‘Radiance and Sunrise’ comes into its own

Santos was much admired as a governor and a senator: someone who never lined his pockets with stolen money, and tried his best to apply in the real world the words he wove in his fiction. He later served as director of the Surian ng Wikang Pambansa (Institute of the National Language). He died on May 1, 1963, fittingly enough on a Labor Day.

Banaag at Sikat is considered as the fountainhead of social realism in the Tagalog novel. It starkly mirrored the various forces clashing during the early days of American colonialism; in this guise, the novel could be seen as a social text.

Santos wrote the novel when he was only 25 years old. He was a voracious reader and his great learning is shown in the authors and books cited in the novel. He also knew that he was standing on the shoulders of a literary tradition. His novel sprang directly from Ninay by Pedro Paterno and the Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo of Dr. Jose Rizal. The costumbrismo tradition — the novel as a document of mores and manners, customs and traditions that was shown in Ninay — can also be found in some chapters in Banaag at Sikat, especially in the description of the luxuriant flora in the countryside as well as the wedding and funeral scenes. The embers of Rizal’s novels can be seen in the subject matter of Banaag at Sikat: like philosophy, it was written “to help change the world.”

Moreover, Banaag at Sikat was a child of the 19th-century didactic novel. This can be seen in the long passages where the characters debate on capital and labor, socialism and anarchy. Sometimes, Santos laid too heavy a hand and would veer a chapter toward another theoretical discussion on capitalism and its discontents, and why the Philippines should embrace socialism instead.

The late National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera, who wrote a musical version of Banaag at Sikat, noted that “in the process of adaptation, [his] biggest hurdle was the ‘polemics of the characters.’ For example, the two male leads spent a lot of time discussing socialism and anarchism.”

Banaag at Sikat then should be seen from the lens of its historical context: the 19th-century novel as a vessel of opinions and an instrument that could enlighten the readers on the burning issues of the day.

Dr. Soledad S. Reyes said that this is the context by which Banaag at Sikat should be seen. While it also deals with love as well as family issues, it does not deal with personal issues alone. It shows the contending forces in a society divided between the few who are rich and the many who are poor. Many of the passages in the novel still have implications for the present, like pebbles thrown on the surface of a lake, creating ripple upon ripple of meaning.

This is also illustrated in Dr. Resil Mojares’ reading in his book, The Origins and Rise of the Philippine Novel Until 1940, when he said: “There are points in literary history when novels in the conventional mode begin to bear tenuous relations with the historical realities of the time during which they are written. The intrusion of these realities will necessarily result in a ‘deformation’ of the conventional plot. This distortion can take several forms: Chiefly, it can be freakish and mechanical (as when the new is simply superimposed on the old) or it can be artistic and creative (as when the two elements are successfully integrated). This is the problem illustrated in an interesting group of early novels, the best-known representative of which is Santos’ Banaag at Sikat.” This led to what Mojares calls the “hybrid plot” of the novel: it is a political tract and a love story as well.

Banaag at Sikat will continue to generate new meanings, or regenerate old ones, through the passage of the years. Translated here as Radiance and Sunrise, may it inspire new readers to take their individual and collective lives into their own hands, and shape it in order to “help change the world.”

Radiance and Sunrise, my English translation of Banaag at Sikat, has just been published by Penguin Books. It is available worldwide at amazon.com.