ANATOMY OF THE ANTI-HERO

• A startling anatomy of Rizal is offered in the

“ First Filipino” by Leon Maria Guerrero and in
“ Rizal From Within” by Ante Radaic.
• The Guerrero book is a biography of Rizal.
• The Guerrero opus is magnum, with 500 pages
and has 24 pages of bibliographical
references.
• Guerrero’s was awarded first prize in the
biography contest during the Rizal Centennial.
• The Radaic study is an extended essay, a
tentative one.
• Radaic subtitled it “ An Introduction To A
Study Of Rizal’s Inferiority Complex”.
• Its 70 pages long, still a manuscript, awaiting
translator and a publisher.
• Guerrero sees rizal as the first man to use the term
Filipino in its present sense.
• Guerrero stresses the role in the revolution, which
“was in a sense made in Spain” – of Rizal’s class – the
propertied bourgeoisie and ilustrado.
• Guerrero paints a cruel picture of Rizal sitting
comfortably in a ship’s cabin, sailing off to Europe in
1896, while Bonifacio and his Katipuneros were
being driven back to the hills of Balara and the
propagandists crowded the Fort Santiago.
• According to Guerrero, Rizal’s trial presents us
with a delimma.
• Guerreo asked, “ Was Rizal innocent or guilty
of the charge?
• Guerrero accepts the retraction as genuine.
• For Radaic, Rizal is “a mystery still to be
revealed”, a sphinx who, even in the impulsive
confessions of his youth, already knew what
not to tell.
• Radaic says that not everything has yet been
said about Rizal, including perhaps the most
important one.
• Radaic suspects that Rizal suffered from
complexes of inferiority ( complejos de Rizal ).
• Radaic says that Rizal was physically defective.
• Guerrero and Radaic , in their personal
circumstances, approximate certain aspects of
Rizal.
• Radaic dwells on Rizal’s obsession with
physical deformity.
• Radaic was also obsessed with physical
deformity being crippled.
• Guerrero, a descendant of the ilustrados, was
bred by the Ateneo and a home steeped in
the old Filipino-Spanish traditions.
• Guerrero has lived long abroad, has a
cosmopolitan outlook and at the same time a
nationalist.
• Radaic fled from his homeland which groaned
under a tyranny and became that archetype of
modern man: the displaced person, the
stateless individual.
• Radaic became an ardent student of Rizal.
• Because Guerrero and Radaic seem, at certain
points, to be reading themselves into Rizal, to
read their respective studies of him is to see
the hero through the prism of Guerrero’s
cosmopolitan intellect and the dark glass of
Radaic’s tragic sense of life.
Guerrero’s Rizal
• For Guerrero, Rizal is the embodiment of the
intelligentsia and the petite bourgeoisie.
• Rizal was brought up in circumstances that
even in the Philippines of our day would be
considered privileged.
• Guerrero surmises that even if born a peasant
and in penury, Rizal would still have made his
mark.
•Rizal became a bourgeois idealist, putting his faith in reason and
the liberal dogmas of the inevitability of progress, preferring
reform to revolution and “revolution from above” to “revolution
from below”.
•Rizal wanted to be representative of the Filipinos in the Spanish
Cortes.
•According to Guerrero, as representative to the Cortes, Rizal
would have worked for :
1. expulsion of the friars
2. sale of the friar estates
3. establishment of self-government
4. more native participation in the government
• Guerrero calls Rizal a reluctant revolutionary.
• In Rizal’s mind the Filipinos of his generation were
not yet ready for revolution because they were not
yet ready for independence, and they were not
ready for independence because they were still
unworthy of it.
• In 1887 Rizal was saying that “ peaceful struggle will
always turn out to be a futile dream because Spain
will never learn the lesson of her former colonies in
South America”.
• 1. more attention
• 2. better education
• 3. higher quality of government officials
• 4. one or two representatives in the
parliament
• 5. more security for ourselves and our fortune
• In 1888, while one side of Rizal was crying, “It
is too late, the Filipinos have already lost the
hopes they placed in Spain!” another side was
murmuring that the happiness of the
Philippines must be obtained by “noble and
just means” and that “if to make my country
happy I had to act vilely, I would refuse to do
so”.
• Who saw Rizal plain?
• Rizal called the idea of a revolution “highly
absurd”.
• Rizal issued a manifesto.
• Rizal condemned Bonifacio’s revolution but
not Bonifacio’s independence for the
Philippines.
• Guerrero says that Rizal believed in the
gradual and natural evolution of the Filipino
Nation.
• Guerrero says that it was Rizal who taught his
countrymen that they were something else,
Filipinos who were members of a Filipino
Nation. He was the first who sought to unite
the whole archipelago and envisioned a
compact and homogeneous society of all the
old tribal communities from Batanes to the
Sulu Sea, based on common interests and
mutual protection rather than on the Spanish
friar’s theory of double allegiance to Spain and
Church.
• Rizal aroused a consciousness of national
unity, of a common grievance and common
fate.
Radaic’s Rizal
•Radaic views Rizal as a modern man-anxious, nervous,
insecure, ill at ease in his word, ridden with complexes
and afflicted with feelings of inferiority and impotence.
•Maria and Narcisa’s description of Rizal to Asuncion
Lopez Bantug
“ Jose was a very tiny child. And his head grew
disproportionately. When he began to walk by
himself he often fell, his head being too heavy for his
frail body. Because of this, he needed an aya to look
after him”.
• Radaic believes that Rizal was aggrieved by his puny
physique.
• “ The son of the teacher was a few years older than
I and exceeded me in stature… After ( beating
him in a fight ) I gained fame among my
classmates, possibly because of my smallness…. I
did not dare descend into the river because it was
too deep for one my size…. At first ( the father at
the Ateneo) did not want to admit me, perhaps
because of my feeble frame and scant height….
Though I was 13 going on 14, I was still very
small.”….( Memorias de un estudiante )
• Other people are seen in relation to their
height.
• There’s an evidence that Rizal had reason to
be self-conscious about his physique.
• Radaic’s point is that Rizal’s career was an
effort to reduce the discrepancy between the
interior image he carried of himself and the
image he saw in the mirror.
• The discrepancy produced both an inferiority
complex and the determination to excel.
• What are the intimate facts that the young
Rizal would “mask?”
– Sexual inadequacy