Rizal Notes

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Rizal began writing the Noli me tangere in 1885.

The first half of the novel was written in Spain


while the other half in France and Germany. Rizal finished writing the novel on February 21,
1887.

Ways of Reading the Noli me tangere

As a literary work: a fundamental way of reading it because it is in fact a literary work. If read in
this way, the reader would focus on the literary qualities of the novel.

As a historical document: After more than 130 years, it is considered a historical document
since it belongs in the past. To read it as a historical document means to read it for the light it
throws on Filipinos and the Philippines from 1885 to 1887.

As an inspiring source of patriotism: this method of reading the noli me tangere is implied in one
of the reasons for the enactment of Rizal Law. This method supposes that the youth should
understand the relevance of the novel to the present Philippines.

How to read the Noli

1. Do not expect its story of plot to be a page turner


2. Do not look for psychologically developed characters
3. Be on the alert for social criticism or social commentary

Social criticism refers to explicit criticism of society, while social commentary refers to
the criticism of society implicit in the way society is portrayed. The former then would
consist of actual texts that are critical in content, while the latter would refer to the world
of the Noli itself, the very portrayal of which is a criticism of society.

4. Pay close attention to discussions of political or social topics


5. Be on the alert for patterns - patterns of events and characters
6. Be on the alert for passages of costumbrismo

Costumbrismo was a literary genre popular in Spain and its colonies in the 19th century,
depicting everyday life among ordinary people in ordinary settings.

7. If you wish to know exactly what Rizal wanted his readers to take away from the noli

The Meaning of the Noli me tangere

The dedication to the Philippines

In the history of human ailments, a cancer is reported of such malignancy that the least contact
irritates it and awakens in it the sharpest pains. Well, then, as often as I have wished to evoke
you in the midst of modern civilizations, whether to have memories of you accompany me or to
compare you with other countries, your beloved image has appeared to me with a social cancer.

Desiring your health which is ours and seeking the best treatment, I will do with you what
the ancients did with the sick: they would display them on the temple steps, so that each person
who came to invoke the Divinity would propose a remedy.

And to this end, I will attempt to reproduce your state faithfully without any hesitations; I
will lift a part of the veil that covers the disease, sacrificing everything to the truth, even my amor
propio, because, as your son, I also suffer from your defects and weaknesses.

The dedication tell us whom the novel was written for, what its subject matter is, and the reason
why the novel was written.

According to the dictionary of the Real Academia Espanola: “Med[icine]. A malignant ulcer that
cannot be touched without risk.” Which for Rizal, is the social cancer that the Philippines is
afflicted with is of this kind. In his dedication, Rizal did not specify which kind of social cancer it
because the novel will be the one to expose the cancer. It should also be noted that this type of
cancer is extremely sensitive. This sensitivity can be regarded to when Rizal touched it twice:
once with his article “El amo patro and another time with his homage to Luna and Resurreccion
Hidalgo.

The second paragraph of the dedication informs us of the purpose of the novel. It does not
intend to propose a remedy to the social cancer the Philippines is suffering from , but rather
solicit remedies from the readers. His purpose is mainly to expose the social cancer to view so
that everyone may propose remedies the implied reason being that he himself does not have
any remedy. The Noli would bring out what everybody was keeping silent about. That is why
Rizal speaks of “lifting the veil.”

The third paragraph informs us that the social cancer does not concern the friars only, or only
the Spaniards for that matter, it concerns the Filipinos as well. The third paragraph mentions
“defects and weaknesses”, these have to be what the social cancer consists of - the defects and
weaknesses of the members of the Philippines society back then.

The Epigraph

“What! No Caesar’s permitted appearance to make on your stages?


No Achilles. Orestes no more, no [Andromache] there?”

No, One sees with us only parsons, commercial advisers,


Officers, magistrates, those who lead [cavalry] troops.

“But, I do beg you, my friend, to know wherein then can this mis’ry
Greatness encounter, how then can what is great happen through them?”
The epigraph written on the title page of the Noli from the poem “Shakespeare’s Shade” by the
German poet Friedrich Schiller (translated by Marianna Wertiz).

The first two verses are spoken by Hercules’s ghost, the ghost is surprised by the
disappearance of the characters of play. The novel’s characters are not heroic types, but rather
the ordinary persons cited in the next four verses.

The dedication and epigraph are usually written last by a novelist. The dedication is dated 1886,
the year before the actual publication of the novel. The dedication and epigraph express what
the novel finally evolved into.

The Plot of the Noli

1. The return of Ibarra


2. San Diego
3. Town life
4. The fiesta
5. The friars and guardia civil versus the governor-general and good citizens
6. Conspiracies serious and ham-fisted
7. The mock rebellion
8. Ibarra’s fight

The Characters

There are seven chapter in the Noli named after characters: Chapters 2 (“Crisostomo Ibarra”), 6
(“Capitan Tiago”), 14 (“Tasio”), 16 (“Sisa”), 17 (“Basilio”), 39 (“Doña Consolacion”), and 42 (“The
de Espadañas”); eight if one includes Chapter 50 (“Elias’s Story”). All except 2 and 17 give us
biographies of the characters. Not all of them are main characters. The absence of any chapter
dedicated to a Spanish character seems deliberate: Rizal’s focus is on native and mestizo
Filipinos.

Noli’s characters are viewed as a literary type, as defined in the Cambridge Dictionary, is “a
person who seems to represent a particular group of people, having all the qualities that you
usually connect with that group.” This is the way the Noli’s characters have been understood to
be since it was first published, and it is a perspective practically dictated by the Dedication. The
novel purports to present ills that beset, not just a particular town in the Philippines, but the entire
country. It cannot do this of course, unless the setting of the novel is typical of towns in the
Philippines and its characters, types of different Filipinos.

We should consider the possibility that Maria Clara was Rizal’s symbol for the Philippines. The
reason for this comes at the end of the novel with the revelation of Damaso’s paternity: Maria
symbolizes the hybrid culture of the Filipino, a mix of the indigenous and the foreign. Ibarra and
Maria Clara symbolize all Filipinos, whether native or mestizo. The difference in the education
they each received in adolescence, however is important: Ibarra was educated in the secular halls
of Spanish universities; Maria Clara, the convent. Each symbolize a different sort of Filipino: Maria
Clara, the traditional in whom the foreign cultural component came from Christianity; Ibarra, the
modern in whom the foreign cultural component came from liberalism.

The Noli is Rizal’s dramatization of the thesis expounded in his toast to Luna and Hidalgo. In the
Noli, the worst villains are friars, just as in his toast. In the Noli, the Spanish governor-general
sides with Ibarra, just as in his toast, the Spanish government is referred to as the Filipino’s ally.
Ibarra’s love for Maria Clara is symbolic of the liberal Filipino’s desire to enlighten the traditional
Filipino. Damaso’s and Salvi’s opposition to Ibarra is symbolic of friarly opposition to Filipino
liberals who wished to improve the education of ordinary Filipinos. Salvi’s attempts to destroy
Ibarra utterly are symbolic of the Filipino liberals’ perception that the friars were out to eliminate
them completely, as in the aftermath of the Cavite Mutiny when the prominent Filipino liberals are
exiled.

There is an occasional artificiality of both the plot and characters in Noli, like the plots and
characters are written to illustrate political ideologies. The most caricatured character of Damaso
and Salvi: that is demanded by the liberal ideology that sees all churchmen as hypocrite. The
same caricatured nature of Maria Clara: that is determined by Rizal’s design in which she
represents the best of Christian values. Ibarra, on the other hand, is full of ideas as the
representative liberal values, but lacks human warmth. The work of Noli is not real insofar as it
has been determined by ideology, but it looks real because of its setting and the minor characters
that populate it.

The story of Sisa in contrast is original to Rizal. It corresponds to his own personal concern about
that streak of cruelty that he has observed in Filipinos dealing with fellow Filipinos humbler status.
The story of Sisa is simple in the extreme and illustrates in an obvious way Rizal’s point about
Filipino cruelty. Sisa is portrayed as the type of Filipino: silently tolerating abuse and never once
speaking or acting against it, seeming, in fact, incapable of passing judgement on the abuser.
Sisa is not a symbol; neither is the sacristan or Basilio or Crispin. But they are sketchily delineated,
as though Rizal was not familiar with their sort. Sisa’s story is emblematic of a deeper problem,
whose most dramatic manifestation is cruelty.

The Themes

Rizal was forced to create Elias, because the only way to bridge the gap between rich and
poor is to have someone who bridges to the world of the rich and also to the world of the poor. In
the world of Noli, the gap between rich and poor can only be bridged by education which allows
the poor to analyze their situation and explain it to the rich. Consequently, Elias is someone who
used to be rich and was educated, but who is now poor and can thus be accepted by the poor
into their company. Elias is a solution to a writer’s problem.

The two main themes of the Noli: the oppression of the friars and violence of the guardia
civil. Ibarra chooses to work for the good of the country through education and progress. Elias
criticizes him, claiming that freedom cannot be won without a fight. A fight that respects the
institutions of the body politic. The freedom Elias refers to is not political independence from
Spain, it is civil freedom, such as freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and so on. Rizal tell
us that the search for a cure of the social cancer should not become a search for revenge.

At the end of the Novel, Ibarra transforms from a defender of the status quo to a
revolutionary. Elias describes his transformation as persons from the middle and upper classes
who are perfectly fine with the Philippines in spite of the injustices other people suffer, so long as
everything is going well in their lives; change the latter circumstance and their attitude to the
Philippines or its government changes.

Rizal by the end of Noli rejects revenge; he also rejects revolution. Rizal wanted people
to study the story of Sisa and her like; the people around the edges and in the shadows of Noli.
We can divide the characters of Noli into two – the rulers and the ruled. The ruled themselves fall
into two categories – the principalia or maginoo and the ordinary. To these three we may add a
fourth: those who lived outside the town or the rule of law obtaining in the town, such as the
tulisanes.

The society they make up is, from Rizal’s point of view is sick. What this means is that not
everyone in Philippine society in Rizal’s time worked for the good of all, the common good, for the
health of the whole; there could be members of Philippine society that actually worked for its
destruction, or did nothing – neither good nor evil – for the whole.

The Narrator

The narrator of Noli is like an additional character, but he is not part of any of the stories
of the novel. He does not behave like the author of the novel either. It is as though he was a mere
observer, watching what is going on inside and outside the various characters. There is really no
way of knowing whether the ideas expressed by the narrator are also Rizal’s, unless we have
seen them repeated in works of non-fiction signed by Rizal. Most readers assume they are Rizal’s,
and it is probably a good rule of thumb to do so until proof to the contrary arises.

The narrator of Noli is a device of Rizal’s to engage the reader and amuse him from time
to time. This is not original to Rizal, and the master of this device in Spanish literature is
Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote. At any rate, the narrator is the source of social commentary
and social criticism that are important parts of Noli. His remarks are often marked by humor,
sarcasm, or irony.

The narrator is absolutely essential to Noli. This becomes clear when one watches adaptations
of Noli to the screen or the stage. The adaptation preserves the story, characters, and dialogue
of the novel, and yet they do not feel like Noli. What they do not preserve is the humor of the
original, its charm, and the narrator is the source of Noli’s charm. The subject matter of Noli is
heavy, but the narrator makes it palatable. The narrator is also Noli’s source of unity. Our review
of Noli’s plot reveals its tendency to fragment: it is the narrator who keeps the whole novel
together.

Nation and Citizenship


Nation

Elias’s words can strike us as quite bleak, demanding a heroism that few would be capable
of. Today, it is easier to imagine someone in Elias’s situation migrating to the US or Singapore,
and Elias, were he real, would not stop them. His advice to Ibarra after freeing him from prison is
for Ibarra to leave the country and his reason is simple: “a foreign land is a better homeland for
us than our own.” When Ibarra protests, he replies, “Because elsewhere you can be happy…,
because you are not made to suffer, and because you would hate your country if one day you
were to see yourself miserable because of her: and to hate one’s own country is a great tragedy.”
Living in the Philippines is not for the faint-hearted.

Love of country for Elias is “pakikiisa,” but not on the level of suffering – in short,
compassion. The reason for compassion would be the mere fact that the persons to be
compassionate with are compatriots, fellow countrymen. The ultimate explanation of this has to
be love of friendship.

Citizenship

Love of country in action seeks the common good. This may be sought in two ways: by
seeking something beneficial to the community or by resisting something harmful to it. In Noli,
the field of citizenship is San Diego. Following the dedication of Noli, San Diego is a community
affected with a cancer. Noli addresses two questions: “How do you do good in a cancerous
community?” and “How do you resist evil in it?”

Tasio distinguishes between the purposes of Ibarra and Filipo: “to sow the good seed” and
“to stir things up.” Ibarra’s purpose needs to be approved of the powers that be, and the way to
acquire this is by demonstrating humility – not humility as virtue, but as signal that he is not
questioning or threatening the power of the authorities in any way. This means accepting and
honoring the canonical sanction of excommunication against his own beliefs. In contrast, Filipo’s
purpose is “to stir things up,” meaning in this case to challenge the impunity that guardia civils
enjoy when they abuse their power.

The ultimate purpose of Ibarra’s and Filipo’s moves is change in Philippine society, one
through ideas, the other through the pursuit of justice. Tasio reminds Ibarra that for projects in the
Philippines, one needs “not only to have money and the will to do it; … there is need besides of
self-denial, tenacity, and faith because the soil has not been prepared: it is sown only with weeds.”
The soil is the people, the ordinary Filipino that at that time did not have the benefit of secondary
and tertiary education. Rizal’s metaphor is a periphrastic way of describing the ordinary Filipino
as “uncultured.” The weeds are vices. “Self-denial, tenacity, and faith” all speak of a long time for
good ideas to take root. The challenge is not only ignorance and vice; it is also popular attitudes
like fear.

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