The Sage Nobody Reads
The town calls Tasio a lunatic; he accepts the title cheerfully, since it exempts him from being understood by his persecutors. He is the novel’s figure of the ilustrado — the enlightened man born a century too early, whose only possible correspondent is posterity itself.
The View from the Ruins
Watching the cornerstone laid for Ibarra’s school, Tasio delivers a vertiginous prophecy: he imagines archaeologists of a future Philippine civilization puzzling over the ruins of the colonial age, explaining to schoolchildren the incredible fact that a people once sent across the world for permission to govern itself.
Perchance the learned men of the nation that dwells in these regions will labor, as do the present Egyptologists, with the remains of a great civilization which occupied itself with eternity, little dreaming that upon it was descending so long a night.
History as Tribunal
The device does serious philosophical work. By treating the colonial present as a future past, Rizal denies it the appearance of permanence that is every regime’s deepest defense. Institutions that feel eternal are shown to be episodes; the judgment the censor forbids in the present is delegated to a tribunal no censor can reach. It is the Enlightenment’s appeal to posterity, sharpened by a colonial subject who knew his true readers had not yet been born.
Tasio’s meditation on the ruins is delivered at the laying of the schoolhouse cornerstone in Chapter XXXII; his defense of writing for posterity is in Chapter XXV.
Related Concepts
