obser" aan a pdsition which the
binds the and self-generating. Like
ideol-
de of production by root
structed is Pp: «y is rendered knowable. ing its history in
“Filipino” B
a ng objec
e ality”
Ee of novel writi to ed : aetive reality” of nce is not history, but the
representational capa cation to a “signified” ou . experience. Anderson, howe ived” as opposed to “actual”
ver, takes pains to differen
Ee ee co oe between the novel and nation constitutes from ideology; and instead tiate nationalism
This intimate compares it to two distinct
' i the problem of the knowable kinship and religion.” The term social formations,
the main terms for the novel'spari aus the novel had be. ideology, with its often negative
strictive associations, fails to com and re-
community. And, in fact, oy it was the privileged form most eminently munica
the nation to command affective
loyalties, nor does it fully suggest
come a self-conscious Fe knowable community. How is this so? the
i aca the link between the nineteenth-century
Benedict ee the nation in his influential Imagined Com- the latter often deals with the issue
European realist “ on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism s of mutability and mortality.
(1991). a One thing that the novel and nation have in
a icn fact, the typecase of Anderson's analysis of common is the insepara-
ea. which bility of their conception as
forms from assumptions abou
modularity. Having once attained t their
Aine hase tiiee accounts in its treatment of nationglity, or i ao . an institutional stability as a self-con
scious form—that is, a “thete-ness" perm -
i d “nationness,” as a “cultural artefact” (1991, . itting people to speak of nations
noe ta the novel form provided the “technical means for ; oe and novels as such—they are held
to acquire a kind of translatability
eo universalizing, generic form that can , a
i
ing’ the kind of imagined community na
i that is‘ the nation” 5 : be carried on to other places, Trans-
i with Florante at Laura, a metrical ro) , latability also brings up the possibilit
y of comparison, As the dedication
ae Futon’ en eee wrote in the late 1830s. Balagtass Page in the Noli made clear, Rizal conju
red up his Motherland “amidst
work has been widely hailed as the most important example of the es modern cultures;” The idea.af comparis
on was there from the beginning—
working of the romance into a form capable of pone ett evoking his motherland ‘was not only
meant to “keep him company” (or
“self-conscious” reference to native society. But the distinctions Soothe his nostalgia); it also entailed
tha comparison with other nations.
Anderson makes between the novel and the romance point to the fact It is usual to explain the emergence of the. novel and
the nation by
that there occurred an important shift in the modes of apprehending the looking at the changes—the developmen
t of printing. technology; the rise
world. For the romance is set in a distant past, whereas the novel locates of capitalism and crystallization of the bourg
eoisie as a class; urban:
ization, secularization, and reform
the action in a recent setting. The romance is based on the epic, whereas ation—then sweeping Europe. Since
these have been treated in greater detail
the novel is modeled on history and journalism. The romance is usually elsewhere, there is no need

CamScanner
set in a remote and exotic location (like Albariia) whereas the novel tends to repeat the arguments. Instead, I would like to look into
the me-
to be set in the author's locale. Romances, chanics of the shift in consciousness that we usually classify.
perhaps more importantly, as the. grawth
blend fact and fiction to create a fictional plot, of empirical and scientific attitudes, and the growth of modern literary:
whereas the novel tends
to deny its fictionality and claims to be realism. The realist nével Itself is often held to be indissolubly tied to the
writing history or rendering life
as it is (Anderson 1991, changing conceptions of the “out there,” the means of representing It,
28; Davis 1983, 40).
shared sammat — and the question of whether representation is possible in the: first place
the “nation” on the basis of its being a —
convergence ny gnification which emerged out of a highly spec (Levine 1981, 6). a

Scanned b y
de torical forces during the later medieval ; For Mikhail Bakhtin, the modem novel signifies the prominence of a
features Anderson attributeslorces to the nation would seem to period. Th
have a lot in new kind of consciousness, a “new cultural and’ creative consciousness
 The Fiction of a Knowable Community
72 ow _Necessary Fictions ss si o 73
ot world” (1981, 12) . Polyglossia—the co-
for the determination of truth. For literacy was not only the precondition
[that] lives in an
wctiedy; pobye? languages within a single cultural
for the tranamibastnny Of the ancient Greek texts; it also encouraged the
existence of two oF ive and important
P componen t in writing litera-
kere
growth of the empirical perspective and fostered a more skeptical. atti-
ogee a oe born of the awareness of other languages within
ture. Thus, ne of signification. “Languages throw light on each other: tude toward, and the rational interpretation of, the erstwhile-authoritative
medieval assumptions regarding the authenticity of saints'
relics and figu-
oneee can, after all, see itself rative status of the Eucharist (McKeon 1987, 35). Before the sixteenth
language.can, ére isonly
not inthethepreexistence
light of another language”
of several lan- century, the canonical truth of the Scriptures had been the main. stan-
_ What becomes thinkable h i “awareness” ” of
on but an awareness of several languages. The dard of spiritual and historical truth against which all other writings
: conditioned by the possibility of comparison, of trans- were measured and often found wanting. “Facts” were relevant, but they
ee hemaar becomes “national” through this comparison. That were subordinated to truth, and in an apparent conflict between the two,
this happened in Europe during the Renaissance can be eenee by it was the Scriptural abstraction. that took precedence over material or
the greatly expanded scope of European voyages of “discovery” that concrete issues.
of period
added a spatial dimension to the Renaissance consciousness An emphasis on. the objectifying power of the written word subse-
(McKeon 1987, 40). quently replaced, over the next few centuries, the emphasis on lineage,
Bakhtin's concept of polygiossia provides an important basis for ex- since print effectively disseminated and reinforced the notion of compet-
amining and explaining the novel, for it sets the grounds for modern ing accounts: of the same event. Jt encouraged the norm of “objective”
to the. “contractual” or “institutional”
criticism's. sensitivity. capacity of research arid understanding through the systematic collection, compari-
literary genres. Rizal’s rellance on the European novel form is, therefore, son, categorization, collation, editing, and the indexing of documentary
not a mere consequence of individual preference, sitice the novel attained objects (McKeon 1987, 43). Print thus promoted a criterion of judgment
its institutional stability and coherence as a self-conscious form during that was appropriate to, and that accounted for, discrete; and empirically
the eighteenth century precisely because of its power to formulate and apprehensible “things”—singularity, formal coherence, and self-consis-
explain a set of problems ‘central to the “modem” experience." One of tency became the test of veracity. In:a way, this was made possible because
these problems was ‘the instability of generic arid social categories. The of the process of typographical reproduction —the extent to which a single
passage of text, a picture, an object or event could be replicated in their
first registered an epistemological crisis, a major change in attitudes to-
ward the representation of “truth” in narratives, The other registered a exact dimensions and quantities helped condition a “scientific” cast of
cultural crisis in. attitudes toward the relationship between its members mind. Viewing objects as “discrete and empirically apprehensible” was
external, social order and internal, moral state, Michael McKeon calls the easily carried over to the investigation of human Jife. Thus, the idea of
first the question of truth, and the second the question of virtue. Both nature, and of human “nature,” changed the course of historical studies.
In sum, print not only conditioned the tum in historical studies, but
are articulated as problems of signification: “What kind of authority or the scientific revolution in general. It was the result of two historically insepa-
evidence is required of narrative in order to permit it to signify truth to
ne, And “what kind of social existence or behavior signifies an rable but distinguishable phenomena: the unprecedented valorization of

Scanned by CamScanner
empirical perspectives and practices, and the rapidly growing opportuni-
byand ables pont, (1987, 20). The Europeanthe realist novel works ties to cultivate and promote these through a fundamental change in the
virtue, The fo Pah aap analogy between questions. of ruth
production and management of knowledge (McKeon 1987, 44).
juxtapose the soma
to the other or conflatingcaethe Sia
=e ea
ems of eoren eh aby cging
one question referring The effect of print on the narrative form was substantial. For print
contributed to and reinforced an “objective” standard of truth, ae a
also, in the narrative, a “historical” standard of truth, of historicity: Did
changed the Sapee: ak ie an en is print. Print capitalism it happen, how did it happen? And print'’s verifying capacity was 60 oe
ods for apprehending it. The spread of ineren eee ee te erful that the act of publication itself would seem to affirm,
Middle Ages had profound epistemolegiect
Pistemologicalae ono andauzing
‘significance the late
ramifications the historicity of the information it was meant to convey. Print oe
1 ar
 The Fiction of a Knowable Community ww 75
of the ever t it recorded, , b but
7ao~
= - :
icity dramas suggested for consideratio
to 4! tt evel happened in the first
place, n are “The Election of the
had the capacity proof that
er a Gobermadorcillo,” a comedy in prose, and
the only the rapid and insta nta- “Mariang Makiling,” a fantastical
hie constituted ch no lo gy that pe rmitted drama of a satirical character. Both drama
uc ed te news and s are written by people from
For print introd terest. In making
: ion of matters of pu blic in’ : the area, and both are intended "to give a Tepresenta
tion of our own
ees neni it made possible not Se : Ty en an ee customs in order to correct our vices and defects and
to encourage our
j rding of novelty as we" ll 8(Davis 1983, 46-49), ;
histori-
better qualities.”
eres perm awareness of mane This small detail from the Noli clues the
ae a
With print ae " : tive’s ability to encode this process. reader in on the narrative
;
cal process, and, importan
tly, the narrative basis of the “Filipino” national community. The fictive dramas—i fact,
the Noli itself as fiction—treat the Philippine patria as a text that n awaits
the act of decoding and link the edifying truth culled from litera
cient since the ture to
nu eae th ae well ee the moral improvement of the viewer/reader. The patria
thus imagined is
Rizal wrote te Malpare : a distinct, self-conscious genre. The at once real arid “out there" and, above all, “true.” Rizal's fesponse to
a a a a ote sapie n the heyday of the novel form, Barrantes’ criticism concerning his novel's characters would
thus argue
oe i that the novel by that time had already workedIn in favor of the existence of the novel and its characters as independ
ent
in its claim tosree
out in a stabilized form some of the kinks
from the author's ideas and intentions, even though thé author would
(1983), 4 he
the mid-cighteenth century, according to Lennard Davis exacer perforce have to invent words that the rustics “could have” uttered and
bated the
creasingvalorization of empirical modes of truth actually even insist that he can prove the reality of what he imagined. The Epi-
the nature of the
hitherto latent tension between the claim to truth and logue of the Noli, for example, begins with the following paragraph:
continuing avalanche
material whose truth was being claimed. That is, the Viviendo atin muchos de nuestros personajes, y. habiendo perdido de
worthy
of news reports gave the news a validity and authority that made it vista 4 los otros, es imposible un verdadero epflogo. Para bien de la
with the
of public attention and cemented the association of the news gente, matarfamos con gusto 4 todos nuestros personajes empezando
historical authent icity of printe d docum ents in the public imagin ation.
having por el Padre Salvi y acabando por Dofia Victorina, pero no es
The public, howeve r, conseq uently found itself in the positi on of
posible...jque vivan! El pafs y no nosotros los ha de alimentar al fin,
to compare many different, highly partisan, and often divergent “true
accounts” of the same events at one and the same time. This experience Since somtie of our characters are still living and others have been lost
fomented considerable skepticism among people regarding the news’ sight of, 4 real epilogue is impossible. For the satisfaction (also trans-
‘claims to truth and historicity, which had by then become something of lated as: for the good] of the people, we should gladly kill off all of our
a convention. characters, beginning with Padre Salvi and ending with Dofia Victorina

The concept of literary realism reformulated the problem of media- (a native who has pretensions te being Spanish, marries a larme‘Span-
tion by making literature not “history,” but “historylike.” The text was iard, and dresses in the European fashion], but this is riot possible.
“true” to external reality but sufficiently removed from it to be true to

Scanned by CamScanner
Let them live! Anyhow, the country, not ourselves, has to support them
itself as well. The Noli presents a self-refereritial statement on the “truth- in the end. (modified translation)

fulness” of fiction in the chapter, “La junta en el tribunal,” in which the

male representatives of San Diego, divided along the lines of generation,
meet to present their proposals for the fiesta. Thé “liberal” party, com-
i Seta young men like Don Filipo, suggests that the money
the benefit of all, by pré-
senting new and ae td ole Sond use for
moro-moros, whichmis in dramas instead of the usual week-long
tations between Christian terminable clashes and dramatic confron-
onists
protag m
and Mosle nists.
antago
In this passage, Rizal invokes both the “real world” in its historically
placed, realized, and detailed specificity (‘some of our characters are still
rendered
living”), and the fictional world in its artistically organized andwith
Padre
knowability (“we should gladly kill off all of them, beginning
Salvi and ending with Dofia Victoritia”) without stretching theof reader's
n history
(in)ctedulity. What is remarkable about this double invocatio
on grants to nov-
and fiction is the power and flexbility such an invocati
The two
 The Fiction of a Knowable Community <<. 77
7p > Me “ ive!” cackles the tive
narrative persona,
: . since th e
elistic discourse. “Let them live! cy even to his novel's most odious ironically to a tension between the claim to truth and the material whose
ve: grant clemen : truth is being claimed; for how in fact can truth be claimed,
given that
ri a sathon "vould have us believe that it is not in his power it is tied to an oppressive and misleading, if not blinding, social order?
I ee puke ends of the narrative and provide @ proper epilogue, On the one hand, it was possible for Rizal to fall back on the novel's
to ue ins li id Maria Clara’
lara's
a Padre Damaso an canonic status to mediate between fact and fiction. His claim to Barrantes
even though he does kill offvillains
that his characters’ ideas did not correspond to his own breaks the
Ee of the : HH where the ; rustics talkfeelabout the
nese — in the section
Similarly, simulacrum theory of the novel. By subsuming his work under the cat-
il
: of the word filibustero,
meaning esis as a
Rizal ;alludes to his own profession egory of fictional prose narratives, Rizal draws on the differentiation of
ent
in the written word by making one of the peasants the news/navel discourse which allows him to perform the reportorial
oem breed of people who talk “with wires," and who know Span- functions of journalism and history in a work of fiction, make direct com-
ee fiat rata anything but the pen." It is as though the author ments on the world, and be a historian in an avowedly fictional work.
conversation of
cctidenndly “overhears” himself in his novel and in the Rizal thus draws on 4 broader notion of faciuality, the factuality of
“historylike,” to make a claim at once epistemological, moral, and politi-
the “constraints”
" Foren bs author's: power to depict his world and cal. By virtue of the admission of fictionality, Rizal is able to incorporate
that this (imagined) world poses on his vision, we have a novel that both news and commentary into his work. It is in the disjunction and
transfor-
embodies and thematizes the impulse to explain not only the interaction between fact and fiction, reportage and invention, news and
mative capacity, but also the mutability, of human affairs in social and novel, that the novel's power in society is confirmed and consolidated. A
historical rather than metaphysical terms. Perhaps, in Rizal's time, the journalistic piece of an ethnographic account would not have gotten the
important difference between putting one's faith in a remote truth attested same kind of reaction from colonizer and native alike, because it could
to by external authorities, and immediately authenticating an empirically more easily be dismissed as tainted by its writers’ bias. Moreover, the novel
apprehensible truth present for ail to see: (and change), was further rein- form's conventions ensured that the question of virtue, by being read as
forced by the fact:of colonial rule, in which the “external” sources of truth fiction, would insinuate themselves into the reader's consciousness, would
and authority were also immediately and empirically verifiable sources of engage the reader in a way that the journalist. pieces, with conventions
exploitation and oppression. The Noli’s influence lay in its providing an demanding a relatively stringent adherence to the disciplinary and au-
alternative to the colonial ideology in that it held the experience of insta- thoritative prose, could not effectively achieve.
bility and oppression to be something that could be identified and The novel's attitude toward fact and fiction is therefore constitutively
addressed “directly” as a sociohistorical condition susceptible to more ambivalent, and it is the novel’s ambivalence, the fact thar it is both about
and not about reality, which engenders. the possibility of commentary
specific analysis and explanation, and to the possibility of transforma- linking truth to a species of ethical thinking, of morality, which is held to
tion” In the Noli, the question of how to tell the truth was indissolubly be the defining capacity of human creation itself." Thus Rizal could cri-
linked to the question of the relationship between social order and indi-
tique the colonial order in the name of higher standardsof morality, and

Scanned by CamScanner
vidual character. It assumed that being able to.tell the truth meant being

: nine the social order. that reflected, and was itself reflected
the human capacity to change society and realize its potentials.
del
neat gal codon. The question of desable of non
eer But the idea of virtue also casts a critical light on the question of
truth, for the fundamental problem of ethical and social signification
quettion-of
while the truth i s coedge not OF getting to the truths inevitably leads to the realization that specific epistemological choices
oni 1s posed in terms of the question of a deter-
etermined social order. The question of truth, in other words, have ideological significance and consequences. Any given explanation
of society and its motions implies certain epistemological procedures oo
ently epistemological ca. le that of social order has an inher- commitments. The question of truth is thus inherently ne a
rooted in a specific social location. On that level, it can be argued ee
Rizal addresses the issue by positing an outside stance through which
 73m Ne The Fiction of a Knowabie a
lony can be denaturalizeq 4s
situation of theie Philippined s evaluated.
as 4 Spanish
The coe tance draws S on (al.
outside stan al from the oppressive reality of European subjugation and
pee
colonies ‘ expl
not explicitly use the terms i a pee like the Phili ppines. Unlike Indian or Chinese vata citation of
aesRizalee
though hims ; ess and change, and looks
Rizal
to s er
could not draw on the past ta create a material/spiritual divide
BaD e for the concrete embodiment admit the superio rity of western forms of technol that would
Sn a ae ee mance o
countries, spe!
of the ideals. “modern,” through its highlighting of the “Filipino” past existed only as already
mediated by colonial rule and rep-
In fact, as eo e e “outside,” closely resembles that of resentation. Rizal’
— s position on colonial power, or the
connection of € over another,” views the “rule of one people
: ‘ 's political writings attribute the outcome of such an enco unter between
the popular discourse i piece pap degradation of the Philip- two

backwardness, that & Use B anish colonial authorities, in part due

pines to misgovernment byi cr dhe enmry they hinye onilbntrad. tina,to
a tune eit the fact that it is contact with. the outside,
one meng: as peoples” that produces “the electric impact”
ah egartes the brutalized natives into “demand{ing] light, life, [and] an elaborate and elaborated Precolonia
the civilization that at one time they [the colonial powers] bequeath ae l “nationality.”
What is, in fact, striking about the
Philippines}, thus confitming the ee we of constant evolution, o Noli is that even its “Filipino”
content is not much different from the
rige cle , of progress” (1964, 18). content of social novels written
in other countries, For example, the
ame Sar toes eae nt literary project eonies out of his similarity in plot and characters
between the Noli and Dojia Perfecta,
attempt at describing the mechanisms of Spanish coloniat rule that are a novel by Benito Perez Galdos,
touted as Spain's greatest writer in the ninet
responsible for “asphyxiating” the “modern ideas” “upon touching the
eenth century, revolves prin-
cipally around the dichotomy and conflict
shores of Manila” (1964, 289). In Rizal’s analysis of Philippine conditions, between the European, liberal,
egalitarian spirit concentrated in and typified
the “modern” is primarily seen as external rather than as merely foreign. by the metropolis or Eu-
rope, and the traditionalist, reactionary spirit concentr
It is something that comes to the Philippines from the outsitle, and has ated in and typified
by the province, or, in Rizal's case, by colonial Phili
an infectious, universalizable quality that the diligent mismanagement of ppines. Perez Galdos’s
plea for the reintegration of Spain into the European
the colony cannot contain. In a Passage where Ibarra passes by the Bo- rationalist vision of
the world could very well have been Rizal's, Ibarra could
tanical Gardens of Manila, the pitifully paltry and neglected also have been
gardens are any one of the young Spaniards (his forefather was
a Basque) who went
compared to those in other European countries where much abroad—to Germany, for example—to be educated and came
money and back im-
effort were expended to ensure the blossoming of a single flower. Rizal bued with the philosophical and scientific ideas prevailing in
portrays progress and change as inevitable because they are world-his- other
European countries during the second half of the nineteenth
‘torical in their scope: despite the efforts of Spain century.2
to keep the Philippines In this light, Rizal draws on a series of related oppositions, such as rea-

Scanned by CamScanner
backward, the ideas of change and the natives’ aspirations cannot son and superstition, just and unjust, and knowledge and ignorance, to
blunted. Seen. in this light, we should not be surprised that Rizal in-be Organize the action his novels. / .
At the same time, Rizal creates a specifically “national” space
in his
novel in which locality and local expression are suggested in term
of form
s
through the insider's perspective, and through the insert of Tagalog
words into Spanish. The idea of a Filipino “content” is thus posited
through words, and through the “form” of double address typical of
are; articulated in the face Noli’s narrative perspective. More important, the ek ne ce
owers, and this meant he h of intensely y compecontitiv
g e Eu-
nationalizing impulse not from a single speaking voice,
ad to differentiate his position but from
 The Fiction of a Knowable Comm
unity ~~ 8B]
0 ~ —_
sive standpoints generated and peroimed jane
by the ainsiqthe the centerof a semicircle made up of “chinos, espaiioles, filipi
differential ape one hand, the outside stan curas,viejas, jévenes, etc.” only nos, militares,
£
outside stance. On 1 standpoint af Europe, of a sense of “worl ne
“world his- peared somewhere else, in the travel
because this semicircle
had already ap-
cognitiv e cam narratives of Europeans who visite
of moral e chet
Jopment, and serves up a powerful nGlounéait if
tory,” and the Philippines and noted the “vari d
On the other hand, the insider viewpoint ety” of Peoples moving in, and
Philippine space. across ,
the abuses of ann omita cy and epistemological significance of the Indeed, the traveling narrative I/Eye
argues in favor ofaa laudable and progressive, standpoints of the ters of the novel as it moves leisur
is evident in the first few chap-
different, and not who live in colonial Philippines. The insider's per. ely through space, providing sketc
of backdrop detail or an inventory of hes
many different people a space for rescuing many voices, voices often customs, practices, and motes. In
; in the novel the Noli, Rizal treats dinner partie
: ; s, picnics, fiestas, All Soul’s Day,
Christmas Day in elaborate detail. But the impli and
eet ailencal, teganautet or simply unrecognized, by the general dis- ed exteriority of Rizal's
narrative stance differs:from what is typical
of the European costumbrismo
in that it is avowedly polemical. Rizal'
s narrative Stance is political be-
cause, unlike the European travel accounts, the
or testimony, the outsider perspective works by aed in late one who describes the
tance born of comparison. This double vision is evide. sa : > te ee
scenes has a stake in what he describes.
European wavelers may desire
peculiar ethnographic stance, Although the Noli is not strictly en ‘ participation in the everyday life of the Phili
ppines (participation often
ethnography, the handling of its narrative stance does operate ont “ asis taking the form of interracial liaisons amour
euses), but their participa-
of what, by then, had become the familiar genre of representing co fonial tion is premised on the knowledge that they
have no stake in the place
Filipinas in travel narratives. The project of “reproducing the conditions they seek to represent. They are only passing
through, as it were,
of the timé draws inuch of its impulse from the printed ethnographic In the case of the Noli, the outsider is, by contra
st, also an inside
r
narratives of colonial encounters, mainly written by European travelers, whose participation in everyday life in the Phili
ppines makes it impos-
going as far back in:the west as 1493, a year after the “discovery of Amen sible for her to fully disengage herself from the
reality she is describing
ca,” when Columbus wrote an account of his voyage and made it available as a whole. Thus, the act of describing or repre
senting Philippine society
for publication. To be sure, travel narratives underwent rapid, often is never just a matter of aesthetic preference, but
an ethical imperative.
uneven changes as they responded to the practical and ideological This enforced rootedness—and the moral accountability
implied by
circumstances of encounter and expansion, and if we speak of a continu- that fact—is the wellspring of the Noli’s enchant
social analysis. To be
ity in the sense of a tradition of travel writing, we can only sure, this rootedness coexists alongside
do so in a the equally compelling
heuristic manner. Nineteenth-century narratives took shape “wordliness” Europe represented—the author and his chara
within—and cters’ sense
Were strongly influenced by—the “globalizing” tendencies of of being part of a larger continuum of space and time
Western called the “out-
expansion. The publication of Karl Linne’s Systema. Natur side.” Tbarra, who finds himself a stranger in the Phili
ae and the inau- ppines after seven
guvation of a series of joint transnational explorative voyages are years in Europe, is privy to this other worldliness, In fact, the Spanish
articulations of a domain of thinking
that Mary Louise Pratt (1992) g8overnor-general addresses him on the familiar basis of their shared
, prior

Scanned by CamScanner
“planetary consciousness.” Travel writin calls
g’s “embourgeoisification” of the occupation of an external. space; “Here [in the Philippine
world is posited s] we cannot
: on the exteriority of the authoritativ laugh at such things [excommunication] in public as we can in the Pen-
male, urban, and lettered, a gaze that e gaze, white, often
constructs a moral <artography, a insula, in enlightened Burape” (underscoring added), The
political
ee landscapes and bodyscapes awaiting extraction and mythology of liberal anticlericalism typical of the Filipinos in
bird’ ja Of the
‘ ne the ethnographic eye generally provides a ganda Movement (Del Pilar 1970, 1~41; Lopez. Jaena 1951, 203-27)theinvei
Propa-
ghs
against an oppressive “frailocracy” that has kept the
imc eo through which it UWavels, and the representa- PI Bip Eran
can be seen in the deor Dark Ages, even as it posits the inevitable defeat of this monastic ou
of People is a favored motif of the genre, a8 Premacy by Progress, by young men who dare defy the ee
Pouring and Paul Gironiére,tn a n> WY foreign travelers like John dream of setting up schools to eliminate ignorance and “popular fanati-
# sense, Rizal could put Maria Clara in
 The Fiction of a Knowable Community c 83
az ow _Necessa Fictions
alism does count for part of the
i iber: images also take walks without raising their skirts, and even suffer
cism.” The idealistic rhetoric a oer yal of the friars in many of the toothaches, perchance on our accounts? Had [Capitan Tiago) not seen
ve,
ti not satin
extremely nega with his small eyes all the Christs in the Sermon of the Seven Last
andists’ WO: it does, with the failure of the
the no ve l end the way Words move and bow their heads three times in unison, moving to
why does striking about che sacri
ai shetorict What is tears and groans all the women and the sensitive souls destined for
liberal poe ese itis polemical as the fact that it inhabits heaven? And more: we ourselves (nosotros miss) have seen the
“[" is not so mM ‘ . modern equivalent of, as men-
eo . ies Nott ditfete from Bureyiean
preacher show the public at the moment of descent from the cross a
the space of the observer as
- ie Point, The paradox of the European
handkerchief soaked in blood, and we ourselves were ready to weep
tioned earlier, the vane with piety when, unfortunately for our souls, the sacristan assured us
travel narratives On P i of the European wishing to elide himself that it was only a joke: the blood of a chicken butchered and roasted
travel narrative 1s the pata’ "here as an object, @ picture. ie
and consumed incontinenti notwithstanding the fact that it was Good:
in order to a raicipatinn in the immediacy of the real. In Friday...the sacristan was fat! (1961b, 28)
the narrative as both an authoritative ac-
saae emigre r dab reads
division of the text into sections on commerce, The laughter is subversive precisely because it is an acknowledgment
t, religion, customs, language, and so on, and as a romance, of the vulnerability of the satirist: it comes from the inside but may also
SS
complete
ies, idyllic
with interracial love stories, idy country settings, picnics,f be directed at the inside. The critical eye is trained on both the Spaniards
ritual celebrations, glittering parties in the city, tense confrontations with and “Filipinos.” Moreover, laughter can arise in the most (in)opportune
and others. The moments and even among the subservient: In the chapter on souls in
irate inhabitants, cayman-catching, dramatic escapes,
end- torment, Sister Rufa, after being ignored by Padre Salvi when she presses
desire to achieve surface mastery of things Philippine through the
of “facts” is mediated by a countervaili ng desire, pushed by forward to kiss his hand after mass, jokingly exclaims. (esclamé... con risa
less accretion
the opposite longing for immersion in the minutiae of everyday life. In burlona): “Can it be that you've lost a real, kuriput (imlser)?"
the act of “immersing” himself in an exotic country, the European trav- The outsider-as-insider's (self-)mocking stance brings out the most
eler foregrounds his separation from that country all the more problematic aspect of Noli: the rhetoric of nation used by a spécific class
emphatically. of self-proclaimed Filipinos. The series of idealized, liberal, utopian spaces
In the case of the Noli, the crucial difference lies in the laughter this that the patriotic, worldly Ibarra tries to create on the basis of liis Bu-

insider-outsider viewpaint generates, It allows readers, for example, to: see

sundry bifurcations at work—between official representation and the
insider’s account of the same event, for example. The Manila newspaper
reportage of the fiesta highlights Padre Salvi's munificent self-sacrifice and
unparalleled courage in single-handedly calming down a restive crowd,
rope-inspired vision of progress and change—notably the school and
picnic, spaces where the colonial hierarchy can be flattened out, where
personal happinéss and political love are intertwined—are constantly
disrupted, ultimately ruined by crowds of the disenfranchised, by: the
insane Sisa, the spiteful Consolacién, the mysterious Ellas, the yellowish

canned by CamScanner
man who ties to kill Ibarra, and Lucas the conspirator aid Padre Salvi's
ee a description of the snoring and quarreling cohorts. The disenfranchised flit in and out of the edges of Ibarra’s con-
ridicule the official version of the mee on ee eonamae, motives sciousness, first as an idealized abstraction on whose behalf he seeks. to
ative stance is not simplysitiat a ee To complicate things, this ne institute reforms, then as individuals like the madwoman. Sisa, her invet-
as well. This is evident in the following the colontzer; itis self-aockine erate ganibler of a husband Pedro, and the mercenary Lucas, who impinge
Sona satirizes the idea of mira per
owing passage where the narrative on his consciousness and interrupt his reveries and preoccupations to
cles wrought by graven images: inflict their specific problems ‘and idiosyncrasies upon him, and finally -
Was it reveal
had noun fais ea ‘ha the Virgin of Luta, of the town of Lipa. one individual (la voz de los perseguidos, “the voice of the persecuted”),
dress dirtied with mud?swollen than the other, and the border of her Elfas, who quite literally speaks, with compelling urgency, on behalf of
Does this not logically proye that the sacred. Capitan Pablo and his band of hunted men.
 ow Necessary Fictlons
cannot entirely preve nt the “unwanted” or “undesirable from
The Fiction of a Knowable —

Just as Ibarra ose welfare he was SUP posed ta be championing, labels like “ignorant” and “fan
t ic gatherings, he is unable to guarantee the atic” not only to
fellow Filipinos,wh are bound to fail: in the present tim: explain why liberal reforms
infiltrating his fes
tive, the sexually moti. ©, but also why these teforms
og r”an of reform. It is not just n
undertaken. It is when
the crowds speak that
ing from paternal concer
his ow n pr the Opposition
success of
vi or the hatred, aris reason and superstition, between i ume
ice . of Pa dr e Sal imse
hims l
elf is; ‘ Orance :
vated mal
Damaso that are the obstacles . Ibarra inforced in the novel. me and knowledge, is often re-
Clara, the lot of his fellow
ee inte his plans for improving Rizal, however, was also
aware thar de crying popular “ignorance” and
oe M
take into proper account thee re real, practical claims fanaticism,”as middle-class ilustrados Were
ee wont to do, cannot fully
Pitta an actie
“Filipinos”oot an : parra is, in a most intimate and personal way,
of recipr
account for what takes place in the
Space of colonial encount
ocity and mutual indebtedness, of of the nove l’s funniest moments involve the snopigeeplet teae
colonial power, The contact zone
e 1 ee tion and suffering that go back a long way, beyond the called “corruption,” or cancer, nota
is precisely what dinates ts
esalclgeaes af the individuals concerned. There is no escaping the bly on the linguistic register. Earl
Y alent who are also fellow Filipinos because they are the ones who negative reviews of the Noli in the
Spanish press excoriated the Nott
made Ibarra, literally and symbolically. By exploiting the indios, Ibarra’s for bad writing (Rodriguez, quoted in
Schumacher 1973, 85), for its
“crassest ignorance of the rules of literature
cruel forefather, Saturnino, founded the fortune that enabled Ibarra to go grammar”
and especially of Spanish
(87). Indeed the Noli itself is a textual mani
abroad; similarly, Elfas, who saved Ibarra’s life after Ibarra saved him, later thing else" that exceeds the rules of novel writi
festation of a “som
e-
finds out just how deeply and ineluctably he is linked to Ibarra. That he that classical allusions cannot be used alongsid
ng, if by rules we mean
would choose to cement this link, rather than sever it, after
finding out e Balagtas, or grammati-
cal Spanish alongside market Spanish, Chinese pidgi
the truth about Ibaira’s ancestry is indicative. of the kind of fantasy about n, Tagalog Latin, and
other languages,
the Filipino nation that Rizal conceived, one that acknowledges the irre- That the word “corruption” is used to describe the lingu
ducible links that bind one person to another. istic experi-
ence and the rest of colonial experience only highl
Moreover, Ibarra’s disenfranchised fellow Filipinos are not passive ights the dangerous
instability of meaning produced within the contact zone. The sour
consumers of Ibarra’s beneficence and vision. The crowd scenes in the ce of
the colonizers’ frustration and paranoia lies precisely in their inabi
Noli (fiesta, cockpit, theater) are depicted as volatile public spaces, often: lity to
control the ways in which meaning circulates and proliferat with
rife with discontent that can very easily spill over into violence. Yet the es in a
crowd. Padre Damaso’s sermon provides one such occasion in whic
so-called natives in Rizal's novels do not only act: these crowds can speak, h the
natives, forced to listen to a long-winded harangue in the incompre
and they often do in many places in the novel. The Noi creates a situ- hen-
sible language of their masters, manage to work out their own reading of
ation in which “the people” are viewed and represented from the inside the sermon according to their specific concerns, with potentially unset-
and outside. This double representation generates an excess of viewpoints ting effects as far as the official discourse of the church is concerne
d,
that Ibarra’s pro-Hispanic reforms cannot simply recuperaté. The crowd since the priest’s vituperation against uppity natiyes somehow gets inter-
blurs the terms by which the Nofi distinguishes between what is rational Preted as the priest's attack against the inefficient Spanish gove

Scanned by CamScanner
rnment
and not, since the narrative persona, indeed the author himself (so he (Rafael 1988, 1-22). Dofia Consolacién’s interminable struggles with the
declares), shares in the people's “irrational” foibles even if these do not word “Filipinas” ends up confusing her husband the afferez and revealing
shales Ce At the same time, given Rizal's his ignorance, thereby undermining his supposed authorit
y and super i-
tional” space into wiih si aie the crowd also constitutes a “na ority as a Spaniard. Or consider again the vicissitudes of the word
Filibustero ag it undergoes iteration with difference into. plibastlero,
eet Continually be:exvendsd, since
thee “ignorance whlch is de€ term plebestiero, plibestiro, plibustiero, pelbistiero and palabistiero in the
the novel uses to accou for the nt hands
tenacity of the habits of thought. and action that help maintain
the op:
of the rustics. In the chapter “Souls in Torment,” the townsfolk engage in
a discussion of the merits of acquiring a hundred thousand years’ worth
inapernt mera! iba the pedagogical task necessary and infinite. of indulgen ces and peni tence. The insertions of ‘Tagalog: words and
— and the Spanish governor-general mouth
 66 Fictions The Fiction of a Knowable Commu
ail register the existence of ce 87
a heteroglossic other,
“corruptions” of Spanish For example, Pedro's wife Sisa
has been driven mad by the disa
ppear-
ance of her son Crispin, a sacr
of other languages and sponte a i ? reada seg in which thi nm istan in Padre Salvi's church. When
approaches him, Pedro
Ibatra promises to help find the missing son, but, when
the Neat promi ae Neh the teat -whe ttior itis Tbarra’s a
can be known or pieced ae x fate of the hermanas' gullibility. Its plot Maria Clara prompts him later, at the fiesta, he admits “
or Elfas’ story oF ‘am of disclosures, of secrets exchanged for another, (medio confuso) that he has done nothing: “Besides,
I icon Beats econ
(He estado ademds muy ocupado). Lucas, another of the disaffect
ean apg aa But this readability is strongly inflected proaches ed, ap-
Ibarra who, in a state of distraction upon
Ben ee, ambivalence toward the implications of its project of illness, angrily brushes off the man. Padre Salvi willhearing
later
of Maria Clara's
ah ieue. especially the implications of its abiiy to “speak to” and with the aforemention
use Lucas, alon
ed Pedro, to organize a rebellion that woul: d :
be.
“speak for” the very people it represents/portrays.” ; wrongly attributed to Ibarra’s leadership. Ibarra should have
taken Tasio
The character of Elfas, a self-identified indio, exemplifies the ambiva- the Philosopher's words to heart. When consulted, the sage astutely ad-
lence of the narrative project(ion). To an extent, Elfas is the more vises Ibarra to give up his well-meaning plan to build a school because
enigmatic of the two outsiders-as-insiders of the novel (the other being “[t}he enterprise needs another man, because to make it a success,
zeal
Ibarra, the self-avowed stranger in his own land). Elfas is both the cata- and money alone are not sufficient; in our country
are also required self-
lyst of events (or even: nonevents, as when he prevents a riot at the denial, tenacity of purpose, and faith, for the soil ‘is
not ready; it is only
theater), and the interpreter who ratlonalizes the behavior arid actions of sown with discord.”
the gente, taming its discontent and the sources of its suffering and In contrast, the nobler, self-sacrificing Elfas’s sense of the patria
is
unruliness to Ibarra. Elfas speaks for the oppressed by rationalizing the premised on (an already) prior abdication of claims to love and personal
“blind,” “popular fanaticism” of the victims of Spanish abuses and casts happiness in favor of the higher claims of “the people."” To do so,
Elfas
his lot with the outlaws after Ibarra, clinging to illusions of paternal would have to cancel out the destructive cycle of exploitation and suffer-
Hispanization, refuses to help the bandits. Yet in the latter half of the novel, ing that had hitherto served as the binding force among fellow Filipinos.
Elfas tries: to dissuade a vengeful, disillusioned Ibarra by invoking the same In burning Ibarra’s papers, Elfas abolishes his original intention of seek-
paternal metaphor Ibarra used: the people are “innocent atid defense- ing restitution from the descendants of the Spanish mestizo-~who had been
less," and will only bear the brunt of suffering unleashed by anarchic tesponsible for the death of his great-grandfather. He abolishes the cir-
violence. Like Tasio, Elfas invests “the people” with the future potential of cuit of revenge and indebtedness in which. he had operated while
Preserving the bond of intimacy linking him to Ibarra, Whereas the well-
change, disruptive, cauterizing, above all, unstable: “The force repressed meaning Ibarra falls into, and is trapped in, the cycle of retribution
for centuries will light and burst.” In so doing, he also gives up his ability
to “speak for" the people since he cannot predict when the change will following his implication in Padre Salvi's manufactured rebellion and his
own suffering at the hands. of the authorities, Elfas escapes such a cycle
erupt. In his discourse, the gente is both an entreaty (ie., open to soli-
because he has cut all ties to his past, and the abolition of indebtedness
daritacco
to and fora threa
y) unt t (i.e., open to disrupti
the effects and implicationson).
He admits his own inability is absolute. The beauty of this self-sacrifice lies in the: fact that it is
of such a symbolic investment.

Scanned by CamScanner
If the self-sacrificing Elfas is haunted by “the
people” for whom he unconditional, and therefore inspires a debt of gratitude that is both
must speak but whom hi peop! infinite and postponed (because the debt is always owed by the fucure
Unlike Elias,ieenre te = never fully represent, what more for Ibarra? generation).
distracted from evenpre with his personal affairs that he is If Elfas’s selflessness and self-immolation mark the natidnialist mo-
.

i 8 the “people” seriously and heeding the un-
nte and plotting around him. He assumes that
Mént, a moment born out of the ashes ofthe past, a moment that
seemingly gives birth to itself and is without genealogy, a moment when
hatred and revenge are transformed into love, sacrifice, and. solidarity,
when blood enemies can become friends, it is only
fittingalone,
given up everything (family, the past, security, love) dies that because
he Ste
 ae ~~ Nec Fictions The Fiction of @ Knowable Commuriity cw 89

‘ . . i
ited as the dissolution © f the self-denying self into an very different idea of Catholicism
nationalism is posit in the Philippines” (1938, v: 5, 14). This
‘ d, but not unknown, in his death
Elfas remains unnamed, e insistence on the complication of our ethical norms posed
by social
gives the knowable com.
and sacrifice ion's

ay ee psy or sein eth

ee notion, of brotherhood
e that suffuses the nations “truth.” It is perhaps
P
Jocatedness, by the specificity of the contexts of day-to-day existence,
meanings, and social relations within the Philippines that define the social
the novel's mmunity to be rendered meaningful. We might say that order, provides the main critical impulse for interrogating the assump-
tions of various critical mediations shaping Philippine “reality.” Within the
allaws the co eae ihe pro-tn
witness to the ; possibility of self-sacrifice
literature’s ability to bear ty is gaps created by the complications: of the universal ideas of freedom and
ari
from which t
senna
the transformation, Rizal locates the emergence of the knowable Filipino
i s one. impoortant Pp position
vide
“ cd mmunity in and thro’ , community. It was, perhaps, in this spirit that, writing to the Filipinos in
— ia vn this meaningfulness of a knowable community is Barcelona from London in 1889, Rizal boldly declared—“Knowledge of a
is most moving
not to be equated with the certainty of immortality. What thing prepares for its mastery: Knowledge is power. We are the only ones
who can’ acquire a perfect knowledge of our country, because we know
about the novel is its admixing of hope and risk. For despite the auspl-
which refers to Christmas both languages, and besides we are informed of the secrets of the ‘people
cious title of the last chapter “La Nochebuena,”
Eve but also literally means “The Good Night,” Elfas' death is solitary, and
uous statement
among whom we had been raised. The Spaniards will never get to know
us well, because they have many preoccupations, they do not mingle with
his invocation of “you who will see the dawn” is an ambig
who will see the dawn” —that neither Elfas the population, they do not understand well the language, and they stay
opening itself to a future—“you
nor Rizal himsel f could fully predict , let alone guaran tee.” a short time. The most that they can know is what is going on in the
The Noli’s constant sliding between inside and outside perspectives, government offices, and thése are not the country” (1963, 254).
between the possibilities and constraints of this positioning, between the Yet who are the “we” whom Rizal invokes? One of the problematic
affirmative presence of “free Europe” and the “indio’s” critical power of aspects of the Noli concerns precisely its depiction and handling of
self-attestation and the power to complicate idealized norms of freedom crowds. It has been argued that in opting for reform over revolution, Rizal
and development, enables the novel to conceive of itself in a national was supposedly expressing the conservatism of the middle class. Renato
moment. It is, in fact, not just the subject mattez, but also the gathering Constantino, for example, reads Rizal as a paragon of the bourgepis fear
power of language in the Noli that allows the possibility of entry into a of the masses and of violence (“Veneration” n.d.). Rizal’s second novel, £1
community of those who have been excluded when the bounds of that filibusterismo, explores the question of violence, and its examination of
community were drawn, a community which, as Rizal suggests, cannot anarchism ag a political alternative echoes the plot of several novels
be fully represented (in both the artistic or political senses) by an ilustrado written around the same time in other parts of the world, notably Fyador
Dostoevsky's The Devils and Henry James's Princess Cassamassima. One
like Ibarra. Paradoxically, though, this inclusive community takes on the
boundedness given it by the colonial state, even if that. state was TesO- could conceivably account for the failure of Simoun’s anarchist plot in
lutely antinationalist.» terms of social developments in the world scene, with anarchisms espe-
Rizal's novel presents an epistemic claim that complicates the nor-
cially in Italy, Spain, and Russia. Written after the French Revolution and
events of 1848 but before the Russian Revolution, the Noli's a ae
mative import of the novel's rhetoric of development and change through
its insistent avowal of the force of cultural material. Rizal’s novel can be assimilation of revolution into anarchism stood between a perind when
the inspiring success of the French revolution was irreparably contami-

nthe Plies oie the nh wt he potent! knowl

ae ihe of his frequently articulated contention that being
nated by the bloody reign of terror unleashed in its wake, and a one
when the masses of people that constituted a potential et .
rmueee inattentive outsiders (and insiders as well) revolutionary activity still lacked the organization, idealogy, ans
por Ieneon’ ot atin ppines. Writing to Blumentritt, Rizal states: “Sin assert its hegemony. *!
ila av Country Only from the books written by friars and Span 4 ironically, ve
who copied one another. If you had grown u I did, in one of This ara in of marked uncertainty based, ee essa esate
our villages, and seen the sufferings of of our peasants,
oeyou would
i have 4 but insistent awareness of the possibilitles of imagining Ce
go_cw_ Necessary leon ail ty was typica
ion, and this5 uncertain ically ex.
for > at ambiguity that defined social movements ositions—makes future decisions possi
political futures
pressed in novels as a decisive and liberatory sevolation, and of fatal, estrous bllity for the decisions (and casid tier ae ae ae
in seamen political terrorism drenched in the blood of inno. cussed and sometimes maligned “indecisiveness” can be read a ef af
individualistic an ideological feature of his novels, but as a literary expression _ ie
; yeading leaves. 4 uestions about the mass Te-
contingency of any attempt to represent a political, moral, and symbolic
cent victims. esas
Though suggestive, this 4 me readers may notice the relative community, an ineradicable component of nationalist thought and prac-
i i swere : _ tice. Rizal's difficulty in grappling with his material, a difficulty that
ie ra Rieal devotes to elaborating the day-to-day life of have been evinced as “unruliness” within the novel or as the unruliness
may
pauc ; le exception of Sisa), content-
: of the novel itself, is an acknowledgment of a difficult love for a knowable
so-called
: ‘ ordinary
: (with the onpossib
peopledropping their con veoeations
sick ints omotien
most i
. Rizal'sveka community, and the risks that attend, or haunt, the interminable task of
ing himself with eaves
;
important
i
achievement,
t, in fact, lies in the fact c tha aan gister rendering a critical—as opposed to blind acceptance of “outside” norms
ess of e
conversations a s over and above the
the people’s presence as an exc
t or values—exposition of this community.
usual, intimate, blow-by-blow accounts of their lives. One must look at When Rizal gives his readers 4 sense of crowds, of people,
and when
Rizal’s novel not solely in terms of what it excludes, but a terms, too, the people talk, and keep on talking beyond the novel, the fictional
re-
the novel pve a place, alism of Noli me tangere reduces the distances separating the author,
however conflictively, of what it includes. For
it declares to
through the narrative device of eavesdropping, for what the reader, and their shared world. Rizal’s “people” are at once the frame
have ‘no place. ; r —— of reference of nationalism, its basis, But they are also something else,
The argument in this. chapter thus far has been that ' the people an excess of speech, a multitude of characters who are “still living” or
who make up Rizal's fantasy of the Filipino nation both have aplace and “have been lost sight of” and whose personalities stand out as reflective
do not have a place in the novel. While Rizal’s depiction of numerous of the distortions, but also the possibilities, engendered within the Span-
character types is what lends his novels their narrative density and tex- ish colony—Dojfia Victorina with her colonial mentality, Capitan Tiago
ture, the Rizal novels also suggest that these types cannot be contained with his venal spinelessness, Dofia Consolacién in all her cruelty, but
both within the rhetoric of liberalism and Hispanism that Ibarra espouses also Elfas with his capacity for self-sacrifice, Capitana Maria in all her
(in the name of the people, of course) and within the novel itself. dignity. The Noli suggests a basis for nationalism rooted in a sense of
This is because these people's actions and reactions—plucked mo- place, of location, and in a mode of connectedness not fully recuperable
mentarily from the flow of the world by narrative acts of. eavesdropping— even by nationalist solidarity and sacrifice. Because the Filipino nation
constitute the novel's mast powerful statement about the complexity of is grounded in the possibility that, despite the readability of social rela-
the social terrain and the historical contingency that attends the impera- tionships and connections that the novel establishes between individuals
tive toward political action, Moreover, Elfas's dilemma shows that it is and societies, between human beings and nature, knowing and acting
not revolutionary violence Rizal fears, but the unpredictability of the on that knowledge may not be enough to guarantee'the success of chang-
effects of any program of action, the intolerable burden of history, of ing the social order.

risk and chance, that are at the heart of all social programs and trans-
Pea visions. Which is not to say that just because one cannot fully
reer for how history might turn out in the wake of one’s actions and
nea one should therefore refuse to embark on action aimed at
eon Society. Elfas, for example, does not abandon the difficult task
foe working
oonlanhs e eae for “the others,” even when he counsels Ibarra
on his plans to exact vengeance:
cisions—contingent bergen nngeney Of artistic= and political
jowled: t ‘ de -
ause they are specific to a range of subject
Scanned by CamScanner
This possibility of a failure in representation (in both its artistic and
political senses of speaking of and for) stems from Rizal's uneasiness
Tegarding the issue of the “corruption” colonial rule spawned. By sum-
Moning the specter of the filibustero in its various linguistic and semantic
mutations, Rizal insists both on the specificity of native reinvention of
colonial terms, as well as the incalculability of the effects of this reinven-
tion. As the mutations of filibustero show, the term can be ap anode
much to the “first civilian I (ie. one of the peasants} see stealing —
as to the political dissident. The danger is that the term would lose its
 92 <w_Necessary Fictlons re on of a Knowable Communi cw 93

tical charge, even if its political charge originates from the possibili- The trreducibil
in ity of thebody,
risk techni
attending the knowable communityity an and
Poties creal
eared by such corruption in the similar
frst Place.
terms,aS 4 necessary
. “fic. its inscription
makes him F
history,
posit. the nation in the fit nies, and i
Politics, ‘
haunts Rizal and
” in
think of “the people
ight a kin d of exc ess that the novel
enerat es, but als o as
‘ per none
ot fully contain. It
registers,
o e = Be es ; tha t the novel can index but cann
a in Rizal's novels in the solved (1963, 610). Because the Filipi
is perhaps nocoincid ence that the people appear round
i 7 ;
act of talking, creating and spreading rumors, which in tum foreg and intractable, a source ofsuccor br alae ame ‘ = ae UE
and nontruth. This excess creates also menacing, it compels but also obstructs
the relations among truth, untruth, genealogy.” It is haunted by the very freedom it
the ative. Seeiax 41 i
ibili i f reference, representation, of writing from a posits. emer’
the passibllly ee
oF # that daries that determime The moment of nationalism is both a fiction
perspective even, blurs the conceptual boun, ar: create or realize, and a fiction produced in
that the novel helped to
such 28 Teasers SU:
the oppositions operating in the novel, oppositions breac the very strictures of oretia
hing of the line
possible forces operating in colonial Philippines. It may not
perstition and knowledge/ignorance. The be proper to speak of
the novel as generating a nation that is then defined
Ibarra to tell Files,
defining the modern and its negation 1s what leads “the nation emerges. precisely from the excess of speech and
as exclusionary. The
issue of
with whom he has been arguing passionately over the clusion. Nationalism and literature thus come together in
violence of ex-
e whose needs,
people”: “I hava not been brought up among the peopl the invention
of a political community, and the efficacy of such.a community does
perhaps, I am not aware of. I spent my child hood in a Jesuit school, I not
have read lie in the success of the invention but in the risks that attend the neces-
grew up in Europe, | have been developed by books’ and I sity of forging a national community, the risks of failure opening that
only what men have been able to bring to light. What remains behind community to the necessity of reinvention again and again. It is to admit
in the shadows, what writers failed to write about, I know nothing of.” that human freedom is haunted irrevocably by time, by human finitude,
Even Elfas, who calls himself “dne of the people” and tries to articulate by the objects that we create and objects that create us. That Rizal’s novels
the people's needs, is also haunted by the contingency of his own posi- were able to index this aporia at the heart of nationalist thought and
tion. When an Ibarra, embittered by the events that led to his arrest on practice may help to explain the continuing fascination that his novels
false charges of having staged a rebellion, speaks darkly of vengeance, command even among Filipinos today:
the knowledgeable Elfas counsels peace and invokes the specter of the
“defenseless and the innocent” for whom even his (Elfas‘s) rationaliza-
tions cannot fully account to dissuade Ibarra from living up to his own
observation about the “right of might.”
This acknowledgment of both the necessity and limitation of writing
from a place and perspective stems from the multiple standpoints the
inside/outside stance generate, which render both transparent yet prob-

Scanned by CamScanner
lemat ic the narrative of progress, unive rsalized cultural norms of Europe,
and construal of progress as table
inevi e.
chang e-outside
The insid per-
spective pits against the often idealized, transcendental account of political
will and self-determination the “nature” of the recalcitrant, empirical
vagaries and particularities of the Philippine colonial situation. Rizal's
evocation of the suffering, but also tenacious survival, of the brutalized
People can be read as a plea for the epistemological significance of the

experiences
vers the colonial situation engendered, experiences that the uni-
alist norms of progress and development may
nor the nationalist ritual of not fully recuperate:
self: abnegation and sacrifice fully absorb.