diced b Jos e S. Arc a, - non

GENESIS OF THE NO L1The novel's impact on the reader is explained by, first, its direct style andthe unmistakable aim easily perceived from the earliest chapters, and,second, its four important characteristics. (1) It is based on personalexperiences—as Rizal himself admits more than once. (2) Historical factsconfirm these experiences and give credibility to the narrative. (3) Theappropriate literary techniques are used to attain his end. And (4) anunmistakable ideology unifies the work and arouses the reader's interest.All of Rizal's biographers emphasize the first characteristic is animportant element confirmed in repeated statements by the author himself ofthe Noli. These are his negative experiences, both personal and familial,mentioned rather fully in his writings. But even if one can deny the novel is"a work whose seeds were the author's personal sufferings," one can also addit is the final result of an intellectual process. With his gifted memory andunusual talent for observation, Rizal will evoke in his novel personal, family,and social experiences. He recalls personages, scenes, anecdotes, places, etc.,and recreates, enriches, and complements them in his mental world. What hesaw, experienced, and read receives flesh and blood to the degree they arereread, reexperienced, and recalled from a wider unifying perspective.Rizal lived and grew up in a family of intellectual tastes sufficientlysuperior to those of the ordinary Filipino family of his time. Both his fatherand older brother, Paciano, studied at the Colegio de San Jose, his mother andsisters at the Colegio de Santa Rosa in Manila. His paternal and maternalrelatives were financially comfortable and had received no mean culturalformation.' Rizal himself entered the cultural world early. At home, hestates, he had at his disposal a library of about a thousand volumes, amongwhich were works of some of the writers who had exercised an influence onthe ideas of the last decades: Voltaire, Rousseau, Cantu, Sue, Lamartine,Dumas, etc. Even as a child, he was an avid reader, with books ready at handvery few could allow themselves the luxury of reading as adults.Another important factor that powerfully helped mould Rizal'spersonality are, naturally, his studies at the two most important centers ofeducation in the Philippines, the Ateneo municipal de Manila, and theUniversity of Santo Tomas," where he received a humanistic and culturalformation much richer and more encompassing than he himself wanted toadmit in the later more critical years of his life." Finally, to all this must beadded the social atmosphere he breathed in the cultural circles among which60