Unbecoming Rizal: José Garcia Villa's Biographical Translations

Abstract

José Garcia Villa is best known as a modernist Filipino poet who migrated to America in the 1930s. Much critical discussion of Villa in Philippine literary studies has emphasised his narrow concern with aestheticism and his rejection of contemporary demands to politicise artistic production. This paper returns to Villa's first short story collection Footnote of Youth (1933) and argues for a reconsideration of the politics of Villa's modernist aesthetics. In particular, I wish to concentrate on a series of short stories at the end of the collection that present revisionary ‘shadow biographies’ of revolutionary hero José Rizal, whose own life story and novels have attained, in Carol Hau 's words, the status of ‘master-narratives’ of the Philippine nation, with Rizal himself portrayed as the ‘First Filipino’. Apart from engaging in translation across language in a multilingual environment, the short stories are translations in a larger sense. They re-present elements of longer narratives such as biography and indeed the ‘biographisation of the social’ deployed by the colonial and bourgeois national states in a consciously fragmentary form. Furthermore, they map such biographies onto the lives of ordinary Filipinos in a manner that destabilises them: on a rational level, the claims of filiation made in these stories are preposterous, yet the narrative and literary economies of the texts encourage readerly identification with their subaltern protagonists. In exploring the space of contradiction that Villa's stories occupy, and the manner in which their formal qualities enable a reappraisal of this space, this paper also to makes a larger argument concerning the frequently neglected centrality of the short story and life-writing in exploring national imaginaries under late colonialism, and encourages reflection on the manner in which biographisation is an unacknowledged subtext in contemporary postcolonial literary studies.