Cut Time

Toward the end of the dedicatory preface to Balagtas’s Florante at Laura, an easily overlooked poetic image appears, one that I want to argue operates, in Schwarz’s words, “as a [literary] transposition of a significant aspect of the historical process” in the Philippines (Two Girls 20). This image appears in the opening quotation of this essay, in which the speaker expresses a contradictory desire to sing their poem as a protraction of “búhay ma,i, mapatid” (“life that has a cut” or “life with a cut”), referring to the inevitability of death. The Tagalog word used to denote life’s cut, mapatid, carries the root word patid, meaning literally “cut” or “cut off.” Patid is also the root word of kapatid, the Tagalog word for “sibling,” because siblings are thought of as having an “umbilical cord cut from the same mother” (“Patid”). In the separation of two or more things—in this case a newborn from its parent—a new social relationship is formed. Balagtas’s metrical romance proceeds from this apostrophic invocation of the cut, which serves as an image of how the poem’s “life” in market circulation paradoxically exceeds the mortal life of the poet. The image thus functions doubly as a metaphor for aesthetic immortality as well as an observation about changes in the profession of Tagalog writing in the early nineteenth century. During this time, authors were granted more autonomy over their work as a result of increasing private ownership of printing presses, which were thereby partially disentangled from the controlling arms of the Spanish missionary orders. These changes reflect a broader set of liberalizing reforms enacted by Spain in the Philippine colony throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, reforms that I explore in greater detail below. For now, it is important to note that Balagtas’s image expresses a desire for immortality at the same time that it draws attention to the liberalizing changes that affected both the profession of vernacular writing and the type of market circulation Tagalog poets could expect for their work.

Despite the historical context that gives meaning to the expression of “life with a cut,” however, the poet’s insistence that a cut exists between mortal life and literary object also exempts the entire poem from being determined by the biographical and historical time of the poet, making the case that literary value should be sought somewhere besides what Soledad S. Reyes refers to as the “referential use of language” (250). This is in contradistinction to how Mikhail Bakhtin understands the realist novel’s import as a unique aesthetic form, which he argues can be seen in the European bildungsroman’s successful “assimilation of historical time” (Speech Genres 19). This assimilation, Bakhtin explains, depends on the text’s “ability to read in everything signs that show time in its course, beginning with nature and ending with human customs and ideas,” all of which he later summarizes as a text’s ability to see “time in space” (25; 30). The paradigmatic example of this principle for Bakhtin is Goethe’s diaries, in which Goethe shows disdain for anything “ruinlike” that could not be understood as having a human, creative link with the present (qtd. in Bakhtin, Speech Genres 32). Through Goethe, Bakhtin emphasizes the historical configuration in which human intervention and labor shape the local, natural landscape.

Balagtas’s Florante at Laura complicates Bakhtin’s construction by “seeing” space allegorically. While Balagtas’s cutting initially seems to articulate an investment in aesthetic autonomy, the second sense of mapatid as a new relationship implies that the literary work’s omission of historical and empirical data occasions a different realism, one still shaped by historical reality. I distinguish this realism—which I call a realism of “personality” for its emphasis on individual emotion and sentiment—from a nineteenth-century European realism that Erich Auerbach describes as “an attempt to reproduce outward reality” through the use of referential language to create “concrete” images (206). Such an understanding of realism limits the ability to identify other modes of realistic literary representation—a limitation that Auerbach himself admits and usefully moves past in his analysis of Charles Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal. Auerbach outlines a kind of realism that appears in “symbolic” language, emphasizing the “vividness of the evocation” in the poem “Spleen” to describe a “mixed style” of realism that was “associated chiefly with the crass representation of ugly…aspects of life” (206). Balagtas’s poem forces readers to consider what Mojares understands as its “cultivation of subjective, lyric values” alongside its inclusion of formal standards that characterize genres such as epos, drama, and fiction (79), with the result that the poem blends what Northrop Frye calls “an internal mimesis of sound and imagery” with the “mimesis of direct address” (250). In my reading, Balagtas’s separation of the work from historical time is therefore the development of a specific literary relationship to outward reality that operates not according to prosaic referentiality but through the realist form of personality, where “personality” names the realistic literary construction of subjective individuality through lyric voice. Modifying Bakhtin’s formulation, realist Philippine Tagalog literature assimilates a different register of time that I call “cut time,” in which historical and empirical reference is suppressed in favor of direct speech. Cut time supplements Bakhtin’s notion of the assimilation of historical time by evoking the historical process in the Philippines through an internal mimesis of emotional subjective voice, so that the “time” of the literary work is neither the time of the work’s diegesis nor the time in which the author lived. This approach to Philippine literary form should therefore start from the way characters express their feelings in order to see how these feelings generate literary structure.

For example, it is in the eponymous protagonist’s opening monologue in Florante at Laura that Santos himself locates the first of the poem’s four literary himagsik (“revolutions” or “insurrections”), which Santos understands to be Balagtas’s allegorical criticism of Spanish government veiled as a lamentation about his own fictional kingdom of Albania (Ang Apat 23). Florante muses to himself,

Dealing with Spanish censors, Santos explains, Balagtas used the poem’s cover as a romance to refer to colonial rule even as he presented the poem as a politically benign piece of popular literature (Ang Apat 24). The veiled criticism targets both the corruption of the reformed Spanish imperial state established in the first half of the nineteenth century, which Florante’s lamentation alludes to, and the religious antagonism between Philippine Christians and Muslims encouraged by the Spanish-colonial state. For Balagtas, what is crucial is not necessarily a literary work’s ambition toward temporal and spatial verisimilitude but how the text makes apprehensible an otherwise invisible social structure—in other words, how a given text mediates historical reality. Anna Kornbluh, drawing on the work of Raymond Williams, understands mediation as that which is “in its broadest terms the sense making and sensuous rendering of the mode of production, a vocation for representation to render ‘relatable’ and thinkable the abstract, systemic conditions of social life” (2). In the case of Tagalog literature, one need not focus on a text’s ability to see time in space but on its ability to see time in speech in order to understand how historical reality is being mediated.

Banaag at Sikat opens with a sleight of hand that extends Balagtas’s approach to vernacular form and the assimilation of cut time. The novel begins with an observation by an unnamed person from the city of Antipolo (taga-Antipulo) to a group of people from Manila (taga-Maynila), contending, “Kailanman pong nagpakárami-rami ang taong umahon dito ay dî gaya ngayón …” (“Many people have already been traveling here for years but nothing like this year …”; Santos, Banaag at Sikat [2018] 1). Observing that Antipolo has recently experienced an increase in its number of tourists (and implying that they are coming from Manila), the person from Antipolo then proceeds to reflect on how unlikely this increase is, citing a large fire that damaged the town in addition to the overlapping wars against Spain and the United States. This recognition of anticolonial warfare is quickly sidelined, and the increase in the number of tourists and the pride with which the person from Antipolo declares this fact are given prominence over the reality of war; the paragraph then ends with the Antipolo resident’s speculation that the mountain town’s natural springs are the primary tourist attraction.

This opinion is confirmed immediately in the next paragraph by the narrative voice, who reassures readers that there was, in fact, a mystifyingly large number of tourists attracted to the springs in 1904. But the memory of this line regarding war is lost as the narrative proceeds, moving from this brief, opening dialogue into an inaugural political debate between the novel’s socialist protagonist, Delfin, and the landlord antagonist, Don Ramon. The novel performs its narrative structure by suppressing historical references and instead prioritizing the dialogic observations of Filipino people who nevertheless provide a narrative barometer of changes wrought by overlapping colonialisms. Again, as with Balagtas, the form of the Tagalog vernacular novel demands that one start with how characters express their feelings in order to see how feeling generates literary structure. The narrative sleight of hand that suppresses historical data at the same time buttresses direct speech as the preferred mode of historical engagement both at the level of characterological dialogue and at the level of narration.

Censorship and Liberalization

The consequences of Balagtas’s emphasis on literary personality, beyond suppressing references to historical and empirical data, become clear when the poem’s plot is more thoroughly situated in its historical context. As Bakhtin contends elsewhere, metrical romances typically exist in a version of ancient Greek “adventure-time,” in which time is conceived as an infinite, empty container of plotted events bearing no relationship to the space in which these events unfold and having no effect on the characters who experience these events (Dialogic Imagination 94). The plotting in these romances is therefore supposedly subject to a logic of coincidence. Bienvenido Lumbera attributes the coincidental transitions of plot in Florante at Laura to the author’s experience as a Tagalog playwright at a time when there were only two permanent theaters in Manila, the Teatro de Tondo and the Teatro de Gunao. Stages apart from these theaters were usually outdoor improvisations, which meant that “[t]o keep action going, the playwright had to depend on arbitrary exits and entrances” (556).

While Lumbera understands the emergence of these theaters as the result of increasing urbanization in the Philippines throughout the first half of the nineteenth century and of the related formation of a middle class, they are better understood as a reflection in the cultural sphere of a period of rapid reforms enacted in the wake of the 1762 British invasion of Manila. Spanning a period of roughly fifty years, these reforms arguably entailed a “(re-)colonization of the Philippines for Spain’s economic profit” (Blanco 54). The islands were previously maintained as a subsistence economy through the rule of missionary religious orders that depended on an unruly system of tribute collection. Following the 1762 British invasion, Spain sought to establish state infrastructure in the Philippines that would effectively shift the economy from subsistence to agricultural export, culminating with the opening of the port of Manila to foreign trade in 1830 (142). During this period of change the printing presses were partially disentangled from the religious orders, allowing for new kinds of literature to circulate that were not purely subordinated to the aims of Christian didacticism.

Coincidental transitions in plot therefore coincide in Balagtas’s work with a greater attention to “[e]motion—the poet’s or the character’s—as the determinant of the development of the subject matter” (Lumbera 573). And it is this investment in emotion, in personal sentiment, that therefore distinguishes Tagalog literary production from the 1830s to the early twentieth century, since the enrichment of Tagalog as a literary language under Spanish- and US-colonial rule necessarily involved an expansion of what could be poetically conveyed as the reality of inner life (Regalado 21; Lumbera 573–74; S. Reyes 249–50; Mojares 78–80). As John D. Blanco explains, “With the repeated invocation of you” in the preface to Florante at Laura, “in which apostrophe abandons the objects of sensuous experience to be found in the native talinghagà [or metaphoric image] in favor of addressing abstract concepts, absent people, and memories, the reader is invited, cajoled, impugned, and otherwise compelled to lend her or his presence to the drama at hand …” (61). For Blanco, Florante at Laura reflects the spirit of the period of reforms by appealing for the first time to the individual agency of readers and by directing that agency toward political rationality. Such a rationality, Blanco elaborates, was maintained by the cultural production of a desire for the liberal Spanish state; however, pushing the argument further, one could say that anticolonial writing in this context can be understood as an attempt to grant Tagalog, previously seen as an irreducibly specific, native language—having what Soledad Reyes terms “poor cousin” status (249)—access to purportedly “universal” categories of secular meaning and experience.

Whatever mode of historical and social engagement is to be found in Balagtas’s poem is inextricable from its expression of personal sentiment, from how its characters speak. The striking phrase that refers to the mortality of the poet as “búhay ma,i, mapatid,” or life with a cut, is a reminder that Balagtas is not simply constructing a poetic image to describe aesthetic immortality but is theorizing a Philippine vernacular approach to literary form. This approach entails suppressing references to historical and empirical data as a response to colonial censorship as well as enriching Tagalog as a literary medium for the expression of emotional, inner life, which colonial rule had previously made impossible. In Tagalog fiction, therefore, the ambiguous evocation of the colonial present through direct speech becomes a register of the assimilation of historical time. In Balagtas’s case, the colonial present is marked by the uneasy coexistence of liberalizing reforms alongside colonial-feudal labor relations, including Spanish-Catholic censorship of cultural production and land tenancy in agriculture. “Mapatid,” simultaneously denoting separation and new relation, operates both as an image of poetic construction in the face of mortality and as Balagtas’s compositional response to the contradictions of Spanish-colonial rule at a time when the liberalization of the Philippine colony was consolidating colonial authority. This kind of assimilation of historical time, or cut time, informs Philippine literature across languages, but because of the literary tradition’s significant detour through Spanish with the magisterial anticolonial novels of Rizal in the late nineteenth century, it is only in the early twentieth century, a time that has been called the Panahóng Gintô (“Golden Age”) of Tagalog novels (Regalado 17), that Balagtas’s approach is continued by authors like Santos.

Santos and Vernacular Speech

Spanish rule had left the islands linguistically, culturally, and religiously disaggregated—a real historical problem to which Balagtas had provided a symbolic solution in Florante at Laura. The Philippines’ disaggregated status was used to legitimate and maintain colonial occupation by the United States after it bought the Philippines from Spain in 1898. As noted by the United States Philippine Commission in its 1900 report, “The most striking and perhaps the most significant fact in the entire situation is the multiplicity of tribes inhabiting the archipelago, the diversity of their languages (which are mutually unintelligible), and the multifarious phases of civilization—ranging all the way from the highest to the lowest—exhibited by the natives of the several provinces and islands” (Report 181–82). Santos necessarily approaches the problem of linguistic and religious diversity that Balagtas had interrogated in his own work in its modified terms as the legitimating discourse of the United States and its policy of “unintelligibility.”

Santos was therefore perhaps the first vernacular Tagalog author to address the problem of speech directly, as well as its relation to linguistic imperialism, specifically language’s material role in structuring and enacting US-colonial policy. Living during the extended deferral of independence that was US-colonial rule, he notes in his autobiography that neither members of the new colonial authority nor natives of the Philippines initially understood each other, either practically or culturally, because they spoke different languages. Santos recalls, “Naaalala ko nang mga unang taon ng mga Amerikano dito, walang sinumang nakauunawa sa ibig sabihin ng mga Amerikano maging mga marurunong nating lider na pulitiko at abogado. Hinding-hindi sila marunong ng wikang Ingles” (“During the first few years of American occupation, I remember that no one could really understand the meaning of American arrival, not even our most learned political leaders and lawyers. They didn’t know the English language”; Talambuhay 42). For this reason, Santos conceives of Tagalog publications as having an important new role as intermediaries in the dissemination of colonial information. He goes on, “Di rin hanggang doon lamang, kasama pa kami ng mga tagapagpalaganap ng pamahalaang Amerikano, ng diwang Amerikano at ng Demokrasya sa pagpapakilala sa bayan sa pamamagitan ng wikang sarili ang kanilang dapat tuntunin sa hinaharap at ng kanilang pag-asang dapat kimkimin sa kanilang pamumuhay” (“Positioning ourselves as propagandists of the American government, it wasn’t until [we translated American public addresses and plans into Tagalog] that the spirit of American rule and democracy was introduced to the country, as well as, through the mediation of the Philippines’ own language, the hope of future independence that the people should nourish to survive”; 43). The ostensible enthusiasm with which Santos includes himself as a representative of the new colonial government is a rhetorical strategy that conceals his emphasis on the mode of address, what he earlier refers to as pananalumpati, imperfectly translated here as “speech,” as the vehicle of sociopolitical change.

Santos conceives of speech as an act of interrelation between people that provides the basis of mutual understanding, expanding on Balagtas’s poetic enrichment of Tagalog as a language for expressing personal sentiment. Santos is clear that Tagalog is furthermore a pamamagitan, or mediation, of the information conveyed, which frustrated US-American attempts at intervening in conversations that took place in the vernacular. Santos’s crucial contribution to a discussion of mediation inheres in his insight that language is not itself unmediated or immediate—that, in fact, language type is inextricable from the process of mediation itself as a mode of rendering apprehensible an otherwise invisible social structure. Writing and speaking in Tagalog is always in this context a political act of communication against and beyond the purview of a colonial rule that never sought to maintain or sustain Tagalog in the first place. In this autobiographical theorization of speech, Santos retraces the formal cut of Balagtas’s own project, opting to forgo direct representation of anticolonialism and instead focus on enlarging the role of Tagalog as both a literary and a political language: in other words, expanding what can and should be spoken about in Tagalog.

Born in 1879 to a typesetter father, Santos was literate, despite being poor, and was furthermore a committed Tagalog grammarian as a result of this early literacy. Writing and reading played salient roles in his childhood, but it is Santos’s interest in speech that distinguishes his career. Banaag at Sikat is first and foremost characterized by its emphasis on dialogue, a formal commitment in the novel that reveals Santos’s deep investment in vernacular orality. His autobiography is itself primarily made up of transcribed interviews conducted by Paraluman Aspillera just before Santos passed away in 1963, therefore evincing a similar attempt to literally speak to others through print. As he notes in this autobiography, “Ibig kong ulitin dito na ang pagtatalumpati ay totoong mahalaga, bagama’t parang dala ng hangin at hindi nasusulat, sa pagbabagong-buhay ng bayan at sa anumang panukalang ibig pairalin” (“I want to repeat here that speech is truly vital, even though it remains unwritten and seems to be carried by the wind, for the regeneration of a country’s life and for the realization of any proposed resolutions”; Talambuhay 51). The emphasis placed on both language type (Tagalog) and the use of language to strategically elide US-colonial authority’s self-representation throughout Santos’s work thus indexes the “military adjuncts” of English-language public schools and the protracted post-1899 counterinsurgency that these schools sought to culturally support.

Such an emphasis on vernacular speech furthermore indexes the changes US-colonial rule brought to the profession of writing. Spanish-Catholic censorship was supplanted by the somewhat more navigable Sedition Act and Criminal Libel Act in 1901, laws passed by the United States to repress public sentiment criticizing the colonial government. These acts resulted in the rapid, widespread establishment of private presses, vernacular newspapers, and periodicals, as well as a feverish uptick in novel writing and circulation (Cano 396; Jurilla 35–37). Mojares also points to “[a]n intellectual ferment” that characterized the period, along with “the rise of proletarian organizations after 1902” (192), including the first trade union in the Philippines, the Unión Obrera Democrática Filipina, of which Santos was a key member. Navigating the sedition and libel laws of the US period, Santos updates Balagtas’s own development of cut time. Using Tagalog to highlight the problem of linguistic diversity in the Philippines that US-colonial authority sought to combat through English, Santos also focuses on the expansion of Tagalog as a social and political tool for developing mutual understanding, leveraging the lack of widespread American knowledge of the language to articulate criticism in newly coded ways.

“Ano Ang Mabuti Kong Gawin?” (“What Is to Be Done?”)

In this section I look more closely at how Banaag at Sikat formalizes Balagtas’s cut in order to demonstrate the unique aesthetic contributions of Santos’s novel, specifically the way in which direct speech is used to differently mediate the reality of US-colonial rule. From the opening sleight of hand in which the novel sublimates historical reference to anticolonial warfare and displaces it into the dialogic observations regarding tourism in Antipolo, Banaag at Sikat proceeds with a straightforward plot characteristic of Philippine romance. The novel follows the socialist Delfin, as well as his anarchist foil and best friend, Felipe, as they try to build lives with their respective love interests. Delfin, who is poor, falls in love with the daughter of the landlord Don Ramon, named Meni, and Felipe, who is wealthy, pursues a poor woman by the name of Tentay, thereby estranging himself from his own family, who refuse to support either his romance or his increasingly radical politics. Over the course of the novel, Delfin and Felipe are successful in gaining the devotion and love of Meni and Tentay, but their struggles and arguments with their families and with each other form the main focus of the novel. Don Ramon, for instance, upon finding out that Meni is pregnant with Delfin’s child, violently beats his daughter until she almost dies, whereas Felipe finds himself the last hope for a large, impoverished family whose patriarch, Mang Andoy, dies shortly after Felipe and Tentay become close.

The novel thus intertwines its political debates with the social pressures of wealth and family. The specificity of the socioeconomic viewpoints on display throughout the novel’s many dialogues can be clarified by looking at the inaugural debate between Don Ramon and the protagonist Delfin. Lamenting how his tobacco workers are striking for higher wages, Don Ramon asks Delfin what the workers want and why they thought a strike was an adequate way to express their grievances (implying that an extended strike would be much more catastrophic for the workers than for the factory owners). Being a young trade unionist as well as a writer for the newspaper Bagong Araw (New Day), Delfin explains how workers face rising prices on the materials needed to both complete and reproduce their labor. In addition to increased prices for food and clothing, the costs of rented land and shelter both outpace wages, which Delfin maintains is the shared predicament of provincial and urban workers. In this way, invested capital belonging to landlords and industrialists rents the workers’ labor power, just as the workers are compelled to continually expend whatever they make back into that same fund of capital, which therefore appears at both ends of the process as a self-generating cause and effect. Don Ramon and Don Filemon (Don Ramon’s business partner) believe that the struggle of the workers is attributable not to a disproportionate ratio between costs of living and wages but instead to the inability of the workers to properly invest their money.

Whereas Delfin emphasizes material constraints when explaining the actions of the workers, Don Ramon and Don Filemon pass value judgments on the character of the workers they employ. Don Ramon claims in response to Delfin’s defense, “Dami mong nasabi sa pagkabùhay ng mga manggagawà. Dátapwa’t hindî mo naalaala ang pagsasabong nilá linggu-linggo, ang maghá-maghapon o puyatáng pagpapanggingge ng mga asá-asawa nilá, ang kahambugán niláng mahigít pa sa gaya naming mayayaman, magíng sa pagkain ng masaráp, maging sa pagbibihis ng marikít” (“You’ve spoken at length regarding the livelihood of the workers. But you’ve forgotten to include the weekly cockfights they attend, how their spouses tire themselves out playing panggingge almost every afternoon and every night—their haughtiness exceeds those of us among the wealthy, with their conspicuous enjoyment of feasts and lavish clothing”; Santos, Banaag at Sikat [2018] 24).Footnote ⁹ He continues, “Hala, sabihin mo sa akin ngayón ang kamáhalan ng pagkain, ng damít at ng pamamahay, at ang kauntián ng kaniláng sinasahod!” (“Go ahead, now you tell me how the expense of their food and their clothing compares with their meager wages!”; 24). Identifying a set of behaviors that appears to run concurrently with both high and low wages, Don Ramon argues in a circle. Implying that the only way the situation can change for the workers is if they change the way they behave, he equally implies that the behavior he sees is essential to the workers, suggesting that the situation can never change. If workers worked harder, invested better, and didn’t waste their money, then they wouldn’t be workers: they’d be wealthy, much like Don Ramon and Don Filemon.

Dismissing Don Ramon’s list of observations, Delfin focuses on what he sees as the heart of the debate, asserting, “Iyá’y mga sakít na dî mapabubuti, kung dî muna gamutín ang mga ugát na pinagmumulán. Ang ugát ng lahát na iyán ay ang kanilá ring pagka-marálitâ. At ang pinaka-patabâ namán ay ang masasamáng halimbawà na sa kanilá’y ipinakikita ng Sosyedad” (“Those [observations of Don Ramon] are just the branching illnesses that will never improve unless we first treat the root from which these illnesses grow. The root of the problems you’ve mentioned can be identified as poverty. And the fertilizer [of their vices] is the bad example that they see in society”; 25).Footnote ¹⁰ Behavior is understood here as a consequence of—or response to—material conditions, in this case what Delfin refers to as poverty. But Delfin takes a further step in identifying indulgences in gambling, food, and clothing as learned social behaviors that are common to a shared socioeconomic environment, not just to those who waste away in poverty. Poverty emerges as a condition cultivated by social custom and inheritance over time within both a given mode of production and a given locality. Delfin reminds readers of capital’s ostensible ubiquity, constituting the system’s a priori justification as well as its a posteriori objective. Despite this immediate appearance of ubiquity, however, Delfin also identifies poverty as a condition that can and should change, unlike Don Ramon, who understands the problem as belonging to an ahistorical, cultural set of behaviors shared by workers.

Don Ramon’s position that Philippine laborers are behaviorally unable to manage their money, instead throwing away wages on cheap pastimes and consumer items, is determined by his understanding of abstract cultural values and customs relative to different classes. His perspective, then, is consonant with the perspective of locals interviewed by the Philippine Commission in 1901 for the purposes of assessing the financial situation of the colony and whether it was prepared to adopt a gold standard. As Allan E. S. Lumba argues, “Racial ideologies and civilizational discourses grounded anti-gold arguments” (53), as demonstrated by the American businessman John T. Mcleod, who shared Don Ramon’s suspicion of the native capability to invest money and his worries about their penchant for gambling, therefore deeming currency reform needlessly difficult (54).Footnote ¹¹ The British bank manager Charles Ilderton Barnes endorsed the retention of silver currency on the basis of the country’s wealth being predominantly in agricultural produce, implying that the development of a consumer economy through the standardization of gold would be culturally impossible (53).Footnote ¹² Additionally, a particularly consistent argument across different foreign banker and broker interviewees insisted on the inability of natives to comprehend the differences in value between a silver currency and a gold one, contending that natives rely on size to determine value (bigger silver coins equal greater value) (54–55).

Being the mouthpieces for a benevolent representation of the colony that seeks to naturalize different economic values and habits associated with free-market, American capitalism, Don Ramon and Don Filemon register a colonialism that is otherwise omitted from the work’s field of representation. The novel’s opening move, where historical reference to overlapping anticolonial wars is immediately sidelined by characterological opinion regarding socioeconomic change, is reproduced in the ways the dons come to represent colonial presence through their speech. It is here that Santos’s development of Balagtas’s inaugural “cut” of Tagalog vernacular literary form becomes clear, as Santos suspends a material representation of US colonialism in order to prioritize socioeconomic conversations internal to the colony, so that foreign bureaucrats are denied the opportunity to speak for themselves, thereby expanding the capacity of vernacular language to speak both poetically and politically. The lack of material representation of American colonialism in the novel is therefore itself a kind of representation, a representation of the way that colonialism’s explanation for itself has become diffused among—and digested by—the bourgeoisie of Banaag at Sikat. By denying colonialism an opportunity to speak for itself, the novel implies that Philippine labor and capital are co-constitutive and interdependent, requiring each other for the development of a genuine solution to socioeconomic problems.

The novel’s initially stark rendering of class antagonism and capitalist contradiction is continually complicated by moments of vibrant and delicate interrelation, illuminating Santos’s formalization of vernacular speech as an aesthetic solution to colonial rule. As an example of this, the eighteenth chapter of the novel unexpectedly opens with what might initially appear as a couple of free indirect questions: “Paanong buhay itó?…Anó ang mabuti kong gawín?” (Santos, Banaag at Sikat [2018] 296). Forgoing quotation marks in favor of em dashes to indicate lines of dialogue, these questions subtly announce that they are in fact being spoken internally by Don Ramon, who is musing to himself sadly in the aftermath of beating his daughter. The first question can be translated as, “How can I keep living like this?” whereas the second question can be translated as “What should I do now?” or “What is to be done?”Footnote ¹³ Don Ramon is posing these questions in response to his reprehensible actions, but he is also ironically posing the novel’s overarching social question: In response to the ever-widening class antagonism between capitalists on one side and Philippine labor (both provincial and urban) on the other, what is to be done?

Mediation through Direct Speech

Already well-established by 1906 as a question linked to wide-ranging socioeconomic reform, first by Nikolai Chernyshevsky as the title of his 1863 novel and then by Vladimir Lenin in his 1902 political pamphlet of the same name, the question as posed by the bourgeois Don Ramon does not work to undo its explicit defense of the working class. Instead, the irony of its being voiced by a bourgeois character implies that there is a contradictory, material relationship between the social misery Don Ramon experiences in response to his daughter’s perceived betrayal and the economic misery of the Philippine peasantry and working class. The simultaneous co-constitution and opposition of Don Ramon on the one hand and Delfin and Philippine labor on the other supports Mojares’s charge that the novel feels like two genres grafted onto each other. Conventions of Philippine romance novels, such as intrigue, sentimentality, and familial duty, are rendered in such a way here that they become inextricable from the novel’s economic argument. What Don Ramon’s suggestive and possible ventriloquism of Chernyshevsky through Lenin explicates is a uniquely colonial complication, where the emergence of class antagonism in the colony is always unsettled by the implied third position of colonial authority, from which the entire colony is regarded and maintained as inferior.

In retrospect, there’s even something too earnest and obvious about the opening argument between the dons and Delfin, and more specifically about Delfin’s participation in this dialogue. The lines are too clearly drawn, with both positions too easily identifiable as either good or bad. The prematurity of the novel’s politics might explain Delfin’s earnestness, as Mojares and Adriatico might assert, but the question remains why the debate is happening at all, why Delfin thinks his lengthy defense of the workers and rousing description of socialist alternative is something either Don Ramon or Don Filemon would care about. Delfin leans too closely toward Don Ramon, his unwillingness to drop the argument despite its consequences for him (he is no longer allowed to court Meni) illustrative of his dependence on Don Ramon as his antagonist. Alongside Don Ramon’s recitation of the novel’s social question, this argument brings two hopelessly opposed viewpoints together, to the extent that it appears to be unrealistic, even naive, a quality that therefore belongs to Delfin, not to Santos.

What becomes eventually clear is that Don Ramon’s position and social status exert a magnetic pull on the young Delfin, as do nearly all positions and social statuses that Delfin encounters, such that his dialogues, combative or otherwise, become legible as ways to relate to and inhabit those positions. During a later argument with his friend Felipe, Felipe points out that Delfin’s defense of law has led Delfin to inhabit a relatively conservative position in their conversation. What started out as a description of Delfin’s plan to regain favor with Don Ramon by completing his education and becoming a lawyer ends as a debate with his friend about whether law can be used to defend anything besides capital investment. “Hala ang kagámutan mong iyán” (“Go ahead and search for whatever cure [for society’s problems] you can”), Felipe resignedly offers. He continues, “Nguni’t sa pagtatalo nating itó ay tila ikáw ngayón ang naging, [sic] si Don Ramon at akó ang nagíng si Delfin sa batis” (“But during this dispute of ours today it’s as though you’ve become Don Ramon and I’ve become Delfin at the springs [where the previous argument took place]”; Santos, Banaag at Sikat [2018] 87). During Delfin’s argument with Don Ramon and Don Filemon, the sharpness of his position risked his coming across as a staunch ideologue, but in this passage it becomes clear that debate in the novel functions simultaneously to draw lines between different socioeconomic positions in the colony as well as to relate those positions to one another by virtue of their both being articulated in response to the same problems.Footnote ¹⁴ Indeed, the fact that both positions are equally articulable in response to the overarching question, “What is to be done?,” renders them alike insofar as they are both partially adequate explanations for the world as it is.

Upon closer investigation, Banaag at Sikat is less interested in who is right or wrong in each debate than in which viewpoint best enables change in response to the problems identified. The novel is actually uninterested in representing particular viewpoints that belong to particular people and is instead attempting to represent different modes of sense making within the Philippine colony that are more or less attachable to different class positions. Its further attempt to represent how these modes relate to one another illustrates Kornbluh’s understanding of mediation as the “sense making and sensuous rendering of the mode of production” in representation (2).Footnote ¹⁵ Following from Kornbluh’s explanation is the uncomfortable realization that there is no such thing as an unmediated, or an immediate, representation of social structure. No less uncomfortable is the way Santos’s novel proceeds from this assumption, subtly implying that Don Ramon’s ahistorical criticism of Philippine labor is also an adequate explanation for social life that rivals Delfin’s materialist analysis. As Williams contends, drawing on Theodor Adorno, “Rather, all active relations between different kinds of being and consciousness are inevitably mediated, and this process is not a separable agency—a ‘medium’—but intrinsic to the properties of the related kinds” (98). Instead of immediate and mediate representations, or good and bad representations, there are different categories of mediation through which representation occurs. In the case of Santos’s novel, Philippine capital and labor form these categories.

If, as Kornbluh suggests, mediation is a “vocation for representation” that seeks to explain or make relatable “systemic conditions” of life (2), then it is important to bear in mind how the vocation of US colonialism in the Philippines, by virtue of its being “benevolent” or “tutelary,” was in part representational and therefore mediatory. As Neferti X. M. Tadiar argues, this mediation involved a “domestication of violence in paternalistic metaphors of discipline, hygiene, and education, attested to by countless political cartoons of the period” (146), which was also “in effect the suppression and internalization of the violence of a translocal, imperial war through civil institutions like the Bureau of Health, the Bureau of the Interior, and the Bureau of Public Security” (146–47). To these bureaus one might add the English public schools investigated by Rafael. In Tadiar’s estimation, the violence enacted against Philippine insurgents opposed to colonial rule during the Philippine American War (in addition to the violence enacted against civilians on an even larger scale) was accompanied and maintained by the construction of institutions that conceived of themselves as beneficial to the development of the colony.

Combating US colonial mediation, Santos’s novel omits material representation of the colonial bureaucracy and military in order to represent, through direct speech, the co-constitution of Philippine classes during colonial transition. This strategy is Santos’s formal, aesthetic solution to colonial rule that further develops Balagtas’s expansion of poetic personality in Tagalog through the allegorical suppression of historical data. Santos’s representation of viewpoints in relation to one another therefore attempts to make sensuous the particularity of class antagonism in the Philippine colony, where self-determination would benefit the bourgeoisie and working class alike, both of which were subject to policies of counterinsurgency and pacification. The inconsistency of the viewpoints on display in Banaag at Sikat, their imbrication with and sometime ventriloquism of one another, and the stark opposition of those same viewpoints at other times in the novel are crucial means by which the novel mediates—and therefore represents—its own socioeconomic reality. Not only does the novel attempt to put on display modes of sense making relative to different class positions in the Philippine colony, thereby representing differently mediated views of the socioeconomic reality of both colonialism and capitalism, but it also attempts to render sensible opposed class positions that nevertheless depend upon one another to either maintain, or possibly overthrow, colonial rule. Recognizing the interdependence of labor and capital would, Santos’s novel argues, allow for the possibility of anticolonial revolution and independence.

Perhaps the key contribution of Banaag at Sikat is Santos’s decision to cut American rule from its field of representation, since it forces the novel to instead absorb capitalist contradiction as a part of its dialogic structure. Furthermore, this omission of US representation suggests that anticolonial struggle under tutelary colonial rule must first fight class antagonism internal to the colony.Footnote ¹⁶ Dialogue and argumentation, as well as the amenability of all characters to both capitalist and socialist ideas, render sensible a shared colonial condition of repression and surveillance that subtends class antagonism, that binds economic hardship among the poor and working class to the overwhelming pressures of social appearance and custom among the wealthy. Unless this internal, contradictory unity is felt by members of the colony, Santos implies, the dawn or sunrise rumored by the novel’s title will never arrive.