•B.

Anatomy of
Anti-Hero by
Nick Joaquin
Nicomedes Márquez Joaquín (1917–2004) was a Filipino writer and journalist best known for his short stories and novels in the
English language. He also wrote using the pen name Quijano de Manila. In 1976, Joaquin was conferred the rank and title of
National Artist of the Philippines for Literature. He has been considered one of the most important Filipino writers, along with
José Rizal and Claro M. Recto. Unlike Rizal and Recto, whose works were written in Spanish, Joaquin's major works were
written in English despite being a native Spanish speaker.

Before becoming one of the leading practitioners of Philippine literature in English, he was a seminarian in Hong Kong – who
later realized that he could better serve God and humanity by being a writer. This is reflected in the content and style of his
works, as he emphasizes the need to restore national consciousness through important elements of Catholic Spanish
Heritage.

In his self-confessed mission as a writer, he is a sort of "cultural apostle" whose purpose is to revive interest in Philippine
national life through literature – and provide the necessary drive and inspiration for a fuller comprehension of their cultural
background. His awareness of the significance of the past to the present is part of a concerted effort to preserve the spiritual
tradition and the orthodox faith of the Catholic past – which he perceives as the only solution to our modern ills.
• The Guerrero book, in English, is a biography in the modern
manner, where the details are massed not for their scholarly but
their emotional value, and the delineation is by narrative, crafted,
progressive and dramatic like a novel, and just as readable,
though the style is hardly Guerrero at his felicitous best.

• The Radaic piece, in Spanish, is a psychoanalysis of Rizal, with

emphasis on his formative years, and has clinical fascination,
though rather prolix and turgid in the writing, its special quality
evident in its sources, which range, not from Retana to
Blumentritt, as one would expect in a Rizal study, but from Rilke
and Dostoevsky to Proust and Joyce!
• The Guerrero opus is magnum. It's a massive tome (over 500 pages), has 24
pages of bibliographical references, was unanimously awarded the first prize
in the biography contest during the Rizal centennial. It was published by the
National Heroes Commission, has so far been received by what one editor
calls "a conspiracy of silence," but can be expected to find its way to the top
of the Rizal shelf and into every debate over the hero's personality.

• The Radaic study is basically an extended essay, and a tentative one; the
author subtitled it "An Introduction to a Study of Rizal's Inferiority Complex."
It's [end of page 53] barely 70 pages long and is still in manuscript, awaiting
translator and publisher. It begins with an exposition of Adler's theories,
concludes with a letter of Kafka to his father. Radaic, a Yugoslavian exile,
finished his study in late 1963, just before his tragic death
• For epigraph, Guerrero uses the words of Cromwell quoted above and two
lines from Othello:

• Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate

• Nor set down aught in Malice.

• Radaic's epigraph is from Alfred Adler:

• "To be human is to feel inferior and to aspire to situations of superiority."

• Guerrero accepts the retraction as genuine: "That is a matter for handwriting experts, and the weight of expert
opinion is in favor of authenticity. It is nonsense to say that the retraction does not prove Rizal's conversion; the
language of the document is unmistakable. It is a truism that the recantation of his religious errors did not involve the
repudiation of his political aims. We may also accept that he was not too fervent a Mason. In fact Rizal himself
stated that he had ceased being a Mason in 1891. Why should it be so strange then for Rizal to 'abhor' Masonry as
a society when he had in fact already left it four years before? One whose sympathies are not engaged on either
side must face the authenticity of the instrument of retraction, on the one hand, and, on the other, the admitted
failure of the intellectual assault on Rizal's position, and can only wonder what it was that happened to the decided
rationalist who had promised to kneel and pray for the grace of faith."

• For Radaic, Rizal is "a mystery still to be revealed," a sphinx who, even in the impulsive confessions of his youth,
already knew what not to tell -- which is why, says Radaic, not everything has yet been said about Rizal, including,
perhaps, the most important facts: "While gazing at pictures of that giant of small and delicate body, many Filipinos
must have felt as I did when I first came to know about him, a few years ago, in Europe -- that behind the well-
buttoned frock coat was hidden a deep and delicate human problem." Radaic suspects that Rizal suffered from
complexes of inferiority (he terms them "complejos de Rizal") and that these arose from a belief that he was
physically defective. It's necessary, says Radaic, to do for Rizal what Socrates did for philosophy, bringing it down
from heaven to earth, not to degrade it but to understand it better.
Guerrero's Rizal

• For Guerrero, Rizal is "the very embodiment of the intelligentsia and the petite bourgeoisie":

• "One gathers from Rizal's own account of his boyhood that he was brought up in
circumstances that even in the Philippines of our day would be considered privileged. Rizal's
father became one of the town's wealthiest men, the first to build a stone house and buy
another, keep a carriage, own a library, and send his children to school in Manila. José
himself had an aya, that is to say, a nanny or personal servant, although he had five elder
sisters who, in less affluent circumstances, could have been expected to look after him. His
father engaged a private tutor for him. Later, he would study in private schools, go to the
university, finish his courses abroad. It was the classic method for producing a middle-class
intellectual, and it does much to explain the puzzling absence of any real social
consciousness in Rizal's apostolate so many years after Marx's Manifesto or, for that matter,
Leo XIII's Rerum Nova- [end of page 55] rum. Rizal's nationalism was essentially rationalist,
anti-racist, anti-clerical -- political rather than social or economic."
• Guerrero surmises that, even if born a peasant and in penury, Rizal would still have made his mark: "His character, in a different
environment, with a different experience of the world, might have made him another Bonifacio." But, reared in bourgeois ease, Rizal
became a bourgeois idealist, putting his faith in reason and the
• liberal dogmas of the inevitability of progress, like any proper Victorian, and preferring reform to revolution, and "revolution from
above" to "revolution from below." What he wanted to be -- what he might have been if the policy of the ilustrados had prevailed –
was representative for the Philippines in the Spanish parliament. Reported Governor Carnicero from Dapitan in 1892: "One of
Rizal's ambitions is to become Deputy for the Philippines, for, once in the Cortes, he says that he could expose whatever happens
in the islands,"

And Guerrero's laughing comment is: "Congressman Rizal, and a congressman dedicated to making exposures, at that!" This ambition
of Rizal must have been well-known among the ilustrados; one of their plans to spring him from jail in 1896 was to get him elected to the
Cortes; the governor-general would then have been forced to release him so he could go to Spain and attend parliament.

• As the Philippine representative in Madrid, says Guerrero, Rizal would have worked for the expulsion of the friars, the sale of their
estates to the new middle class, the establishment of a certain measure of self-government in the islands and more native
participation in it; and this would have resulted in an alternation in power between conservatives and liberals, this political activity
being, however, limited to the educated and the propertied. In other words, the two political parties would have represented only one
social class; the bourgeoisie. If this is really what Rizal envisioned, then his dream has come to pass, for the two political parties
that alternate in power today are limited to the educated and the propertied and actually represent only the middle class.

• Yet there was a Bonifacio latent in Rizal, according to Guerrero, who calls him "the reluctant revolutionary." El Filibusterismo in 1891
shows the hero divided.
• Observes Guerrero:

• "'Assimilation' has been rejected as a vain hope. 'Separatism,' or in plainer

words, independence, has been advocated almost openly. Rizal in the Fili is
no longer the loyal reformer; he is the 'subversive' separatist, making so little
effort of concealment that he arrogantly announces his purpose in the very
title of his novel, which means 'subversion.' No solution except
independence! But how is it to be achieved? At this point Rizal hesitates and
draws back. The last chapters of the Fili are heavily corrected, and it may not
have been due only to Rizal's desperate need to cut down his novel to match
Ventura's money. The thought of revolution in real life may have called up too
many 'bloody apparitions.'"
• So, Father Florentino is made to deny in the final apostrophe of the novel that freedom must be won at
the point of the sword: "What is the use of independence if the slaves of today will be the tyrants of
tomorrow?"

• "What," asks Guerrero, "are we to conclude from this? In Rizal's mind the Filipinos of his generation
were not yet ready for revolution because they were not yet ready for independence, and they were not
ready for independence because they were still unworthy of it."

• The Hamlet split in Rizal between the will to act and the tendency to scruple preceded the flagrant
schizophrenia of El Fili- [end of page 56] busterismo. In 1887 he was saying that "peaceful struggle will
always turn out to be a futile dream because Spain will never learn the lesson of her former colonies in
South America." That was the Bonifacio in Rizal speaking. But Rizal the man of property quickly added:
"In the present circumstances, we do not desire a separation from Spain; all that we ask is more
attention, better education, a higher quality of government officials, one or two representatives in
parliament, and more security for ourselves and our fortunes." Four months later, he turned 26, and
both sides of him wrote: "I have no desire to take part in conspiracies which seem to me premature and
risky in the extreme. But if the government drives us to it, if there remains no other hope than to seek
our ruin in war, then I too shall advocate violent means."
• "It was Rizal," says Guerrero, "who taught his countryman (sic) that they could be something
else, Filipinos who were members of a Filipino Nation. He was the first who sought to 'unite
the whole archipelago' and envisioned a 'compact and homogeneous society' of all the old
tribal communities from Batanes to the Sulu Sea, based on common interests and 'mutual
protection' rather than on the Spanish friar's theory of double allegiance to Spain and
Church.
• "He would arouse a consciousness of national unity, of a common grievance and common fate. He
would work through his writings, overleaping the old barriers of sea and mountain and native dialect,
from Vigan to Dapitan. Without this new middle class of which he was the exemplar, now national by
grace of school, the printing press, and [end of page 58] newly discovered interests in common, the
Kabite Revolution of 1896 might not have had greater significance than that of 1872. Instead, what
might have been only one more peasant revolution, what might have been a Tagalog uprising to be
crushed as before with levies from Pampanga or the Ilokos or the Bisayas, was transformed into the
revolution of a new nation. It was Rizal who would persuade the principales, and with them, and
sometimes through them, the peasants and the artisans that they were all equally 'Filipinos,' and in so
doing would justify the opportunities of his privileged birth."
• Comments Guerrero: "We think of Rizal as a mild and gentle reformer who shrank from the thought of
separation from Spain, most of all a violent revolution; it would seem that he appeared to his
contemporaries, especially after the publication of the openly subversive Fili, as a wild firebrand, as
• Radaic's Rizal

• A Victorian hero is one's ultimate picture of Guerrero's "First Filipino." Ante Radaic's "Rizal from Within" is, on the
other hand, modern man - anxious, nervous, insecure, ill at ease in his world, ridden with complexes, and afflicted
with feelings of inferiority and impotence.

• The key image is of the child Rizal, as described by his sisters Narcisa and Maria to Asunción López Bantug: "Jose
was a very tiny child. And his head grew disproportionately. When he began to walk by himself he often fell, his head
being too heavy for his frail body. Because of this, he needed an aya to look after him."

• Radaic believes that Rizal was aggrieved by his puny physique. Whether the hero was really smaller than normal, the significant
thing is that he thought he was, during the impressionable years of youth. In his "Memorias de un estudiante", written before he was
20, references to his size recur obsessively:

• "The son of the teacher was a few years older than I and exceeded me in stature… After (beating him in a fight) I gained fame
among my classmates, possibly because of my smallness … I did not dare descend into the river because it was too deep for one
my size… At first (the father at the Ateneo) did not want to admit me, perhaps because of my feeble frame and scant height …
Though I was 13 going on 14, I was still very small."
• Other people are seen in relation to his height. His teacher in Biñan is "a tall man"; his professor in Manila is "a man
of lofty stature"; and most poignantly of all, the young man presumed to be suitor of Segunda Katigbak, Rizal's first
inamorata, is "un hombre alto."

• There's evidence that Rizal had reason to be self-conscious about his physique. His brother Paciano decided
against enrolling José as a border at the Ateneo because (this is from Mrs. Bantug's account) he was timid and
small for his age." And Father Pastells of the Ateneo wrote that Rizal failed to be elected president of the college
sodality because of his "small stature."

• His sisters recalled that he insisted on joining games -- like the popular game of "giants" -- for which he was too
weak and small: "He grew up pathetically conscious of his short stature and fragile body, he made great effort to
stretch himself out in his games, and he was continually begging his father to help him grow. His little body did not
permit him to compete with boys his age but stronger than he; so he withdrew into himself. Nevertheless, the tiny lad
went on craving to become big and strong. He persisted in playing the game of 'giants.' His Uncle Manuel, seeing
the boy's avidity for advice on body building and pitying his eager envy of tougher boys, took him under his care. A
strong man full of vitality, he sought to part the boy from his books and to satisfy his craving to develop his body. He
made the boy skip, jump, run; and though this was at first hard for the frail boy, he had so strong a will and such
anxiety to improve himself that, at last, the will won over the flesh. He became lighter and quicker of movement, and
his physique more lively, more robust, more vigorous, although it didn't grow any bigger."
• Comments Radaic: "Truly, the mystery of the body is
great. It's as if every man carried within himself an ideal or
invisible image of the body, of his body; and looking in the
mirror, compares what he sees there, the visible image
that confronts him, with the invisible image he hopes to
see mysteriously reflected there. Feelings of inferiority al-
most always arise not from a confrontation of the I with
the non-I but from our confrontation with the interior image
we carry of ourselves. We measure ourselves, not against
anything outside the sphere of the I, but against our own
selves, or, rather, the ideal of ourselves we propose to
• "Rizal, as adolescent, had in his mind a clear and vexing
image of his puny stature, an image not yet repressed
into the subconscious; and it's not difficult to understand
the marks and imprints his little body stamped on his
spiritual character. Nature, as whimsical as fortune and as
rarely just, had created this little body as hovel for the
spiritual beauty of a child whose ailing soul felt itself to be
an exile from a world infinitely purer. Because of an
excess of spirit, Rizal saw his body as inadequate, and
this, in turn, influenced his complex psychological
structure."
• Radaic's point is that Rizal's career was an effort to
reduce the discrepancy between the interior image he
carried of himself and the image he saw in the mirror. The
discrepancy produced both an inferiority complex (Rizal
withdrawing into himself and his books because he could
not compete with tougher boys) and the determination to
excel (Rizal fighting the bigger boy and taking up body
building and fencing). That he already carried, as a child,
an image of himself as a great man, is demonstrated by a
childhood incident.
• Says Radaic:

• "The fights Rizal mentions in his Memorias, with boys bigger than he, against whom he
thrust his little body as though to assure himself and show others he was not so weak, are
but compulsions to compensate for his inferior build, as if he would thus attain the physical
height nature had denied him. His fights express his complexes, are an aspect of his
timorousness, a timorousness turned inside out.

• "Tormented by eternal feelings of inferiority, Rizal made a career of ascension. The struggle
between his complexes and his ever more ambitious I lifted this extraordinary man to the
supreme heights of perfection and human endeavor. His career is that of the lesser sons in
the fairy tales, who work wonders and win princesses. A Rizal well formed of body might
never have found in himself the force needed to raise himself so high for the sake of his
country."