Readings #8

• Few countries give the observer a deeper feeling of historical vertigo than the Philippines
• The armed uprising against Spanish rule of 1896, which triumphed temporarily with the establishment of an independent republic in 1898, makes the Philippines the visionary forerunner of all the other anti-colonial movements in the region
• The Philippines was the last of the Spanish imperial possessions to have thrown off the yoke, seventy-five years after the rest
• The Philippines was profoundly marked, after three and a half centuries of Spanish rule, by Counter-Reformation Catholicism
• The Philippines was the only colony in the Spanish Empire where the Spanish language never became widely understood
• The Philippines was the only colony in Asia to have had a university in the 19th century
• In the 1890s barely 3 per cent of the Philippine population knew 'Castilian', but it was Spanish-readers and writers who managed to turn movements of resistance to colonial rule from hopeless peasant uprisings into a revolution
• Today, thanks to American imperialism, and the Philippines' new self-identification as 'Asian', almost no one other than a few scholars understands the language in which the revolutionary heroes communicated among themselves and with the outside world
• José Rizal


  Poet, novelist, ophthalmologist, historian, doctor, polemical essayist, moralist and political dreamer
• José Rizal was born

  1861
• Rizal was arrested on false charges of inciting Andrés Bonifacio's uprising and executed by a firing squad


  1896
• At the time of Rizal's death, Lenin had just been sentenced to exile in Siberia, Sun Yat-sen had begun organizing for Chinese nationalism outside China, and Gandhi was conducting his early experiments in anti-colonial resistance in South Africa
• Rizal's education


  • Provided exclusively by the religious Orders, notably the Dominicans and Jesuits
  • Gave him a command of Latin (and some Hebrew), a solid knowledge of classical antiquity, and an introduction to Western philosophy and even to medical science
• Rizal exhibited remarkable literary abilities from a very early age, winning first prize in an open literary competition at the age of 19
• The brief liberal triumph in the Glorious Revolution of 1868 in Spain had immediate repercussions for the remote Pacific colony of the Philippines
• The renewed ban on the Jesuits and the closure of monastic institutions in Spain seemed to promise the end of the reactionary power of the Orders overseas
• The arrival of the first 'liberal' Captain-General, Carlos María de la Torre, in Manila in 1869 was met with popular cries of 'Viva la Libertad!'
• The collapse of the Glorious Revolution in Spain brought about a ferocious reaction in Manila, culminating in 1872 in the public garroting of three secular (i.e. non-Order) priests
• Rizal's mother was accused of poisoning a neighbor, forced to walk twenty miles to prison, and held there for over two years before being released
• Rizal's elder brother Paciano, a favorite pupil of Father Burgos, the leader of the garroted priests, narrowly escaped arrest and was forced to discontinue his education
• In 1882, with his brother's support, Rizal left quietly for the relative freedom of Spain to continue his medical studies
• Rizal spent the next five years in Europe, studying on and off, but also travelling widely and picking up French, German and English with the ease of an obsessive and gifted polyglot
• 'el demonio de las comparaciones'


  A new, restless double-consciousness which made it impossible ever after to experience Berlin without at once thinking of Manila, or Manila without thinking of Berlin
• Rizal finished his novel Noli me tangere in Berlin just before midnight on 21 February 1887
• Noli Me Tangere


  • Its characters come from every stratum of late colonial society
  • The geographical space of the novel is strictly confined to the immediate environs of the colonial capital, Manila
• Noli Me Tangere


  Combines two radically distinct and at first glance uncombinable genres: melodrama and satire
• Plot of Noli Me Tangere

  1. Wealthy, handsome and naively idealistic mestizo, Don Crisostomo Ibarra, returns from Europe with plans to modernize his home town and his patria, and to marry his childhood sweetheart Maria Clara

  2. Discovers his father has died in prison, framed by the brutal Franciscan friar Padre Damaso

  3. Learns Damaso is the real father of his bride-to-be

  4. Padre Salvi secretly lusts after Maria Clara and has covered up the murder of one of his young acolytes

  5. Ibarra makes friends with liberal-minded locals but the friars and their allies scheme to abort Ibarra's marriage and plans

  6. Padre Salvi frames Ibarra as the instigator of a planned rebel attack, Ibarra is imprisoned but escapes

  7. Maria Clara chooses to become a nun to avoid a loveless marriage
• The melodramatic plot of Noli Me Tangere is interspersed with the novelist's own unquenchable laughter at the expense of his own inventions
• Noli Me Tangere is a novel by José Rizal
• The novel has a melodramatic plot interspersed with brilliant sketches of colonial provincial society and the novelist's own unquenchable laughter at the expense of his own inventions
• The opening of the novel describes a dinner hosted by Don Santiago de los Santos, popularly known as Capitan Tiago
• The news of the dinner circulated around the world of social parasites in Manila
• The novel's final chapter ('Epilogue') comes immediately after the story has reached its grim, Gothic conclusion
• The authorial play with readers, characters and reality in Noli Me Tangere is quite uncharacteristic of most serious 19th-century novels
• Noli Me Tangere was the second novel ever written by a putative Filipino, the first being minor, experimental trash
• Rizal never mentions the Spanish writer Galdós in his voluminous correspondence, even though it has been said that he borrowed heavily from Galdós' 1876 anticlerical novel Doña Perfecta
• Rizal had a passionate admiration for the brilliant satirical journalist José Mariano de la Larra
• Rizal's mother tongue was Tagalog, a minority language spoken by perhaps two million people in the multilingual Philippine archipelago, with no tradition of prose writing, and readable by perhaps only a few thousand
• Rizal wrote Noli Me Tangere in Spanish, a language understood by only 3 per cent of his countrymen
• Five years after Rizal's martyrdom, a greedy and barbarous American imperialism destroyed the independent Republic of the Philippines, and reduced the inhabitants once again to the status of colonial subjects