Banaag at Sikat by Lope K. SantosMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
"The time of the great West has passed. Now it is the time for the East to rise from the shadows."
There has been a movement over the past few decades, a call to replace Jose Rizal's NOLI ME TANGERE and EL FILIBUSTERISMO in the school curriculum with this book. When I first heard of this several years ago, I remember promising to myself that, should the time come for an English translation to come out, I'd read it and find out why some folks think this is better than Ibarra and Simoun for our youth to read in class.
Fast forward the first Philippine Book Festival, where I found a copy at the Penguin SEA stall!
I dove into the novel in a comparative frame of mind, and could see a lot of similarities with the Rizal novels.
We have lovers from different social classes, a clash between haves and have-nots, characters who STAND FOR SOMETHING and have unnatural dialogues awkwardly set up as mini-debates about the pros and cons of socialism and the evils of inherited wealth.
In both novels we have the heights of the infamous Malay passion that are obvious predecessors to the melodramatic plots of teleseryes today.
Now the differences.
Rizal's novels served to unite Filipinos in their ire against the foreign oppressor.
Santos' novel, in contrast, seeks to set Filipinos against each other: the laborer versus his boss, the proletariat versus the bourgeois.
This is obviously the work of a very young man (Santos was in his early twenties when he wrote it in 1906). It reeks of dangerous idealism, untried, untested, impractical and impossible to implement.
I'll admit it was an interesting read, but only in the historic sense. This was, after all, only a few years after the death of Rizal. We had just exchanged one foreign oppressor for another. This was written before history had shown that the great experiment of socialism/communism was doomed to fail, before the Russian revolution and Stalin's infamous famine, before Mao's Cultural Revolution.
But in terms of the elements of "good literature," this book falls short and is one of those books that became famous because it was among the first of its kind, and not on the strength of its literary merit.
People fall in love at a glance. If this was meant to be a romance mixed with political propaganda, the lovers' dialogues are trite and nonsensical. One can predict what will happen in the plot chapters away. And the characters are obviously personifications of social classes, they do not change and seem like unrealistic individuals. The supposed hero and heroine's chief virtue seem to be hard headedness and not any other nobility in spirit.
The author is pedantic at times:
"From the way the two sisters dressed that day, the female guests saw how funny and ugly it was to borrow clothes from other lands, and how beautiful it was to wear dresses that belonged to one's own people. They learned that not all that was good in Europe or the United States should be borrowed and imitated by Filipinos. Whether in clothes or character traits, we should only borrow those elements that would not destroy what was beautiful in our own country and race..."
Rizal's novels, therefore, emerge superior not only in literary style, but also because of their characters. True, they are symbols, but Rizal managed to imbue them with a sense of epic majesty that captures the imagination. And his characters change. Ibarra becomes Simoun, and becomes something else towards the end.
In this regard, Banaag at Sikat fails to approach the standard that Rizal set. This teacher would support a movement to include it in the curriculum, but not to replace Noli and Fili completely.
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