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1. MODULE 7
THE SOCIOLOGY OF NOLI
ME TANGERE
AND POLITICS OF EL
FILIBUSTERISMO

2. Most Essential Learning Outcomes
At the end of this module, the learners are expected to:
1. Understand the different basic approaches and
techniques in critical reading and literary theories and
criticism.
2. Draw out social, political, and philosophical messages
from Noli and Fili using reading techniques.
3. Describe greed for power as the theme of the two
novels.

3. Reading and Textual Comprehension
By and large, there are two ways of
reading a text: “cursory reading” which
is light reading and “close reading”
which involves analysis and synthesis for
a reader to appreciate and thoroughly
understand scholarly works, classic, or
mind-boggling books.

4. By reading and thinking, a reader may
comprehend the message of a book. Reading
comprehension consists of four levels; namely,
1. Literal comprehension is reading the
texts/words to answer the questions who, what,
when, where, and when.
2. Reading between lines involves combining
information and drawing out inferences to
answer the how and why questions.

5. Reading beyond or above lines is using
information to form opinion and ideas by
application, analysis, and synthesis to respond to
a question as to what the reader will do if here
were the one in focus.
Evaluative reading focuses on the characters,
the plot, and style of presentation in a story to
answer questions regarding behavior of major
and minor characters. It also includes analysis of
the style of presentation.

6. Literary Theories
Literary theories is a distinct discipline influenced by philosophy. This
is anchored on a proposition that philosophy inheres in all
intellectual undertakings. It includes philosophical consciousness of
textual studies.
Based on this theory, a book may be analyzed based through fallacies:
Affective and Intentional Fallacies
Affective Fallacy is synonymous with semiotics. It excludes
the author’s biography and focuses on rhetoric, style, form,
structure, and the text itself.
Intentional Fallacy is the discovery of the author;s
intention or motives in writing a particular text.

7. Reception Theory is similar to
symptomatic approach. It deals
with the readers’ expectations in
every phase of reading which are
either fulfilled or unfulfilled. This
empty space is to be “filled in” by
the reader by imagining what
follows next.

8. The reader supplements what is missing through his own
imagination or skills. In Noli Me Tangere, for example, a void
is left when Crispin was presented in a dream. Having been
murdered could be presumed, but as to what exactly
happened to him, the reader has to theorize or make some
guesses. The seduction and death of Juli in El Filibusterismo,
likewise ended with numerous unanswered questions.
Why did Juli jump to her death? What was witnessed by
Hermana Pule that made her shout like a mad woman?
Another intrigue is whether or not Maria Clara was the
woman at the top of the roof. These situations are examples
of “blanks” to be filled in by the readers.

9. Symptomatic Approach Theory is similar to
reception theory. The message is inferred from
the clues found between or beyond the lines of
the text. Here, the reader has to fill in the
vacuum, let the silence speak, discover the secret
of the text, theorize, and draw out his own
conclusion. Allegorical symbols, satirical
expressions, simile or metaphors, or there
combination serve as mind teasers.

10. A reader may also derive ideas from different ideologies which pertain
to logical ideas or a closely organized system of beliefs, values, and
ideas forming the basis of social or political philosophy or program.
Ideologies contain the reasons why the present set up must be
retained, reformed, or changed.
To understand a socio-historico, political novel, a reader has to know
the prevailing situation when the book was written, as follows:
The general mode of production
I. The general ideology
II. The author’s ideology
III. The aesthetic ideology
IV. The textual ideology
V. The reader’s ideology

11. Gothicism and Greed: Themes of Rizalian Novels
Gothicism or Gothic Fiction refers to a style of writing that
is characterized by elements of fear, horror, death, and
gloom, as well as romantic elements, such as nature,
individuality, and very high emotion. These emotions can
include fear and suspense.
This style of fiction began in the mid 1700s with a story
titled, The Castle of Otranto (in 1764), by Horace Walpole.
This story was about a doomed family and is filled with
death, desire, and intrigue. This story is considered to be
the first of the Gothic fiction tales, since it encompassed
many of the characteristics of the genre.

12. The settings were often old, dilapidated
buildings or houses in gloomy, lifeless, fear-
inducing landscapes. Much of the literature
involved monsters, such as vampires, who
brought suffering and death to the
forefront. There were also stories that simply
displayed these elements of fear and
suffering in the settings themselves.

13. Fiction as tool for Social Analysis
Like biography, fiction can be a form of social
analysis. Both view the social process from the
life position of the individual, focusing on
individual consciousness and experience. Unlike
scientific social analysis, both explore a purely
local world. In that world, they see different
people and groups, each in its complex
particularity, each from a particular and
inevitably limited point of view that is itself
within the flow of interaction.

14. By contrast, scientific social analysis
generally sees abstractions—properties of
social beings—and from a position outside
the flow of interaction. Even its models of
action imagine abstract beings making
isolated and formalized decisions in formal
structures, not particular beings struggling
in a loosely woven mesh of possibility and
constraint.

15. The individual standpoint makes fiction and
biography very persuasive to readers, who after all are
particular individuals themselves. But it can hide the
social forces and implicit connections that are so often
invisible to individuals. Explicitly scientific social
analysis has precisely the opposite virtue. By looking
at social categories, or social groups, or even social
properties, it easily finds the hidden forces and
structural constraints so invisible to actors. But it does
so at the price of irreality. The social process does not
happen in abstractions, but in complex experiences.
Abstractions do not act.

16. Social Realities behind Noli Me Tangere
Among the most politically successful
examples of fictional work that can be used
as tool for social analysis are the novels of
José Rizal. As what we have explored in the
previous modules, there is continuing
debate about Rizal’s brief, complicated, and
much-mythologized life. Analyzing his
works, however, is barely a question of who,
but of how and why.

17. In Noli me Tangere, the Ibarra character
is in fact little more than a projection of
José Rizal into a series of possible
events—family matters, romantic
relationships, political life—that are
used to examine the internal structure
of Philippine society from the illustrado
point of view.

18. Ibarra returns to his homeland seeking to help it
develop and to marry his beloved Maria Clara,
but is on the one hand thwarted by malevolent
friars and corrupt merchants and on the other
aided by dispossessed poor people and fallen
illustrados. Although he radicalizes slowly, he is
hounded by the authorities for the tame
reformism that he has in fact left behind, and in
the end barely escapes with his life.

19. Around this simple plot swirls a gothic melodrama, complete
with madwomen, imprisoned maidens, devilish villains,
elaborate tortures, and incredible coincidences. The tone of
the text varies between gothicism, didacticism, parody,
allegory, and—occasionally—straight narration. The book is
extremely rich in local references (almost enough as to be
unreadable for a non local without notes), but also has a
surprising number of biblical allusions, chief among them
the Christlike character of the hero, which itself follows a
long-standing tradition of Philippine interest in Christ’s
Passion (see The Deification of Jose Rizal).