Pursuing the Pleasure of the Story: Reading Rosario Cruz Lucero’s “The Death of Fray Salvador Montano, Conquistador of Negros”

Abstract

This article attempts to draw out the intertextuality of Filipino fictionist Rosario Cruz Lucero’s “The Death of Fray Salvador Montano, Conquistador of Negros” — one of the stories in her collection Feast and Famine: Stories of Negros (2003) — by studying it from the perspective of the reader’s “circular memory” (Barthes 1975). Following the introduction are sections of varying lengths that create conjunctions between the story and other works or concepts drawn mainly from the fields of history, theology, and postcolonial literary criticism. The first section discusses the interplay of conversion and subversion in the story within the context of the conquista espiritual on which was founded Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines. The second and third sections briefly delve into some aspects of the author’s creative technique as evidenced in the story. The fourth section links the pasyon-singing incident in the story with a historical study that focuses in part on the pasyon. The final section reads the colonial relationships depicted in the story in terms of Thiru Kandiah’s concepts of symbiosis and perceptual diversity. Through these varied approaches, the article hopes to demonstrate the richness of the reading experience offered by Cruz-Lucero’s story.