A review of E. San Juan, PEIRCE/MARX

 A Review of E. San Juan, Peirce/Marx  Speculations on Exchanges between Pragmatism and Marxism 

By Prof. Paulino Lim, Emeritus Professor of English,California State University, Long Beach

The title Peirce/Marx yokes two philosophers -- not with a dash but a slash -- hinting at the strategy of the monograph by E. San Juan, Jr. The subtitle reinforces this with "Speculations between Pragmatism and Marxism." Also, calling his work a "thought experiment" shows awareness that his findings will be challenged or modified by subsequent critics, as he himself does to some of his sources.

San Juan attributes the awakening of his historical sensibility to the war in Indochina as part of the Cold War against China and international communism. The U.S. used its bases in the Philippines to launch its invasion of Vietnam, using counterinsurgency tactics (burning villages, executing civilians) to subjugate and colonize the Philippines. Mark Twain protested against the U.S. violence in the Philippines. So did the philosopher William James against the atrocities in Vietnam displaying his pragmatism, but there is no mention of Charles Sanders Peirce sharing the same sentiment.

San Juan offers this absence as "pretext for this speculative exercise." Can Peirce's condemnation be inferred from his other theories that concur with Marx's, for instance, on the nature of reality? This is what San Juan undertakes in the monograph, searching for "creative transaction" on the agreement between Peirce and Marx on the methodology of obtaining knowledge (40).

San Juan echoes the unacknowledge acolade of Peirce as the "American Aristotle," claiming that the philosopher's ideas have not been tested as "a strategic guide to wide-ranging sociopolitical action." (9) San Juan, however, does some of the testing by juxtaposing the convergences between Peirce's pragmatism and Marx's ideology. In effect, San Juan orchestrates a dialogue between the two but, despite the evidence he marshalls, he raises the white flag in mock surrended shielding the speculative nature of his project. In this regard, he is overly cautious and self-deprecating, demeaning his project with a bit of ironic humor as "a fruiful chabitation if not synergestic." (19)

To clear the path for his synergesis, San Juan targets what he calls the misreadings and misconstruals of Peirce and Marx. Even William James gets chastised for offering a cheap psychological fix: "Ideas become true just so far as they help us get into satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience." San Juan calls this "a feel-good recipe for mass consumption." (27) The Soviet authorities, however, gets the full brunt of San Juan's critique for "delimiting pragmatism as subjective idealism and obscurantism." (33) He highlights the Soviets' judgment that "pragmatism has given way to neo- positivism and religion as the dominant influence on the spiritual life of the United States." (35)

After dealing with many of the misconstruals of both Peirce and Marx, San Juan lays out the parallels or analogues between Peircian pragmatism and Marxism, claiming that both are universally applicable in analyzing class struggle, the contradictions of social formations, and the unpredictable trajectory of movements and revolutions. The Arab Spring is a case in point. A few of the applications escape me, for instance, "All men are mortal, but mortality is not the same for all men." (56) I suppose it means that not all men die the same way, or that some men believe that death is not an end but a transformation to another life. 

In as much as the monograph is an "exploratory survey" of the thinkings of Peirce, Marx, and San Juan (one must add), I find myself gleaning from the bountiful harvest of thoughts, holding on to what I can consume. I did wince a bit when San Juan calls Heidegger "fashionable." (I spent a sabbatical in Germany studying Heidegger's phenomenology). In journalistic parlance, a few takeaways from the monograph include the historicity of knowledge and of objective reality as being independent of consciousness, the link between dialectics of Marx and Hegel, and Peirce's modification of the Cartesian requirements for a proposition -- clear and distinct -- by adding "meaningful" as a third criterion. One may of course quibble that it is redundant since meaning, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. The meaning an author intends may no be what the reader gets. We do need a community of truth-seekers to agree on the definitive meaning of the Cartesian axiom "I think, therefore I am."

In short, San Juan's monograph for me serves as an invaluable primer to pragmatism and Marxism in one's enduring quest for knowledge.—##

ANG ATING PANITIKAN SA KASALUKUYANG PANAHON--ni E. San Juan, Jr.

 I. PANITIKAN SA KASALUKUYANG PANAHON

Modernidad at Globalisasyon: Diyalektika ng Panahon at Lugar

Ni E. SAN JUAN, Jr. Polytechnic University of the Philippines

Nasaan tayo ngayon at kailan nangyayari ito? Tila kabalintunaan ang nangyayari ngayon.

Pagnilayin natin ang mga mungkahing sumusunod. Singkahulugan ng modernidad ang katwiran at pagkamakatao, sagisag ng pagsulong ng kabihas- nan. Sa malas, batay sa krisis sa Ukraine, Syria, patuloy na digmaan sa Af- ghanistan, Mindanao, at hidwaan tungkol sa China Sea, umuurong na tayo mula sa modernidad tungo sa barbaridad, mula globalisasyon tungo sa kumprontasy- on ng mga makasariling bansang nagpipilit ng kanilang natatanging etnisidad na namumukod sa iba. Kabaligtaran nga sa perspektiba ng rasyonal at makataong antas ng sagad-modernong milenyo sa mundo.

Ibungad natin ang problemang bumabagabag sa atin: Anong uri ng mod- ernidad ang taglay ng Pilipinas? Kaugnay nito, paano mapapalaya ang potensyal ng ordinaryong araw-araw na buhay ng bawat mamamayan sa epoka ng kapital- ismong pampinansiyal na laganap sa buong planeta?

Isang anekdotang may masusing pahiwatig ang ibabahagi ko muna. Ka- makailan, sa isang workshop ng mga manunulat sa TABOAN 2014 (pagtitipon ng mga manunulat sa Subic Free Port, Zambales) tungkol sa pagsasalin, naitanong ko sa panel: "Pare-pareho ba o magkakapantay-pantay ang lahat ng wika na mag- agamit sa pagsasalin sa kasalukuyan?" Di umano, isang inosenteng tanong. Tu- gon sa akin ng dalawang kasali roon: "Oo, pare-pareho, walang wikang nakahi- higit sa iba." Ibig sabihin, Ingles, Cebuano, Pranses, Intsik, Ruso, Aleman, lahat iyan ay magkakapantay-pantay...

Saan ba tayo nakatira? Anong petsa ba ngayon, saang lugar tayo nakatala- ga? Ano ang tunay at eksaktong posisyon natin?

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Nakakalito nga. Tingnan ninyo: bagamat ang Subic ay isinauli na sa Filip- inas, patuloy pa rin ang paggamit noon ng Kano sa taun-taong Balikatan Exercis- es, pati Clark at iba pang dating base militar sa buong sangkapuluan. Lumubha pa nga dahil sa pag-iral ng Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) na pinirmahan nina Presidente Aquino at Washington. Dagdag sa Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) na saligan ng taunang Balikatan Exercises, ang EDCA ay lubos na pagsuko ng soberanya ng bansa sa tropa ng Estados Unidos: halos lahat ng bahagi ng teritoryo ng Pilipinas, pati lupa't mga gusali at magagamit na likas-ya- man nito, ay pwedeng sakupin ng hukbong Amerikano nang walang pahintulot ng karaniwang mamamayan. Bumalik na tayo muli sa posisyon ng isang kolonya, o di umano'y neokolonya dahil may pagkukunwaring taglay natin ang kasarinlan. Kabalintunaan ba ito?

Sa ano't anuman, una munang pinagkaabalahan ng mga nagpupulong ang PX goods at aliwang karaoke sa Olongapo, hindi ang VFA at patuloy na interben- siyon ng US sa ating soberanya na sumukdol na sa pagpataw ng EDCA. Kaya patas ba ang neokolonya at estado ng bansang nagdidikta ng kondisyon ng VFA sa gobyerno ni Presidente Aquino?

Himayin natin ang sitwasyon. Sa perspektiba ng lingguwistika, tama, bawat wika ay nagsisilbing sapat sa pangangailangan o adhikain ng grupong gu- magamit nito. O sa layon ng partikular na pagsasalin. Ngunit ang wika, anumang senyas o sagisag na may kargadang kahulugan, ay hindi nakalutang sa himpa- pawid o sa pantasiya; nakaugat ito sa espasyong may tiyak na lugar at panahon. Sa globalisasyon ng mundo sa ilalim ng IMF/WB at mga higanteng korporasyon, walang pasubaling global Ingles ang namamayani. Hindi lengguwaheng Intsik, Ruso, Hapon, Pranses, Aleman, Espanyol, o Filipino, salungat sa sentido komun ng mga manunulat na nabanggit. Bakit nagkaganito?

Punto de Vista sa Pagsasaliksik

Dalawang mungkahi. Una, palagay ko'y hindi natin masasagot iyong tanong kung hindi susundin ang ilang gabay o paalala sa pag-ugit ng imbesti- gasyon.

Una, ilagay sa konkretong konteksto ng kasaysayan ng lipunan ang wika o anumang usaping pangkultura. Pangalawa, hindi uubra ang indibidwalistikong pananaw (methological individualism) kung nais natin ang malawakang kontek- stuwalisasyon at praktikang paghuhusga. Bakit? Sapagkat ang lipunan ay hindi koleksiyon ng hiwa-hiwalay na atomistikong indibidwal. Binubuo ito ng artiku- lasyon ng ugnayang panlipunan na may kasaysayan, may lumipas at kinabukasan sa pangkalahatang kabatiran.

Anumang pangyayari ay lilinaw sa pagtarok sa lohika ng pagsudlong ng panahon at lugar. Tinutukoy rito ang konteksto o kuwadrong kinalalagyan ng tema, paksa, buod ng diskurso. Sa madaling salita, kontekstuwalisasyon sa isang

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tiyak na yugto ng kasaysayan at pagtutok sa proseso ng panlipunang relasyon ang dalawang bagay na dapat idiin sa ating pag-aaral ng modernidad. Kung hindi, arbitraryong hatol ng metapisikang pag-iisip ang maghahari.

Pagtugis sa Kasalukuyan

Makasaysayang pagkakataon ito upang pag-isipan natin ang sitwasyon ng Filipinas, ang katayuan ng lipunan at kultura nito, sa panahon ng globalisasyon. Panahon din ito ng malubha't lumalalang krisis ng imperyalismong sumasakop sa buong planeta. Bagamat global ang pananaw, isang sipat na bumabagtas sa bakuran ng mga bansa, lokal pa rin ang pokus ng analitikong pagsusuri ng ispe- sipikong buklod ng mga pangyayari at tauhan. Nakaangkla sa praktikang dalumat ng mga kolektibong lakas kaakibat ng situwasyong nagtatakda at nagbibigay- kahulugan sa bawat teorya at karunungan.

Bagamat tila patag ang lahat sa biglang sulyap, mapag-aalaman na umiiral ang hirarkiya at pagtatagisan ng lakas ang kalakaran. Panahon din ito ng paglan- tad sa "total surveillance" at "drone warfare" na isinasagawa ng US habang patu- loy na pinatitingkad ang giyera laban sa "terorismo"--ibig sabihin, ang interben- syong paglusob at paglupig sa mga bayan at grupong kontra sa imperyalismo ng mga higanteng korporasyong nakabase sa US, Europa, Hapon--ang Global North at mga kaalyado nito. Nakapanig pa rin ang Filipinas sa Global South, nakapailal- im pa rin sa mga industriyalisado't mayamang bansa.

Sa okasyong ito, ilang tesis lamang ang ilalahad ko upang ganap na ta- lakayin natin sa pagpapalitang-kuro hinggil sa usapin ng suliranin ng mod- ernidad.

Nasaan tayo sa hirarkiyang internasyonal? Bagamat kunwaring may kasarin- lang republika buhat pa noong 1946, ang Pilipinas, sa katunayan, ay isang neokolonya ng US. Lantad ito sa pagdepende ng oligarkong gobyerno sa poder militar ng US, at sa mapagpasiyang kapangyarihan nito sa WB /IMF, WTO, G-7, UN, at konsortiya ng mga bangko't nagpapautang na mga ahensiya. Hindi lumang kolonya kundi makabagong anyong angkop sa bagong salinlahi at bagong sensi- bilidad nito.

Sa pandaigdigang situwasyong ito, nakalukob tayo sa panahon ng malub- hang krisis ng kapitalismong pampinansiyal. Ebidensiya ang pagbagsak ng Wall Street, pangalawa sa nakaraang siglo, noong 2008. Mas maselan ito kaysa noong 1929. Napipinto pa raw ang isang mas mapanira't katastropikong pagbulusok sa hinaharap, kalamidad na makapagbabago sa kultura't ideolohiyang pumapat- nubay sa kasalukuyang modernidad. Dito nakalakip kaipala ang post-modernidad ng lahat ng bansa, ang kultura't kaayusang pampulitika't pang-ekonomya nito.

Akumulasyong Walang Iginagalang

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Nakalilito ang mga karatula't palabas sa ating kapaligiran. Maingay ang konsumerismong namamalas na pangunahing aktibidad sa lipunan---laluna sa mga siyudad sa atin na siksikan na ang malls, trapik, gusaling "call centers--kaya tila nakalimutan na ang basehan nito. Paglago ng tubo ang siyang lohika pa rin ng lipunan.

Ngunit huwag tayong palinlang sa namamasid sa nakasisilaw na tabing ng mga palabas. Bagamat iba't ibang porma't paraan ang akumulasyon ng kapital, ng tubo, dahil sa makabagong teknolohiya ng komunikasyon at transportasyon, sa tulong ng kompyuter at Internet, nakasentro pa rin ang sistemang global sa pagkamal ng kapitalista sa surplus-value na nagmumula sa di-binayarang trabaho ng karamihan. Iyon ang bukal ng tubo/profit.

Kasama na rito ang "service workers," OFW--mahigit 12 milyong Pilipinong empleyado sa Saudi, Hong Kong, at saanmang lupalop, pati sa mga barkong nagdadala ng langis at mga produktong ipinagbibili (kabilang na ang armas, bomba, tear gas, atbp). Sa ngayon, anim na libong katawan ang umaalis sa bawat araw, Kung magpapatuloy ang walang kaunlaran ng bansa sa hinaharap, tiyak na mayorya ang tatakas o maghahanap ng bagong tahanan.

Nakalutang ang ekonomya, salamat sa kita o sahod ng 12 milyong OFW, mga kababayang nag-abrod. Sa patuloy na lumalaking remitans nakasandig ang ekonomya ng bansa--dagdag ang "call centers" at iba pang "business outsourc- ing." Walang matibay o malusog na produksiyon ng makina, ng malaking kagami- tan sa industriya, sa atin kundi mga mall, ispekulasyon sa real estate, at "service industry" ng turismo, atbp.

Sa ibang salita, ang tubo o kapital ng uring kumukontrol sa malalaking gamit/paraan ng produksiyon, ay hinuhugot pa rin sa lakas-paggawa ng mayorya, ang mga anakpawis, magbubukid, at mga propesyonal na bumubuo sa panggit- nang saray, ang petiburgesya. Dito nakasalalay ang modernidad ng ordeng inter- nasyonal.

Vortex ng Modernidad

Sa sangandaang ito, maiging idiin ang ilang nakalimutang aksyoma sa agham-panlipunan. Ang pinakaimportanteng katangian ng kapitalismo, ayon kay Marx, na siyang birtud na nagtutulak sa tinaguriang "modernization" at "devel- opment," at humuhubog ng kultura, lifestyle, at araw-araw na pamumuhay ay walang iba kundi ito: walang tigil na transpormasyon ng modo ng produksiyon, walang patid na pagbabago ng kagamitan at proseso ng produksiyon ng lahat ng bagay, at reproduksiyon ng relasyong panlipunan/ugnayan ng mga tao. Nakasalalay dito ang pagsulong ng lipunan, ang paghahati ng panahon.

Sa dagling paglalagom: "Everything solid melts into air...." proklamasyon ng Communist Manifesto. Pangkalahatang pagbabago, pag-iiba.

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Nais kong salungguhitan ang katotohanang naipaliwanag na nina Marx, Engels, at sinaunang pantas tulad nina David Ricardo, Saint-Simon, at iba pa. Materyalistikong diyalektika ang nagsisiwalat sa rebolusyong nagpapasulong sa kasaysayan ng mundo. Ang rebolusyong ito ng "mode of production" (na umuugit sa kompitensiya ng iba't ibang paksyon o grupo ng burgesya) ang sali- gan ng modernidad sa estilo ng buhay, ng kultura, ng sensibilidad at mentalidad ng bawat lipunan. Mabuting tandaan: ito ang motor o makina ng pagbabago sa diwa, ugali, gawi, at damdamin ng ordinaryong nilalang.

Siguradong dama at danas na ng lahat ang mga nangyayari sa kapaligiran, bagamat hindi nila tarok ang mekanismo't dahilan nito. Sintomas ng pagbabago ay masisilip at makakapa sa larangan ng ideolohiya--relihiyon, pulitika, sining, mass midya, atbp.--kung saan nakikita, nararamdaman, natutuklasan ang pag- tatagisan ng ibat ibang pwersa sa lipunan sa bawat yugto ng kasaysayan. Ang modernidad ng globalisasyon ay nagkakatawan sa tekstura't istraktura ng ideolo- hiya.

Metamorposis ng Kapaligiran

Bumalik tayo sa tema ng lugar at panahon. Pwedeng ituring na alam natin kung nasaan tayo. Kung di ninyo alam, konsultahin ang GPS, o inyong cellphone. Kung sa bagay, nagtatalo pa rin ang mga akademiko hinggil sa diyalektika ng "place" (lugar) at "space" (espasyo) sa isyu ng globalisasyon. Dahil nga sa kompyuterisasyon, nakompress ang espasyo--ayon kay David Harvey sa kanyang librong The Condition of Postmodernity--kaya panahon, bilis ng pagkitid ng es- pasyo, dagliang transaksyon--ang makatuturang problemang kinakaharap natin ngayon, ang "politics of time." Dapat tayong maghatol sa halaga at katuturan ng bawat baytang sa pag-inog ng panahon, ang katuturan at kalagahan ng bawat ba- hagi nito.

Ginawang larangan ng pagsukat at pagtimbang ang bawat bahagi ng kasaysayan, ang pagkilala sa bahagdan ng kasaysayan. Paano babansagan ang bawat hati ng panahon upang makatiyak sa ating pinanggalingan at patutun- guhan? Nasaan tayo sa temporalisasyon ng kasaysayan? Bakit importante na nasa unahan tayo at hindi sa huli? Paano ang pagkilala sa huli at una, at pagkakahalintulad o pagkakaiba ng mga ito? Ano ang bentaha nito, ano ang imp- likasyon nito sa ordinaryong karanasan ng mamamayan?

Siyasatin natin ang mapa ng panahunan. Tanggap ng lahat na pagkatapos ng krisis noong 1970, minarkahan ng pagkatalo ng U.S. sa IndoTsina, nagbago ang mundo sa pag-urong ng Unyon Sobyet sa antas ng "booty capitalism." Sumunod ang Tsina at Biyetnam, ngayo'y mahigpit na kasangkot sa pandaigdigang ikot ng akumulasyon ng tubo. Pumasok tayo sa panibagong yugto pagkaraan ng 9/11; at paglunsad ng digmaan laban sa tinaguriang "teroristang" extremists--giyera sa Afghanistan, Syria, Palestina-Israel, Ukraine, at kampanya ng NATO laban sa Iran

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ukol sa langis, petroleo, na bukal ng pangunahing enerhiya pa ring gamit sa mga importanteng pabrika ng higanteng korporasyon sa buong mundo.

Sa ngayon, nasa bingit tayo ng giyera laban sa Rusya at Tsina--sintomas lahat ito na patuloy na kompetisyon ng mga paksyon ng kapitalismong global hinggil sa pamilihan ng komoditi, kung saan ipagbibili ang yaring produkto, at kung saan kukuha ng hilaw na materyales sa produksiyon. Sa kontekstong ito, mabilis ang pagbabago ng kagamitan sa produksiyon at pagsasakatuparan sa paghango ng tubo/profit. Ang malaking tubo ngayon ay galing sa upa, sa utang (credit/debt), sa palitan ng salapi at iba pang instrumentong pampinansiyal, na susi ng imperyalismong salot ngayon. Mabilis din ang buhos at agos ng penome- nang kaakibat nito sa anyo ng kultura ng araw-araw na kabuhayan.

Digmaan sa Arena ng Kultura

Samantala, maalingasngas ang usapin ng NSA (National Security Adminis- tration ng U.S.), espiya o surveillance, tortyur, at kagyat na asasinasyon o pag- paslang ng sibilyan sa pamamagitan ng drone, atbp. Talagang tumitingkad ang krisis ng kalikasan, sampu ng paglusaw ng Artika at Antartika. Penomenal ang Yolanda, baha, lindol, bagyo sa Mindanao, at iba pang sintomas ng epekto ng kabihasnang pinaiinog ng exchange-value, salapi, tubo.

Tanda ba ito ng bagong epoka, o pag-uulit lamang ng nauna at walang pro- gresyong pag-inog na kasaysayan?

Walang tigil na pag-uulit ng araw-araw na buhay o pagbabago--alin ang at- ing oryentasyon? Saan tumutungo ang takbo ng panahon, ang gulong ng kasaysayan? Para sa konserbatibong modernista (tulad ni Martin Heidegger), repetisyon ng tradisyon at mito ng lahi ang dulo ng pagpapasiyang umiral sa harap ng takdang kamatayan. Ito ang solusyon sa eksistensiyalistang kilabot. Ang mito ng Volk ay siyang kalutasan sa angst ng tiyak na pagsapit ng itinakdang kamatayan. Nalutas ang indibidwal na kapalaran sa mistipikasyon ng dugo't lupa ng Volk. Ito ang doktrina ng Nazi sa Alemanya noong nakaraang siglo. At ipinag- papatuloy kakatwa ng mga liderato ng Zionista sa Israel laban sa mga Palestino at iba pang rasa sa Gitnang Silangan.

Maraming kategorya rin ng transpormasyong titigil at tuwirang puputol sa repetisyon ng araw-araw na buhay. Para sa radikal na modernista (tulad ni Walter Benjamin), ang kasukdulan ng panahon ay pagputol sa repetisyon--sa opresyon at kahirapan--sa katuparan ng Ngayon, pagpapalaya sa pwersang sinupil o sin- ugpo sa araw-araw upang maligtas ang lahat. Transpormasyong radikal ang kailangan.

Maraming paraan ng liberasyon ng araw-araw na buhay, na makikita sa avant-garde na kilusan ng suryalismo, futurismo, konstruktibismo, situwasyon- ismo, sining konseptuwal, atbp. Kaalinsabay nito ang mga rebolusyonaryong

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proyektong pampulitika ng mga anarkista, sindikalista, at sosyalistang nilagom nina Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Luxemburg, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Che Gue- varra, Amilcar Cabral at iba pa. Kasalukuyang sinusubok din ang iba't ibang uri ng liberasyong pambansa, o pambansang demokrasya, sa Venezuela, Pilipinas, Hilagang Korea, Mexico (konsultahin ang masinop na pagsasalaysay ng pi- losopiya ng Pangatlong Mundo sa libro ni Enrique Dussel, Ethics of Liberation(Durham & London, 2013).

Karnabal ng Pakikipagsapalaran

Dalawin muli natin ang matinik na temang inilunsad sa umpisa. Anong yug- to ng kasaysayan tayo ngayon? Saang dako ng proseso ng modernidad (hindi modernisasyon) nakahinto ang bansang Pilipinas?

Ang temporalisasyon ng kasaysayan ay pag-uulit ng nakaraang karanasan. Ngunit sino ang sumusukat o tumitimbang sa agos ng panahon at paano ito natatarok na makaluma o makabago? Makatatakas ba tayo sa rutang siklikal na krisis ng kapitalismo o imperyalismo? Makaiiwas ba tayo sa kalamidad sa pagbuo ng ibang hugis o uri ng makabago, ng modernidad, ng kontemporaneo nang hindi pinapalitan ang lohika ng kapitalismo?

Bihag pa rin tayo ng indibidwalistikong pananaw, ng "methodological indi- vidualism" ng burgesyang sosyolohiya at sikolohiya. Suhetibismo't relatibismong kalkulasyon ang resulta. Nakakulong pa rin tayo sa atomistikong pagtingin, ti- walag sa konkretong konteksto ng kasaysayan. Nakatago pa rin ang tunay na kawalan ng katarungan sa alyenasyong namamayani sanhi sa reipikasyon ng ug- nayang panlipunan. Ang ugnayan ng bawat tao ay nilalason o nilalambungan ng petisismo ng komoditi, ang pagsamba sa salapi, tubo, mga produktong mas ma- halaga pa kaysa buhay ng mga taong yumari o lumikha nito.

Ang mga problemang ito ang dapat masinsinang bulatlatin. Dapat mata- mang tugaygayan ang temporalisasyon ng historya at uri ng modernidad sa araw- araw na kabuhayan upang maipaliwanag ang kinabukasan ng bansa sa gitna ng krisis ng kapitalismong global. At upang mapalaya ang nasugpo't nasisikil na en- erhiya ng taumbayan, ang kinabukasan ng diwa't budhi ng bawat nilalang. Susi ito sa problema ng pagkadehado o atrasado ng kabuhayan ng ating bayan.

Maidagdag pa na ang krisis na ito ay di pansamantala lamang kundi per- manente, batay sa mabangis na rasyonalidad ng sistemang kapitalista: ang walang hintong pagbabago ng paraan o mekanismo ng produksiyon, ang walang tigil na pagsulong ng imbensiyon ng mga gamit sa produksiyon, ng teknolohiya, at mga produktong ipinagbibili sa pamilihang pandaigdig. Naidiin ko na: ito ang saligan ng modernidad, ng mabilis na pag-iiba at transpormasyon ng mga bagay- bagay sa kapaligiran, hanggang sa epokang digital at mabilisang komunikasyon. Kalakip nito ang susi ng modernidad at globalisasyong sumisira sa kalikasan at pinagmumulan ng giyera at pagdurusa ng nakararami.

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Alyenasyon at Reipikasyon

Sa lipunang pinatatakbo ng tubo, salapi at komoditi ang namamagitan sa bawat tao. Alyenasyon ang bunga nito. Reipikasyon o pagtiwalag sa maram- daming buhay ang resulta nito. Kontrolado ng komoditi ang lahat, ginawang bagay na walang buhay ang tao, sinipsip ng mga bampira ang dugo ng bawat ni- lalang.

Sapagkat sa ordinaryong karanasan, ang tunay na pagtatagisan ng mga uri at sektor sa lipunan ay nakatago o natatabingan ng petisismo sa komoditi--ang buong mundo ng salapi, negosyo, pagpapalitan ng binili-ipinagbili--sampu ng mistipikasyon ng reyalidad dulot ng relihiyong institusyonal, pyudal na gawi't paniniwala (halimbawa, ang doxa na demokrasya raw ang sistemang pampulitika natin)--katungkulan ng mapagpalayang kritiko/intelektwal pampubliko ang wasakin ang tabing na nagtatago sa katotohanan: ang paghahati ng lipunan sa ilang mayamang nagsasamantala at karamihang aping binubusabos. Ibunyag ang pagtatagisan sa likod ng tinaguriang normalidad ng pagsasamahan o natural na pakikipamuhay araw-araw.

Nasaan tayo ngayon? Ano ang dapat gawin? Sa harap ng mistipikasyon ng komersiyanteng kultura at araw-araw na komodipikasyon ng karanasan, dapat sikapin ng makabayang intelektwal ang pagbubunyag sa katotohanan ng neokolonya, ang patuloy na pagsunod ng oligarkong namumuno sa utos ng USA (sa tulong ng mga kakutsabang elite na kinabibilangan ng oligarkong komprador, burokrata at panginoong maylupang taglay ang pyudal na ugali) at pagpapailalal- im ng kapakanan ng taumbayan sa interes ng tubo ng korporasyong global. Pag- wasak ng mga ilusyon at kababalaghang pumapalamuti sa mandaraya't mapan- linlang na burgesyang orden ang dapat adhikain ng mapagpalayang sensibilidad at mapanuring kamalayan. Lumaban tayo sa ngalan ng prinsipyo ng katarungan, katunayan, at egalitaryong kalayaan.

Sa Wika Nakataya ang Katubusan

Maibalik ko ang usapan sa wika o lengguwaheng sinasalita at isinusulat.

Ang wika ng kumbersasyon, midya, paaralan, kultura, atbp., ay madugong larangan din ng pagtatagisan ng mga uri, ng burgesyang gamit ang Ingles--o baryasyon nito na mga "englishes'-- bilang sandatang ideolohikal sa pagsuhay sa buong sistema ng palsipikadong soberanya at walang hustisyang demokrasya. Sa gusto o ayaw mo, wika ay sandata o kagamitan sa ideolohiyang pagtatagisan ng mga uri. Samakatwid, pinipili ka ng wika upang magpasiya laban sa interes ng iyong kolektibo o upang magsumikap itaguyod ang kapakanan nito.

Paglimiin natin ang nangyayari sa milieu na lunang sosyo-politikal na ating ginagalawan. Araw-araw, sa TV, Internet, pelikula, radyo, at iba pang midya, ang

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wikang ginagamit--na nakakabit sa mga imahen, dramatikong eksena, perfor- mance art, awit, at komplikadong salik ng pelikula-- ang wika ay siyang sangkap na makapangyarihang umuugit ng mensahe na siyang nagtutulak sa ating kumi- los, magsalita't gumanap ng isang tiyak na papel sa lipunan, partikular na ang maging konsumer at masunuring mamamayan. Sa ibang salita, maging isang subalternong alagad ng imperyalismo.

Mapang-akit at mapang-gayuma ang nangingibabaw na kakintalan, ang kagyat na impresyon ng kapaligirin, na nakasaplot sa katotohanan. Nakabubulag ito at nakaliligaw. Upang makaligtas sa alyenasyon at reipikasyong nabanggit ko na, kailangang hubarin ang balat-kayo, ang saplot ng pagkukunwari't panlilinlang ng burgesyang ideolohiya. Kailangang tistisin at buhaghagin ang mga mapang- gayumang idolo ng pamilihan, ng tangahalan, ng midya at iba pang institusyong aparato ng explotasyon at pagsasamantala.

May aral na mahuhugot dito. Kung pesimistiko ang utak, sikaping maging optimistiko ang pagnanais, payo ni Antonio Gramsci. May dahilan kung bakit masigla ang pagnanais bagamat maulap ang kabatiran. Hindi malagim ang lahat ng sulok ng larangan ng kultura. Ang halimbawa ng mga kritikong sumusulat sa PINOY WEEKLY o BULATLAT, mga progresibong midya, at mga kapanalig sa iba pang midya at diskurso ay isang katibayan na ang malikhai't mahusay na artiku- lasyon ng konsepto ng katwiran at katarungan sa wikang umaabot sa nakararam- ing mambabasa--ang wikang sinasalita ng taumbayan--ay siyang mabisang kagamitan sa pagpukaw ng mapanuring kamalayan, ng mapagmalasakit na damdamin.

Kahinugan ng Panahon

Balik-tanawin ang paksang bumabagabag sa mga pampublikong intelihen- siya ngayon.

Sa panahon ng total surveillance, ang konsumerismong modernidad ng neokolonyang Pilipinas ay nagkukubli ng lumalalang problema ng malalim at mabagsik na paghahati ng ilang pangka ng mga mayaman at mayoryang mahi- rap. Huwag nang ibilang pa ang ekolohiyang kalamidad at pagsira sa kalikasan. Ang remitans ng mahigit 12 milyong OFW, na siyang dahilan ng pagpapatuloy ng kapangyarihan ng oligarkong rehimen, sampu ng mga instrumentong ideolohikal (iskwela, militar, korte, burokrasya, simbahan, midya), ay lantad sa panganib ng krisis cyclical ng kapitalismong pampinansiyal.

Pag-isipan ang isang sintomas nito. Maraming Pinoy na humanga sa pe- likulang "Ilo-ilo" na ginawa ng isang taga-Singapore at tinustusan ng gobyernong Singapore, ay walang memorya sa pagbitay kay Flor Contemplacion at kasawian ng maraming kababayan sa Singapore. Sa harap ng napipintong "global melt- down" ng imperyalistang orden, sa matinding kumprontasyon ng mga nagtu- tunggaling mga pwersa (USA, Tsina, Rusya, Europa), pati na ang digmaan laban

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sa terorismong tutol sa paghahari ng USA, Europa, at transnational power-elite, ano ang maaring posisyong dapat piliin ng Filipinong nag-iisip at hangad lumaya? Ano ang situwasyon natin at sirkunstansiyang magtutulak sa ating de- sisyon?

Ibaling natin ang kamalayan sa ngayon. Ang kumbersasyon natin sa pagkakataong ito ay isang paraan upang makatulong sa edukasyon ng nakarara- mi at mobilisasyon sa mga kolektibong proyektong makapagsusulong at maka- pagpapabuti sa sawing kalagayan ng nakararami. Hanggang may nakikinig at handang kumilos salungat sa indibidwalismong naghahari, may pag-asa pa ang ating bayan.

Ang kontradiksiyon ng modernidad ay nagbubunga ng kanyang kalutasan. Sa anahon ng globalisasyon, sa mas mabilis at mabilisang pagbabagu-bago ng lahat ng bagay, sa disyerto ng mall at mga "Global City" na itinatayo sa guho ng mga tahanan ng maralitang taga-lunsod at sa bukid na inagaw sa mga magsasa- ka, kailangan ang mapangahas at subersibong panulat upang tuklasin ang kato- tohanan at itanghal ito sa panunuri't pagkilatis, pagtimbang at pagpapahalaga, ng taumbayan. Mabigat ngunit mapanglikhang pananagutan at katungkulan ito para sa mga nagnanais ng kasarinlan at kalayaan.

Mapanghamong tawag ito na hinihingi ng sitwasyon, isang pagkakataon kung saan ang diskurso ng manunulat, kritiko't guro ay makapagsisilbi sa pagpa- palaya't pag-unlad sa tunay na ugat at bukal ng kanilang imahinasyon, ang sim- pleng araw-araw na buhay ng masang yumayari ng kayamanan ng lipunan, ang proletaryo't magsasaka ng bayang naghihimagsik. -

II.PROYEKTO SA PAGBUO NG KOLEKTIBONG MEMORYA NG NAGKAKAISANG- HANAY

O, BAKIT WALANG PAHINGA ANG PAKIKIBAKA KAHIT NAGAYUMA SA INTERLUDE NG AWIT?

Ilang Pagninilay sa “Bakas” ni E. San Juan, Jr.

Sa puwang ng ilang pahina, hiniling ng patnugot na ipahayag ko ang ars poet- ikang nakatalik sa tulang “Bakas.” Balighong hinuha, ngunit sa tangkang paunlakan,

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sinubok ng makata ang interpretasyong sumusunod na bukas sa anumang pasubali, pagwawasto, at pagpapabulaan.

Pambungad na gabay muna: Huwag kalimutan na nakapaloob sa kolonyalis- mong orden ang lahat ng intelektwal sa ating bayan, mula 1899 hanggang 1946, at sa neokolonyalistang istrukturang saligan ng Estadong nakapailalim sa imperyalismong U.S. Dahil sa kapangyarihan ng pribadong pag-aari (kapitalista, piyudal) at di- makatarungang dibisyon ng trabaho, patuloy ang digmaan ng mga uri’t iba’t ibang sek- tor ng lipunan. Mistipikasyon at obskurantismo ang namayani sa klima ng panahon ng pagkagulang ng makata (1938-1948), at utilitaryanismong neoliberal mula 1949 hang- gang sa ngayon. Samantala, maigting din ang paglago ng mga puwersang sumasalun- gat sa hegemonya ng kapitalismong global.

Walang tabula rasa sa naratibo ng talambuhay. Masasaksihan doon ang suli- ranin ng “Unhappy Consciousness” (Hegel) na diyalektika ng ugnayan ng alipin at panginoon sa islang sinakop. Kolonyalisadong mentalidad ang minana ng makata hanggang magkaroon ng kabatiran sa panahon ng anti-imperyalismong pag-aalsa la- ban sa U.S. interbensiyon sa Vietnam at pagsuporta sa diktaduryang Marcos (1972-1986). Ang katotohanan ng kolonisasyon/neokolonisasyon ng isang subalterno at kung paano maitatakwil ito’t makahuhulagpos sa nakasusukang bangungot ng pang- aapi’t dominasyon—ito ang tema ng “Bakas.” Sa trabaho ng negasyon, sa pamamagi- tan ng gawaing subersyon ng umiiral, bumubukal ang kinabukasan na siyang katubu- san ng nakalipas. Ililigtas din nito ang Rason/Ideyang ipinagtanggol ng mga bayaning nagbuwis ng buhay upang mapalaya ang sambayanang lumilikha ng pagkataong Fil- ipino at kalinangang batayan ng sosyalismong hinaharap.

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Mapa ng Salaysay

Di na dapat sabihin na matatarok lamang ang buod ng karanasan kung pagdu- rugtungin sa banghay ng naratibo ang proseso ng pagsulong at kinahinatnan. Mauu- nawaan sa gayon ang Konsepto (Begriff) ng kolektibong kamalayang nagbabanyuhay. Kaya susubaybayan natin ang detalye ng panahon at lugar na sumasagisag dito. Bawat nilalang ay nakaangkla sa isang espasyong partikular, lunan o pook kung saan nakaluk- lok ang Ideyang Unibersal (“Geist,” bansag ni Hegel; ang kooperatibang humanidad, sa isip ni Marx-Engels). Ngunit walang kabuluhan ito kung hindi nailalakip sa daloy ng kasaysayan.

Naimungkahi ni Henri Lefebvre na ang produksiyon ng espasyo ay isang usaping kaugnay ng buhay o kamatayan para sa bawat lahi. Naisusog niya na walang makaiilag sa “trial by space—an ordeal which is the modern world’s answer to the judgment of God or the classical conception of fate” (The Production of Space, 1991, p. 416). Ad- hikain ng tula ang himaymayin ang ideolohiyang minana sa kolonisadong kultura ng Commonwealth at neokolonyang Republika sa paraan ng paghahalo’t pag-uugnay ng iba’t ibang kontradiksiyon ng karanasan, paghahalintulad ng pira-pirasong yagit ng guni- ta, alanganin, pagsisisi, panimdim, pangarap, pagkabigo, mapangahas na pagsabak sa daluyong ng pakikipagsapalaran. Makikilatis ang tunguhin ng bawat tagpo sa tula: ang balak na lumikha ng identidad mula sa metapisikal na indibidwalistikong ego tungo sa isang konsepto ng budhi ng pagkatao. Sa kabilang dako, layon din na makalinang ng isang diwa o matris ng kolektibong ahensiya ng uring gumagawa o yumayari—sa ibang salita, ang ahensiyang istorikal ng mga manggagawa’t pesante, ang bayang pumipiglas

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sa kadena ng imperyalismo’t burokratang kapitalismong namamayani hanggang ngay- on. Ito ang protagonistang uugit sa transpormasyong radikal ng bansa.

Sinikap dito na isatinig ang kolektibong memorya sa pagbabay sa mga kon- tradiksiyong masisinag sa karanasan ng makata. Kailangang ilugar ang nangungusap na aktor sa isang takdang yugto ng kasaysayan. Kung walang katawan, walang mararamdamang pangyayari, walang bisa’t katuturan ang pontensiyal ng kaluluwa— ang birtud ng inkarnasyon. Sino ang bumulong ng balitang isisilang na ang Mesiyas? Kinakasangkapan ng sining ang ilusyon ng anyo o hitsurang nadarama upang maibun- yag ang katotohanan, ang sintesis ng sangkap at kaakibat na totalidad. Sa gayon, hindi matatakasan ang araw-araw na pakikihamok, tuwa’t daing ng mga katawang magkaba- likat. Bawat pulso ng wika’y siya ring pulso ng body politic, ang komunidad na kinabibi- langan ng makata. Artikulasyon ng katutubong wika (hindi Ingles) ang mabisa’t mabun- gang medyasyon ng bahagi at kabuuan.

Mobilisasyon ng Pagnanasa

Nasaan tayo ngayon? Patungo saan? Balitang nakatambad sa Internet: Martial law sa Mindanao, patayan sa Marawi City ngayon, mistulang katuparan ng binhing naipunla noong dekada 1972-1986 kung saan namulat ang makata sa realidad. Paano maipangangatwiran ang sining/panitikan sa gitna ng gulo’t ligalig, malagim at nakasisin- dak na paghahari ng terorismong gawad ng imperyalistang globalisasyon? Paano maikikintal sa konsiyensiya ng lahi ang balangkas ng buhay na nakagapos sa anomie at alyenasyong naibunsod ng komodipikasyon ng bawat bagay—panggagahis o pag-

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bebenta sa karanasan, pag-ibig, seks, panaginip? Lahat ay nalusaw sa fantasmagorya ng salapi at bilihing lumamon sa dugo’t espiritu ng bawat tao. Saan ang lunas sa malubhang salot na nagbuhat pa sa pagsakop ng Estados Unidos nang mabuwag ang proyekto ng himagsikan ng 1896 at nalubog tayo sa barbarismong laganap ngayon? Nabalaho ang kasaysayan natin sa gayuma ng komoditi/bilihin, sa diskursong burgis ng pamilihan/salapi at indibidwalistikong pagpapayaman.

Ituring na alegorya ang imahen, tayutay o talinghagang ikinabit dito sa ilang pook ng MetroManila kung saan nagkaroon ng kamalayang sosyal ang makata. Isinilang bago pumutok ang WW2, nasagap pa ang huling bugso ng nasyonalismo ng Philippine Commonwealth (Avenida Rizal). Nagbinata noong panahon ng Cold War, panahon ng Korean War at pagsugpo sa Huk rebelyon—rehimen nina Quirino, Magsaysay at Carlos Garcia (Montalban, Rizal). Tinalunton ang landas tungo sa pagpasok sa Jose Abad Santos High School noong nakatira sa Balintawak; at sa paglipat sa Craig, Sampaloc, nasabit sa mga anarkistang pulutong sa Unibersidad ng Pilipinas.

Di sinasadya itong makitid na ruta ng uring petiburgis. Paniwala ito ng aktor/ suheto ng pansaliring pagnanais. Natambad sa positibismong pilosopiya nina Dr. Ricar- do Pascual at mga kapanalig—sina Cesar Majul at Armando Bonifacio—at nakisangkot ang awtor sa kampanya nina Recto-Tanada noong dekada 1954-58. Nakilahok din sa praxis ng diskursong sekular laban sa panghihimasok ng ilang reaksyonaryong kleriko sa akademya. Nakakawing sa mga pook na naitala ang ilang pangyayaring nagsilbing konteksto sa paghubog ng diwang mapagpalaya’t makabayan, diwang tumututol sa umiiral na ordeng puspos ng pagsasamantala’t korapsiyon, ng walang tigil na tung-

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galian ng uri, kaalinsabay sa pagsigla ng pambansang pagsisikap makalaya’t makamit ang tunay na kasarinlan at pambansang demokrasya.

Salungat sa pormalistikong estetikong iginigiit ng akademikong institusyon ang buhay ng makatang tinalunton dito. Litaw na nagbago ang kamalayan sa pamamagitan ng ugnayan ng praktika at teorya, hindi lang pragmatikong pakikilahok at pakikiramay. Maraming balakid, natural, ang ruta ng gitnang klase sa lipunan. Tubo sa petiburgesyang uri—guro sa haiskul at pamantasan ang mga magulang, na naging ka- mag-aral nina Loreto Paras-Sulit at henerasyon nina Jose Garcia Villa at Salvador P. Lppez—naging huwaran ang mga intelektuwal sa milyu ng Komonwelt. Unang pumukaw sa imahinasyon sng mga pelikulang Hollywood, mga huntahahan ng tiyo’t tiya sa Blumentritt, ang mga kuwento ng kaiskuwela sa Jose Abad Santos High School sa Meisic, Reina Regente, na ngayo’y higanteng mall sa Binondo. Nagpasigla rin si Manuel Viray, tanyag na kritiko, at naglaon sina Franz Arcellana, Rony Diaz, Ernie Man- alo, Pete Daroy, Gerardo Acay, Carlos Platon, Ruben Garcia, atbp. Huwag nang bang- gitin ang palasintahing pagpaparaos ng panahon na pwedeng suriin sa isang nobelang education sentimental—tila kalabisan na ito, mangyari pa.

Naligaw na Mapa ng Paglalagalag

Bagamat kabilang sa mga petiburgesyang etsa-puwera, hindi biglang naging maka-kaliwa ang awtor—matinding impluwensiya sa simula ang Existentialismong naisadula nina Sartre, Camus, Marcel, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. Ginagad sina Villa, T.S. Eliot, Wynhdam Lewis (tingnan ang “Man is a Political Animal” at iba pang detalye sa Kritika Kultura #26 ) at mga awtor na tinangkilik ng mga kaibigang kalaro sa bilyaran at

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kainuman sa Soler, Sta. Cruz, Quiapo at Balara. Tanda ko na laging bitbit ko noong kat- ulong ako sa Collegian ang libro ni Sartre, What is Literature? Hihintayin pa ang dekada 1965-1975 bago mapag-aralan sina Mao, Lenin, Lukacs, Marx, Engels, Gramsci, atbp. Nauna si Mao noong huling dako ng dekada 1960, at sumunod si Georg Lukacs sa an- tolohiya kong Marxism and Human Liberation (1972). Mapapansin ang indibiduwalis- tikong himig ng tula, na hango kina T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, at W.B. Yeats, mga ma- nunulat na naging ulirang padron noong aktibo sa UP Writers Club at sa krusadang anti- obskurantismong pinamunuan nina Pascual, Alfredo Lagmay, Augstin Rodolfo, Leopol- do Yabes, Elmer Ordonez, at iba pang guro sa pamantasan. Nakaimpluwensiya ang mga sallita’t kilos ng mga iskolar-ng-bayan, at naging tulay ang tradisyong humanis- tikong iyon sa pakikipagtulungan ko kina Amado V. Hernandez at Alejandro Abadilla noong mga dekada 1960-1967. Hindi dapat kaligtaan ang pakikisama ng awtor kina Ben Medina Jr., Rogelio Mangahas, Ave Perez Jacob, Efren Abueg, at ibang kapanalig sa kilusang makabayan.

Bakit panitik o sining ang napiling instrumento upang maisatinig ang mailap na katuturan/kahulugan ng buhay? Anong saysay ng tula sa harap ng mabilis na trans- pormasyon ng lipunan—ang pag-unlad nito o pagbulusok sa lusak ng barbarismo ni Duterte at oligarkong kasabwat? Noon, masasambit bigla ang pormularyo ng Talks at the Yenan Forum ni Mao. Sapantaha kong nakausad na tayo mula sa dogmatikong gawi. Sukat nang sipiin ang bigkas ni Amado Hernandez sa panayam niya tungkol sa sitwasyon ng mga manunulat noong 1968: “Ang kanilang mga katha ay hindi na bun- gangtulog kundi mga katotohanang nadarama, kaugnay at kasangkot sa mga pakikiba- ka ng lipunan at taongbayan at ng pagbabalikwas ng uring dukha laban sa inhustisya

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sosyal ng mga manghuhuthot at mapanlagom” (Panata sa Kalayaan ni Ka Amado, ed. Andres Cristobal Cruz, 1970).

Salungguhitan ang Sangandaan

Nasa kalagitnaan na tayo ng pagtawid sa ibayong pampang, bagamat naudlot ang usapang pangkapayaan sa pagitan ng gobyerno at National Democratic Front (NDFP). . Inaasahan kong naisaulo na natin ang prinsipyo ng materyalismong istorikal: ang konkretong analisis ng masalimuot na paglalangkap ng sari-saring dimensiyon ng anumang krisis sa kasaysayan. Umpisahan natin ang mapanuring pagtalakay ng kasaysayan sa metodong Marksista: malawak ang imbak na posibilidad ng sam- bayanan, ngunit ito’y binhi pa lamang ng kinabukasang nahihimbing sa pusod ng kasalukuyan (ayon kay Ernst Bloch). Gayunpaman, hindi natin mahuhulaaan ang tiyak na oras o sandali ng kagyat na pagsalimbay at pagdagit ng anghel ng Katubusan.

Ito ang dahilan sa pagdiin ng makata sa kontradiksiyon ng di-maiiwasang pan- gangailan at libertad, ang larangan ng contingency at ng nesesidad. Naitanghal na ito ng mga suryalistikong artista at nina Pablo Neruda, Bertolt Brecht, Lu Hsun, Aime Ce- saire, atbp. At naipaliwanag din ito sa pilosopiya nii C.S. Peirce (ang polarisasyon ng tadhana at aksidente; tychism, synechism). Sa paglagom, ang kalayaan ay nagmumula sa pagkabatid sa batas ng kalikasan (tendensiya, hindi istriktong batas, batay sa galaw o kilos ng produktibong lakas ng komunidad).

Sa masinop na imbestigasyon, masisilip din ito sa Tao Te Ching, o sa akda nina Clausewitz at Sun Tzu hinggil sa arte ng digmaan. Kaugnay nito, pag-isipan din natin ang turo na ang sining ay hindi tuwirang salamin ng realidad kundi simbolikong praktika.

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Sa pamamagitan ng retorika, talinghaga, sagisag, binibigyan ng solusyong ideolohikal o pang-imahinasyon ang kongkretong kontradiksiyong pulitikal-sosyal sa lipunan. Tungku- lun ng manapanuring aktibista ang pagsiyasat at pagsaliksik sa subtexto na mga kon- tradiksiyong pinoproblema sa karaniwang buhay ng madla sa lipunan.

Pahimakas sa Patnubay ng mga Bathala

Sa larangan ng malikhaing panulat, desideratum sa makata ang paghabi ng makabagong artikulasyon sa loob ng parametro ng sistemang lingguwistika, at sa musikero ang pagyari ng baryasyon sa tema sa loob ng kumbensyonal na kuwadrong sonata o fugue, halimbawa. Lumisan na ang Musang maipagbubunyi. Naiwan na lamang ang gumuhong labi ng malungkuting alingawngaw ni Maria Makiling sa Pinag- buhayan ng bundok Banahaw. Marahil, bukas, makikipag-ulayaw tayo sa mga Pulang Mandirigmang nagdiriwang sa liberated zone ng Sierra Madre.

Balik-aralin ang proposisyon ni Sartre: Kanino mananagot ang manunulat? O sa pagtatasa ni Brecht: dapat bang mang-aliw o magturo ang manunulat? Maari bang pag- isahin ang naihiwalay sa aksyomang klasikong dulce et decorum, ang responsibilidad na magpataas ng kamalayan habang nagliliwaliw at nagsasaya? Maibabalik ba ang gin- tong panahon nina Balagtas at Lope K. Santos?

Sa panahon ng kapitalismong neoliberal, at madugong militarisasyon ng bansa (sa ironikal na taguring Oplan Pangkapayapaan), paano maisasakatuparan ang pagba- balikwas sa lumang rehimen at pagtatag ng makatarungang orden? Paano mapupukaw ang manhid na sensibilidad ng gitnang-uri na nabulok na sa walang-habas na ko- modipikasyon? Hindi na matutularan ang huwarang kontra-modernismo ng makatang

S AN JUAN 18

Charles Baudelaire, halimbawa, na nagsiwalat ng kabulukan ng burgesyang lipunan noong ika-1800 siglo (ayon kay Walter Benjamin,The Writer of Modern Life, 2006).

Ano ang dapat gawin? Malayo na tayo sa milyung inilarawan ni Ka Amado noong 1968. Sa ngayon, ang katungkulan ng mandirigmang makata (mithiin ng awtor ng “Bakas”) ay makisangkot sa pagbuo ng hegemonya ng proletaryo’t magbubukid bilang organikong intelektuwal ng nagkakaisang-hanay (tagubilin ni Gramsci) sa panahon ng imperyalismong sumasagka sa pagtatamasa ng kasarinlan at kaunlaran ng bansa. Huwag kalimutan ang Balanggiga? Oo, subalit huwag ding kalimutan ang Maliwalu, Es- calante, Mendiola, Marawi! Itampok ang bumabangong kapangyarihan ng sambayanan! Sa halip na mag-fokus sa egotistikang talambuhay, ibaling ang isip sa mabalasik na bugso’t pilantik ng kolektibong gunita na mauulinigan sa musika ng “Bakas.” Sukat na itong magsilbing pahimakas sa kabanatang ito ng paglalakbay ng manlilikha sa mapan- ganib na pakikisalamuha (hindi pakikipagkapwa) sa digmaang-bayang rumaragasa’t patuloy na gumigimbal at bumabalantok sa buhay ng bawat nilalang sa milenyong ito. —##

SAN JUAN 19

FOR JOSE RIZAL, FILIPINO ANTI-IMPERIALIST REVOLUTIONARY: On his 59th birth anniversary

by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.
Philippines S tudies C enter, Washington DC


On the occasion of Rizal’s 150th birth anniversary in 2011, the Paciano Rizal Family Heritage released for sale replicas of an exquisitely handcrafted book devised by Rizal when he was in exile in Dapitan (1892-96). The improvised fortune-telling kit bears the title, “Haec est Sibylla Cumana”/ “This is the Sibyl of Cumae,” a book of oracles (Yuchengo 2015). The figure referred to is the priestess/prophetess presiding over the Apollonian oracle at Cumae, a Greek colony near Naples, in ancient times. She played a pivotal role in Virgil’s Aeneid,helping guide Aeneas in his journey to the underworld to visit his dead father Anchises. Bridging the realms of the living and the dead, the old and the new, she reminds us of her sisters (the most famous being the Sibyl of Delphi) who also offered to help smooth the passage of the traveller from regions of the past to the present and future (on six other sibyls, see Benjamin 2015, 303-08).
Ancient oracles served to appease the gods, revealing what secret messages are hidden behind visible occurrences and natural phenomena. During the medieval age, the Sibylline books (like Virgil’s Eclogues) were thought to prophesy the birth of Christ and the ultimate salvation of humankind. Thus, worldly time acquired import and a direction, everyday life found a specific gravity in the chartered chronicle. So would the time Rizal spent in exile—a dragging duration which he filled with socially rewarding accomplishments—bear significance, charged with still unravelled purport and portentous meanings.
Divining Incommensurables
What motivated the deported filibustero to spend his time and energy in inventing this game? Was it simply to while away the boredom of exile? Or does it suggest the artist’s preoccupation with fate, temporality, the hazardous passage from past to future? Rizal did not foresee his forced removal to Dapitan when he left his mother and relatives in Hong Kong in 1892. He formed the Liga Filipina on July 3. On July 6, he was arrested for allegedly transporting subversive material in his sister’s luggage, and summarily deported. During those years of exile, he appealed several times for a change in his situation, but to no avail. Chance, luck, happenstance, accident—was he the plaything of unknown mischievous forces?

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Fortune-telling was no stranger to Rizal. In the festivities described in Chapter 24 of Noli Me Tangere, men played cards and chess while the women “curious about knowing the future, preferred to ask questions of the wheel of fortune” (2006, 202). Denouncing their games as if they induced fornication, Padre Salvi wrenched their sinful book and tore it to shreds. As for the matter of chance, Elias may be allowed to speak for the free-thinking spirit when he replied to Ibarra’s query whether he believed in chance—an apt response also to skeptics of the Sibylla Cumana game: “To believe in chance is tantamount to believing in miracles; both beliefs assume that God does not know the future. What is chance or contingency? An event that absolutely no one has foreseen. What is miracle? A contradiction, an upsetting of natural laws. Contradiction and lack of foresight in the Intelligence which controls the world’s machinery signifies two great imperfections” (2006, 300). The Deist Cartesian persona of Rizal is surely ventriloquizing here to dodge censorship.
Whatever the wager of this ludic exercise, Rizal’s parlor-game is delightfully provocative. It offers the player 52 questions and 416 answers (each question has 8 possible answers) all cryptic, ambiguous, vague enough to trigger wild speculation. You roll a wooden top with 8 sides in order to pick your answer from an elaborate table; chance decides which answer you will receive. One answer may be gambled here: “A mother-in- law is not just a mother-in-law; she is also a mother—and you are an enemy of mothers?” A symptomatic query. Overall, the game is user- friendly, advising us not to be afraid of the future. But whether we like it or not, we are thrown into our common lot, guessing, suspicious, left in the lurch.
According to the Rizal clan, this precious heirloom was preserved by generations of safekeepers and descendants, foremost among them Narcisa Rizal Lopez. It survived the disasters of the 1896 revolution, the Filipino-American War, the Japanese occupation, and MacArthur’s horrific “liberation” of Intramuros where millions of Filipinos perished (Yuchengco 2015). Its survival presages the hero’s fortuitous intervention into our humdrum shopping/consuming affairs in this new millennium.
Deciphering Origins in Oak Leaves
Three years before his Dapitan sojourn, Rizal was engaged in some kind of reasoned guessing, specifically in conjuring the future of the islands from the vantage-point of the Madrid-based La Solidaridad. This time it’s not divination via a wooden top or roulette-wheel. Using hi knowledge of the past and intuition of the character of nations, Rizal tried to predict the vicissitudes of the islands in the judicious calculations of “The Philippines A Century Hence.” It would be a search for what’s genuinely autochtonous, motivated by the historian’s quest “to make

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known the past so that it may be possible to judge better the present and measure the path which has been traversed during three centuries” (cited in Cushner 1971, 224)..
Noli Me Tangere demonstrated the protagonist’s chief malady, Ibarra’s temporary loss of roots after seven years abroad. His family’s victims would reanimate his atrophied memory. To proceed in his journey of rediscovering his homeland, Rizal had to retrace its original condition. On his return to Europe, in 1888-89, he rescued Antonio de Morga’s 1609 chronicle, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, from the London Museum and had it published in Paris with his annotations.
Armed with testimonies of a flourishing pre-conquest civilization, Rizal dares to foretell the fate of his country a hundred years from the close of the 19th-century. Note that the extrapolation is based on a continuing dialectical movement in which potent unused qualities persist, transmuted but preserved by the forces that seek to destroy them: “Religious shows, rites that caught the eye, songs, lights, images arrayed with gold, worship in a strange language, legends, miracles and sermons, hypnotized the already naturally superstitious spirits of the country but did not succeed in destroying it altogether, in spite of this the whole system afterwards developed and operated with unyielding tenacity” (1984, 366). Given elements of the pristine past transmigrating to the fallen present, Rizal hypothesizes what may occur:
...Will the Philippine Islands be separated from the mother country to live independently, to fall into the hands of other nations, or to ally themselves with neighboring powers?
It is impossible to reply to these questions, for to all of them both yes and no may be answered, according to the time desired to be covered. When there is in nature no fixed condition, how much less must there be in the life of a people. being endowed with mobility and movement! So, it is that in order to deal with those questions, it is necessary to presume an unlimited period of time, and in accordance therewith try to forecast the future (1984, 367).
Geopolitics of Circumvention
Notice Rizal’s accentuation of “mobility and movement,” a sign of global modernity foregrounded in his 1889 article, “On Travel” (1962, 22-28). Other signs highlighted what’s relative, arbitrary, and undecideable where circumstances prevailed over all. In his essays, Rizal historicizes geography, connecting Egyptian, Greek and Roman civilizations with newly opened China and India via commerce and migration. He attributes all the advances in modern societies to the movement of bodies, ideas,

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perceptions and impressions. This compression of time-space is hinted by his pen-name, “Laong Laan,” “ever ready,” prepared for any comeuppance, as he confessed to his associate Marcelo del Pilar after dreaming of dead relatives and friends: “Although my body is very strong and I have no illness and no fear, I am preparing myself for death and for any eventuality. ‘Laong Laan’ is my true name” (quoted in Zaide 1984, 172).
Whatever the epochal contingencies involved, Rizal anchors his prediction on a constant factor: the Malayan “delicacy of sentiment,” sensitive “self-love,” readiness to sacrifice everything “for an aspiration or a conceit.” He has “all the meekness and all the tenacity and ferocity of his carabao.” Moreover, “brutalization of the Malayan Filipinos has been demonstrated to be impossible,” nor can they be totally exterminated. He concludes that “the Islands cannot remain in the condition they are without requiring from the sovereign country more liberty. Mutatis mutandis. For new men, a new social order.” Self-determination of Indios looming in the horizon cannot be ignored, given the emergence of novel productive forces bursting the integument of the repressive, decadent social order.
It is only a matter of time. Sooner or later, Rizal asserts, a natural law dictates that the colonies will declare themselves independent. When the country secures its independence “after heroic and stubborn conflicts,” no other power will dare to take up what Spain has been unable to hold, not even the United States whose traditions will not allow it—a seriously misleading oversight. Rizal closes with an eloquent hymn to a vision of a bountiful, free, convivial homeland reminiscent of the naturalizing invocation of the 1882 essay, “Amor Patrio” / “Love of Country” (1962, 15-21).
Very likely the Philippines will defend with inexpressible valor the liberty secured at the price of so much blood and sacrifice. With the new men that will spring from their soil and with the recollection of their past, they will perhaps strive to enter freely upon the wide road of progress, and all will labor together to strengthen their fatherland, both internally and externally, with the same enthusiasm, with which a youth falls again to tilling the land of his ancestors so long wasted and abandoned through the neglect of those who have withheld it from him (194, 391).
A mood of exultant self-confidence pervades the landscape of blood-soaked, scorched fields where zealous tillers appear, poised to strike with plow and harrow. To be sure, Rizal cannot indulge in probabilities. He ventures to chart a destiny vulnerable to random, haphazard incidents. But immediately he assures us, with nonchalance, “It is not well to trust to accident, for there is sometimes an imperceptible and incomprehensbie logic in the workings of history. Fortunately, peoples as

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well as governments are subject to it.” Soon Rizal will render transparent this dystopic conspiracy of history.
Indeed, Rizal cannot allow the gratuitous and the aleatory from taking over, for he discerns a hidden pattern under surface contingencies. There’s more hidden behind appearances. He interpreted his dreams as enigmatic forecasts of the future. Does this mixture of law and luck, decorum and delirium, capture Rizal’s own strategy in confronting his relations with women, not just with his mother and sisters, whose feelings and sensibility somehow gravitated to his orbit?
Scandalous Missing Object
We may now segue, with “fear and trembling,” into the perilous domain of sexual politics. Benedict Anderson’s meticulous catalogue of European influences on Rizal’s thought in his book Under Three Flags analyzed Rizal’s susceptiblities. Rizal absorbed omnivorously the heterogenous colors, valence and savors of European culture. But was he gay? Or was he secretly an anarchist, a closet nihilist? Anderson sought to anatomize Rizal’s psyche and its bizarre libidinal permutations. It’s an intriguing detective itinerary that unfortunately succumbs to smug Eurocentric vainglory.
However, we need to focus our discourse on “the woman question.” Since our task here is limited to investigating the situation of Sisa as a metaphor for the problem of gender inequality, the fraught issue of Rizal’s sexual identity is entangled with the position of the Others—the outcasts, lunatics, profane flunkeys, perverse guardians of “the sacred,” etc. In this context, it might be profitable to survey the aleatory as well as reiterative performance of his erotic disposition and disclaimers. His go-ahead signal for this inquiry was sounded at the end of his prognostication: “The masks have fallen...” We no longer see through the glass, darkly.
Earlier, in his 1884 speech praising the painters Juna Luna and Felix Hidalgo, Rizal announced: “The patriarchal era in the Philippines is waning...The furrow is ready and the ground is not sterile” (2011, 18-22). Nature has been historicized; the androcentric cosmos needs to yield to the nurturant, generative principle of the cultivators, fisher-folk, artisans, women, indigenes or ethnic minorities—the exploited Indio workers seeds of tomorrow in cities and countryside.
Biographers have eagerly inventoried the fabled targets of Rizal’s affections, with their varying if incalculable pressure on his political and ethical pursuits. Ultimately, the aesthetic/hedonistic level of engagement would be surpassed, shifting the burden of responsibility to the ethical and eventually political field of symbolic violence. We owe this angle of

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interpretation to the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) who lived before Rizal was born, his writings unknown to the Filipino exiles in Madrid and Paris. So far we can trace the critical moments of evasion in all encounters with the desired subject/object of cathexis and its fetishistic resonance, including the two eccentric cases: the Japanese companion and the Irish paramour.
Trauma of Counter-Identity
In Either/Or and other texts, Kierkegaard defined the alternative modalities of living with Others endowed with the power of recognition or refusal. They are inscribed in the tortuous passage from the aesthetic to the ethical and then to the religious domains characterized by “the baptism of the will” (1946, 107-08; 129-30). For Rizal, however, the leap into faith is circumvented by his rationalist disposition acquired during his European schooling. Aside from frailocracy’s stranglehold, the path of orthodox piety is blocked by the commitment to the mother/nation, a universal category, in which immanent martyrdom aborts mystifying transcendence. The ideal of honor, self-esteem (pundonor or amor propio), grounded in his appreciation of native practices, also thwarts subservience to dogmatic absolutism. The Kierkegaardian concept of repetition, the recollection of past experiences superimposed on a future trajectory of conduct, has distinguished Rizal’s handling of his affairs with women. Nostalgic retrospection marks all his letters from Europe, syncopated with dreams of retrieving the years of childhood innocence and customary family/clan solidarity.
But Rizal was not a naive idealist habitually looking backwards. He was always forward-looking, given to utopian speculations (for his Dapitan experiments, see Craig 1913; Zaide 1984; for the Borneo scheme, see Rizal 2011, 321-28). One way of implementing this existentialist orientation is to foreground Rizal’s development as a versatile artist- thinker, his gradual maturation by force of circumstance from a quasi- romantic reformist public intellectual to a radical-democratic revolutionist, as Fr. John Schumacher has suggested (1987). After completing the Noli, Rizal was already a revolutionist, confident that “the peaceful struggle shall always be a dream, for Spain will never learn the lesson of her former South American colonies” (letter to Blumentritt dated 26 January 1887, cited in Cushner 1971, 225). The discordant vortices of natural endowment and historical opportunities converge in this metamorphosis of Rizal’s world-outlook.
The inaugural moment of the psyche’s reflexivity, as we have discussed earlier, is the aborted affair with Segunda Katigbak, circa 1878-79. Rizal was 16 years old when he met her in Trozo where his maternal grandmother resided at that time. He found the “sylph” alluring,

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Her engagement to a townmate in Lipa, Batangas, may have deterred Rizal from proposing. But he blamed his shyness when he failed to detain her carriage as it passed by for the imagined tryst he had carefully prepared in his mind. In his Memoirs, she is represented as a swift ”floating shadow.”
At the time when Rizal’s mother was losing her eyesight and could not recognize her son, the son remembers his first love’s expressive eyes, ”ardent at times, and drooping at other times, a smile so bewitching and provocative,” while her entire self “diffused a mysterious charm” (1984, 308). Rizal was paralyzed, saying nothing. And so, later on, he drew this painful lesson of disenchantment that would haunt him for a long time:
[Segunda Katigbak] bowed to me smiling and waving her handkerchief, I just lifted up my hand and said nothing. Alas! Such has always happened to me in the most painful moments of my life. My tongue, profuse talker, becomes dumb when my heart is bursting with feelings... In the critical moments of my life, I have always acted against my will, obeying different purposes and mighty doubts. I goaded my horse and took another road without having chosen it, exclaiming: This is ended thus. Ah, how much truth, how much meaning, these words then had! My youthful and trusting love ended! The first hours of my first love ended. My virgin heart will forever weep the risky step it took in the abyss covered with flowers. My illusion will return, indeed, but indifferent, incomprehensible, preparing me for the first deception on the road of grief” (1984, 317).
The montage of illusions would unfold quickly. After this traumatic wound whose scars would rankle for a long time, Rizal slowly recovered via the phantoms of Miss L. of Calamba with “seductive and attractive eyes,” and of Leonor Valenzuela of Pagsanjan, Laguna. A recharging station on the way to his sacrifice for the motherland was Leonor Rivera of Camiling, Tarlac, who attracted him as a tender “budding flower with kindly, wistful eyes.”Again, the beloved’s enthralling eyes, surveillance without relief. Leonor’s mother objected, so Rizal’s parents advised him not to visit her in Dagupan when he returned from Europe. It was the ultimatum to abjure the local femme fatale and circumvent residual elective affinities with previous acquaintances.
Occlusions and Disclosures
Goodbye, Leonor, and welcome our other sisters who beckoned, mournful sirens languishing in moribund Europe. In 1890, while attending a play in Teatro Apollo, Madrid, Rizal lost his gold watch chain with a locket containing the picture of Leonor, a weird omen. Remember Maria

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Clara’s locket given to the leper, then owned by Juli, and finally claimedby Simoun? Subsequently, Rizal received Leonor’s letter announcing her forthcoming marriage to an Englishman (the British engineer Edward Kipping), her mother’s choice.
In contrast, Maria Clara (modeled after Leonor) lost her mother early, so it was another father (Padre Damaso) who dictated her choice, her quarantine in the convent “safeguarded” by the cagey Padre Salvi. Leonor asked for forgiveness, but Rizal broke down, agonizing for weeks, comparing himself to an immense volcano exploding and “putting an end to everything living and breathing.” His Austrian correspondent Ferdinand Blumentritt tried to console him with folkloric, homegrown platitudes:
...but you are one of the heroes who conquer pain from a wound inflicted by women, because they follow higher ends. You have a courageous heart, and you are in love with a nobler woman, the Motherland. Filipinas is like one of those enchanted princesses in the German legends, who is a captive of a horrid dragon, until she is freed by a valiant knight....I am grieved with all my heart that you have lost the girl to whom you were engaged, but if she was able to renounce a Rizal, she did not possess the nobility of your spirit. She is like a child who cast away a diamond to seize a pebble....In other words, she is not the woman for Rizal (quoted in Zaide 1984, 180).
Is it possible that Blumentritt had in mind Rizal’s 1882 essay “Amor Patrio”? Rizal affirmed this love of “patria” (motherland) “just as the child loves its mother in the midst of hunger and misery.” We follow the procession of the children in his fiction: Basilio, Crispin, Elias, Juli, Tano, Placido Penitente, Isagani, and other nameless orphans.
Before Leonor’s confession of infidelity in 1890, Rizal seemed to have been bewitched by Consuelo Ortiga y Perez. It was shortlived; he had to give way to his rival, Eduardo de Lete. It was only in Japan on his second trip to Europe in 1888 when he met 23-year-old O-Sei-San, a samurai’s daughter, that he may have experienced carnal bliss. With a geisha’s simulacra? It is impossibe to test the veracity of his record of intimacy in this quite exceptional liaison.
Rizal’s testimony can be taken as sincere, unless he is pretending to be the victim of Orientalist fantasies: “O Sei-San, Sayonara, Sayonara! I have spent a happy golden month; I do not know if I can have another one like that in all my life...No woman like you has ever loved me. No woman like you has ever sacrificed for me. Like the flower of he chodji that falls from the stem fresh and whole without falling leaves or without withering—with poetry still despite its fall—thus you fell. Neither have you lost your purity nor have the delicate petals of your innocence faded...Your name lives in the sight of my lips, your image accompanies and animates all my thoughts. When shall I

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return to pass another divine afternoon like that in the temple of Meguro?” (quoted in Zaide 1984, 132).
Rizal’s apostrophe extolled his Japanese companion as the “last descendant of a noble family, faithful to an unfortunate vengeance....” What the last two words signify remains a puzzle. Is it simply an extravagant cliche to compensate for an unresolved aporia of doubts, virile pride and intractable premonitions? Or is it a vow to fulfill a long- forgotten promise?
Deterritorializing Interlude
We follow Rizal in his peregrination. Next in line was Gertrude Beckett with brown hair, blue eyes, and rosy cheeks, the oldest of three sisters in his boarding house at Primrose Hill, London, near Frederick Engels’ residence. But though the flirtation became hot and heavy, as it were, Rizal quickly realized that he could not marry Gettie. It was at this time (22 February 1889) when Rizal composed in Tagalog his provocative “Letter to the Young Women of Malolos.”
We may pass over the episode with Petite Suzanne Jacoby who pursued him with her letters in French when he fled to Madrid in July 1890. Rizal confided to his sister Soledad: “In my love affairs, I have always acted with nobility, because I myself would have felt humiliated had I behaved otherwise. I have despised and considered unworthy every young man I have seen hiding himself, prowling in the dark...” Earlier he expressed the reason for his temporizing and diffidence: “I cannot deceive her; I can’t marry her, because I have other affections to remember in our country.... (Palma 1949, 130, 133). What are these other affections?
Neither ascetic nor hedonist, Rizal did not isolate himself, vowing chastity and performing rituals of self-purification. The next challenge was posed by Nellie Boustead. In romantic Biarritz, Rizal courted Nellie who supposedly reciprocated. But Nellie’s mother registered objections, and Nellie herself required Rizal to become a Protestant, which he shrugged off. His friends Tomas Areola and Antonio Luna encouraged Rizal to choose the matrimonial path, to no avail. it was only when Josephine Bracken came to Dapitan, accompanying the blind Englishman George Taufer, that Rizal recovered, with due qualifications, the unrepeatable experience he recorded with his Japanese muse. That was also the year, 1893, when Rizal received the news of Leonor Rivera’s death.
The historian Ambeth Ocampo psychoanalyzed the recurrence of snakes as phalllic symbols in Rizal’s dreams. A trivializing suspicion. He speculated that Rizal may have been a closet gay: “It dawned on me that the fact that Rizal had many women [“had” is arguably a masculinist hyperbole] was probably an indication that he was incapable or perhaps had difficulty in

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maintaining a stable relationship with one woman” (2011, 67-68)—except with patria, which, for Ocampo, was too lofty, too inhuman. No one has claimed that Rizal “possessed” any of his female acquaintances except perhaps O- Sei-San and Bracken.
Finally, Ocampo contends that given the unresolved Oedipus complex, Rizal could have been a homosexual. But his yearning for his Nanay, Rizal’s idolizing his mother, was “very Filipino,” Ocampo concludes, so that could not serve as a proof of homosexuality. But why deflect the inquiry to this topic, obscuring the gendered division of social labor (including reproductive/sexual behavior) that undergirds the androcentric system?
Encountering the Irish Sibyl
The coming of Josephine Bracken, a “wandering swallow” for Rizal, disrupts this maneuver to dismiss “the woman question” as superfluous if not irrelevant. To return to Anderson’s aside on Rizal’s sexuality, the scholar’s tactic is to demonstrate that the milieu rendered in the novels witnessed gay and lesbian practices thriving without any overt stigmatization, as in Chapter 21, “Manila Characters,” and Chapter 22, “The Performance.” It’s all very entertaining if not distracting. So what?
In truth, Anderson does not have anything worthwhile to say about Sisa, Juli, Salome, Dona Consolacion, nor about Segunda Katigbak, O-Sei- San, Leonor Rivera, etc. His references to Bracken are a summary of inferences made by Coates, Guerrero, and Ocampo regarding her spurious progenitors. Since she was not of authentic Irish provenance—her mother was alleged to be a Chinese laundress, the father unknown, and therefore Bracken could not be evidence of Rizal’s heteronormal disposition. Anderson devotes three pages to Rizal’s Dapitan exile but ignores any role Bracken may have played in the martyr’s struggle to endure his punishment.
Only Dolores Feria, among a plethora of feminist scholars, succeeded in defining the role of the 19-year-old Bracken as the “missing menber. ” While sutured to the Rizal narrative by fortuitous circumstance, she could not eclipse the formidable Teodora Alonzo. The stern mother and her daughters objected to Bracken’s rejoining Rizal in Dapitan after Tauffer’s ailment was somehow relieved. The Catholic priest Father Obach who refused to marry them was scandalized when the two held hands together and married themselves.
Rizal’s mother resigned herself to this unorthodox arrangement—the authorities tolerated the hybrid Bracken as a legitimate phenomenon within the querida system. Alonzo opined that it was better to “live in concubinage in the grace of God than to be married in disgrace” (Palma 1949, 254). Due to an accident, Bracken prematurely delivered an eight-month old baby boy

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whom they christened “Francisco” (in honor of the hero’s father) before burial (Zaide 1948, 240; Craig 1913, 123-25). Rizal thus vanquished both the ancestral totem taboo, the archaic fetish of the virgin bride, and the myth of his indeterminate sexuality.
Visionary Swerves
So many nearly Faustian accomplishments transpired in Dapitan. We can only cite here one fulfilling act: Rizal proved the value of his medical studies when he successfully operated on his mother’s eyes. His education was not wasted; he was already earning a doctor’s income in Hong Kong before his fateful return to Manila. A few days before he left for Spain as a medical volunteer for the beleaguered Spanish army in Cuba, the plebeian Andres Bonifacio fired the first volleys of revolution on August 26, 1896. Rizal was impicated and brought back to Manila, imprisoned in Fort Santiago, and condemned to death by a military court which had already agreed on its verdict before the trial.
Before his execution, Rizal bequeathed his copy of Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ to Bracken, with the dedication “To my dear and unhappy wife.” She was also memoralized in Rizal’s “Ultimo Adios” in the penultimate line: “Farewell, sweet stranger, my friend, who brightened my way.” This “dulce extranghera” later marched and fought with the Katipunan detachment together with Rizal’s brother Paciano, fighting Spanish soldiers in Cavite, Laguna, and the surrounding hinterland before she was finally persuaded by her fellow partisans to return to Hong Kong and assist the revolution from that relatively secure vantage point.
As cited earlier, Feria paid homage to Bracken’s participation in the armed struggle against imperial Spain. Bracken’s role as Insurrecta offers the direct antithesis to the iconic Colegiala, the model for the Maria Clara character-type. Feria compares her with Salome, the polar opposite of the convent-bred woman, recalling for us the legendary figure of the earth- goddess Maria Makiling, naturally generous, an emancipated spirit. Her power to give joy to Elias, her beloved, may be deemed “an act of grace, with its own moral justification.” Feria elaborates further:
The orphan Salome...anticipates the twentieth-century woman’s frankness and sexual freedom and the pre-Spanish Filipina’s ignorance of original sin...Josephine, like Salome, was an outsider...[She] has been successively portrayed as Magdalene, Mata Hari, Kitty O’Shea, Sadie Thompson, and Joan of Arc; but her own preferred image of herself was as Insurrecta. In fact our last really detailed glimpse of her, provided by the memoirs of General Ricarte, shows Josephine fleeing from barrio to barrio after the Spanish capture of San Francisco de Malabon, hungry, and the

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soles of her feet bleeding, but refusing to lag, as the long retreat moves across the Maragondon mountains to Laguna...Josephine signifies more in the experience of Rizal than simply an imprudent infatuation or the eroticism of pity...For Rizal, Josephine Bracken was a breath of fresh air; and in her he found an expression of freedom from class restraints, conventionality, and a practical impertinence which his own original environment, the conservatism of his family and friends had so long denied him. Indeed, Josephine was Rizal (1968, 110-20).
This substantial homage to Josephine Bracken as an integral part of the Rizal saga may neutralize all suspicions regarding the hero’s performative sexuality. He could live with strangeness, even the phantasm of Bracken’s enigmatic past, because he knew her before in the volatile conduct and catalyzing disguises of Segunda Katigbak, Leonor Rivera, Consuelo Ortigas, and the foreigners O-Sei-San, Petite Jacoby, and Nellie Boustead, not excluding the veiled countenance of the “hospitality” lady of Vienna.
Articulating the Excess/Exclusion
At this juncture, I would call attention to the previously excluded chapter on “Salome and Elias,” now restored by Soledad Lacson-Locsin in her expert translation of the novel. This episode rounds out Elias’ character as more than a capable, intelligent peasant victimized by adverse circumstances. In contrast to the naive Ibarra (in the Noli), Elias personifies the cunning “labor of the negative” by claiming that he loves his native land because he owes her so much pain and misery” (Agoncillo 1969, 39). He is adored by a mature, sensitive woman who respects him and allows him the final decision to leave her for her own sake so that she won’t be persecuted as his accomplice. We hear Rizal’s parting words to his intimate acquaintances in Europe: “Take advantage of your youth and beauty to look for a good husband whom you deserve. No, no, you still do not know what it is to live alone, alone in the midst of humanity” (Noli 2004, 216).
In effect, Rizal knew himself thoroughly as a marked protagonist, soon to be a dangerous dissident. This dates back from the time he penned Amor Patrio, “A La Juventud Filipina,” his annotations to Morga, the incendiary diatribes and polemics in La Solidaridad, and certainly the two explosive novels that no doubt contributed to inciting his countrymen to organize the Katipunan and launch the national uprising of 1896, morphing into the stubborn resistance to U.S. imperial aggression and its ferocious genocidal onslaught.

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As for the controversy over Rizal’s alleged retraction and marriage to Bracken, which Zaide dismissed as immaterial to the hero’s achievement (1984, 255-56; for a different view, see Pascual 1962), I refer students to ponder on the various perspectives explored in the scripts of two screenplays by Clodualdo del Mundo, Jr. and Mike de Leon, Rizal/ Bayaning 3rd World (2000). A rigorous study of Rizal’s writings in the context of the historical specificities of their appearance, as well as their impact, would be the most judicious way of appraising the worth and pertinacity of the controversy (San Juan 2000).
Constellation of Motives
Initially conceived as an extended metacommentary on Rizal’s message to the women of Malolos, this essay has exceeded its intended goal. But one thing leads to another, as they say. Not only because one cannot really grasp the totality of Rizal’s impact on the popular consciousness, including ilustrado and plebeian interlocutors. But with “the woman question,” every element in the fabric of his discourses and their purport counts as an integral factor/force in determining their reality- effects, their consequence in action. Past melancholia and future hopes converge in his reflections on the harsh present.
Rizal pursued a mode of inquiry similar to that of Rosa Luxemburg who applied Marx’s logic of crises and ruptures. Frigga Haug describes how Luxemburg’s method of appealing to the masses rejects empathy with the wretched situation of the oppressed: “Instead of empathy, she seeks the germs of the future in the defects of the present. This approach is disconcerting because it is alien, familiar only in the form of hope. But by presenting hope as sadness about being torn free and dispossessed, her criticism becomes truly radical...Her route goes out into the world, not back into the home....This politicization of experience, the political articulation of everyday experience, the transformation of the wish to endure into the will to change—these things are indispensable for women’s politics” (1992, 230-43). From the wish simply to survive to “the will to change”--that formulation captures quite aptly the Desire called “Rizal” parlayed into this current project.
In this perspective, Rizal was not simply a moralist endeavoring to educate the minds and dispositions of his compatriots. Nor was he simply deploying a conscienticizing agency whose efficacy transcends the aesthetic reach of his novels. He was instilling hope by politicizing everyday experience, transmuting the instinct of self-preservation into “the will to change”—precisely his message to the women of Malolos, a dynamic conatus (to use Spinoza’s concept) embodied in the barbed insinuations and innuendoes of the Noli and Fili.

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Benedict Anderson begs to differ. He faults Rizal for being a short- sighted moralist. In contrast, Austin Coates contends that Rizal’s novels are essentially political, not literary, artifices (Ocampo 2011, 97). While elucidating the sociopolitical context of Europe in which Rizal’s ideas germinated, Anderson finds Rizal limited in depicting the brutal exploitation of natives and their social misery: “There is nothing in Rizal’s
voluminous writings like Luna’s horrified description of the Parisian iron foundry, the painter’s naively expressed, but telling remark that the Filipinos were fortunate compared with the industrial workers of Paris seems utterly outside the novelist’s frame of reference” (2005, 108).
The remark is incredibly wrong-headed and rebarbative. It pointedly ignores the quite discrepant economic and social reality of feudal/agrarian Philippines. The colony’s chief production consisted of export-crops abaca, sugar, indigo, hides, etc. Its sole industry of textile weaving in Iloilo was quickly destroyed by the importation of cheap cotton from England (Arcilla 1991, 134-46). Labor organizing in the cities in the form of gremios and embryonic cooperatives for mutual aid in the countryside only started in the first decades of U.S. colonial rule.
The colonial reality of 19th-century Philippines, its historical specificity, eludes Anderson’s optic. As already suggested, Rizal matured quickly in the aftermath of his mother’s imprisonment and the 1872 Cavite Mutiny together with the execution of Fathers Burgos, Gomez and Zamora. His disillusionment with his compatriot’s reformist program intensified in 1890 with the eviction of his parents from their Calamba farm and the persecution of relatives (see the articles, “On the Calamba Incident” and “Justice in the Philippines”; 2011, 296-99; 317-20).
But even before that, Rizal already expressed complete disenchantement on many occasions, as evinced in the 1884 article, “Reflections of a Fiipino,” and in a letter from Madrid, dated November 1884: “Studying at Madrid disillusions me. [Filipinos are] dishonored, entrapped, debased, opposed and tyrannized. I was also there [in the mass demonstrations of students and faculty]. I had to disguise myself three times...”(Zaide 1984, 76).
Circumscribing a Paradigm-Shift
Mimesis, following Aristotle, seeks to render the configuration of experience in a plotted sequence of events. But the modern naturalistic representation of incidents could not by itself register the nuances of feelings and sentiments of the Indios undergoing the symbolic and actual violence of the colonial system. To do that, Rizal had to politicize their experiences in both domestic/familial sphere and public space. Thus we observe the heteroglossic rendering of social gatherings and the focus on

14

concrete locations: busy homes of notable personages, the plaza, church, market, theater, cockpit, urban/village festival sites, prison, transport vehicles, farms, schools, leisurely retreats, graveyards, offices of bureaucrats and officials, streets and remote trails, domestic interiors, and the liminal zones between rural and urban settings. The massive repertoire of events and the spectrum of particulars marshaled are meant to produce a plausible, veridical reality-effect.
Without doubt, the milieu transcribed by the artist is labyrinthine, multilayered, enticing and bewildering at the same time. One example is the arrangement of sensorily vivid crowd scenes in Makamisa, including the ribald, mock-heroic tuktukan game, which testifies to the writer’s virtuoso gift. Rizal’s dialogic imagination encompassed a wider range of themes, motifs, dramatis personae and their ramifications than those found in Eduard Dekker, Galdos, de Larra, Baudelaire, or Malatesta’s pseudo-sophisticated ruminations (for further evidence, see the compendium of Rizal’s Tagalog texts in Ocampo 2002)..
Granted, Rizal may have been influenced by European intellectuals such as Bakunin, Proudhon, Dostoevsky, and others during his two sojourns in Europe. Anderson, in fact, credits those myriad influences as the real sources of Rizal’s creativity, the templates for his plot and characters. He cites, for example, Rizal’s casual conversation with two Russian women nihilists in Paris in the lodging of Trinidad Pardo de Tavera.
Ferreting similitudes between European events and personalities, and the gothic/baroque furniture of the Fili, Anderson pronounces on the derivative quality of the novel: “The prolepsis is mostly engineered by a massive, ingenious transfer of real events, experiences, and sentiments from Spain to the Philippines, which then appear as shadows of an imminent future....El Filibusterismo was written from the wings of a global proscenium on which Bismarck and Vera Zasulich, Yankee manipulation and Cuban insurrections, Meiji Japan and the British Museum, Huysmans and the Commune, Catalonia and the Carolines, Nihilists and anarchists, all had their places. Cochers and ‘homeopathists’ too” (2005, 120).
Indeed, we are served a mindboggling potpourri of leavening substances to yield a buffet of exotic dishes for further meditation! At one “Soiree at the Home of Mr. B.” in Berlin (circa 1886), Rizal reflected how one “young barbarian from the Philippine Islands” exchanged pleasantries with the blonde, blue-eyed “granddaughters of ancient barbarians...who astonished the patricians of Rome,” an encounter proving how the world “turns round and round” (1962, 216).

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Anderson’s comparativist mind-set can be praised for encyclopedic erudition. But he seems too self-satisfied with his cosmopolitan bravura. He disingenuously insists on a mistaken assumption, spiced with a racist innuendo. Surely Rizal is not vying to be an epigone of Huysmans, Bakunin, Malatesta, Nietzsche, Herzen, etc. In his 1908 prologue to an edition of the Fili, Wenceslao Retana performed a similar autopsy of European influences and putative mimicry. But, unlike Anderson, Retana (despite his imperial hauteur) buttressed his assessment with allusions to the concrete experiences of the wretched subalterns. He also accentuated the singular predicament of the native intelligentsia seeking reforms.
Moreover, Retana underscored the specificity of locations and the constellation of incidents shaping Rizal’s sensibility: “During his very first years he hardly witnessed anything around him except human misery pictured on a landscape replete with melancholy and mysterious poetry; and stimulated by an exquisite nervous sensibility, the child Rizal, on the shores of the great lake which gives its name to the province (la Laguna) asked whether there was beyond, any social state better than the one he saw in his hometown, in the urban part of which he knew the dominant despotism of the friar-landholder; and the suburban part of which the bandits govern” (1979, 33-34).
The “bandits” noted here would epitomize the numerous Indio victims with their load of grievances against colonial authorities (both civil and religious) in that period. Filibusteros included women protesting their brutalization by their husbands or confessors, beggars who became outlaws (tulisan), and heretics labeled infidels or savages by the theocratic regime.
In the lifetime of Rizal’s parents, filibusterismo was already rampant. Examples are the1815 Sarrat rebellion, the 1823 Novales revolt, the 1832-41 uprising of the Cofradia followers of Apolinario de la Cruz, the 1872 Cavite Mutiny, to cite only the most dangerous or threatening to the status quo (Constantino 1975, 132-44). In his “Data for My Defense” written in Fort Santiago, Rizal enumerated some of those separatist movements (2011, 342). A sampling of native grievances can be gleaned from the satirical articles such as “A Freethinker,” “A Pompous Gobernadorcillo,” “The Vision of Fray Rodriguez,” “By Telephone,” “The Lord Gazes at the Philippine Islands,” “The Religiosity of the Filipino People,” aside from the more widely influential diatribes such as “The Indolence of the Filipinos,” “The Philippines a Century Hence,” and other relevant documents in Tagalog (see Ocampo 2002).
Apocalyptic Reverberations

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One can argue that Retana’s journalistic sensorium was better adjusted to apprehend the historically specific conflicts and crises that informed Rizal’s worldview. Retana recorded the ethos of the rural countryside, the predatory feudal monstrosities, and one native response to the regime’s barbarism that Rizal may have condensed in the following paragraph: “When a people is gagged; when its dignity, honor, and all its liberties are trampled; when it no longer has any legal recourse against the tyranny of its oppressors; when its complaints, petitions, and groans are not attended to; when it is not permitted even to weep; when even the last hope is wrested from its heart, then....it has left no other remedy but to take down with delirious hand from the infernal altars the bloody and suicidal dagger of revolution! Caesar, we who are about to die salute thee!” (2011, 129; see also Retana 1979, 146-47). Echoes of Padre Florentino’s farewell prayer to the dead Simoun?
The concept of the Kantian sublime predominant in Rizal’s melodramatic staging animates the conclusion of the essay “The Sense of the Beautiful” in which the ancestors shed their tears on the child’s cradle “so that the sacred plant of liberty and progress may bloom” (1962, 32). Friedrich Schiller, author of the play William Tell which Rizal translated into Tagalog, once declared that one encounters and actualizes freedom/ autonomy through the creation of beauty as “living form” via the calibrated, nuanced play of instinct and reason(1952, 407-08). Rizal was thoroughly acquainted with this solution to the quandary of the artist grappling with the recalcitrant, refractory materials of quotidian existence.
Aesthetics mediates the ethico-political burden of Rizal’ s narrative craft. It is Intriguing how the image and voice of the Roman slave- gladiators acknowledging the glory of the Emperor (quoted earlier) recall Juan Luna’s masterpiece, El Spoliarium. The painting depicted in sombre tone the gory gladiators’ corpses, their sacrificial tribute, dragged from the arena of combat in the Roman amphitheater. Rizal celebrated Luna’s evocation of the carnage as a sign of resurrection—a prelude to the planned fireworks of Simoun/Ibarra, this double agent of a repressed community, passionately envisaging the apocalyptic triumph of his cohort of avengers.
In Luna’s painting, according to Rizal, “can be heard the tumult of the multitude, the shouting of the slaves, the metalllic creaking of the armor of the corpses, the sobs of the bereaved, the murmurs of prayer, with such vigor and realism as one hears the din of thunder in the midst of the crash of the cataracts or the impressive and dreadful tremor of the earthquake” (2011, 19).
Rizal’s celebration of Luna’s art is instructive. Notice the naturalization of a historical occurrence, as if the phenomenon has been

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providentially decreed, at the same time that nature functions as figural presentiment of what is bound to happen. It is Rizal’s diacritical gesture of temporalizing space and spatializing duration, collapsing the past into the present and future to generate the stage for the fulfillment of Sisa’s “vengeance.” It also posits the hypothesis that what appears as fate or destiny is nothing but a sociopolitical construction, a social practice or a wholly human contrivance open to alteration, reversal, change. The social order is mutable, contingent, subject to unpredictable transformations. The future is open for our choices and actions.
We then enter the realm of possibilities, of necessity converted to freedom, and the principle of self-determination as a guide to collective action, with the collaborative subalterns acting as rational-natural subjects and impassioned, mobilized communities. We behold the awakened nation-people forging at last their common destiny in mass insurgency.
The issue concerns the subtlety, depth, and sharpness of artistic rendition of the lives of the major protagonists and their doubles. Certainly, one can construe Simoun’s unconscionable scheme of killing government officials and innocent associates as one inspired by the European anarchist propaganda of the exemplary deed. Further, his scheme of rescuing Maria Clara from the nunnery replicates certain motifs and themes in canonical European texts.
But the inventory of the horrendous torment and anguish endured by Elias’ family, the suffering of Sisa and her children, and the intolerable ordeals that afflicted Cabesang Tales, Tandang Selo, and Juli (reminiscent of Rizal’s family evicted from Calamba), as well as Capitan Pablo and his band of rebels (see the Noli, Chapter 46, “The Fugitives”), would be more than enough carnage to surpass the hardships of the Parisian workers singled out by Anderson.
Actually, the issue is more embroiled and vexing. In my view, it is not a question of comparing the veracity or scale of one kind of misery against another. Rather, it is a question of selecting which scenes of conflict and struggle can synthesize the distinctive gravity and resonance of an entire people’s experience of centuries of colonial domination and the durable intensity of their resistance to it. Can art simply be reduced to a narcotic coaxing the audience to submission, or apathy? Can postmodern cynical reason be recruited to make us indifferent to this classic dilemma? Can the deconstructionists be summoned to arbitrate the merits of the case between a voluntarist artist serving the cause of the oppressed masses and a determinist critic enforcing reactionary norms and regulations for the sake of upholding high standards and refined tastes? We can imagine various scenarios and hypothesize multiple

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endgames and warring consequences by way of dialectical sublation or Kierkegaardian repetition.
Anatomy of the Terrorizing Sublime
Notice has been made earlier regarding Rizal’s predilection for melodrama tempered with Rabelaisian farce. Whatever sophistic qualifications may be offered, I submit that aside from the poignant rendition of Sisa’s agony and the Tales’ family’s seemingly endless punishment (analogous to Elias’ family’s tribulations), Rizal’s artistic shrewdness may be discerned in such episodes as the slow torture of Tarsilo Alasigan in Chapter 58 of the Noli and the hideous plight of the prisoners in Chapter 38 of the Fili, among others.
At such moments in the Fili, the montage of horror is framed and distanced by an explicit cut in the narration. This can be quickly ascertained in a few instances. Take the episode where, after the report of the assassinated landgrabbers (Chapter 10), the narrator abruptly shifts to addressing his readers by dissolving the illusion: “Do not be alarmed, peaceful citizens of Calamba...” For another instance, consider the freezing of the camera-eye in Chapter 23 when Maria Clara is reported dead, stupefying Simoun, at which point the narrator interrupts to perform a pacifying invocation: “Sleep in peace, unhappy child of my unfortunate motherland....” These are just samples of the obvious defamiliarizing semiotic device of the narrative designed to reconcile on the imaginary plane painfully lived contradictions energizing the plots and characters of Rizal’s fiction (Balibar and Macherey 1996).
By themselves, spectacles of misery and human degradation do not by themselves trigger anger leading to sustained mass agitation and insurrection. In fact, as the historical precedents show, they often lead to the emergence of a populist demagogue whose authoritarian violence serves as catharsis for moral panic and mass hysteria. Were the proletarian viewers of Luna’s El Spoliarium, or the readers of Zola’s portrayals of brutalized workers, stirred up enough to demand immediate action? Can literary artifice serve as an effective tool to improve the victims’ wretched condition? Other contingencies and variables involving audience reception, their race/gender/class-defined dispositions, and attendant institutional constraints have to be taken into account. Needless to say, political propaganda like commercial advertisements can employ artistic means; but their effects are dependent on imponderable contingencies, so that intentions and motives are not always realized.
Nonetheless, one can venture the proposition that the aesthetic level of response cannot really be measured and judged apart from their ethico-political ramifications. We can pose the following questions: what

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conceivable sequence of conduct can be inferred logically arising from such scenes as the encounter between the sanctimonious Dona Victorina and the feral Dona Consolacion in Chapter 48 of the Noli? Or what effect is intended to be produced by the last chapter of the Fili?
I have in mind specifically Padre Florentino’s impassioned appeal for the youth “who would generously shed their blood to wash away so much shame, so much crime, so much abomination” even while he condemns Simoun’s call for sacrifice, for blood, to guarantee their “rights to social life.” The priest’s appeal does not exactly block a sanguinary path to extremist purification.
One is disquieted, if not disconcerted, by the ambiguous resolution of the Fili. A sequel did not materialize with the author’s demise. The final chapter is charged with the purpose of satisfying readers’ expectations, but the scene is invested with contradictory ideological implications, just like the Noli’s closure. When an official representative of the government visits the convent of Santa Clara (where Maria Clara was confined) to speak to the abbess and meet all the nuns, we are suddenly confronted with this shocking spectacle, a cryptic intervention from the author’s buried past: “It is said that one of the these appeared with her habit soaking wet and torn to shreds; weeping, she asked for the man’s protection against the violence of hypocrisy, and revealed other horrors. It is said that she was very beautiful, that she had the loveliest and most expressive eyes that were ever seen (2004, 565)
Again, we confront those “expressive eyes” gesturing to the missing object! We have encountered this scopic insignia before, first underscored in the “Memoirs of a Student in Manila by P. Jacinto,” where the transgressive coupling of love and death, of desire and its perversions, configured the first twenty years of Rizal’s life (for the interplay of eros and thanatos, see San Juan 2011, 37-50). The surveillance of a patriarchalnomos continues in the world of make-believe. And this is where Rizal’s reflections on women’s surbordination, the sexual division of labor, and gender inequity, becomes fraught with radical, ultimately subversive political consequences when translated into either spontaneous or organized mass action--filibusterismo on the rampage.
Signposts of Deliverance
Rizal’s heroic achievement is generally identified with the ideas and actions enacted in the two novels. For schools and official functions, the “Ultimo Adios” serves as a precis of the hero’s credo. One can assert here that, by a formidable consensus, Rizal’s novels have been judged as the foundational scripture of the republic, a national allegory of our collective experience as colonized object-become-emancipated subject. In effect,

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they constitute the epic of our ethnogenesis, of becoming ideally a nation- state with popular-democratic sovereignty. They operate as the paradigmatic exemplum of our acquiring a historic national identity. And by “national allegory,” we allude to Frederic Jameson’s thesis on the peculiarity of political-didactic romances fashioned in colonial terrain. He reflects on this topic: “Third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamc, necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (2000, 320). Embattled up to now, even beleaguered, given the insidious neocolonial bondage we continue to suffer.
In Rizal’s unconventional allegory, the hero’s situation is cast as a microcosm of the body politic, the historic predicament of the majority writ large. As synedochic figure, Ibarra’s plan to improve schooling (inflected later in the students’ demand for a Spanish academy) fuses private and public spheres. Both attempts are foiled. The conflicting sides mirror the asymmetry between lord and slave (in Hegel’s famous tableau). But through agonizing labor and initiative, the slave acquires self- consciousness, elicits recognition, and liberates herself as an emblem of transcending the syndrome of contradictions. The pathos of awakening-- the recognition of the totality of the situation after the reversal and catharsis of repressed emotions--initiates us to enter, at last, the threshold of national-popular revolution.
Argued from another vantage-point, we engage with the disruption of assemblages, compromises, and temporizing unions. Diremptions prevail over fusion and linkages. What the novels strive to convey, among other aims, is the break-up of the matrimonial market and its cognate family structure, the basis of masculine domination. Sisa’s plight and Elias’ genealogy condense this trajectory. Its aftermath coincides with the swift disintegration of the decaying tributary structure and its supernaturalist legitimizations. Sexual difference comes to the foreground in Rizal’s counter-metanarrative and exfoliates into pathetic submission, serial tragedies, or into the fury of nihilist rage (for an argument against gender dimorphism, see Butler 2000, 143-79).
In the Beginning: Exchange of Women
In this context, Pierre Bourdieu’s insight into the role of women in the economy of reifying commodity exchange yields heuristic pertinence: “The principle of the inferiority and exclusion of women, which the mythico-ritual system ratifies and amplifies, to the point of making it the principle of the division of the whole universe, is nothing other than the fundamental dissymmetry, that of subject and object, agent and

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instrument, which is set up between men and women in the domain of symbolic exchanges, the relations of production and reproduction of symbolic capital, the central device of which is the matrimonial market, and which are the foundation of the whole social order—women can only appear there as objects, or, more precisely, as symbols whose meaning is contributed outside of them and whose function is to contribute to the perpetuation or expansion of the symbolic capital held by men” (2001, 42-43).
Responding to this crucial question cannot be shirked: what can abolish this market and the salient role of symbolic capital in organizing social relations? Victimized women’s rebellion and the sympathy or solidarity it elicits, is one answer. Rizal, of course, responded within the given opportunities of his time and place, cognizant of the hierarchies of power and knowledge limiting his agency, resources, and reflexivity.
Changes in the mode of production are bound, sooner or later, to modify the reproduction of the whole power-arrangement, including the distribution of wealth and symbolic capital. With the changes in the family structure and domestic/household set-up, plus opportunities for remunerative work outside, women gained more autonomy. They were gradually freed from strict parental control and the burden of rigid traditional mores regulating kin-network (Goody 1998, 79-95).
From this point of view, we can appreciate the shattering of masculine domination in the wreckage of Ibarra’s courtship of Maria Clara, the sundering of families and murder of daughters (Sisa’s case), the farcical rigmarole of Dona Victorina and Dona Consolacion, estrangement among relatives and friends, as well as the interruption of Paulita Gomez’s wedding and the heart-breaking separation of Elias and Salome. Such reversals transpired in the process of disclosing the truth behind appearances, alongside satiric lampoons, sardonic interior monologues, and tragicomic interludes.
Let us rehearse Rizal’s attitudes and sentiments touched on earlier. The curse of patriarchal ascendancy is over. It has been exorcised, and a new epoch of indeterminacy and dicey possibilities glimmer in the horizon. The dice have been cast. Shall we greet the new age of hope convulsed in its bloody birth-pangs? Whatever the reader’s response, this advent of a new epoch is welcomed by the hero on the eve of his execution:
Mis suenos cuando apenas muchacho adolescente, Mis suenos cuando joven, ya lleno de vigor,
Fueron el verte un dia, joya del Mar de Oriente, Secos los negros ojos, alta la tersa frente,
Sin ceno, sin arrugas, sin manchas de rubor,...

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Mi patria idolatrada! Dolor de mis dolores!
Querida Filipinas, oye el postrer adios!
Ahi te dejo todo; mis padres, mis amores,
Voy donde no hay esclavos, verdugos ni opresores, Donde la fe no mata, donde el que reina es Dios!
My dreams, while yet merely a child, or when nearing maturity, My dreams, when a youth full of vigor at length I became,
Were to see Thee one happier day, O jewel of the orient sea, Thine ebon eyes dried of their tears, thine uplifted brow clear and
free
From the frowns and the furrows, the stains and the stigma of
shame....
My idolized motherland, whose grieving makes me grieve, Dearest Filipinas, hear my last farewell again!
I now leave all to thee, my parents, my loved ones I leave.
I go where there are no slaves, a brute’s lash to receive; Where faith does not kill, and where it is God who doth reign.
(Tr. Frank Laubach; Palma 1949, 321-22)
Frame of Intelligibility
Our meditation on the sexual politics of Rizal’s allegory is nearly over for now. We have concentrated on the representation and elaboration of his ideas on “the woman question,” broadly construed, in his fiction and in various speech-acts. It will take another treatise to explore further the transformation of Rizal’s artistic project via complex dialectical mediations to a fully fleshed ethico-political program of action. We have witnessed its initial outline in the constitution of the Liga Filipina. We can also glimpse the concept of the “general will” adumbrated in “The Rights of Man,” “By- laws of the Association of Dapitan Farmers,” and the proposal for the development of north Borneo by Rizal’s family and relatives.
The principles enunciated in the documents of the French Revolution can be extrapolated from Rizal’s manifestoes or public statements drawn up before his trial and execution, such as “An Address to the Spanish Nation” and “Data for my Defense” (2011, 309-91). Those discourses contain both negative/critical insights combined with positive/ utopian projections and their corresponding affects. They are impregnated with a totalizing vision of the whole imperial system--Spain/Europe vis-a- vis Philippines/Asia--where History appears as pivotal events of confrontation between lords/bondsmen, colonized and colonizers.

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MOMENT OF DECISION
(Kairos /Jezt-zeit /Now-time)
Elias’s Sacrifice / Cabesang Tales-Matanglawin

 

HERITAGE <—————————— Padre Florentino (ocean)
Ibarra’s Father (lake) Simoun’s Jewelry
SISA
Quotidian time suspended/crossing borders
(Basilio/Isagani at Cross-Road: Retrieval) (Repetition / Temporalization: Ibarra/Simoun

———————->

DESTINY
Salome on the move Tasio’s Hierogyphics
Telos of Simoun’s Quest

     

ANOMIE /LETHARGY <——————

——————------>

BARBARISM
Padre Salvi Padre Camorra
Alferez Dona Consolacion Padre Damaso

Capitan Tiago
Senor Pasta Don Custodio

ALIENATED TIME—EMPIRE’S DURATION

Ben-Zayb Placido Penitente
Dona Victorina Don Tiburcio
Quiroga Gobernador-General ____________________________________________________________________________________
Schematic Outline of Thematic/Allegorical Network in Rizal’s Novels
We can assert that those events are also moments of decision in which heritage (the past), including its barbarism and lethargy, are dialectically converted by agents into destiny via group praxis. We offer the following semiotic diagram spelling out agencies and other thematic strands and their interweaving in the novels to supplement an earlier schematic tabulation found in Rizal in Our Time (2011, 94):
[PLACE DIAGRAM AFTER THIS PARAGRAPH]

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Toward.a Radical Architectonic
Suffice it for this occasion to suggest the direction for a future critical negative/positive hermeneutics of Rizal’s life-work to discover hitherto unexamined aspects. Almost all his biographers concur that Rizal’s self-formation diverged from the usual pattern of a linear evolution due to the impact of sociohistorical circumstances. The planned course of his studies was interrupted in 1882, then in 1888, followed by the Depitan exile in 1892-1896. The itinerary of his thought unfolded in ironic or paradoxical ways. Sometimes Rizal argued for revolutionary change only to back-track with the usual qualifications about means and methods. But when faced with extreme urgent situations, Rizal committed himself to dissidence, remonstrance, protest, intransigent resistance.
The vicissitudes of Rizal’s speculative adventure, its “structure of feeling” (to use Raymond Williams’ rubric), may be tracked in his narratives. Adopting the genre of gothic melodrama popular in Europe, Rizal reworked the reversal of fortunes (including peripeteia and anagnorisis) caused by institutions into naturalistic scenes where the charismatic or supra-empirical tendencies predominate, Scrutinize, for instance, the chapters portraying Mr. Leeds’s Imuthis, the mummified Egyptian talking-head; the ghostly phantom on the convent roof; crocodiles in the lake; the philosopher Tasio’s uncanny intuitions; Dona Jeronima’s escapades, and other seemingly bizarre phenomena. They all problematize the intrusion of forces beyond one individual’s control, suggesting the pressure of structures and received group mores or folkways--the power of Necessity circumscribing people’s will and choices, the ruses of Spirit (in Hegel’s philosophy) to determine individual/group fates immanent in the antagonism between the advancing forces of production and the inherited social relations that inhibit progress.
With the onset of global commerce, the exchange of commodities and ideas in the second half of the 19th-century, a new landsape of urban speed and technological mobility began to erode the inertia of old rules and habits. Anomie and alienation began to unsettle the normal modes of

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perception and social behavior, opening gaps for intervention. Crisis actually presents us with the twin moments of danger and opportunities. Perspective is gained by people wrestling with these sudden unexpected turns, allowing the larger horizon of the social drama to surface. In the novels, the texture of the social landscape seems saturated by disappointments, miscarriage, delays, failures, aborted schemes, remorse, melancholia, flailing anger, fits of delirium.
The Sibyl of Cumae seems to be beckoning from the edge of the crossroad. Fate and capricious fortune are invoked, beseeched, and denounced. Tragic and comic affects blend in contrapuntal rhythm as when, for instance, we juxtapose the legend of Dona Jeronima with the painful trials of Maria Clara, Dona Victorina, Paulita Gomez, Juli, and other women. Sisa’s agony punctuates this lanscape with an abject experience impossible to categorize or normalize. In brief, the course of alienated existence in the colony was utterly precarious and the outcome of plans could not be fully extrapolated, hence the accidents, the exigencies, the dizzying variety of contingencies and constraints that defy the conjectures about the future offered by any number of SIbylline oracles awaiting at the wings.
Regrounding Our Agenda
We have now traversed the zone of dead quotidian space/time, coming from the Empire’s petrified duration, to the Now-time: the settling of accounts. Sisa’s torment precipitates kairos, the ripeness of all that King Lear proclaimed. By existentialist retrieval/repetition, the gaps and silences of the staus quo have been exposed. The sacrifices of Elias, Cabesang Tales, Capitan Pablo, and Sisa have been staged and witnessed by all. So now we can understand how Rizal’s preoccupation with individual lives (veridical as well as fictional) was dictated by the sheer pressure of turbulent occurrences. The imperative of family-kinship solidarity and the claim of Indio-tempered honor compelled him to move away from the customary analysis of the ego-centered psychic dimension to the more demanding ethico-political inquiry into purposes, ideals, and principles lived by communities and regions. Acquisitive individualism and instrumentalist beliefs have to be re-evaluated against the wider socio- political background, together with the ideological apparatus of Empire that legitimized extraction of surplus-value/profit, as well as feudal tribute (rent, exorbitant landlord credit), from the natives based on church/state- sanctioned inequities of race, gender, religion, and class.
The memorable dialogues of Ibarra-Elias and Simoun-Basilio, among other exchanges, illustrate Rizal’s grasp of the unity of opposites, the role of contradictions, in all social processes. Of prime importance is the dialectical reflections of the phliosopher Tasio who appied the logic of negation on all experience, thus counseling Ibarra that failure always

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yields a measure of success: “...Lay the first stone, sow; after the storm is unleashed, some grain of wheat will perhaps germinate, survive the catastrophe, save from destruction the species which would later serve as seed for the sons of the dead sower” 2004, 231).
Unlike the either/or stance of his townmates, Tasio’s mediation seeks to resolve antinomies, aporias, and the one-dimensional thinking validated by church/state metaphysics. As antithesis, we note the personalistic indecisiveness and temporizing abstractions found in the thoughts and deeds of the youthful Basilio, Isagani and other characters (including Don Custodio, Padre Fernandez, the opportunist lawyer Pasta, and many more) which are tested and proved inadequate, forcing one to assume more distancing, suspicious, critical, self-estranging, interrogative stances.
One standpoint for further examination is the equivocal role of Simoun, Ibarra’s double or shadow (Elias functioned in the Noli as Simoun’s avatar). His self-righteous judgment of defending the oppressed is undercut by his obsession with a frozen past, a petrified ideal (Maria Clara’s purity now compromised in the convent). This turn of events seems predestined by the middle of the narrative. In demonstrating the futile idealism of Simoun’s plan (arguably a cynical inversion of Ibarra’s pedagogical meliorism) to stir up mass unrest and chaos for the sake of salvaging his beloved--a surrogate for the dishonored father whose corpse iwas ordered disinterred and thrown to the lake, Rizal’s twin narratives evince the transition from an aesthetic exercise to an ethico-political engagement, a movement from the anomie/barbarism of Capitan Tiago and the friars to the stage of an existential leap to judgment, passing through Sisa’s and Elias’ sacrifices, the most pregnant gifts to patria.
Subterranean Mobilizations
We have been prepared for such a transition. Even before his execution, Rizal always affirmed his convictions about freedom and rights and his obligation to perform his duty to patria regardless of costs. This testifies to the inherently contradictory mechanism of the ilustrado sensibility and intellect in dealing with the crisis. The solitude of Simoun and Padre Florentino’s piety converge at the end, not without generating contradictory, extravagant impulses--other lives are on the move outside the remote retreat, advancing toward the fortified metropolis.
At this conjuncture, the emergence of a counterhegemonic bloc is not far from the scene. The ilustrado’s seemingly irresolvable predicament can only be remedied by class suicide, fulfilling its tendency to dissolve its vacillating status into that of a nomad operating as an integral component of the proletarian-peasant, united-front formation so long held dormant in

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the process of slow germination. With Elias’ death and the tell-tale absence of Isagani and Basilio (youth as hope of the motherland), as well as the vigil of Cabesang Tales and other insurgents surrounding Intramuros, we are left suspended in that pregnant interregnum occupied
by Sisa as synoptic emblem (see the semiotic diagram in a previous page) before the quiet smuggling of “Ultimo Adios” from Fort Santiago and the tumutuous cry of Balintawak--a passage of rebirth and redemption for the subjugated multitude.
We arrive at this temporary station of our journey of interpreting and understanding Rizal’s achievement. We have compressed all the issues of gender, class and nation into the metaphor of “Sisa’s vengeance.” This may now be conceived as a symbolic labor of negation and secular transubstantiation, converting the people’s blood into the wine of redemption. The process of narrativizing routine time, everyday life, into the twists of the plot (modeled on the quest, ordeal, mission, etc.) transforms abstract theory into concrete praxis. In this context, the couple Simoun/Elias incarnates all the victims of patriarchal, frailocratic power. Meanwhile, Padre Florentino mourns over the dying Simoun confessing his real identity, The good priest implores the Christian God with His juridical wisdom to provide the weapon of retribution. He appeals to this metaphysical providence to rescue someday the treasures that he consigns to nature’s oceanic womb.
Padre Florentino’s “ultima razon” for getting rid of gold/money/ commodities may be Rizal’s paramount message overriding others. The die is cast. This gesture of sacrificing merchant capital, labor/wealth stolen from the masses, is a promise of compensation for the fidellity, patience and trust of those praying for the last day of judgment—in this case, for an imaginary resolution of real-life contradictions, which is art’s socially redeeming vocation. The destruction of Simoun’s treasure (the sweat and blood of human labor turned to waste) reawakens Sisa’s muffled cry of grief and protest.
Wanting to reconstitute the lost aura of her home and children, “Sisa’s vengeance” functions as the trope of that confluence of all the energies desiring change that were blocked, sublimated, or repressed. It heralds the emergence of a popular counterhegemonic agency designed to carry out to the end the program of anticolonial, national-democratic liberation. On the whole, Rizal’s narrative of mayhem, withdrawal,

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defeats, arrests, torture, murder, and generalized chaos may permit the grassroots messiah, the bathala of the boondocks, to intervene in sabotaging and eventually terminating for good the hitherto tolerated, but now bloodied, barbaric, wasted march of imperial history.
Yo muero cuando veo que el cielo se colora
Y al fin anuncia el dia, tras lobrego capuz;
Si grana necesitas para tenir tu aurora,
Vierte la sangre mia, derramala en buena hora Y dorela un reflejo de su naciente luz!
I die just when I see the dawn break,
Through the gloom of night, to herald the day; And if color is lacking my blood thou shalt take Pour’d out at need for thy dear sake,
To dye with its crimson the waking ray.
(Craig 2010, 148) ###----------------------------------------------------------------------
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
An internationally renowned literary and cultural critic, E. SAN JUAN, Jr. is emeritus professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Ethnic Studies, University of Connecticut and Washington State University. He received his degrees from the University of the Philippines and Harvard University. He was previously a fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University; and Fulbright Professor of American Studies, Leuven University, Belgium.
San Juan was recently professorial chair of Cultural Studies, Polytechnic University of the Philippines; and visiting professor of English & Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines. His recent books include Balikbayang Sinta: An E.San Juan Reader (Ateneo UP); Carlos Bulosan: Revolutionary Filipino Writer in the

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United States (Peter Lang); Working Through the Contradictions (Bucknell UP); In the Wake of Terror (Lexington); U.S. Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (Palgrave); Filipinas Everywhere (Sussex Academic Press); Learning from the Filipino Diaspora (University of Santo Tomas Press), Between Empire and Insurgency; and Kontra-Modernidad (both from University of the Philippines Press)..###

   

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