Narrative Rupture as History, or the Search for the "Missing text" in Miguel Syjuco's Ilustrada and Gina Apostol's The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata

• Main Author: Roma, Dinah T.
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: Jose Rizal; historiographic metafiction; narrative; Philippine colonial history; rupture
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss39/20; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/1999/viewcontent/KK_2039_2C_202022_2019_20Forum_20Kritika_20in_20Honor_20of_20Edel_20E._20Garcellano_20__20Roma.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

The search for the “missing text” is the central trope in Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado (2008) and Gina Apostol’s The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata (2009). In Ilustrado, the search for The Bridges Ablaze, the missing manuscript of the dead migrant Filipino writer Crispin Salvador propels the novel from beginning to end. In The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, the tattered loose leaf pages from the diary of the half-blind revolutionary Raymundo Mata become the annotative focus of a psychoanalyst, a translator, and an editor. While the novels have received critical reviews, there have been no studies yet that look into the trope of the “missing text” as it amplifies the narrative ruptures within the novels. Taking cues from historiographical metafiction and narratology, ruptures and disruptions are symptomatic of a deeper discontinuity in history and may point to a desire—Lacanian in nature—to rewrite and contain the schisms of Philippine colonial history into fiction. By examining the narrative ruptures in the two novels, as they may take the form of textual productivity, this paper looks into how Philippine colonial history, particularly, as embodied in Jose Rizal, continues to undergo a reimagining that allows for more possibilities of reading and critique.