February 1890

From: Jose Rizal
To: Vicente Barrantes

Rizal replies to Barrantes’ criticism of Noli Me Tangere – He points out Barrantes’ inconsistencies – It is a strong and courageous reply.

* * *

TO THE MOST EXCELLENT VICENTE BARRANTES[1]

MOST EXCELLENT SIR,

The honor that you confer upon me by dealing with my person and Noli me Tangere in the Seccion Hispano — UItramarina in La Espafia Moderna, January 1890, volume XIll, as well as certain insinuations and attacks you direct now to me, now to the ideas expressed in my book, give me a right to answer you, at least to defend myself and put things in their proper place. Far from being offended by the tone of your article, sometimes acrimonious, but always patronizing, though it degenerates into the language of the master, I consider myself up to a certain point obliged, for frankly, I expected a cruder and more virulent (though perhaps less malicious) attack, considering the literary past that exists between Your Excellency and me, and accustomed as I am to read the unbosoming of the journalists of my country. Your doctrinal tone and your advices move me and I find them natural in one who, like Your Excellency, is a member of the Reales Academias Espafiola y de la Historia, two peaks from which poor writers like me ought to look like pigmies or ants, who, in order to write, have yet to do it in a borrowed language.

The whole thesis and synthesis of pages 177-181 are reduced to this: That I have incurred in contradictions, that I am “a storehouse of contradictions,” because in one part of my Noli me tangere, the captain general said to my protagonist that he was “the first man with whom I talk in this country” and because I, Rizal, in La Solidaridad ask for reforms for my fellow countrymen. And for this Your Excellency calls me “a novelist of his sins, a storehouse, etc” Your Excellency says that my style is exceedingly bad. Be it known that these epithets are not my fabrication. God save me from engaging in being a novelist of the sins of Your Excellency! Your confessor should take care of that!

If Your Excellency, who throws in my face that I have cited only one proper name, speaking of outrageous friars, has not been able to find my writings more contradictions than this one, in truth I can be considered twice fortunate — first, for being more consistent than the Bible, the Gospels, the popes, and all mortals; and second, for seeing the miracle of the bread and the fishes corrected and augmented, Your Excellency establishes what you call [a] “storehouse of contradictions.” If, instead of choosing to be a literary man, Your Excellency makes yourself a shop clerk or manufacturer, holy God, how commodities would abound!

But let us examine this “contradiction.” Your Excellency writes (page 177): “ . . .Quioquiap himself does not have such a poor opinion of the Filipinos as you have, nor would he dare to put in the mouth of the captain general those sanguinary words addressed to the protagonist of Noli me tangere: ‘Mr. Ibarra, you are the first man I talk to in this country.’ You don’t even consider your compatriots men, Mr. Rizal! A Spaniard or even a Christian, I repeat, would not commit such a tremendous injustice . . .” (It seems that the best Christian is less than the last Spaniard, Mr. Barrantes?)

And I say: Neither an Indio, nor even a Tagalog,[2] would draw such a tremendous deduction! Because, in order to make a “syllogism of four legs,” as the Dominicans say, and deduce a universal conclusion from a secondary premise, it is necessary to suppose, first, that the captain general and I are equal (I would not be bound by the consequences); second, that the captain general spoke with all the Filipinos before speaking with Mr. Ibarra; third, that in every conversation His Excellency knew thoroughly his interlocutor; and fourth, that His Excellency never exaggerates.

I do not know, Most Excellent Sir, if the academicians ambarum domorum[3] have already laid down as law that the ideas expressed by the characters in a novel have to be precisely the writer’s own convictions and not what are suitable to them considering their circumstances, beliefs, habits, education, and passions. The blessed Fr. Jose Rodriguez abounds with the ideas of Your Excellency or vice versa (the order of factors does not alter the product); but until now the said friar is not yet an academician, so far as I know, though he might be, two do not make a majority in the learned corporations and even if they did, their law would have no retroactive effect. It can very well be that Your Excellency might have acquired this literary conviction from your frequent contact with the friars as proven by certain tricks of yours, certain phrases like those “to reprimand me, a novelist of my sins,” and others, which smack of the convent and seem to be of the very same Fr. Jose Rodriguez. Until now, unable to give freedom to my country, I give it to my characters and I let my captain general say what he wants without bothering about reciprocity. I had learned besides from the authors of rhetoric and poetics what they call mixed laws in which diverse characters and the author himself intervene. In the narration are attributed to the character what they say and to the author what he says. To Caesar what is Caesar’s! But this is too much to ask. I shall be satisfied if they would tell me whether or not my characters have life and a character of their own, if they act and speak according to their circumstances and different manners of thinking and they lay aside my own convictions.

But, transeat,[4] let us adopt for a moment the Rodriguez-Barrantes Law. I am the spirit, I am the captain general himself; I have spoken with “all” the Filipinos; I have understood them and I have even spoken with the last Ibarra; I did not find a single man. Good! To what literary law will you resort now, Your Excellency, in order to nullify the corrective that Ibarra applies to “my” incontrovertible words? Because if Your Excellency had read the following lines, you would not have committed this “tremendous injustice” that neither a Spaniard nor even a Christian, would commit, nor would he have written so many pages resembling the digressions of those who write on what does not exist.

In fact Ibarra replies in the following lines:

Your Excellency has seen only those who crawl

in the city; had you visited the slandered hovels of

our towns, Your Excellency would have been able

to see true men, if to be a man it is enough to

have a generous heart and simple customs.

Who speaks now for Ibarra, Most Excellent Sir? Would it be perchance Your Excellency? And then, what happens to the Rodriguez-Barrantes Law? And then, why [does] you’re your Excellency say afterwards that Ibarra and Rizal are the same? Either we are or we are not? I do not like to attribute to bad faith Your Excellency’s way of citing. Accuse me of injustice and keep silent on the reply that is precisely in the next line! That is called in plain language to deceive the public, Most Excellent Sir. Your Excellency has been civil governor and director of administration in my country for many years. Your Excellency is a consummate literary man, you have a grand style and irreproachable pen. Your Excellency is a member of royal and learned academies and you never contradict yourself. Your Excellency is rich in years, experience, and honors and you belong to a superior and privileged race. I am a pariah, a poor expatriate, a bad literary writer with the worst style, a “storehouse of contradictions,” an inexperienced young man, and of an enslaved race, and despite all that I am going to dare give you an advice in exchange for what you give me paternally. When one has the titles and aspirations of Your Excellency, one must write with more good faith and more sincerity. One must not hold on the tricks of the polemists of the cafes, for as Your Excellency itself says “learning is not the best emblem or the exclusive attribute of man but virtues and moral endowments.” What Your Excellency says of man can be applied to the critic and historian.

For the same reason I find highly censurable the assertion that you attribute to me on page 179 in which you say that I call “carpenters” the modest artists of Santa Cruz and Paete. By what reason, Most Excellent Sir? How could Your Excellency see in the phrase carpinterias de Paete in my Noli me tangere the shops of sculpture of Santa Cruz? Does Your Excellency think that the district of Santa Cruz is inside the carpentry shop of that town of my province? Your Excellency in another article places Colombo apparently outside of Ceylon and now you yield to the opposite vice: you put towns inside others like the boxes of the jugglers. To what system do you adhere? Come now, Your Excellency has done it to discredit me in the eyes of my compatriots, or is it because Your Excellency does not know how to read and now you want to pose as defender of the Indios who remembers so many things about Your Excellency? Thus cited also Fr. Rodriguez and following that system, the Holy Ghost itself can come down to write and I assure you that it will come out stripped of honor. That is why Your Excellency doubts my love for truth, because in some things I do not agree with Your Excellency. Your Excellency, it is evident, disposes of the truth at your pleasure and monopolizes it! But returning to the cruel words of my general, I shall admit that they are cruel, very cruel, indeed, but they are not false, considering the personality of the speaker. Your Excellency speaks with greater cruelty even on page 180 and you are a Spaniard and a Christian and you already had before your eyes the satire of my general. Your Excellency says:

In truth, in truth, I have looked indefatigably

with the very same lantern of Diogenes throughout the

Archipelago and with better sense of smell, undoubtedly

on account of my experience, than the aforesaid general,

who found only “one man” and he was you, because

Ibarra and Rizal are the same, the same.

Let us conclude. Did Your Excellency find him? Did Your Excellency find more men? If Your Excellency found what you were looking for, why talk to us of the “indefatigability” of the very same lantern of Diogenes (popularly, the lantern of the civil guard); and if you did not find him, why talk to us of your sense of smell superior to that of my general, who was not indefatigable, nor did he go around the Archipelago looking for his man, nor did he have a lantern even of the Middle Ages? Would Your Excellency want me to have taken you for the model of my captain general? Why talk of us about sanguinary words? Your Excellency, who in all your writings breathes the harshest hatred of my race and my country; Your Excellency who has always enjoyed seeing us suffer; Your Excellency now poses as a defender of the Indios? To what extent has our misfortune gone when we have to be defended by the very same ones who have insulted us?

Who is the one who contradicts himself? Does Your Excellency call me a “storehouse of contradictions” because I have in my memory a good supply of your contradictions?

Is it strange that a captain general who spends the three years of his term of office in an atmosphere of conceit and flattery, surrounded by friars and interested persons, does not know the inhabitants of the country, when Your Excellency itself, despite your many airs, does not know them, Your Excellency whom the friars do not court but who courts them? And tell me, who is the sensible man who will like to place himself within reach of a captain general of the Philippines and talk to him freely and frankly when he knows that dysentery or the bad digestion of His Excellency can upset the tranquility of his home? And consider that in the Philippines dysentery and bad digestion are the order of the day among certain classes. I know of a brother-in-law of mine who is now banished for the second time, without he and the governor general ever having seen each other, without trial, without knowing what crime he is accused of, except that he is my brother-in-law. I myself, “the man”; the Ibarra of Your Excellency (I know not why, for I am neither rich nor a mestizo, nor an orphan, nor do the qualities of Ibarra coincide with mine) the two times that I presented myself at Malacanang have been to my regret. The first in 1880 because I was knocked down and wounded one dark night by a civil guard because I passed before a bundle and I did not salute, and the bundle turned out to be the lieutenant commander of the military post. I was wounded treacherously in the back without many exchange of words. I went to Malacanang but I did not see His Excellency Primo de Rivera[5] nor did I get justice either. . . and the second time, in 1887, because I was summoned by Mr. Terrero[6] to answer the accusations and charges against me on account of my book. Now then, how many thousands and thousands of men more worthy and more honorable than Ibarra and I have seen even the end of the hair or the bald pate of His Excellency? And Your Excellency who prides itself in knowing the Archipelago, with how many Filipinos have you spoken? How many have unbosomed themselves to you? Does Your Excellency know the spirit of the country? If you did, you would not say that I am “a spirit twisted by a German education,” for the spirit that breathes in me I have had since a child before leaving the Philippines, before I had learned a word of German. My spirit is “twisted” because I have been reared among injustices and abuses, because since a child I have seen many suffer stupidly and because I too have suffered. My “twisted spirit” is the product of that constant vision of moral ideals succumbing before the powerful reality of abuses, arbitrariness, hypocrisies, farces, violence, and other vile passions. And twisted like my spirit is that of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos who have not yet left their miserable homes, who do not speak any other language but their own, and if they would write or express their thoughts, they would leave my Noli me tangere very puny indeed and with their volumes there would be enough to raise pyramids for the corpses of all the tyrants. . . .

Yes, Your Excellency is right; Noli me tangere is a satire and not an apology. Yes, I have depicted the social sores of “my homeland,” in it are “pessimism and darkness,” and it is because I see much infamy in my country; there the wretched equal in number the imbeciles. I confess that I found a keen delight in bringing out so much shame and blushes, but in doing the painting with the blood of my heart, I wanted to correct them and save the others. Quioquiap, with whom Your Excellency compares me, undoubtedly to humiliate me and make me hateful in the eyes of my countrymen, has depicted native customs in order to insult and humiliate an entire race, in order to mock it and laugh at its misfortune, generalizing the bad and the object without exceptions, drawing, like Your Excellency, universal conclusions from secondary and remote premises. But I have depicted the good beside the bad, I have depicted an Elias and a Tasio, because the Elias and the Tasios exist, exist, and exist, however much it may displease Your Excellency. Only that Your Excellency and your partisans, fearing that the few good men I have portrayed may serve as an example to the bad and redeem them, shout that it is false, poetic, exaggerated, ideal, impossible, improvable, what more do I know? And you only acknowledge the bad so that the people may stoop down and be humiliated, for being incapable of rising, you want everyone around you to go down in order that you may appear great and exalted. There is indeed much corruption over there, may be more than anywhere else, but it is because to the soil’s own rubbish has been added the dross of birds of passage and the corpses that the sea deposits on the beach. And because of the existence of this corruption, I have written my Noli me tangere, I ask for reforms so that the little good that there is may be saved and the bad may be redeemed. If my country were a republic like that of Plato, neither would I have written nor would the Noli me tangere achieve the success that it had nor would reforms be needed, because for what do the healthy want medicine?

But Your Excellency wants to catch me in an error with your device on page 179 claiming that the men who need liberal reforms that I ask in Filipinas dentro de cien anos [The Philippines a Century Hence] are not in Noli me tangere. I see now that Your Excellency has not read my entire book and I am not sorry because I had not written it for Your Excellency. But since you want to be a censor, and an infallible censor at that, you should have read it whole in order not to waste time asking stupid questions. Your Excellency asks slothfully: “Why have you kept silent so long a time? What better occasion than a novel to announce to the world your wonders?”

The greatest wonder here is the boldness of Your Excellency who imagines one thing, takes it for truth, and draws from it whatever conclusions may occur to you. Well, indeed, Most Excellent Sir, those of whom I speak in my Filipinas dentro de cien anos are announced on pages 290 to 291 and I do not quote them here because that would be wasting time and paper. Everybody can read it. That movement that has reached the corners of the provinces — for even the philosopher Tasio has observed it ten or twelve years ago, the period covered by my novel — has produced the men of today, but Your Excellency calls this consequence, even the chronology of events a contradiction. Your Excellency has also called the natives of Ceylon Malayans, you have placed Santa Cruz in Paete, and Colombo I do not know where. May you profit from that procedure!

Your Excellency cites the names of Anacleto del Rosario, Isabelo de los Reyes, and Arellano. You could cite more if you knew better the country and its men and you did not begrudge us much our little national glories. I could cite to you in addition a Leon Guerrero, a Zamora, a Joaquin Garrido, a Jose Luna, a Regino Garcia, Pardo de Tavera, Benedicto Luna, Vicente Garcia, del Pilar, Mariano Sevilla, Pedro Serrano, and many others; but here it is not a question of making a catalogue of men who are worthy, there are and that is enough. Your Excellency asks about historiographers, freethinkers, and philosophers. Of the first, though they are not of the Real Academia de la Historia, there are, like Isabelo de los Reyes who, though he has not written Guerras Piraticas, has, on the other hand, great merit for the conscientiousness of his works. As to giving Your Excellency the names of the freethinkers and philosophers, God save me from falling into the trap! “Rather!” as the English say, not even the name of the province! We know enough of how the unhappy Mr. Francisco Rodriguez was persecuted and slandered while living and after death, because of his fame as a freethinker! Your Excellency, pretending to be innocent, asks me for the works of the philosophers. And the prior censorship? Have it suppressed, Your Excellency, and I promise you that the first copies will be dedicated to you. Find out also the number of copies sold of the works of Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Cantu, Sue, Dumas, Lamartine, Theirs, Aiguals de Izco, and others and by the consumption you will have an idea of the number of consumers.

Your thesis is reduced to this: I am a storehouse of contradictions, because Your Excellency fancies me thus and because you see contradiction in everything. Does Your Excellency use spectacles with the quality of contradiction or [does] Your Excellency have the spirit of contradiction in your nature?

Does Your Excellency by chance persist in your opinion that the characters of a novel must all conform to the convictions of the author? Then indeed I acknowledge the “storehouse of contradictions” and still more. But that Poetica of Fr. Rodriguez should have been published before, Most Excellent Sir!

I am glad that Your Excellency places Quioquiap many cubits above me. Put him in the moon and in Heaven too. I will never aspire to have his style; I keep mine which is very bad, as Your Excellency says, Academicus Vincentius Barrantes dixit, ergo ita est. But however bad it might be, it is not as bad as the abuses it combats, and I can say with Lista:

De mi libre Musa jamas el eco

adormecio a tiranos ni vil lisonia

emponzofio su aliento . . . .

It has never corrupted an administration nor has it served to cover up frauds, oppress or exploit an over-confident people. Bad and all, it has served what I liked and if it is not the conic, nickel-plated, and polished bullet that an academician can shoot but only a rough pebble picked from the brook, on the other hand it has hit the mark, hitting on the head that double-faced Goliath that in the Philippines is called frailism and bad government. It is just that it should kick about violently; I do not deny its right to do so. The wound is there, death is there, what does the missile matter to me? Unable to deny the veracity of the facts, let them cling to the style, to the bark. A dog bites the stone that wounds it. For the rest, if I do have detractors, I do not lack panegyrists— one compensates for the other. It would be madness to ask the offended powerful to reward he who told him bitter truths. I consider myself very lucky that I am still alive. Only the demigods ask that their hands that slap be kissed. What I would have felt indeed is to hear, instead of curses and roarings in the rank of the enemy, applause and compliments, for then it would be a proof that the shot had come out of the butt end of the musket And as I did not write for myself nor to be admitted to the porter’s lodge of the Academy, but only to denounce abuses and unmask hypocrites, my purpose having been achieved, what do the rest matter to me? My book, moreover, has not been judged nor can it be judged because its effects are still felt. When the men that it fustigates and the abuses that it combats shall have disappeared from the politics of my homeland; when there shall come a generation that will not countenance the crimes or immoralities of the present; when Spain shall put an end to these struggles by means of sincere and liberal reforms; in short, when all of us shall have disappeared and with us our self-esteem, our vanities, and our little passions, then Spaniards and Filipinos shall be able to judge it tranquilly, and impartially without enthusiasm or rancor.

RIZAL

03-501 [Reformists]