Rizaliana historical background

In 1956 Republic Act 1425, known as the Rizal Bill, mandated the inclusion of Rizal’s life and works in school curricula, contributing to a surfeit of Rizaliana: primers, anthologies, juvenile biographies, essays, monographs. Thousands of Rizal-themed books burst forth from publishers, contributing to an intellectual glut which caused Filipinos to feel a false sense of security and satisfaction in having explored everything that is to be known about the hero. Starting with the dizzying range of reading materials that the Department of Education mandated in public schools from elementary school to college, Rizalmania crested with the tidal wave of hundreds of Rizal publications, from translations into English and vernacular languages, international conference proceedings, to monographs and ephemera published by the Jose Rizal National Centennial Commission (JRNCC) in 1961.

The foremost Rizal scholar of our time, Ambeth R. Ocampo, wrote in his book Meaning and History that the national hero “is obscured by his own omnipresence…. Rizal’s greatest misfortune was becoming the National Hero of the Philippines. He is everywhere and therefore nowhere….” Many books published after the war “glorified Rizal, often exaggerating his accomplishments and hiding his defects, thus transforming the national hero into a superhuman being, a model for Filipinos to emulate. By this time Rizal began to be a heavy burden for Filipinos, someone whom ordinary mortals found impossible to identify with.”

While the 1961 Jose Rizal National Centennial Commission did an admirable job in publishing most of the original Rizal documents, very few people, outside of libraries, have access to the voluminous books, some of which have been long out of print and have become quite rare, especially Rizal’s original works in Spanish. Generations of Filipino and international scholars are reading the writer through the filter of English or Filipino translations. Ocampo points out that the Escritos de José Rizal project(consisting of 13 volumes or 25 books) undertaken in 1961 by the JRNCC may have inadvertently contributed to a false sense of confidence in the completeness of its collection, evidenced by the fact that since that year, few scholars have researched original Rizaliana in the vault of the Philippine National Library. In 1987, for example, while studying the draft of the original Noli me tangere, Ocampo re-discovered the unpublished manuscript of a draft of Rizal’s third novel, subsequently titled Makamisa. Even though JRNCC had known of its existence, the draft had been deemed unworthy of inclusion in the Escritos de José Rizal project in 1961.

Worse, many content themselves to studying Rizal only through secondary sources written in English, such as Austin Craig’s Lineage, Life and Labors of Jose Rizal (1913), Leon María Guerrero’s The First Filipino (1963) and Austin Coates’ Rizal: Philippine Nationalist and Martyr (1968). Some have reacted against the sheer volume of secondary sources by reducing Rizal’s body of work, which represented thousands of pages of letters, prose and poetry, into a convenient canon of two novels, Noli me tangere and El filibusterismo, with an occasional passing study of a handful of essays and his greatest poem Mi último adios.

The problems of language, access to primary sources, and superabundance of secondary materials have contributed to the lack of primary research. Filipiniana.net and the National Historical Institute address these issues by using web technology, modern library science, and search engines to deliver to the world the full measure of Rizal’s remarkable cultural output, surely a gift, not only to Filipinos, but also to all mankind.

Why Rizal?

Rizal continues to be re-evaluated with every succeeding generation. Wenceslao Retana, the most emininent Filipinist of his time, wrote Rizal’s first biography in 1907, depicting him as a misunderstood nationalist who was nevertheless loyal to his Spanish upbringing and education. The American colonial administration encouraged the fawning elevation of the hero, which was best exemplified by Austin Craig’s 1923 biography. Rafael Palma, closest in spirit and times to Rizal, wrote a more balanced and more sympathetic biography (La biografía de Rizal, 1949), emphasizing the hero’s immersion in freemasonry and liberal thinking.

Carlos Quirino, echoing Ferdinand Blumentritt, called Rizal the “Great Malayan,” (1940), describing him in all his faults and virtues. This humanization was echoed by Rizal’s great grandniece, Asuncion Lopez-Bantug, who had access to the family's oral traditions, in her Lolo Jose (1981). Nationalist historian Teodoro A. Agoncillo in his book The Revolt of the Masses (1956) began the historiographical trend of questioning Rizal’s eminence versus that of the plebian Supremo Andres Bonifacio. This trend would reach its zenith in 1968, just before the First Quarter Storm, when Renato Constantino delivered his Rizal Lecture “Veneration without Understanding,” in which he depicted Rizal as an American-manufactured hero.

In our postmodern world, there is now a tendency to evaluate Rizal from within multiple disciplines and perspectives. Benedict Anderson analyzed Rizal in juxtaposition to Isabelo de los Reyes and avantgarde European literature and politics (2005). Strongly influenced by Anderson, Caroline S. Hau meditated on how Rizal despaired of the incompatibility of Enlightenment ideals with entrenched Philippine social mores, and that with his novels, he became the ultimate creator of the master-text of Philippine nationalism. Vicente L. Rafael in his book Contracting Colonialism (1988) explored how Rizal ironically advocated a Spanish language policy in order to foster and solidify the Philippines’ sense of national community.

As Rizalist Juan Collas summed up: it is through the study of Rizal that he “becomes again like the rest of us, the flesh of our flesh, weak as that flesh is bound to be... the deathless symbol of the possibilities of his people and their latent greatness as a race.”

Why Complete?

It seems fitting to close the rationale for this ambitious website with the very words of the First Filipino as to why he himself preferred complete versus selected works, courtesy of American scholar Benedict Anderson’s book Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination.

Writing from London in April 1888, Rizal requested his good friend Mariano Ponce to send him the complete works of Mariano José de Larra, a contemporary Spanish writer whom Rizal considered “el mejor prosista español de este siglo” (Spain’s greatest prose writer of the 19th century). But when in June Rizal received only some of his works, Rizal sent a rejoinder to Ponce stating:

 

“Como tengo la costumbre de preferir las obras completas á las escogidas, tratándose de los grandes autores, le suplicaría me remitiese las Obras Completas….. Conservaré sin embargo ésta [la obra seleccionada] con mucho gusto par ir haciendo comparaciones entre las diversas ediciones. Mi razón… es porque creo que en los grandes hombres todo es digno de estudio, y que es muy dificil decir en absoluto cuáles sean las mejores ó las peores….” [as I am in the habit of preferring, where it concerns great authors, the collected works to just selections, I would plead with you to send me the Collected Works… However I will keep this volume with great pleasure, in order to make comparisons between various editions. My reason … is that I believe that with regard to great men everything is worthy of study, and that it is very difficult to state absolutely which are better and which are worse]. Epistolario Rizalino, volume 2, 1887-1890 (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1931), pp. 7-8, 12-14. Translation and ellipses supplied by Benedict Anderson.