Hidalgo and Luna: Vexed Modernity (page 3 of 8) 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | Toast Jóse Rizal is the ur-interpreter. He set the manner and thematics for the politicization of the work of Hidalgo and Luna in his brindis, the elegiac toast he gave during a big party at the Madrid's Restaurante Inglés, immediately upon their oro/plata wins at the Universal Exposition in that city in 1884.16 (If only for the speaker, it is unsurprising that Rizal's Hidalgo and Luna are cast in stone.) The speech is quoted in full [see Sourcebook] in this volume, for recall as a whole rather than in part. It has endlessly been quoted since that night, often as fragments, often to make two points: that Rizal ably articulated the ilustrado political passions of the late 19th century; and that it marked the moment Rizal himself became a centra1 figure in the reformist expatriate community from las islas filipinas. In the late 20th century, historians Gregorio F. Zaide and Sonia M. Zaide, among other producers of widely circulated texts, do not modulate the effusive description of earlier decades, in their case using a stream of superlatives in writing of the "magnificent speech...greeted with wild ovations," from a "brown Filipino...almost peerless in nobility of thought, in Spanish rhetoric, in sincerity of feeling, and in sonorous eloquence." [My italics]17 Still, Rizal was extravagant, however florid the Spanish of the day. As, indeed, were the gestural qualities of both winning paintings. The spirit of that extravagance informed the claim, the first of a very long series of repeats:   "The patriarchal era in the Philippines is waning. The deeds of her illustrious sons are no longer wasted away at home. The oriental chrysalis is leaving the cocoon." Rizal took the opportunity to soliloquize on the universality of human achievement. He clearly held faith in evolution and progress, and had an ecstatic response to the idea of genius. Graciano López Jaena shared these views in his own toast that same heady night— although, as Luna biographer Santiago Albano Pilar observes with a note of endorsement for the Visayan propagandista, López Jaena was more belligerent and emotionally raw than the Tagalog thinker.18 The following much-cited section is in fact more straightforward about the ideological faith in social Darwinism than Rizal was:   "All Europe views with ecstasy the first fruit of your evolution on the path of progress on the marvelous and delicate canvasses of your sons, Luna and Resurreccion, in spite of that theocracy, ever despotic and ignorant, living amid shadows and mysteries that for centuries has refused you [the Philippines] entrance to the concert of modern culture."

The differences that cleaved through shared sentiments, separating Rizal and López Jaena, for example, are a vital cue: to take stock of the heterogeneity of the so-called propaganda movement. (To begin with, individuals change. López Jaena, the angry propagandist who in due course will become a conservative,²⁰ added the overtly anti-friar to sentiments to the night for Hidalgo and Luna. The Rizal who skipped this point in his brindis would oppose theocracy for the rest of his life.) A close reading of historian John Schumacher's detailed reconstruction of the reformist campaign yields an unusually textured view of those divergences, which ranged from petty personal conflict to disparity in method to insuperable ideological variance. Among Schumacher's observations, one has particular relevance to this essay's focus on picking up the import of differences. "A racial element," he wrote in relation to the demise [in 1887] of the first-attempt propaganda instrument Espaņa en Fillpinas, "appears to have figured in all their dissidences, with the lines largely drawn between the creoles and Spanish mestizos on one side, and the Chinese mestizos and indios on the other"²¹ —even in instances when the cause of conflict or irritation was not at all race-related.

By the time La Solidaridad was being published in Barcelona, the reformists were mostly young Chinese mestizos and those who were or saw themselves as indios. The peninsulares, insulares, Spanish mestizos and creoles²² —as well as an older set of Spanish sympathizers—distanced themselves even from the reformists' legally argued asimilista politics, preferring a paternalistic colonialism that paid attention to economic concerns. (Much less would there be interest in separatist ideas, on the whiter registers of the racial spectrum.)

The struggle for assimilation itself would not prosper; neither the end-in-itself version that asked for Spanish citizenship for the inhabitants of the Philippine Colony, nor the strategic version that regarded the call for equal rights as a step towards some form of autonomy. It must be remembered, then, that the variance between Rizat and López Jaena the night honoring Hidalgo and Luna presaged the far more pronounced splintering of the reformists along racial, class, personal and intellectual lines. It may even be argued that Luna's presence that night-"foiled," as it were, by Hidalgo's absence—exhibits a significant distance between them, likely in their understand of their public, and their public roles.

For Hidalgo and Luna interpreters through the 20th century to each in turn extract and intone fragments from Rizal's (and Lopez Jaena's) speech is to freeze particles from a moment before differentiation—particles that are, hence, malleable around eternal verities. And those presumed verities—that the reformists en toto shaped the nation, that the shape issues from arrival at a civilized status, that that civilized status is demonstrable by such genius turns as winning prizes at the Expositions, passing through the "dolorous path of art"—promote the illusion of a nationalism that was uniformly understood, desired and fought for, notwithstanding racial and class differences. The extracts—for instance, the famous "genius knows no country"—seem to float above ideological divisions, above processes of intellectual maturation, and outside the politics of skin color. But this phrase does not float; when read as part of the original cluster of sentences

"Luna and Hidalgo are Spanish as well as Philippine glories. They were born in the Philippines but they could have been born in Spain, because genius knows no country, genius sprouts everywhere, genius is like light, air, the patrimony of everybody; cosmopolitan like space, like life, like God."

it indicates no more than a young Rizal arguing, perhaps naively, for the full assimilation of the Philippines into Spain. Except for the invocation of a polyethnic Spanish nation (rather than Crown), the passage is not—or not yet—recognizably nationalist at all insofar as a putative Philippine nation is concerned. Not in the late 18th century German Romantic sense of return to mythic roots—although Rizal would later spend a lot of time researching and theorizing in this spirit. Not in the sense of early 19th century Spanish nationalism which was anti modernization. Nor in the manner of the mid-19th century Magyar popular nationalism—although this is the kind of vernacular movement that the activities of Rizal, and Luna, Hidalgo and the rest the reformists are said to have constituted, in the hindsight view of mainstream 20th century political discourse in the Philippines.

But: if it were indeed nationalism that suffused the night honoring the two winning artists, it was most likely a version that drew ideas from two disparate streams, both murky. I refer firstly to the transformation of a number of European autocracies into nation-states, as reaction to popular nationalisms in Slavic Europe (but also, as Benedict Anderson points out, ²⁴ adding to Hugh Seton-Watson's "biting" characterization, in England, France, Germany, Spain and the United States.) Historians Anderson and Seton-Watson describe these formations as the "official nationalisms" that preserved aristocratic or dynastic privilege within modernity. In this connection: while the reformists were certainly not representatives of Spanish authority, there was a sentiment abroad amongst them that wished to keep the specter of revolution, and the dispatch of social order as everyone knew it, at bay. There is, secondly, the older (in Anderson's history, the pioneering) nationalism of creole America of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The reappearance of this nationalism in the outer fringe of the Hispanic world is not implausible of course: a nationalism figured racially, for white or mestizo benefit. As things will transpire for the Philippines, a nation along mestizaje articulations will in due course take shape. But the Hidalgo and Luna successes, early in the reformist campaign, were not-not yet-absorbed into creole nationalism.

Taking it from Rizal, the night was given over to an evanescent shadow of the 18th century French Enlightenment idea of an amour de la patrie that can, simultaneously, yield to a universalist l'amour de la liberte and l'amour de la paix. Emphasis on the universal, international, cosmopolitan: the freedom of all to fly, outside the confines of home if so desired, provided that that home is rebuilt to ensure that love and freedom of flight. This is the transcendent love of country of the Enlightenment's Jean Jacques Rousseau, which sought realization in the shape of a nation that preferred happiness to greatness. Or, this is Rousseau translated, among others by Michelet at mid-19th century, into one of several Romantic idioms that required the construction of that category whose time had come: le peuple. The arrival of "the people" in French political discourse (the pueblo in Spain and the German volk, variously inflected) crystallized the argument for an all-inclusive polity. However, the more important point to be made is that Europe had already been disabused of such love of country, people and freedom—except in pure idealist terms—by the defeat of the democratic revolution in 1848-49.

By the late 19th century of the reformists from the Philippines, European nationalism was largely a reactionary form, shoring up elite privilege. Late 19th century liberalism, which will be discussed further on, would surrender the idea of achieving progress through free institutions, to the idea of achieving progress via mastery of science (and concomitantly, via the bourgeois wealth to gain that mastery). It may not be surprising that these reformists connected themselves to a less conceptually problematic, older Europe; a Europe that passed on, almost two hundred years before their time. ln any case, whether deliberately so or not, their modernity was a strangely old-fashioned one; vexed, it seems now, by the very density of the history they thrust themselves into. And vexed, as well, by their own diversity and instability as a group, which could perhaps only find a common-denominator set of ideas in the past. In an idealized Enlightenment, not in a treacherous contemporaneity.