Life and Works of Rizal (GED0102)

Group Output #3
On C. Hau’s Necessary Fictions and J. Rizal’s Noli
Section 16
Group No. 5
Member No. Name
1 Castillo, Christian Jude S.
2 David, Maria Mikaela F.
3 Florendo, Mikaela G.
4 Lacre, Sharmaine Kaye S.
5 Mangubat, Claudelle B.

I. Context on the theme assigned

RIZAL AND THE INSIDE AND OUTSIDE PERSPECTIVE

Jose Rizal addressed current situation of the Philippines under the Spanish
government and clergy during his time positioning an outside and inside stance in his
novels. The outside stance draws on a universalist notion of world history, of progress and
change that looks to other countries specially to the modern Europe with connection to
the “modernity” that he acquired during his stay in the West. And the inside stance was
portrayed in his novels by the different characters. “Rizal creates a specifically “national”
space in his novel in which locality and local expression are suggested in terms of form
through the insider’s perspective, and through the insertion of Tagalog words into
Spanish.(p. 77-78) […] […] On the one hand, the outside stance draws on the cognitive
apparatus and standpoint of Europe, of a sense of “world history,” and of moral
development and serves up a powerful indictment of the abuses of colonial rule. On the
other hand, the insider viewpoint argues in favor of the efficacy and epistemological
significance of the different, and not always laudable and progressive, standpoints of the
many different people who live in colonial Philippines. It is in contact with the outside
particularly with the “western people” that produces the “electric impact” that awaken the
natives into demanding light, life and civilization that one time they leave the Philippines
and passed it to the one who colonize us, thus confirming the eternal laws of constant
evolution, of change, periodicity and progress. The insider’s perspective creates in the
novel a space for rescuing many voices, voices often denied, silenced, fragmented, or
simple unrecognized, by the general discourse of progress and change.” (Hau, 2000, p.
80). The insider perspective works by critique through testimony while the outsider
perspective works by means of a critical distance of born of comparison. This is evident in
the work of Rizal which is the Noli.
Moreover, the creation of Rizal’s novels is an outcome of his attempt to expose
how the Spanish government is trying to isolate the colonial Filipinos from the “modern
ideas” which Rizal acquire from the outside of the nation. In one of the passages from
Noli, where Ibarra passes by the Botanical Garden of Manila, the neglected gardens
 portrays the effort of Spain to keep the Philippines backward, to make the Filipinos live in
the past even though modernity and ideas of change is evident in the outside witnessed
by Rizal.

II. Explain the theme's significance and problems in regards to Rizal's project of creating a
community.

The Noli does not only mock the Spanish colonizer but there are some
parts wherein the narrative is self-mocking as well, or in other words, it scrutinized
both the Spaniards and Filipinos. Bu the outsider-as-insider mocking brings out the
problematic aspect of the novel. As Ibarra tries to create on the basis of his
European-inspired vision of progress and change, there are the deprived
characters that ultimately and constantly ruined his visions, the insane Sisa, the
spiteful Concolacion, the mysterious Elias among others. Ibarra cannot entirely
prevent the unwanted or undesirable fate of his fellow Filipinos, and he was unable
to guarantee the success of his own programs and reforms making himself the
biggest problem. Also, the underlying connection between Elias and Ibarra, on how
the ancestors of Elias was oppressed and suffered under Ibarra’s ancestors, but
Elias deciding not to further severing it after finding the truth is an indication that
Rizal’s kind of fantasy about Filipino nation acknowledges the irreducible links that
bind one person to another. “Elias’s selflessness and self-immolation mark the
nationalist moment, a moment born out of the ashes of the past, (p. 87) […] a
moment when blood enemies can become friends. The notion of brotherhood and
sacrifice gives the knowable community the emotive charge that suffuses the
nation’s ‘truth’. It is perhaps the novel’s ability to imagine the possibility of a self-
sacrificing death that allows the community to be rendered meaningful. We might
say that literatures ability to bear witness to the possibility of self-sacrifice provides
one important position from which the national community is “knowable” as a
community in and through death. Another case is inside-outside viewpoint of padre
salvi’s fiesta highlight, in the outside perspective Padre Salvi said to single-
handedly calm down a restive crowd but the novel uses the insider’s description of
the snoring and quarreling churchgoers and Salvi’s own lecherous, less than
honorable motives to ridicule the official version of the melee. (p.82)
Furthermore, on Rizal’s writing to Bluementritt, he stated: “Sir you know our
country only from the books written by friars and Spaniards who copied one
another. If you had grown up, as I did, in one of our villages, and seen the
sufferings of our peasants, you would have a very different idea of Catholicism in
the Philippines. (p. 87-89) […] In his writing to the Filipino in Barcelona from
London in 1889, he boldly declared— “Knowledge of a thing prepares for its
mastery: Knowledge is power. We are the only ones who can acquire a perfect
knowledge of our country, because we know both languages, and besides we are
 informed of the secrets of the people among who we had been raised. The
Spaniards will never get to know us well, because they have many preoccupations,
they do not mingle with the population, they do not understand well the language,
and they stay a short time. The most that they can know is what is going on in the
government offices, and these are not the country (1963, 254).

REFERENCES
Hau, C. Necessary Fictions: Philippine Literature and the Nation. (p. 77, 78, 80, 87, 89) 2000.
AUP Imprint