The History in the Text
By Resil B. Mojares
Any literary text is a point of entry into the historical world.
It does not have to be an overt piece of what the resident critics of Malacañang call “historical literature.” It need not be a text of Jose Rizal, Amado Hernandez, F. Sionil Jose, Linda Ty-Casper, or some other “historically-minded” writer. The category “historical literature,” while a convenient label for certain pedagogical purposes, is essentially redundant. All literature is historical since the writing of texts, the reading of them, and their existence as artifacts are unavoidably permeated, determined, or compromised by history.
In looking for history in the text, a few reminders may be useful.
1. A work need not deal with past events for it to be historical. If we have the expression “current history” it is because history is not just a matter of tense but a way of thinking about the world. The novels of Jose Rizal are not chronicles of the past but an account of contemporary life. If they are the most “historical” novels in our literature, it is not because the Present they deal with is now our Past but because their telling is distinctly informed by a historical consciousness, a consciousness of how lives and societies are shaped by the material and ideological forces working within the bound dimensions of time and space.
2. History is not just a subject matter, a matter of plot or theme. It is present in the totality of the text as an artistic creation. This is again illustrated in Rizal, as Ben Anderson, for instance, shows in his reading, in Imagined Communities (1983), of the graphic, energetic opening paragraphs describing the day of Capitan Tiago’s dinner-party in Noli Me Tangere (1887). Locating the event in a specific time and place, mid-nineteenth-century Manila, Rizal communicates a distinctly modern consciousness, one radically different from what informs earlier narratives, like saints’ lives and metrical romances. The characters of Rizal do not move in the universalized space and “empty time” in which moved St. Roch in the eighteenth-century Visayan novena or Juan Tinoso in the nineteenth-century Tagalog corrido. Rizal does not only recreate a historically particular community of people whose lives are bound together, even if they may not quite know it, he does it in a narrative style that draws his readers, the Filipinos of his time, into an imaginative participation in that collective life he creates.
Such consciousness, Anderson argues, indexed the kinds of epistemological changes — the ways in which people imagined the social world — that underlie the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century in the Philippines and elsewhere in the world. This reading reminds us that a text like Rizal’s is not just about a historical period, it is — in the way it constructs its subject, selecting and deploying the materials and devices available to the writer — an enactment, a production of history itself.
3. The “history” that may be important may not be the history that the work purposely deals with but the history that determines or shapes the act of writing itself. This is shown in the example of Rizal. It is true as well in those cases where the writer may be blind to the determinations of history in the writing of his or her work. Consider the example of two novels, F. Sionil Jose’s The Pretenders and Kerima Polotan’s The Hand of the Enemy, both published in 1962. Both embed contemporary experience in past events, in a similar past in fact: peasant rebellion in Pangasinan in the twentieth century (the Colorum uprising of 1931 in Polotan’s novel). Yet, both may be less interesting for what they reveal of past events as about the moment in history in which they were written.
Both novels are governed by a sense of social pessimism about the possibilities of meaningful change in the conditions of society. This is dramatized in how, in both novels, weighed down by powerlessness and guilt, the main protagonists commit suicide. This pessimism can be explained with reference not only to the particulars of their authors’ biography and literary influences but the ideological environment in which these novels were written. In this case, reference can be made to how, at the close of the 1950s, the social mood in the country was one of drift and disillusion. The collapse of the Communist movement in the 1950s (with the mass arrest of Politburo members in 1950 and the surrender of Luis Taruc in 1954), the death of Magsaysay in 1957 (and, with him, the social euphoria he had engendered), and the pervasiveness of graft in the government under the uninspiring leadership of Carlos Garcia fostered a sense among many that avenues for meaningful social change had been closed. This may be the more important “history” to be unpacked in these two novels — one that may be hidden from the authors themselves — rather than the historical topics with which they deal.
A further example from a very different period can be cited. Some years ago, going over the catalogue of the Newberry Library in Chicago, I was excited to “discover” what may be the earliest published biography of a Filipino — the 49-page vida of Miguel Ayatumo (1593–1609), a young native of Bohol at the close of the sixteenth century. His life appears as an appendix to El Cristiano Virtuoso, by Jesuit Pedro de Mercado, published in Madrid in 1673.
Imagining I would find a picture of sixteenth-century Boholano life and the kind of rich, circumstantial detail we have come to expect of biographies, I was disappointed to find such meager “historical information” in the account. Except for the names of a place (Boholio), the young Christian convert (Miguel Ayatumo), his people (Pintados), a few fugitive allusions to local “pagan” practices, and the schematic accounting of the process of individual conversion, there was little historical information to be found in the text. Bohol could have been a place elsewhere in the Philippines (or South America, for that matter) and Ayatumo could have been some other Christian convert. I quickly learned, of course, that this was an extremely rich text in other ways, if one interrogated it in the right way — relating it to the medieval tradition of saints’ lives (the model the Ayatumo narrative replicates) and setting it in the context of the dogma and practice of Catholic conversion in the sixteenth century. By listening not only to the said but the unsaid in the text, one is fruitfully led to an exploration of conceptions of time, space, and personhood, issues important in considering the ideology of conquest, conversion, and colonization in the Philippines.
This leads us to a fourth reminder.
4. History need not be a history of big events, movements, or personalities, but a history of common, day-to-day life. It need not be an account of objective, external occurrences (like rebellions or the collapse of governments) but a tracing of the historical transformations of ideas, emotions, consciousness — what the French historians call “a history of mentalities.” In 1941, French historian Lucien Febvre — lamenting that no history has been of love, of death, of pity, of cruelty, or of joy — called historians to the task of reconstituting “the emotional life of the past” through the use of such sources as documents on moral conduct, artistic works, and literary texts. Since then, studies have been done in this field, in the Philippines as elsewhere. (A similar example in the case of the Philippines is the work of Reynaldo Ileto on the pasyon.) Yet, much more work remains to be done in a field where the conjunction of history and literature can be most fruitfully studied. It is in the creation of “mentalities,” after all, that literary texts are richest both in enacting history as well as producing it.
Take a random but not unfamiliar example: the classic Cebuano love-poem, “Pag-usara” (1922) by Vicente Ranudo (1882–1930). This male lament of the bittersweet solitude of unrequited love may seem to have little to do with “history.” Yet, it is a text heavily compromised by history, and not only in what it reveals of more obvious themes like gender but of the social and political temper of the post-revolutionary era.
If one takes the lover’s address to the beloved as one of the central metaphors in Philippine poetry, a template of both personal and social sentiment, then it should be possible to see in the shifts of this metaphor something of the shifts of social consciousness itself. We know how, in the course of the Revolution and its aftermath, poets transformed the idiom of romantic love into expressions of patriotism. The love of a woman (or, in variant form, the mother) became a template for love of country. The lover’s address (or, conversely, the plaint of the Beloved) became a kind of emotional keyboard on which was played the dialectic of presence and absence, hope and disillusion, desire and betrayal that shadowed the rise and fall of the Revolution and the Republic. Ranudo works out of this idiom (echoing, for instance, Rizal’s “Mi Ultimo Adios” in his poem). In “Pag-usara,” however, the “dominant” (to use Roman Jakobson’s key term) has shifted to a mode of solipsism and self-love, one in which love has turned performative, emotion a conceit, and the lover is in love not so much with the Beloved as love itself. If this is the case, what then does the poem (and its popular appeal to Ranudo’s readers) say about the social mood of the time in which it was written?
The argument I am making about reading Ranudo and the other writers mentioned is intended to be merely suggestive. To expand and refine the argument, one has to bring in a larger mass of data and the texts than I have space for here. It will involve a more thoroughgoing process of reconstructing the biographical, literary, ideological, and socioeconomic contexts to which the text is doubly connected, as product as well as constituent part of such contexts.
In looking for history in the text it is well to be reminded that it is everywhere present in the work. And any literary work is a point of entry into the historical world.
REFERENCES
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso Editions, 1983.
Febvre, Lucien. “Sensibility and History: How to Reconstitute the Emotional Life of the Poet,” A New Kind of History from the Writings of Lucien Febvre, ed. Peter Burke. New York: Harper & Row, 1973. pp. 12–26.
Jose, F. Sionil. The Pretenders. Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House, 1962.
Mercado, Pedro de. S.J. El Cristiana Virtuoso. Madrid: Joseph Fernandez de Buendia, 1673. See Resil B. Mojares, “The Brief and Blessed Life of Miguel Ayatumo, a Sixteenth-Century Boholano,” Philippine Studies, 41:4 (1993), pp. 437–458.
Mojares, Resil B. “Reading Rahudo: The Cultural Translation of Philippine Poetry.” Unpublished paper, 1995.
Polotan, Kerima. The Hand of the Enemy. Manila: Regal Printing Co., 1962.
Ranudo, Vicente. “Pag-usara/Solitude,” Cebuano Poetry/ Sugboanong Balak Until 1940, ed. E.K. Alburo, et al. Cebu: Cebuano Studies Center, 1988. pp. 90–93.
