Intertextual Relationship Between Hugo's Notre Dame De Paris & Rizal's Noli Me Tangere

INTERTEXTUALITY IN THE CHARACTERS OF

RIZAL’S NOLI ME TANGERE AND VICTOR HUGO’S NOTRE DAME DE PARIS: PROPOSED STUDY GUIDE

A Thesis Proposal

Presented to

The Graduate Study Faculty of

Cebu Technological University–Main Campus

R. Palma Street, Cebu City

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree: MASTER OF EDUCATION IN

ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE TEACHING

(M.Ed. ELLT)

SEÑOREN, PHILIP JOHN B.

2014

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Title Page                .        .        .        .        .        .        .        i

Table of Contents                .        .        .        .        .        .        ii

CHAPTER I

THE PROBLEM AND ITS SCOPE

        Rationale of the Study                .        .        .        .        1

        Theoretical Background                .        .        .        .        4

        The Problem        .        .        .        .        .        .        .        8

                Statement of the Problem        .        .        .        .        8

                Works Cited        .        .        .        .        .        .        9

        Appendices                .        .        .        .        .        .        10

Chapter I

THE PROBLEM AND ITS SCOPE

Rationale of the Study

        José Rizal is widely known as the greatest Philippine hero; the one who contributed immensely to the emancipation of the Filipinos from Spain’s colonization. Not only that, he also has the distinction of being one of the great writers whose two major novels--the perennial Noli Me Tángere and the audacious El Filibusterismo, have for years been a staple text in high school particularly in the Filipino subject where it is generally regarded as a perfunctory read identified simply as ‘Noli’ or ‘Fili’. As Joaquin puts it--Rizal’s books have been so

beatified, so canonized, so enshrined, that they have almost ceased to belong to literature. It’s becoming a sort of sacred duty among us Filipinos. And that’s exactly how we read him: as a duty, a tribal duty; and to have our minds elevated, our patriotism intensified. In short, nobody reads Rizal. All novels are written to be enjoyed. But when we want to curl up with a good book, do we think of Rizal’s? Alas, no. We sit down to study Rizal. But we don’t take his books to bed with us like we do Margaret Mitchell’s. (http://poisedforflight.wordpress.com/2012/12/21/the-novels-of-rizal-an-appreciation-by-nick-joaquin/)

        Regardless, Noli Me Tángere is quite simply a master’s work; fashioned with exquisite prose that is both heartbreaking and humorous. Despite this reputation, Rizal has been accused of copying the works of other literary greats. Alexandre Duma’s The Count of Monte Cristo is said to be the prototype of El Flibusterismo and some of Noli Me Tangere’s characters are peculiarly similar to Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame De Paris. One can surmise that the latter comparison is perhaps a valid one since it is known that he devoted most of his money to the purchase of over 2,000 books, which included a Spanish translation of Lives of the Presidents of the United States, Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales (five of which he translated into Tagalog for his nieces and nephews), the complete works of Victor Hugo, and Florante at Laura by Francisco Balagtas. (http://www.uwyo.edu/uwyo/2012/13-2/docs/kaminski-obituary.pdf)

        Given that Rizal indeed copied Hugo, it is a fact that most great writers began painstakingly writing out in longhand the works of the greats who had come before them. Like a chef who never stops sampling and dissecting the delicious dishes of other cooks in order to find inspiration to up his own game and create his own new recipes, great writers spun the underlying elements of others’ style into something uniquely theirs (http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/

03/26/want-to-become-a-better-writer-copy-the-work-of-others/). Victor Hugo himself was profoundly influenced by François-René de Chateaubriand; his life journey showed that it followed paths parallel to Chateaubriand's in many ways. (http://www.deepspirits.com/great-people/victor-hugo/)

        The analysis of the parallelisms in the characters of Noli Me Tangere and Notre Dame De Paris is basically where this study anchored on—to put into light the idea that Rizal’s created characters are wholly original; that the similarities sprung from the inspiration he got from Hugo’s work. In comparison to Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, Joaquin defended Rizal; he said: “If Rizal did borrow from Dumas, it’s amazing what he did with it. He took a creaky, lugubrious melodrama and turned it into a crisp, ironic social-problem novel.” (http://poisedforflight.wordpress.com/2012/12/21/the-novels-of-rizal-an-appreciation-by-nick-joaquin/)

        To gain a clearer background of the study, it is fitting to know the milieu wherein the two writers began their respective novels. Written during the July 1830 Revolution, Notre Dame de Paris was profoundly affected by the historical and political trends of the early nineteenth century. Victor Hugo was born at the beginning of the Napoleonic Empire in 1802 and began writing under the Restoration monarchy before becoming one of the most ardent supporters of the French Republic. From the early days of his youth, Hugo identified with the themes of social and political equality that characterized the legacy of the French Revolution. (http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/hunchback/context.html)

        In writing Noli Me Tangere, Rizal wanted make the people realize that the need for the development of the intellectual virtues, like the love of study and of justice, while cultivating the moral virtues of honesty, love of work, bravery and consideration for one’s fellowmen. In this manner they would come to hate and oppose tyranny while developing those qualities that would render a corrupt government an anomaly among them. (Roces 1941)

Theoretical Background of the Study

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INTERTEXTUALITY,

MIMESIS

Character Parallelisms

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Figure 1. Theoretical Framework of the Study

        This study theorizes that some of the prominent characters of Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and Hugo’s Notre Dame De Paris have parallelisms in terms of their defining features and mimetic relevance. This is supported by the theories of Expressivism, Intertextuality, and Mimesis. All elements of fiction are equally important in the creation of literary work but character brings humanity to a text rendering connection to the readers. Without them, there would be no story. A realistic characterization is above all a vehicle for meaning. There is always a causal connection between the description and its meaning, behind each description of a character there lies the essence of a person (van Alphen 777).

        Theories have emerged in the analysis of characters in uncovering its major sub-elements such as physical appearance, speech, psychological traits, and archetypal significance in relation to other works. Literary criticism is the practice of interpreting and writing about literary works. Intertextuality is a term coined by Julia Kristeva in 1966 to denote the interdependence of literary texts, the interdependence of any one literary text with all those that have gone before it. Her contention was that a literary text is not an isolated phenomenon but is made up of a mosaic of quotations, and that any text is the ‘absorption and transformation of another’. Furthermore, intertextuality functions as comparative instrument by putting two texts together. When literature references another text, we are asked to draw from our knowledge of the text in its original form, and compare this to how it is being used, changed, or reframed by the primary book. Intertextuality functions on comparison and contrast of similarities and differences. (http://humanities.wisc.edu/assets/misc/What_Is_In