A Writer's Secret Moves: On a Paired Rereading of Rizal's Noli and Fili

For Benedict Anderson and my students at University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, spring 2024: Sara, Josie, Elijah, Andrew, Joe, Monica, Malia, Alex, Hiroko, and Jake, who read Rizal with me, enduring my speculations.

I'd like to talk about Rizal here from my perspective, from reading him as a maker of fiction. Jose Rizal is the Philippines' national hero, but he was also an ophthalmologist, amateur zoologist, farmer, sculptor, educator, ethnologist, and poet. However, above all, he was the Philippines' Original Gangster of a novelist.

My favorite among Rizal's works is the Fili—El Filibusterismo, his second novel, published in Ghent, Belgium, in 1891, continuing the saga of Crisostomo Ibarra, masked as Simoun, an anticlerical, anticolonial jeweler from South America (yes, Rizal went transnational in the Fili), who foments conspiracy and rebellion against Spain. Oddly, the Fili could also be called a college novel, set mostly among student activists in nineteenth-century Manila. Some of the ideas in this essay come from pen-pal conversations I once had with Benedict Anderson, the Irish scholar on Southeast Asian history and political science whose thoughts on Rizal are ground for his essential concepts on nation-making, his most famous work being the classic textbook on nationalism, Imagined Communities. In Rizal's novels, Ben found exemplary ground for his theories on how nations are "imagined," thus made.

So I dedicate this essay to Ben—Om Ben, as he liked to be called.

I used to pose theories to Ben on Rizal as an artist, mostly for fun, to get him to think along with me (we had diametrically opposite tastes in fiction; he preferred realism). Ben and I bonded (in our letters; I met him only once) over what turned out to be our shared love for the Fili. Unlike Ben, I was not so much a lover of Rizal's first novel, Noli Me Tangere, which helped inspire revolution against Spain; it's the Philippines' (and nation-making's) ur-novel. But no one I knew could move with me into my nerdy Fili-love as Benedict Anderson could.

Disclaimer: I love Rizal. He's a mutant nerd before whom my irony fails. It's not just that Rizal spoke at least a dozen languages—including Tagalog, Cebuano, Cavite-Chabacano, English, French, Italian, German, and of course Spanish (though not including my own, Waray); wrote realist yet also mysteriously playful novels; and blazed a trail on narrative art that is important to the world, not just the Philippines. Most importantly, he had an uncanny and undaunted self-regard—he centered himself and his country—at a time when the Spanish colonial Philippines was in dire straits. It's important to note that at one point in Rizal's time, the Philippines was ruled by the man who, during the Spanish-American War, was known as the Butcher of Havana, or just "Butcher," Governor-General Valeriano Weyler—though Weyler was only one among many insensible rulers of the Philippines, then and now. Rizal was sui generis, and we're lucky as Filipinos to have him, period.

So I'm not one who'd like to smash the idol with my hip wit—that's a job equally entertaining for some other reader, or maybe some other me. For this rereading project, I read first chapter 1 of the Fili, then chapter 1 of the Noli, and so on, creating a puzzle reading that I thought might simply be amusing. When I began reading, my thesis was this: the Fili is a mirror text of the Noli and was written clearly to revise the first. His first novel is only a palimpsest; his second novel is the text. But what I found, oddly enough, was also the converse: read in tandem with the Fili, the Noli gains complexity and texture as a strangely doubled text, as if the rich and fluent Fili also lives in it, a ghost within its machine.

In the end, these mirror texts told me a story of Rizal as a novelist and of other ways to think about nation.

My rereading project really was to recover Rizal as an artist. True, that was also my goal in writing my second novel, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata. But in that case, I did not just read—I double-crossed Rizal and wrote an entirely new novel, co-opting him. And I've always wondered why in that novel I never had Raymundo Mata actually read the Fili—my favorite Rizal text. As I wrote Raymundo Mata, I kept deferring Raymundo Mata's reading of the Fili—and in the end, he never does get to read the book. And I still wonder why. (Yes, even I wonder about my weird novels.)

What might come from this project of rereading Rizal is a portrait of a writer questioning his means, I thought, wondering through his second novel about his first novel's choices. I've been told there is yet no book on Rizal as a novelist, which does not surprise me. Rizal's use of perspective, or narration modes, for instance, rarely comes up in discussions of Rizaliana, though some cultural thesis on sampaguitas, opium addiction, or student life in Manila could be well served by a close reading of the books' choices of discourse. (Note: the flower sampaguita comes up only once in the Fili, a novel mostly set in Manila, but seven times in the Noli—thrice in proximity to María Clara, in mixes of omniscient third and free indirect discourse; once in relation to the dead—in a cemetery where Ibarra looks for his father's absent corpse; and the rest in provincial ceremonies, both secular and religious, in direct discourse, or what I call the pueblo, or mass, voice in Rizal: the sampaga in the rural Noli is related to Rizal's nation imagery; its symbolism disappears in the urban Fili.)

Rereading the noli

I'm not exactly sure when I decided that the Noli is the less interesting text. It may have been my own teenage aversion to bad romance. I was in high school when I first read the Noli, in Tagalog, and I was very disappointed in Maria Clara, the romantic object whose life ends up not so good. It's through the pathos of Maria Clara that murderous wrath against the Spanish friars has the most righteous cause in Rizal's novels.

My trite formulation has been that the Noli is great as propaganda but not as artful as the Fili.

When I was reading Rizal for The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, I began to think that the nation's sensibilities are still tied to his favored nineteenth-century romances: the pop melodrama of Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas that so enthralled Jose Rizal. If the Filipino novel is germinated by Rizal, then Rizal's tastes tell me nineteenth-century French blockbusters, like Eugene Sue's Mysteries of Paris and Hugo's Les Misérables, have been ironed into our DNA. And the Noli's voice, to me, seems more tuned to the Frenchmen Hugo, Sue, and Dumas than to their younger, seemingly more experimental contemporary, Flaubert. I kept wishing the Noli would read more waywardly, like Machado de Assis's Philosopher or Dog? or Dom Casmurro. As I read his letters and miscellanea, I kept looking for signs that Rizal had even read Flaubert. I knew he traveled Europe with the work of seventeenth-century Tagalog poet Francisco Balagtas. Balagtas's romantic spirit runs through the Noli, along with candid Voltairean hijinks wit. One can imagine Rizal doing selfies with Florante at Laura as prop in some coffee shop in Heidelberg. These assured tones—anticlerical humor and romantic agon, Voltaire and Balagtas both—combine in the Noli's editorializing, omniscient narration.

Benedict Anderson, in Under Three Flags, notes that Rizal had one book by Flaubert in his library and many by Dumas. I know from Rizal's letters that he loved Eugene Sue, The Wandering Jew in particular, now a fairly unreadable novel (at least to me; I tried and found it ghastly), but I wished to know whether he was familiar with that exemplar of style indirect libre, or free indirect discourse—Flaubert—since after all he did write the Noli while traveling mostly to and from Paris. I had this theory that my enjoyment of the Fili has to do with the fluidity of Rizal's narration modes in the book—an entertaining, complex, para-Flaubertian style. (I recognize that this happens to turn on my own taste in novel-making. I accept that my comments are shot through by my own views of art. I also accept that my concerns with Rizal's texts are technical. I read books, from Gayl Jones to Tom Jones, for instruction on my own writing.)

But I did not need to find Flaubert under Rizal's pillow to confirm my idea about narration modes; I just needed to read the Noli and the Fili in tandem, one chapter after another, and compare them.

Free indirect discourse is a supple narration that enters multiple consciousnesses within an omniscient frame. The psychological acuities of Henry James and the comic shrewdness of Jane Austen (to mention just two novelists who have taught me a lot) arise from those authors' fabulous control of this third-person form. Free indirect discourse allows for multiple and contingent authorities and, in turn, also plays tricks with the reader's consciousness. The nineteenth-century novels of Dumas and Hugo, beloved of Rizal, enthralling in other ways, indulge mostly in the straight omniscient voice. And it's true that, in general, Rizal does use straight omniscience in both novels; his default mode is a single, ironic voice of authority that delivers his themes with excellent and subtle wit. He's good at it. He follows a good writing workshop mantra: he sticks to his strengths.

Especially in the Noli, his godlike, omniscient perch above the fray is a powerful tool to impel reader response—specifically, outrage. Rereading Father Damaso's evil malice at the beginning of the Noli, I still get angry. I hate Father Damaso as much as I hated him when I was a kid, and I want to kick him in his stupid, ancient-Roman cono face. For Filipinos, Rizal's Noli begets a powerful reader response. It became clear, on rereading, how Rizal's omniscient narration in the Noli binds the reader to his seductive bias.

It is important to note that Rizal's omniscient irony is the vessel of speech for the angry Filipino in the text—whom, in fact, Rizal does not picture in chapters 1 and 2 of the Noli. Instead, he foregrounds the acts and dialogue of the elites, most of them peninsular Spaniards. In the Noli's opening scenes, Rizal's omniscient voice is therefore the sole witness for the otherwise mute, absent, and angry Filipino. It's a strategic, powerful partnership: his omniscience and our absence whet anti-Spanish rage. And its result, this sharpening of our knives, that is, our reader response, is a prominent part of his novel.

Similarly, in the Fili, he begins with the "upper deck," the elite, but it's parallel with the "lower deck," where Filipinos have voices. Reader and narrator are entwined in both novels. We, the reader, are part of Rizal's narrative moves, and shrewd as he was, his choices of narration inevitably bound us to him. Of course, historically, they inspired revolt.

He clearly had a thesis of nation in mind, and he moved his readers in this novel of propaganda that, as we know, worked only too well—it killed him (a narrative consequence I do not recommend). But especially in the Noli, his keen sense of readership is crucial and central to its power. Neglecting the role of the reader in the Noli diminishes our understanding of the text.

What I found in my rereading was that the fascinating mirroring of the two novels—eerie incidences of twinning in the Noli and the Fili—further complicated any superficial reading I had of the Noli. One of the more obvious mirrorings is the twinning of scenes. The most powerful among these mirrored chapters, for instance, are the parallel chapters 24. Fili chapter 24 is titled "Un cadaver." Multiple deaths or decays are imagined in this chapter, but the corpse in question lies in the news Basilio delivers to Simoun, who is on the brink of his revolution plot—the news that Maria Clara is dead.

And what is the parallel chapter in Noli chapter 24? Hauntingly, it is the memorable scene of the picnic, when the young lovers are completely blissful and Elias the pilot saves them from the crocodile, and we hear a full poem by Rizal sung in Maria Clara's voice—sweet are the hours in one's native land.

How eerie to have these two chapters 24 side by side, like inverted envelopes in which one scene enfolds the other, so that the news of Maria Clara's death encloses her voice in the past, singing Rizal's distant poem of his country, and the song of Maria Clara in the Noli encloses her future as un cadaver, destroyed by a priest's lust, in the Fili. This twinned incidence, coincidence or not, is chilling and moving. It is correct that the most moving twin chapters of the two books are of Maria Clara—she is the ghost of the dyadic, of the primal memory of wholeness, that haunts Rizal's twin books (and who knows, perhaps Rizal—and so his nation), heightening the social fractures and tragic personal fissions in his texts.

Regarding the dyadic in Maria Clara, that is, her figuration as the site of her beau Crisostomo Ibarra's Freudian primal attachment, I base this on the balikbayan azotea scene in the Noli when the two lovers tease each other about how they remembered/did not remember the other during Ibarra's absence. Ibarra's romantic memory of Maria Clara is framed by his recall of Europe: a cosmopolitan, continental, and, according to the narrator, mentiroso (lying) effusion that describes Germany, Italy, and Andalusia as much as it recalls Maria Clara.

Maria Clara's sweet, intimate memory is of the past; it encompasses mothers. Her recall is of his mother's death when they were children and the leaves of sage she gave him at her dying, remembering how that day they were united in a shared grief: the loss of a mother. Maria Clara also reminds him (via a fatal love letter she keeps in her bosom) of his father's last words. In that scene, Maria Clara literally binds him to patria: patrimony and nation.

Other accidents of analogy occurred as I reread. In chapter 5 of both novels, for instance—in Fili chapter 5, Basilio, an orphan, returns home to San Diego on Christmas break; in Noli chapter 5, Ibarra, who has just been told why he is now an orphan, is spending his first night home on his return to Manila. Orphan versus orphan return home in these parallel chapters. These hallucinatory mirrorings kept happening as I reread Rizal's two books: fun-house returns of doubling scenes. Of course, it is also my own mind that I see; perhaps hallucination, this diplopia, is my modus operandi. But this rereading in tandem is a productive hallucination I'd recommend—for one thing, this reading in tandem is neither homicidal nor heinous. It is only Borgesian—not murderous, but Menardian.

In the analogy created by this reading in tandem, Ibarra, the upper-class victim of priests, is translated in the Fili into Basilio, the lower-class victim of priests. Thus, in the Fili, Rizal recasts his hero, turning the upper class into the lower class, and so in the Noli, vice versa. And just as after the Noli, Simoun transfuses/translates (in Tagalog: nagsalin) into Elias, into what will Basilio, still alive at the end of the Fili, transform?

Remember that Rizal was a sculptor, too, familiar with recasting: remolding and overlaying forms.

This sculptural, structural twinning gets underlined in the mirrored narration strategies of chapter 6 of both novels: Fili chapter 6 is a flashback, telling the backstory of Basilio, that is, the saga of the education of a poor servant kid. But interestingly, Noli chapter 6 is also a flashback, telling the backstory of Capitan Tiago, that is, the saga of how a vacuous wealthy kid becomes wealthier. Constantly, Noli's chapters on the elite become implicated in the saga of the lower classes through analogous mirrorings in the Fili. Talk about demonio de las comparaciones.

Asymmetries, mirrors, and the art of the novel

There are, of course, asymmetries that deny my mirroring fancy: Maria Clara's locket (Noli chapter 27) returns in the Fili in chapters with no numerical hauntings (chapters 4, 8, and 10); many minor characters like the Noli's great Hamletian gravedigger, who has no name, or the Fili's Mautang, who weirdly does, occur only once, though Mautang's sidekick, called el Carolino (the Caroline), it turns out, is Juli's brother Tano, one more lost boy from the Noli. Not only minor, but some key figures do not recur or double, most significantly the unfound body of the sad, vanished sacristan and haunting child laborer, Crispin. (Question: if Tano appears, can Crispin be far behind?) Padre Florentino is a key character, the lone good priest, "an indio cleric," who occurs only in the Fili.

But there are enough doublings or returns from Noli to Fili to fill a baklad or tampipi. Surely one can also say he's just a writer with a narrow imagination—maybe Rizal just doesn't have too many plots. But it is fascinating to imagine how these doublings and analogies in the two novels allow us to imagine Rizal's problems as a writer and his self-critiques. Rizal, in his ephemera, his letters, or his science jottings, is garrulous—about boxing, books, or bagoong. But he never talks much about his art; he talks about problems with nation, not narration.

The amazingly persistent mirroring of structures, characters, scenes, and tropes in the Noli and Fili tells us that, in some way, the Fili does perhaps rewrite the Noli. But Rizal does it not, as I had imagined, only by his narration modes but also by his weird doublings. The doublings capture, but in elusive and not strictly absolute ways, how Rizal commented, through the Fili, on the Noli's devices. He questioned them, resculpted them, reframed binaries of elites and masses, or indio and Spaniard, or civil and religious, or slave and revolutionary, and so wondered about his art. Someone else can write a whole book on that.

It is only by chapter 7 of the Noli that Rizal moves into extended free indirect discourse, in the third-person limited voice of Maria Clara. Most of the novel is in persuasive third-person omniscient, but a fluid omniscience that sometimes veers into an intimate, gossiping plural first. The first trace of extended free indirect discourse in the Fili is also the psychological perspective of a woman: Basilio's superstitious girlfriend, Juli. But unlike the Noli, by chapter 4 onward, the Fili moves easily into multiple third person perspectives, indirect and free indirect modes of various characters—he ventriloquizes the psychological perceptions of the untutored Juli, the unlettered wit of the coachman carrying the medical student Basilio back home, the grief and terror of Basilio confronting the frighteningly radical Simoun in that creepy place of textual doubling, "Ibarra's wood" (which is the site of Elias's death in the Noli and entombs both the focus of Basilio's grief, his maddened mother Sisa, and the focus of Simoun's grief, Ibarra's noble friend Elias: not to mention the Gothic death-plot of the land-grabbing colonizer, Ibarra's ancestor with no name), and so on.

So fluid in his use of perspective in the Fili, Rizal thus seems to have liberated himself from the straitjacket of the omniscient editorial voice in the Noli, giving consciousness to multiple voices in his new, confident, but experimental style, from chapter 4 onward. For such a young writer, working only on his second book, Rizal displays no nerves, making unexpected moves, some noted by Ben Anderson already in readings of the chapter "Tatakut" in Why Counting Counts, among his other comments on the Fili. It is no wonder the Fili is less taught in Philippine high school classes—the book is interested also in consciousness, not just country. Rizal shifts in and out of the minds of casual cynic Pecson, cowardly bully Juanito, opportunistic but oppressed Quiroga—a whole panoply of tipos Manilenses, as Rizal the scientist-cataloger called them—in ways that, for me, seem to acknowledge the flat urgencies of the Noli's singular propaganda voice. But interestingly, even as he moves into fresh narrative territory while recycling old plots, he honors the problems of Filipino discourse he had solved in the Noli. A novel quite clearly about the "social cancer" of colonialism, the Fili also ponders the art of the novel—pondering, in my view, Rizal's first novel, the Noli, in particular.

Chapter 7 is a touchstone passage in both the Fili's themes and the Fili's art. Chapter 7 of the Fili is a gorgeous set piece. Amazingly reflexive, it weaves perhaps one of the most complex reader-writer-text-(language)-nation webs in Philippine writing—that imagined community in novels that I find most persistently engrossing and problematic in my own experience of writing novels. It's important to recognize here that the central plot of the Fili puts the novel in reflexive, refractive, mirroring territory. The Fili's plot is the reading/writing theme of language itself—a key topic for any writer but, in many ways, the cri de coeur of the Filipino.

The students in chapter 2 are agitating for a Castilian Academy in Manila, a school for teaching Spanish.

Thus, a crisis of language is the plot's pivot.

Rizal asks: Is it revolutionary for Filipinos to learn Spanish?

What's language got to do with it?

For me, a novelist, what I hear loudly here is the self-critical question of the writer Rizal: what does it mean for him to be writing a Filipino novel, "hold[ing] a mirror up to nature," in Spanish?

This question implicates the text within this text, the Noli—because by the time he was writing the Fili, IRL the Noli, as we know, had the odd effect of being a bomb, una mecha, set among friars who wished to kill him. It was also the fuse, una mecha, a call to action, among Filipinos who wished to follow him, precisely for his art-crime of convincingly mirroring (considering any number of projections and misrecognitions such mirroring entails) the conditions of Rizal's Philippines.

In Fili chapter 7, Simoun says to Basilio, whom he accuses as a lower-order thinker, that is, a reformist, who does not understand that a Filipino's misplaced faith in Spain's civil authority is a radical failure of self-analysis:

Go ahead, ask for Hispanization and do not blanch from shame when they tell you no…You want to add another language to the forty-odd we already speak here so we can understand one another even less?

Simoun's continuing speech is a beautiful expletive that explodes, in a singular tongue, the problem of having multiple tongues. He delivers his illuminating rant on the Castilian in illuminating Castilian:

El español nunca será lenguaje general en el pais, el pueblo nunca lo hablará porque para las concepciones de su cerebro y los sentimientos de su corazon no tiene frases ese idioma: cada pueblo tiene el suyo, como tiene su manera de sentir. ¿Qué vais á conseguir con el castellano, los pocos que lo habeis de hablar? ¡Matar vuestra originalidad, subordinar vuestros pensamientos á otros cerebros y en vez de haceros libres haceros verdaderamente esclavos!

How odd for Simoun to ventriloquize this point that Rizal has, in fact, already made quite moot through the persuasive explosion that was his last novel, the Noli:

Spanish will never be the language of the country, the people of the country will never speak it because for the thoughts of their own mind and sentiments of their heart that idiom does not have phrases: each people has its own tongue, as it has its own manner of feeling. What will you gain with Spanish, the few who will speak it? Kill your originality, subordinate your thoughts to others' minds and instead of gaining your freedom make yourselves truly into slaves!

(all translations are from the Penguin Classic editions of Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, translated by Harold Augenbraum)

The breathtaking reflexivity in this passage is contradictory, provocative, and dizzying on several levels. One, Simoun, speaking in Spanish, convicts himself as one of the verdaderamente esclavos (truly enslaved); two, Basilio, understanding Simoun's Spanish (he functions, too, as the reader's proxy in the passage), is thus complicit and so also esclavo; three, the Filipino reader who understands Simoun's Spanish is also part of the textual crime, that is, esclavo; four, the novel, written in Spanish, is destabilized explicitly by the writer who devised this passage denouncing el españnol the writer, writing in Spanish, convicts himself, too, by the damning words he fashions in Simoun's oracular voice. (Only the Filipino who does not read, write, or speak Spanish is null in this speech—a question for a different essay.)

This conviction by language—to play on that English pun—raises the specter (or speculum, Latin for mirror, as Rizal's pedant Sybila might note, using one more of Rizal's tongues) of that great mirror-novel hidden in the Fili—that is, the Noli. But he (and we) also know the Noli has paradoxically already opened the eyes of the verdaderamente esclavos—in some sense freeing them (and in terms of the Noli's reach, this is true not only of those Filipinos who read Spanish but also extends its voice to us, those who read it in translation, in its wake).

And so Rizal questions both the Noli and himself, wondering about his own originality and subordination, one of "the few who will speak it." At the same time, he frees himself from the bondage of being the iconic author of the Noli, indicted by Simoun as a suspect text, while also, oddly enough, recognizing the Noli's power.

By what awry, magical stroke, then, does Rizal in this passage complicate his novels but also conjure the problems of the Filipino reader of his novels?

He creates a destabilized, reflexive people who must cross-examine who they are. Or, in a sense, they must recognize themselves through misrecognition as a constantly lost and yet also found figure of translation—translation being the site of their lost-and-profound humanity—when they read the nation in Rizal's words.

This is the crux of ourselves as a nation—and the problem of all our novelists. We exist indelibly in translation, even among ourselves as fellow speakers of our intramural Filipino languages—Ilonggo or Waray or Tagalog or Ilocano or Cebuano and so on—but also in relation to our power speeches (currently English, though Tagalog is also a "colonizer" language in some spaces). We are subjected, and mediated, and lost yet found in our multiple texts—and tongues. We are thus born, in Simoun's speech, into the reality of our multiple speech selves.

Very early on, like a prescient prophet of our "postcoloniality," as some call our traumatic yet also utterly human condition, Rizal in his novels grapples explicitly with the labyrinth of language that defines us.

As the student Sandoval exclaims in Fili chapter 14: "What does the integrity of the state have to do with the rules of syntax?!"

Well, Rizal, the reflexive novelist, might say—everything.

The art of the sphinx

Of course, one must also take Simoun's speech with a grain of salt. Rizal's dialogues are diabolically dialectical. To be honest, as a writer, I most envy Rizal's skill as a pellucid debater of plural ideas in conversations, powerful in both the Noli and the Fili. It's hard to do because you must imagine conviction on both sides; they each must have their own humanity and stakes.

Rizal's correct choice is to do it in formula, as a pattern, a recurring weave that the reader expects. In Fili chapter 7, one is meant to refract Simoun's speech through Basilio's (the proxy reader's) modest skepticism in the scene. As the novel unfolds, Simoun—versus such idealists as the poet Isagani or hopeful cynics like the student Pecson and so on—keeps shape-shifting: he is a masked, unstable truth-teller.

This ambiguity is deliberate. Rizal is very aware of personalities as analogies, comparaciones rather than singularities, existing within a dialectic of ideas and forces, not simply as a flat image without a glass backing—without a mirror of comparisons. It is hard to see the elite Simoun without seeing his translation, or reflection, in the poor orphan Basilio in the scenes they have with each other, or to view the poet Isagani without his twin, lawyer Señor Pasta, or his other co-duelist, Father Fernandez. Enfolded in Isagani are the demands of law and church. Scene by scene, Rizal keeps projecting one character in the other, and not only that, one book into the other, mirroring perhaps the multiplicity of his own desires and, more obviously, the rigors of his highly reflexive intellect.

It's hard to be a hero if your mind can consistently hold two contradictory notions at once.

But in many ways, that is a novelist's job.

As I noted in the novel Raymundo Mata, it is no accident that in Rizal's two books, the middle name—or matronymic—of Ibarra, his hero, is Magsalin, an infinitive verb, a pun, meaning both to translate and to transfuse blood. To me, the name shows how aware Rizal was of words, homonyms, and doubling texts running in our veins. In his Miscellaneous Writings, a notebook jotting his daily observations as a student, he gossips about his friends, such as the risk-taking fop, Pedro Paterno, in code—even IRL Rizal's a word trickster.

In the Quiapo Fair chapter of the Fili, called "Supercherías," or Tricks, the character Simoun, who is really Ibarra in disguise, gets a magician to set up a talking Sphinx's head to entertain a group of priests, who include Padre Salvi, María Clara's abuser. The Sphinx's head tells an ancient Egyptian story about a powerful priest's lust for a defenseless girl. The reader understands that the superchería, or trick, is that through the magician's hidden mirrors, it is Simoun, as Sphinx, who is fabricating this tale that mirrors details of Padre Salvi's abuse. Padre Salvi faints as he hears his secrets told aloud in the dark magician's den.

One hears Rizal laughing as he sets up the unexpected cryptogram for resurrecting that cryptic head in the Fili's Quiapo Fair chapter. The password, the code for the Sphinx's speech, is Deremof. Deremof is an anagram, not in his novel's Spanish but in unexpected yet prophetic English. (By the way, Rizal makes zero effort to help us figure this out.) The oracular code Deremof is this instructive and amazing, double-tongued sword. Deremof is the anagram of the nation's desire, but Rizal in the Spanish-language novel Fili speaks that desire in scrambled English.

Deremof = freedom.

Researching the Philippine-American war, when I recall this prolepsis—this linguistic future-telling in the Fili, by which Rizal oddly leaps toward the nation's capture, two years after his death, by America—my head spins.

Any consideration of the representation of the elite or of peasants, or of the diaspora, or of womanhood and any other similar themes must consider the profoundly analogical, refractive acts of representation that run through these novels. I do not see anything flat in the work of Rizal. There is trickery in his texts. I read him as a demonic comparative thinker—highly aware of readership, or acts of reading and writing in the text.

For instance, I note Rizal's name for the Sphinx-head in "Supercherías" — its name is Imuthis—so I scrambled it for other, possible anagrams: Himuti (s) in Tagalog would be someone becoming pale or white. But one more scrambling came up with himitsu. It's a Japanese word—and it's significant here that Rizal had spent some months in Japan, with an alleged Japanese sweetheart to boot. In addition, japonaiserie was all the rage in Paris at the time: in one of his letters, Rizal notes how at a museum he is mistaken for Japanese, and just for fun, he pretend-speaks Japanese to the white man, enacting one more innocent anticolonial subversion.

The word himitsu, in Japanese, means secret.

If we give credit to discretion in Rizal's Sphinx-like, riddling art practice, even this secret he declined to reveal. Again, nothing in extensive, published Rizaliana has mentioned this code.

Rizal was a trickster; he liked secrets, jokes, puns.

These art gestures in his novels must be front and center in any reading of his words—and thus of ourselves. Even in his practice as a novelist, he exercised a grounding political ethos—reflexivity. He found a way to reread himself, and so forged his fresh, astonishing style in the Fili. He creates, in the figure of Simoun, his unsparing twin of himself, a doppelganger—a desperate, despairing fixer of plots.

That is, a fictionist.

Where the ball not yet is

Too often, we fail to imagine Rizal as a writer who is creating fiction, though yes, a persistent reading of nation, Rizal's Philippines, conjured in the fascinatingly unstable mirror of his words, dominates the text.

We often think of the Fili's ending—that disappointing, vacillating response to revolution in the scene of Simoun's death—as Rizal's absolute commentary on revolution. But it's also possible to see Rizal as more Gramscian than not: the concept of "decisive conjuncture" might be a good way to think about revolution and Rizal. The founder of Italy's Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci, emphasizes how revolution (but sadly also devolution) is a contingent matter, the success of which depends on the ability to analyze correctly and seize the historical moment. The Fili is a novel always in the contingent moment of revolution—its outcome is contingent even as it ends. Its decisive moment is still in suspense.

On the other hand, it's odd how Rizal failed in his work to fully envision contemporary, real-life revolutionary figures like Mabini or Bonifacio, verdaderos filibusteros par excellence, who seem to exist on a different historical plane than the novels, though Mabini and Bonifacio both avidly read Rizal.

I like to think that Rizal, like any other novelist, imagined himself writing his next book. A writer, like a good soccer player, plays toward that spot in the future—where the ball not yet is. The Victorian novel, as we know, was historically read in threes, called triple-deckers. I like to imagine Rizal had that third book in mind.

But as we also know, Rizal did not live to write, or finish, another novel. In this sense, what happens after the Fili is still undone, unwritten, perhaps like the nation or revolution?

But the ending of the Fili can also be seen as Rizal's artistic response to the Noli. What psychological acuities, aesthetic considerations, and political moves are gained, refashioned, and lost when one moves into unfixed and vagabond free indirect discourse? You have a more reflective, doubting, politically and psychologically ambiguous character in Simoun—more ambiguous certainly than the mourned-for, faithful Elias—because, like any emerging writer (he was not yet thirty after all, still okay for the Whiting Award), Rizal's narrative technique had changed.

I imagine this as his conundrum: what to think of his very effective Noli as he enjoys a different way to write? Can a writer molt from his first book, leaving it behind? His was not quite the dilemma of the second-book author, but let's imagine. As if it were the nation's treasured, precious Noli that at the end of the Fili the priest Florentino throws into the sea, his encomium on the Noli being this invocation, which ends El Filibusterismo: "When men need you for a holy, sublime reason, God will pull you from the bosom of your waves."

Few Filipinos would wish to withhold from the Noli those adjectives—holy and sublime. Not I.

On one level, as noted, the Fili is a university novel, and many of its powerful scenes in free indirect discourse are set among students. I've written three university novels about revolt, and so I do see my biases here—in fact, my book Gun Dealers' Daughter was written with the Fili in mind, including a character whose rebel name is Simoun.

Among Rizal's student chapters, my favorite is chapter 13 in the Fili, "La clase de fisica." After considering the dizzying puzzle of mirror structures in Rizal's two novels, how fascinating to read that this chapter centers on the trope that illuminates what I consider Rizal's major device for evoking the nation in his novel diptych, as literary theorist Neil Garcia names the pair of novels, the Noli and the Fili, so uniting them as one.

(Though, as I said, for me, I see Rizal going for the triple-decker. One of my speculations that I sent Anderson: if the rediscovered, unfinished Makamisa, found by historian Ambeth Ocampo in mislabeled folders in the National Archives, were the third novel, begun in Tagalog, with a character named Ysagani, a religious kid luckless in love, Makamisa could hint at a flashback history, going back further in time, in analepsis, way before the Noli. Rizal's use of the name Ysagani I link to the good priest Florentino, whose backstory is also about lost love. Padre Florentino is the figure who throws Simoun's jewel box into the ocean at the end of the Fili. Why is he the book's last character? Because his story jumpstarts the next one. I'd make Padre Florentino's first name be Ysagani; thus, Ysagani Florentino, who later has a nephew who bears his name. Basilio, the doctor-orphan, and Isagani, the priest's nephew, happen to be the last rebel students standing in the Fili—thus, in the third novel, Basilio and Isagani would herald the new Filipino. So I told Ben Anderson. I knew Ben loved speculation; he took my bait, and he wrote me back. Unfortunately, he died before we finished the conversation. His last words to me were: "You make it very interesting!!!!"—four exclamation points. And now I will never know just how crazy he thought my idea was.)

In Fili chapter 13, a satirical chapter set in a physics class, Rizal's illuminating plot device is a mirror. Padre Millon, the sadistic physics teacher who is also an idiot, makes students memorize a numbing definition of that basic subject of materials physics: un espejo—

Se da el nombre de espejo á toda superficie pulimentada, destinada á producir por la reflexion de la luz las imágenes de los objetos situados delante de dicha superficie por las sustancias que forman estas superficies se dividen en espejos metálicos y espejos de cristal…

The name mirror is given to all polished surfaces, destined to produce by the reflection of light the images of objects placed in front of said surface by substances that form these surfaces divided into metallic mirrors and glass mirrors…

This theme of reflexivity, or reflection, or doubling, or mirroring, becomes the literal center of this chapter satirizing education in Spanish in the Philippines (and is succeeded by the Quiapo Fair chapter on mirror tricks, and so on), thus causing a vertigo of refraction in this self-referential text. Because the novel, of course—any novel, really—but especially this novel, is also a trick with mirrors, as is Imuthis/Ibarra's storytelling deception in the Quiapo chapter: "Destined to produce by the reflection of light the images of objects placed in front of said surfaces…"

This scene of the mirror in a physics class conjures another vertigo of images—an infinite regression of reflections that is the fatal, unstable condition of novel-writing, a knowing deception that attempts truth, but also a "truth" founded on "tricks" (supercherías)—enclosing as a novel does the projections and mirrorings of the reader, the writer, the novel, and the world it hopes to mirror (which includes the reader, the writer, and so on, ad infinitum). When we address the Fili by a close reading of his narration moves, Rizal's work becomes a text somewhat like Borges's Library of Babel, a vertiginous mirror of a universe—in Rizal's case, more modestly, a nation. "Whimsical," yes, but intriguing.

That fleeting act

By trying to describe what the novels were doing as novels, I found myself in a surprising conversation with Rizal's books. I experienced a pleasure that I had not realized before I sat down to describe their effects. By closely reading the novels for their art moves, instead of depending on my own hazy memories of my prejudices, I learned to appreciate the Noli in ways that had escaped me, and my rereading taught me to imagine a writer's secret moves that, too, had eluded me.

In Raymundo Mata's pursuit of Rizal in my book The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, Raymundo's deep disappointment in Dapitan was that he never saw signs of Rizal writing. It is as if, ultimately, by this gap, Raymundo could not be with Rizal—in intimacy, in knowing. And now perhaps I can tentatively answer why, in that novel, my character Raymundo kept trying but never read the Fili—I could never actually picture Rizal revising, which, to me, is the heart of writing. I could not see him so vulnerable.

Reading his novels in tandem for this project, I finally pictured him in that fleeting, painfully mortal, ordinary act, central to my own concept of writing and too often absent in our concept of Rizal, or perhaps more dangerously, our concept of nation: the act of revision.

Rereading the Fili and Noli in tandem, I finally found Rizal revising. And in this sense, through doubling, I finally found my elusive intimacy—as a novelist, as a reader, as a Filipino—with Rizal. It is my own private Rizal, of course. But after all, it is this dyadic communing, this impossible striving for intimacy, if not wholeness, that all of us want, and which language tells us we will not consummate. And yet, we try.