The Filipino post-communist revolutionary in Mario Miclat's Secrets of the eighteen mansions

• Main Author: Po, Leslie Ann L.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2012
• Subjects: Communism in literature; Ideology in literature; Mario Miclat. Secrets of the eighteen mansions; South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/5309
• Institution: De La Salle University

This thesis uses Althusser's concept of the Ideological State Apparatus and Rolando Tolentino's political literary criticism theory in his book Pag-aklas, Pagbaklas, Pagbagtas: Politikal na Kritisismong Pampanitikan (2010) in examining the political milieu in the novel Secrets of the Eighteen Mansions (2010) by Mario Miclat. The protagonist-narrator Mario is free-willingly subjected to ideology that manifests in material and imaginary form through the functions of the Communist Party of the Philippines. Adherence to a cultural category of exposure to American culture and education and, collective experiences with fellow CPP members eventually led to the protagonist-narrator's subjection to Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Thought of Communism. The protagonist-narrator's perception of Philippine history as well as the disparity between the Chinese and Filipino practices, led him to reconsider modernity as a vision of a Filipino class-less society. The first part examines the Communist Party of the Philippines' actions to infiltrate the Ideological State Apparatuses to disseminate an alternative ideology, the second part identifies the changes in the imaginary and material relationship between the narrator and the Philippines as a State, and the third part identifies the shift in the narrator's subject positions as influenced by the opposing ideals between the individual and the collective. The analysis ends with an Althusserian-Marxist and Tolentino's political literary examination of class tension within the novel, ultimately leading to the researcher's commentary on the situation of class relations. By examining class struggle and the narrator's material and imaginary relationship with the State, the political literary criticism of Miclat's novel serves as the evaluative instrument in finding a Philippine appropriate Marxist theory in the sphere of Philippine literary criticism, which is proposed to be Tolentino's political literary perspective.