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Home > Journals > PAHA > Vol. 5 (2015) > Number 2

 

Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia

Abstract

This study undertakes a comprehensive, close reading of the original version of Paz Marquez Benitez’s (PMB’s) “Dead Stars,” published in the Philippines Herald in 1925. Previous critical essays have explicated selected aspects of the 1975 version edited and published by Leopoldo Yabes, based on some of its elements and techniques. On the other hand, this close reading is supplemented by empirical data gathered through historical research, including the cultural forms of the three Philippine traditions: indigenous, Hispanic, and colonial American. Weaving through the intertextual reading is the use of PMB’s biography, sources and influences, specifically the story’s historical context, milieu, prescience, and interrelationship with the Philippine literary tradition. On the premise of the story’s prescience, the study begins with the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during the Second World War (1942–45). It then works backwards through the American Commonwealth in the 1930s; the American Colonial Period in the 1910s to the ’20s; the Filipino-American War at the turn of the twentieth century; and to 1894, the year of her birth. A timeline of the story’s scenes is presented alongside parallel historical events. The study demonstrates how “Dead Stars” depicts the three cultures and sensibilities— Filipino, Hispanic, and American—eliding into each other. This theme is illustrated by the story’s descriptions of the architectural styles, the country-and-city dichotomy, and the behavioral differences between the older and younger generations. The characters, whether major or minor, dramatize these sensibilities as well. Esperanza is the residual Hispanic hegemony; Alfredo is the tragic figure caught between his resistance to, and complicity in, the US dominant hegemony; and Julia Salas is the irrepressible oppositional hegemony. All these details lead to a revelation of the many-layered meaning of “dead stars.”

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