A Literature Research

Presented to
Dr. Matilda H. Dimaano
Professor

In Partial Fulfillment
Of the Requirements for the Course
Lang 600 – Research Methods in Language and Literature

Submitted by
Estrella H. Piccio

December 20, 2020

 REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLES OF FILIPINOS IN EDILBERTO K.
TIEMPO’S NOVEL “TO BE FREE”

“There was a revolution in the study of literature. That new way of

approaching a piece of work from its textual aspects was unknown in the
Philippines. When I had taken a course in 1935 it was the usual thing – plot,
character, climax, and so forth. That really means nothing to one who wants
to know the structure of a literary piece...There was a story all right, but there
was really no definable meaning. There was only straight narration. But that’s
not what fiction is. I had to learn this.”
-Tiempo

Abstract
To be Free is a historical novel which gives an insight about the life and

spiritual tradition of the Filipino people amid the Philippine-American War in

1899. This study is also meant primarily as a study of the nature of the novel

which reflected the type of society presented in the novel in through

characterization and the sociopolitical issues in the novel. The research

interest was far less in literature as social evidence or testimony than in the

literary problem of what happens to the novel when it is subjected to the

pressures of politics and political ideology. In a post- modern society, even

youth are not only exposed but are active participants in the socio-political

happenings.
 Thus, materials such as this lead the students not only to 21st century
literature but the interaction and connection between literature and the society
they live in. The notion that literature mirrors life and society will be

strengthened through this study. Moreover, by measuring such material

against the ideological and emotional content of traditional and respectable
fiction, they might gain added insight into the wavering of modern readers
between the necessity of learning the mechanisms of adaptation and
conformity and the daydreams of a happier, though unattainable or historically
impossible, way of life.
(https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/lowenthal/1948/literature.htm).

INTRODUCTION

All people are born with God given, unchallengeable individual rights.

Consequently, these rights cannot be taken away or given to a person by
anyone or anything, including kings, presidents, lawyers, and constitutions.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, free means not under the control
or in the power of another or able to act or be done as one wishes It is a
subject neither to foreign domination nor to despotic government.
All people have natural rights. However, they may be infringed upon by
governments and other people. The existence of free will has been the
subject of debate for centuries among scholars ( Libet et al., 1999; Kane,
2005; Baer et al, 2008). Meanwhile, laypersons also have different opinions
about freedom Paulhus and Carey, 2011) . The present study seeks not to
find the ultimate answer in the debate on free will but to explore the practical
consequences of individual differences in the belief in freedom among
laypersons.
 As stated by Diener et al., 2003, an important research direction
regarding the practical consequences of the belief in free will is to investigate
the relationship between belief and happiness. Happiness, also referred to as
subjective well-being (SWB) in academic psychology, is necessary for good
individual lives and a good society, and research on it is fundamentally
essential to behavioral sciences. If simply believing in free will could help
people pursue

happiness and be happier, psychologists may develop training programs to

increase SWB by facilitating laypersons’ belief in free will. Theoretically,
believing in free will means believing that people can freely act to accomplish
personal goals and improve life quality.

To be free is a perfect in which a person is free to practice his/her

liberties without the fear of persecution. Recent studies have suggested that
laypersons have different opinions about free will and this difference may
influence individuals' behavior substantially (seeBaumeister & Monroe,
2014for a review). Conceptually, believing in free will means believing that
individuals can freely act to make decisions (Baumeister & Monroe, 2014).
Therefore, free will believers are more willing to exert deliberate effort when
performing cognitive tasks (Rigoni, Kühn, Gaudino, Sartori, & Brass, 2012)

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
This study was conducted to explore the sociopolitical implication in Edilberto
K. Tiempo’s To Be Free as a depiction of the Philippine Politics and
Governance.

1. To describe the revolutionary struggle of the Filipino people amid

the Philippine-American War.
 2. To trace the kind of society presented in the novel in terms of :
a. Politics and governance; and
b. cultural freedom
3. To illustrate the socio-political environment in the novel

METHODOLOGY
This novel “To Be Free” by Edilberto K. Tiempo is highly qualitative in
nature which rely heavily on direct interpretation of events and less on
interpreted measurements. The primary characteristic of qualitative
research is the centrality of interpretation. The findings are not just
findings but "assertions." Given intense interaction on the data, given a
constructivist orientation to knowledge, given the attention to intentionality
and sense of self, however descriptive the report, the researcher
ultimately comes to share a personal view. In addition to its orientation
away from cause-and-effect explanation and toward personal
interpretation, qualitative inquiry is distinguished by its emphasis on
holistic treatment of phenomena. The epistemology of qualitative
researchers as existential (non-determinant) and constructivist. These two
views are correlated with an expectation that data to be analyzed are
intricately related to many coincidental actions and that understanding
them requires a wide sweep of contexts: temporal and spatial, historical,
political, economic, cultural, social, personal. Thus, the findings are seen
as unique as well as common.
(https://education.illinois.edu/circe/EDPSY490E/B47_Nature_of_Qual.html
).
 Text analysis was particularly used. Text analysis is the method
communication researchers use to describe and interpret the
characteristics of a recorded or visual message. Its purpose is to describe
the content, structure, and functions of the messages contained in texts.
There are four major approaches to textual analysis: rhetorical criticism,
content analysis, interaction analysis, and performance studies. In the
case of this study, content analysis was initiated. The data were subjected
to

meaning units, which involve symbolic meaning and thematic units, topics
contained within messages (Frey, L., Botan, C., & Kreps, G., 1999).

IV. ANALYSIS/ DISCUSSIONS

A. Plot Summary
The initial batch of American forces in Bayombong, Nueva Vizcaya
arrives quietly in 1899. The Spanish governor’s residence is taken over by
the American military governor signalling that Nueva Vizcaya has been
freed of Spanish grip of power. Capitan Lucas, governor of N. Vizcaya,
father of Hilarion Alcantara and Lamberto Alcantara, feels it a “wait and
see” situation. Filipinos continue their daily routine, but keep vigilant in
case the Americans might try to harm or dishonor their women. One day,
Theodore McIntosh, the American military governor, visits Capitan Lucas
for two reasons: to win their friendship and to let Senior Hilarion help him
as a Senior Provincial Board member. He stresses that they won’t stay
long in the Philippines and intends to give Filipinos complete autonomy
until such time they are ready for self-government. Knowing that the
strong-willed Hilarion will not take the job, he offers instead the position to
Capitan Lucas who hesitantly accepts the offer. Capitan Lucas feels
 unhappy for betraying his son unavailable at that moment. As expected,
Capitan Lucas is elected governor of Nueva Vizcaya in the first popular
election for provincial officials. After serving his first term of office, he is re-
elected as governor, but a year before his second term expired, he dies.
At that time, Teodora, Lamberto’s daughter, 13, is in high school. Through
the invitation and prodding of his friends, Lamberto runs as governor and
emerges as winner after enduring different kinds of political machinations
that take place behind the scenes during his political campaign. Later,
Teodora marries Primo, the junior partner of her Uncle Hilarion in his law
firm. Lamberto is disappointed for what his daughter has done. Dejected,
he is not informed about the marriage of Teodora and Primo, made worse
by his son-in-law’s not undergoing the Gaddang marriage custom of
servitude. Much later, Luisa dies while Primo and Teodora are blessed
with a baby girl named Luisa Consuelo. When World War II breaks out,
the Japanese reign of terror has seen some Filipinos participate in as
collaborators, while others as puppet officials of the Japanese Imperial
Army. However, the combined forces of the Americans and Filipinos who
fight side by side end the Japanese rule. After the war, Lamberto serves
Nueva Vizcaya again and resigns later from the government service to
devote his time to Teodora and his granddaughter that he dotes on. In
due time, Luisa meets Col. Lansing again, now a divorced man and
accepts Ruben, Luisa Consuelo’s son to Felix, as his own flesh. They
later stay at the US leaving behind Luisa Consuelo’s grandfather
Lamberto Alcantara.

Table 1 The revolutionary struggle of the Filipino people amid the

Philippine-American War.
Revolutionary struggle Quoted Line:
of the Characters
Lamberto Alcantara  What has Lamberto Alcantara to show ?
Nothing, fellow Citizens. Absolutely nothing.
Zero. Oh yes, I almost forgot. He has
something to show. He has money. He and his
dates. Can anybody in Nueva Vizcaya match
 that record? Certainly,not anyone in the
Alcantara family ( p.74
 At the time,former Governor Lamberto
Alcantara himself offered to help get me out of
the town (p 218)
Hilarion Alcantara  “You are different from him”.
Lamberto Alcantara  You mean Bettu? Why do you say that?
Hilarion Alcantara  He scares me sometimes.” ( p 43)

POLITICS AND GOVERNANCE

          To be free is a political novel, a novel in which political ideas play a

dominant role or in which political milieu is the dominant setting. Political novel
contains the idea of society penetrated by the consciousness of the
characters in all of its profoundly problematic aspects, so that there is to be
observed in their behavior, and they are themselves often aware of.  Edilberto
K. Tiempo’s novel is the story of five generations of the Alcantara family of
Nueva Viscaya, from patriarch Capitan Lucas Alcantara to his great-great-
grandson Ruben,and some 60 years of history , from about 1890 to the early
1950s. But, more than that, it is a story of freedom. Tiempo has given us the
creative artist’s picture of freedom in all its manifestations, what Teresita
Rodriguez calls a “panoramic definition of freedom”. The novel is the story of
people struggling against domination in all its forms. There is a national
freedom, first of all,pictured on three levels of foreign domination and in three
historical epochs- the colonialism of Spain and the United States and the
military domination of Japan. This is also the fourth level of economic
colonialism that is expressed so vehemently in the speeches of Remegio
( sic,p.126) Salazar in Chapter 15 on American economic imperialism. Tiempo
also outlines a picture of internal national freedom in the three postwar
elections that he describes in some detail. Bettu Alcantara wins the first
election because he compromises principles in the service of the good and
engages in some not so subtle political maneuvering and vote buying. The
pragmatist in him tells him that the end justifies the means. He wins reelection
four years later because he won’t or doesn’t need to,buy any votes. Bettu’s
party loses the third election because this time he refuses to compromise. On
Tiempo’s scorecard, one win for political freedom,one loss and one draw. But
the reader has the nagging suspicion that all three should go in the loss
column.

CULTURAL FREEDOM
The second face of freedom is cultural. The symbol of that freedom is for
Tiempo is the Gaddang custom of the groom’s service in the home of the
bride before he can marry her. Lamberto observes the custom with five years
of service before he marries Luisa. His daughter Teodora marries without
observing the custom, and his granddaughter Consuelo Luisa majors in
victorian literature and writes a research paper on the custom of servitude
( pp.202-203) but has a child outside of marriage. The observance and
nonobservance of the cultural servitude is thus critical in the three middle
generations of the Alcantara family in 1895,1921 and 1947- in Spanish times,
under American rule, and in the first years of Philippine independence.
Cultural freedom also appears in two other areas, in the characterization
of Padre Pascual in Chapters 6 and 7, which is reminiscent of Rizal’s portrait
of the friars, and in the struggle to integrate the cultural and social minorities-
the Igorot and the Aripan (in the past, the servant class in Nueva
Vizcaya,p.332; Tagalog Alipin) It is ironic that in the every act of becoming
free from social inferiority, the Aripan Nieves Lariola insists on the ritual
washing of feet that the culture demands. Tiempo seems to be saying that
man is not even free to be free!

”What it is, Rubio?” ”I would like to stay on in this house.”

Lamberto studied his face.
”How would your wife feel about it?”
”I am marrying her on that condition, Senor.”
“But why Rubio? What about the land and the other things?
Don’t you want to be your own master? ”Yes, of course and
I thank you for your concern. But I want to serve you to the end

of your days. And then later my family and I will live on the land
you give me.” Is that what you really want to do?”
“ Yes, Señor.”
“You are delaying the enjoyment of your freedom?
“No,Senor.” It is hard to explain: When you offered the land to my
father, and the house and the money and the rest, you freed him
from my family’s promise to serve this house. When my
father choose to stay I think he did right. I also choose to stay”
(p.273)

Finally Tiempos novel pictures the implications of freedom and non-

freedom on the personal level. For Hilarion, as all the critics have pointed out,
freedom is an abstraction. He goes to Europe in 1917 to fight for a principle,
and he demands that elections be won on principles. For Lamberto freedom is
a more concrete thing. It is pragmatic, a twisting abstraction that must be
pinned down in personal action. For Lamberto it means not philosophy but a
series of personal choices.- to submit to the demands of servitude or not, to
stand idly by in the face of injustice or to oppose it, to win an election by any
means whatever or to lose it honestly, to retreat to the hills in the face of
military might or to stay in the town and collaborate, to accept a changing
word or to fight for the old way of doing things, “Hilarion lived in the dreadful
loneliness of believing ahead of his time,” but for Bettu “living was now and
here, following a rule of conduct rigid enough to allow for errors” (p.330).

SOCIO-POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT

There is a subtheme which runs through the novel-the theme of change

which is held together by the permanence of the individual. But that is more
properly as aspect of character or in the no man’s land between theme and
character, since the choice for theme having been made, character must be
bent to serve the theme. I Aristotelian terms, mythos must precede ethos.
That choice of theme over character is not necessarily a bad one, but in the
view,it has weakened this particular novel considerably.
Tiempo was here confronted with a particularly difficult choice - to
concentrate on one central character or to use the whole Alcantara family as
his hero. In other words, he had the choice of writing a heroic novel with its
emphasis on one central hero, or a dynastic novel, with its emphasis upon
generations of the same family. Tiempo chose one hero, for its Lamberto who
holds the novel together. But the problem, it seems that Tiempo really only
half-chose a heroic novel. He wanted to eat his cake and keep it too. And by
trying to paint the family as well as Lamberto, he has destroyed the impact of
Lamberto on the reader. For two-thirds of the novel, we half-suspect that
Hilarion is going to be the hero, and it is really only with the death of Hilarion
that Lamberto comes clearly into focus. The choice inevitably leads to an
artistic dilemma because no matter which character Tiempo chose as focus,
the reader would have wanted to know more about the other.
Tiempo could have solved this dilemma by choosing the Alcantara family
rather than Lamberto or Hilarion as his focal point. Admittedly this would have
made his task much more difficult,but it would have made for a greater novel.
It seems that the greatest strength of To Be free is its characters. Tiempo
knows how to create characters that are strong and alive. They haunt you
even after you put the novel down like knowing more about the mestiza Luisa
for example, and her granddaughter Consuelo Luisa. They are interesting
women, but

Tiempo gives us just enough of them to want to know them better. Capitan
Lucas and his wife, sadly unnamed in the novel, deserve a book of their own.
Tiempo has a host of characters crying out for expression. Like Hilarion’s
crickets, they are there when you stop to listen ( p. 246) perhaps he could
have doen justice to these characters by abandoning Lamberto or Hilarion as
his central character and using a revolving point of view to tell the story of the
Alcantara’s family.

In the final analysis, Tiempo seems to be telling us freedom is not

something outside us, but the personal integrity within us. As Rubio says, I am
free “inside me,” and that is what makes all the difference. “What mattered
finally was preserving a bedrock decency that would be honored no matter
what the time or place . It had taken him all his lifetime to see it that way”
( p.329)

V. CONCLUSION
 As To Be Free shows, freedom comes in many guises, and it is
simplistic to think that one culture’s interpretation of freedom pales in
comparison to that of another culture. The freedom to act or to choose meant
setting limits, a self-built cage.” We may choose to disagree with the social
codes that make Louise consider single motherhood a “degrading bondage”,
but there is validity in her realization that there was a certain dignity to be
earned when voluntarily sacrificing oneself to tradition. Lamberto proves his
worth to the woman he loves by sacrificing his personal ambitions to become
a servant in her house, and there is a certain pride to be earned when making
such a self-sacrificing gesture. In a sense, it’s like dying for one’s country in
which one achieves dignity through selflessness. “What mattered finally was
preserving a bedrock decency that would be honored no matter what the time
or place,” Tiempo

writes at the closing chapter of the novel, reminding us that to be free means
choosing to live with dignity, which means refusing to be enslaved by our own
selfish desires. Selflessness, in the end, is what makes us free.

VI.References:

Edilberto K. Tiempo. (n.d.). Retrieved September 27, 2017, from

http://en.wikipilipinas.org/index.php/Edilberto_K._Tiempo
https://books.google.com.ph/books?
id=g9MqAAAAMAAJ&source=gbs_book_other_versions
https://icsai.org/procarch/12iclice2imelt/12iclice-016.pdf
http://halohaloreview.blogspot.com/2016/08/to-be-free-by-edilberto-k-
tiempo.html
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/lowenthal/1948/literature.htm