Interventions

by Edel E. Garcellano

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Book Design by Ismael Escobar

Cover by the Garcellanos

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Copyright ©1998 by Edel. E. Garcellano

All rights reserved
ISBN 971-781-000-1
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in
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Published by the PUP Press

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Set in 10 pts. Zaphhumns BT

 The Fiction of History

A
t the recent National Centennial Commission Confer-
ence which saw the local and foreign delegates read
papers on the Katipunan Revolution, it was reported
that O.D. Corpuz would "recommend to the NCC spon-
sor a full-length and decent account of the Revolution
from 1896 to 1906," a move which drew support from Carmen
Guerrero-Nakpil who would argue with "Jose Arcilla, S.J., in "his
Utopia and Revolution, that "Rizal was right because we were not
ready for 1896." She would also enthuse over O.D. Corpuz, "who
set us on our ears with a brilliant abstract of his 70-page paper,
during which he declared that the History of the Revolution had
yet to be written, then proved with his incisiveness that he is al-
ready writing it.'
Corpuz, according to report, harped on "history books miss(ing)
out (on) a "number of important details and events which all Filipi-
nos, especially the youth, must be aware of." He added that some
reference materials did not mention anything about the Army of
the Liberation of the Filipinos and the Christian-Filipino-American
war in 1899." Moreover, "the history books also failed to explain
why the Katipunan was doomed to lose in Manila and why the
Philippine revolution was not seen or studied as a military struggle."
In short, it is proposed that the so-called master narrative of
our nation-state must be finally structured so as to pin down the
frame of our collective being and consciousness, this grand narra-
tive, however, that post-modernist historians aver as no longer pos-
sible, and in fact is constrictive of the reworking of the so-called history.
Suppose however such were made possible by a country needing
to present an organic unity of its identity, how would that historicizing be?

215
 It should be noted that the Centennial has been formalized to
promote values, which count among others courtesy, nationalism,
patriotism, wholehearted participation, love of peace, confidence
in the Divine Creator — such serialized canonical objectives in-
deed designed to construct the Filipino's historical face/fate. Yet
these values also underlie some ideologies that would fail to inter-
face with other variables. For instance, faith in God, while it will
help soothe the national government's anxiety over possible sub-
version of its imagined history, could reduce the historiographic
work to a metaphysical odyssey, where truth in history in no more
than the essentialist reference to God in History — thus pursuing a
line that would incorporate both the antagonistic elements in secu-
lar and clerical discourses. And whose view of history would there-
fore sum up our alleged totality: Corpuz's ? Agoncillo's? Ileto's?
The canonized pedagogues whose theory of history would be a
schematic ramification within the same ideological matrix?
Exactly, how would we view History? The reconstruction of
history, or that which we presume to have been, for William Henry
Scott, in his Cracks in the Parchment Curtain, could only be made
real and possible through the very texts that historicized our collec-
tive process, but which historization was from the vantage point of
eliding our colonial condition. That is , Scott could only presume
the truth through the untruths of our representation, thus affirming
our history by denying a history for us by our conquerors. But how?
What the Spaniards, for instance, told about us, our stories, is
no more than the patina which veils our very truths which, fortu-
nately, must glimmer through the language of the lie. Again, this is
to say that the lie carries the truth: the so-called "parchment cur-
tain to signify the official documents of the Spanish colonial 're-
gime..." has "chinks, so to speak, through which fleeting glimpses
of the Filipinos and their reactions to Spanish dominion may be
seen..." This may be decoded through original letters and reports
bickering complains among conquistadores, appeals for support, re-
ward and promotion, long-winded recommendations that were never
implemented, and decrees inspired by local obstruction of govern-
ment goals — all these contain direct or implied references to Filipino

216
behavior and conditions. In brief, it is by mining the so-called
textual lode that history comes to us; however, what we cannot be
denied is that this history is no more than a play of words which we must
assume to be real (the past coming alive through the play of signifiers).
Are we not, in a sense, proclaiming a history that reduces itself
to signification, a mode of the fictional?
In Tony Bennetts Outside Literature, we are told that "the
past, in so far as the historian is concerned with it, is never the past
as such — not everything that maybe said of it — but only the past
as the product of the specific protocols of investigation which char-
acterize the discipline of history in its concern to establish, classify
and order the relations between events pertinent to the injury in
hand. In this way [Bennett continues Cousin's line], the practice of
history may be said to "produce (uncover) events, whose repre-
sentations are called historical facts. In this conception, the reality
of those events and thereby , so to speak, of the historical past
consists in nothing but, and certainly nothing beyond, the status of
historical facts that is accorded those representations whose
evidentist standing has passed the test of disciplined scrutiny."
If indeed the mode of investigation actually determines the
truth itself, then how would one explain the the discrepant his-
tories that result especially when historians, given to the same
methodology, quibble over, for instance, the date of the Cry of
Pugad-lawin?
Nicolas Zafra would graph 10 historians who have different
calendric posting of the event from 1896 to 1956. It fluctuates
between August 20 to 26 to the generalized span of "last week
of August". It was argued that the proclamation of August 23 as the
day of Cry of Pugad-lawin (indeed not any other date, nor any
other place like Balintawak, Bahay Toro, Kangkong) was only made
hegemonic in terms of its inscription in history books and com-
memorative practices through Teodoro Agoncillo who was then
"at the peak of his popularity as he had just published the classic
Revolt of the Masses that gave impetus to the budding nationalist
movement at that time."
It is here implied that it was simply the hierarchical aura of

217
personal/pedagogic power of Agoncillo that conferred upon August
23 the truth of its reality. lsagani Medina would vouch for the alleged
"inconvertible pieces of evidence that support it," although this is
rigorously objected to by "Guerrero, Encamacion, and Villegas"
who point out that Ethel date and site of Cry lack positive documen-
tation and supporting evidences from witnesses." In a sense, the
bone of contention is the presentation of evidence, such as in a
judicial battle, that would construct the legal truth of an event or an
assumption: other than that, a historian of this mould could not
possibly swear by his/her claim.
After all, it is not the Katipuneros' alleged massing at a spe-
cific site that is denied, hut the specificities of its occurence. Here we
are regaled by the attempt to foist a historical symbolic to be iden-
tical with a historical Real — a Lacanian binary, of course, that pre-
supposes a perpetual, unbrigeable gap between the two. The
preposterousness of such debates as to the actuality of the date could
now be be "settled," as interposed by a media reporter, by the
"living Cry participants (themselves). But, "it is asked, if it was
impossible while they were living, why should it be now?"
The classic formulation is actually reminiscent of the so-called
"intentional fallacy" where the speaker is alleged to be the knower
of truth. This way, only Shakespeare could settle the the originality
of his dramatized truth, Rizal the revolutionary in his rejection of
the uprising and Bonifacio the integrity of his mission. The rest is a
huge lie, and we're all back to square one where history is imma-
nent, because language implicates a constant play of signifiers, the
accidents of truths.
But Terry Eagleton cannot accept this. There must be an ad-
judication itself in this gray area where the determinate becomes
indeterminate as well. Or else history lapses into pure instability—
in which case the political field simply becomes a chessboard of
chance, cunning, wizardry, a game of transcendental signifiers.
Here Eagleton, beholden to the Marxist paradigm of the flow
of history, in fact the narrativizing of it, would not allow such leap of
the narrative of history into illusory... "any more than we should
chide the working class movement for nurturing its mighty

218
dramas of universal solidarity overcoming the evils of capitalism."
[Moreover] "that fiction is not a lie." He would insist within the
logic that "narrative continuities do not merely orchestrate into mo-
mentary cohesion, a cacophony of historical noises. For there are
historical continuities..."
But such formulation is not surely reassuring. While history
must be presented as logically connected and defensively arguable,
the reader of "history," in a sense, is asked to suspend his/her
belief as well as disbelief (a mode of Derrida's differance where
meaning is not immediately conferred inasmuch as the signifiers
are still at play, allowing for a constant re-opening and subversion,
because presumably this is a mode of resisting authoritarian dis-
courses) because the narrative is fiction is a lie not a lie. And it is so
because linguistic meaning assumes an arbitrariness, in fact a
Barthesian multiplicity.
It can only be so for it must be argued that not the truth of
history (an essentializing mode) is at bar but rather the defensible
truth of history — it being a construction and not immanent revela-
tion as in religious hermeneutics. Eagleton's historical project, it is
noted, is "predicated on the construction of a revolutionary party,"
which in effect actualizes the so-called historically dialectical, where
the process of history is the articulation/practice of the human will
for freedom, and not indeeed grounded on the pre-determined,
classical theatre of the god's whose power dictates what human
tragedy should be: any action outside the ambit of the god's pre-
ferred ploy should constitute hubris, precisely because liberation
is against the universal spirit and revolution a curse on mankind.
Amado Guerrero's Philippine Society and Revolution advances a
similar thesis.
The observer as historian therefore is confined not so much by
the investigative mode of his pursuit as by the politico-ideological dis-
courses that constitutes him/her and which he/she necessarily also con-
stitutes.
It could be posited hence that the current imbroglio on cer-
tain event, even the so-called invention of heroes, dwells more
on the ideological strategem that intellectuals steer clear of, or get

219
interpolated into, in their positioning that is determined by class,
gender, religion, race, ethnicity. And this merely gives flesh to my
claim that while historians pretend to de-ideologize history as though
it were a transparent, objective truth, they are no more than ide-
ologized constituents that presume to inhabit a non-position itself
in the social grid. As though the discursive net does not trap us all.
It is in this context that I would confess that I personally had
not had the opportunity to observe the Manila Hotel pow-wow.
But if the conference did not slide easily into the contemporary
scenario where a revolution (this is also denied by certain quarters)
is still quietly raging, then we could only but be witnesses to the
unfolding of a game of ideological diffusion which, in Pete Daroy's
words, has made "research work of our academicians as either
esoteric in nature or superficial in character." [Manila Standard,
August 23, 1996].
For a revolution on the centennial which projects a historical
event as simply a fetish for concealing the continuities, the traces of
the 1896, into 1996, and which continuity cannot be confronted
by historians because "all the facts are not yet in," and history is not
a future but a past whose intervention into the present is a continu-
ing indeterminate proclamation and that history is a deferral of
meaning, merely reduces everything to a fascist rendition of orden
y progreso, where order is a platoon formation and progress the
cadence of martial music.
Relatedly, it goes without saying that any historical project that
must take into consideration a faith in the creator reduces any hu-
man activity into the pre-ordained, the fated. Such historical policy
already establishes the sphere of its own containment.
Indeed, it's hardly any consolation then that a Diliman Review
editorial on the centennial would construct for us the alleged am-
biguity of the 1896 revolution (But from whose point of view? The
academics who have been incarcerated in bureaucratic ratholes?
The state which would benefit from the allegations of a historical
mess? The people whose praxiology of violence has been con-
tained by the discourses of defeatism and despair? The DR, after
all, could only lament its own historiographic amorphousness:

220
"Sandaang taon matapos ang pangyayari, nagsimula pa lamang
tayong matunghayan ang kabuuan ng ating himagsikan..."
Are we slowly drifting toward the final pieces of the puzzle of
the grand narrative, that cabalistic key , to switch metaphors, that
would unlock the enigma of our collective being?
But suppose post-modernism has been correct all along? That
the grand narrative that holds in its grip totalizing "cartographers"
like Corpuz and company no longer holds?
The DR's incursion into local histories should indeed
underline the resurgence of the specifics, the centralization of the mar-
ginal, the construction of the voices of the muted [homogenizing
this shift from the universal of the old schemas, towards the hetero-
geneous, the differential] for post-modernist history is virtually a
collage of all the scraps that constitute a provisional, ever certain
face of our "being". [Take note, new data do not necessarily sup-
port an established theory or corollary but may even negate it. Thus,
the revolts in Misamis, Capiz, Zamboanga, and the rest of the ar-
chipelago merely reinforce the very idea of the death of the master
narrative which O.D. Corpuz proposes should be done, with him of
course as the master narrator].
Today's historical grip, it would appear, draws sustenance from
the post-Marxist critique of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe who
"argue that it is consequently necessary to abandon, as a terrain of
analysis, the premise "society" as a sutured and self-defined total-
ity" which, as paraphrased by Tony Bennett, would mean that "it is
impossible to locate a unifying principle, such as that traditionally
supplied by the concept of society as a rationally ordered whole
which might reveal its nature to a rationally ordered intelligence."
This would be distressing to ambitious historians who would
imagine themselves imagining for a collective, themselves the look-
ing eye that would scan the panorama of beauty and ugliness, wealth
and squalor, good and evil, as it were. For post-modernism is not a
small discursive space that merely houses the western paradigms,
but encloses as well Filipino historians (given our Western orienta-
tion and exposure) whose subscription to Foucault's treatise on Eu-
ropean penology and culture, Althusser's science and break from

221
ideology, Bourdieu's habitus more or less infects the othering of the
native subject. The historian as native articulator of the so-called
real, primitive, pristine truths vis-a-vis the colonialist on the other
hand has only resulted in the nativist philosophy so pervasive today
in the academic circuit, as though nativism itself were not imbricated
in colonialist discourse as well as imperialist design [Said], The de-
finitive portrait of Philippine history, this proposed obra, posits there-
fore a "unifying principle" that would imply, for Laclau, a recogni-
tion of fixed positions in a society that constantly shifts. Hence,
grand narratives in an age of post-modernism when territories are
constantly remapped would theoretically eschew the general de-
sign of the revolutions of our times.
It is in this catch-22 situation where we are forced to make
choices of action for the colonial subject.
What history should be constructed then? That which would
valorize Bonifacio over Aguinaldo? That which is between the ideo-
logical construction of Bonifacio as tragic (Agoncillo) and Bonifacio
as boorish (Joaquin)? Or that of Bonifacio as an invention by radical
forces to serve the iconic desire of the underclass (Glenn May)?
That which is totally definitive (as in Jameson's) or that which is
calculatedly provisional (as in Laclau's)?
Documentation and its empiricist argument would still keep the
door a jar, but would it suffice? After all, Glenn May's assertions are
based on alleged forgeries of Bonifacio's textual heritage, but some-
what steers clear of the very praxiological corpus of Bonifacio as a
Katipunan fountainhead. Surely, Bonifacio —and his historical in-
tervention—existed, or Gregoria de Jesus was a liar or a ghost.
But, of course, the very physical reality of Bonifacio cannot
be denied. It is presumed by Rolando Gripaldo (Determining The
Truth: The Story of Andres Bonifacio) that Glenn May has simply
concluded that our canonization of the Katipunan founder, "the
Bonifacio we have is ... mostly an illusion, the product of undocu-
mented statements, unreliable, doctored or otherwise spuri-
ous sources and the collective imagination of several historians
and memoirists." The alleged mythmaking by nationalist histori-
ans is denied; instead he asserts that May's historicism vis-a-vis

222
Constantino, Agoncillo and Co. is no more than a selective histori-
cism aimed at a particular school of writing, a contraideological
positioning disguised as objective reframing (Gripaldo does not, of
course, employ the word "ideological", loaded as it is with left-
wing orientation). Still and all, the narrative of history itself cannot
demand a definitive reconstruction, but simply, as Gripaldo argues,
a more arguable presentation of "additional circumstantial evi-
dence as to the provenance of existing documents." Further, "the
line between historical deconstruction and historical invention or
re-creation is very thin indeed. And sometimes, such a line is never
drawn at all." And so, I may add, the imaginary line that separates
fiction from reality, language from truth.
Be that as it may, we can advance that history, be it what it
was, or what we deemed it was, leaves us mortals no other option
but to choose that history which would explore the interests histori-
ans protect and pursue — for it is largely on the notion of discur-
sive/institutional power and spheres of influence that historians them-
selves, who position and consequently are positioned by texts and
histories, play the game of texts and histories.

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