AN IMMODEST PROPOSAL FOR LITERARY STUDIES

{1} Two historical moments saw a surge of intellectual interest in the local and popular in Philippine culture
and history.

The landmark of the first is arguably Isabelo de los Reyes's El Folk-lore Filipino (1889), which called for
the collection and promotion of "popular knowledge" (saber popular) in all the branches of art and science for
constituting what was then an inchoate sense of Filipino nationality. This initiative can be seen as part of the
late nineteenth-century Propaganda Movement but it is singular in its advocacy of the local and popular in
building a national culture from the ground up. However, the folk-lore movement de Ios Reyes announced did
not get off the ground. It was overtaken by events-the anti-Spanish revolution, the United States –occupation-
and when the dust settled a new government (rather than free-floating intellectuals like de los Reyes) was in
place to take a directive role in the making of a "national culture."

In the early twentieth century, the incipient, populist movement de los Reyes envisioned morphed
into what was mainly a state-supported, nation-building project aimed at creating a cultural canon essential
for the formation of a "Filipino citizenship." An illustrative initiative was the project undertaken by the
University of the Philippines in the 1930s, when UP President Jorge Bocobo created a committee of the
university’s leading faculty that went on expeditions to the provinces to collect and record songs, dances,
costumes, musical instruments, and other. With the work of other state institutions (in particular, the public
schools), a canonical, civic nationalism took form in the early twentieth century.

INTERROGATIONS

The second historical moment came in the 1970s when there was a new surge of academic interest in
popular and local studies in such fields as history, literature, and the arts. (More broadly, this happened during
what Vicente Rafael felicitously calls "the long 1970s”, the period that coincides with the Marcos presidency
from 1965 to 1986)

I shall not dwell at length on the reasons for this wave of interest except to say that the realities of the
time-deep economic crises, a debased electoral democracy, the rise of Left politics, insurgency, the experience
of martial rule-forced scholars to interrogate their neocolonial formation and relation to society, and in
particular the problem of what was excluded and obscured in the constitution of the “nation". When the
young activists of the time called theirs as the "second propaganda Movement," they were invoking
something truer than what many of them may have imagined.

In literary studies, the shift stimulated among many the need to connect to what was local, indigenous,
and popular. There was great: enthusiasm for the collection of hitherto neglected vernacular texts, the study
of these texts, and the establishment of programs for local and regional studies. This responded to a situation
in which literary studies were heavily Anglo-American in methods, language medium, and content where the
teaching of Philippine literature was marginal and almost exclusively focused on works in English; and libraries
had little interest in the collection of popular ephemera and vernacular materials.

Together with this new enthusiasm for the popular was a critical unease on how vernacular or popular
texts are to be studied, given that the scholars of the time were almost entirely trained in Western, mostly
formalist approaches to literature. This led Bienvenido Lumbera, a leading figure in this movement, to argue in
1976 that finery evaluative studies of vernacular texts may be premature and that it was more advisable for
students to engage in "descriptive" rather than "critical" studies.
 While this was a most sensible suggestion, it is not easy of course to mark where the descriptive ends
and the critical begins; when data would be enough to theorize and devise the most appropriate critical
approaches or what the relation should be between Western theory and local material.

The implied promise in Lumbera's suggestion was that by establishing the “baseline," as it were, we
shall eventually ascend to a more comprehensive critical understanding of the entire body of literary works
that constitutes Philippine literature.

Today, some four decades later, we can look back on a rime of vigorous work in popular literary studies
by many scholars (Doreen Fernandez, Virgilio Almario, Soledad Reyes, and Nicanor Tiongson, to name a few).
One can justly say that their work has given us a significantly ampler and more informed understanding of
Philippine literature and culture in general. Yet much work remains unfinished, and I am not quite certain that
Lumbera's promise has been fulfilled.

{2} Thinking of the unfinished, I am reminded of a paper I wrote in 1979. Revisiting one's old paper may
be self-indulgent, but I would like to return to it for several reasons. I assume that few have read it since it was
published many years ago by a provincial university that no longer exists; it points to what I think is an
important research direction that I or others did not seriously pursue; and it allows me to introduce a few,
thoughts on Philippine literary studies today.

Entitled "Gugmang Kabus: Symbolic Action in Cebuano Fiction," the paper was written for a lecture
series on the theme of "Filipino thought on man and society," organized by Leonardo Mercado, SVD, a pioneer
in "Filipino psychology," at the Divine Word University in Tacloban in 1979. Inspired at the time by my readings
of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz and the critic Kenneth Burke, I decided to write a paper that would apply
some of their ideas to the analysis of popular Cebuano fiction. I was interested in Geertz's use of the linguistic
concepts of "surface" and "deep” structure in the study of cultural systems and Burke's idea of literature as
"symbolic action," both of which urge us to go beyond the surface level of a work into its deep structure, to
come from behind the work as it were, and see the pattern of motives, conscious and unconscious, embedded
therein. I was convinced that this was a fruitful approach in the study of vernacular literary texts, and the
sociology of popular mentality in general.

I knew that the study I wanted to undertake could not but be exploratory. In addition to the fact that I
did not quite have the tools for the analysis I had in mind, vernacular literature was still in the stage of being
systematically collected. Moreover, the study required contextual data not readily available: the social profile
of writers and readers, the conditions of literary production, and the nature of the society in which the texts
were written and read. I recognized the effect of "commodification” in the production of routinized,
"formulaic" fiction but I decided to set aside the problem for a more extended study.

Mainly for purposes of demonstration, I tried out the approach by taking up the popular romance, in
particular the stories that use the gugmang kobus plot-formula, stories of the class-divided lovers that are one
of the most durable and ubiquitous story-types in early twentieth-century vernacular fiction.

The gugmang kabus plot symbolically enacts social tensions arising from the division between rich and
poor. At the core of the narrative we have a man and a woman separated by the social distance between the
classes to which they belong. The story's initial situation is set by the fact that one loves the other, a love
either resisted or reciprocated. As an important corollary we usually have the figure of the parent or parents
who perform the "blocking" function, interposing an opposition based on the acceptance or defense of the
status quo, insisting that the social gulf is unbridgeable, that (using the cebuano terms) the disrance is one of
langit (sky) and yuta (earth), that the difference is one of lana (oil) and tubig (water).
 My assumption was that the gugmang kabus formula is a rich template for understanding popular
perceptions of a social reality-about social goals and expectations, popular sentiments about the realizability
of these goals, the agencies through which these goals can be achieved, and the ways in which the pains of
their impossibility can be moderated. The question then was: If we are to take plots as "conceptions of social
action"-or enactments on a symbolic plane of social desires and fantasies-what are we to make out of the
thousands of stories in Philippine vernacular literature that use the familiar poor boy/rich girl plot-formula?

I proceeded to analyze thirty-two short stories in Cebuano published between 1910 and 1940-a small
sample meant to demonstrate an approach and suggest lines of research rather than arrive at definitive
conclusions.

AN IMMODEST PROPOSAL FOR LITERARY STUDIES

In analyzing plot as "conceptions of social action," I broke down the plot into what I regarded to be the
core elements in this story-type: the social position of the characters, their goal, the outcome of the action,
the agency to bring about the outcome, the setting, and the time to bring about the outcome. My thesis was
that one could track these elements across the thirty-two stories and see "what a society was like in a past
age, what the individual felt about it, what he could hope from it, and how he thought he could change it or
escape from it.”

A statistical breakdown of the core elements showed that in two-thirds of the stories, the principal
protagonist is a poor man who wooes a rich girl, who in all but two cases loves him in turn. The goal of the
protagonist is to achieve happiness in love and marriage with a beloved of a different class. In the use of the
love theme is implied an assertion of equality, and while the critique of socioeconomic inequality is not always
made explicit in the stories, their logic makes this part of the symbolic goal of the works considered as a
whole.

In more than two-thirds of the stories, explicit parental objection to the relationship provides the
dramatic blocking effect. In a good number of cases, the conflict is heightened by the introduction of a rival
suitor that the parents prefer, a rich man who is either depicted as honorable or villainous. However,
essentially the same symbolic action as in the other cases takes place.

The conflict's resolution is the most important element in the story. In the majority of cases, the
protagonist fails to achieve his or her goal. The protagonist is simply turned down, eliminated through
violence, or marries the beloved but is later abandoned.

In slightly less than a third of the cases, the protagonists marry each other and the story comes to an
ostensibly just conclusion. However, in the cases where the lovers find happiness, success in the achievement
of the goal is undercut by a lack of credibility and realism in the agency through which it is achieved. In these
cases, the objective fact of social division remains: it has only been sidestepped. Either, through the operation
of a fantasy of social elevation, the poor boy becomes rich and thus becomes acceptable to the girl's parents,
or the poor boy wins the girl through a Juan Pusong type of trickery, or the lovers force the parents to submit
through the moral force of suffering after an indeterminate lapse of time.

INTERROGATIONS

Having broken the stories in quasi-statistical fashion into their constituent elements and strategies, I
concluded that the common paradigm of the stories has to do with the tension in the popular consciousness
over the division of society into rich and poor. The poor is the protagonist, the rich the antagonist: an
assignment of roles occasioned by the fact that we are dealing with "popular" fiction where the writers are
mainly of the middle-class and the readership is distinctly middle and lower-class.
 {3} I concluded that a first observation that can be made is that the rich/ poor division is not represented in
primarily economic terms. It is seen through a moral filter whereby moral qualities are assigned to each side.
To the poor is ascribed values that include honor, decency, patience and endurance, and to the rich typically
belongs the negative virtues: pride, arrogance, selfishness, and even violence and deceit. The crime for which
the rich are held culpable is a moral one: palabilabi, pagkamahitas-on (abusiveness, arrogance). This is
opposed to the virtues seen as characteristic of the poor: pailub, pagkamaubsanon (forebearance, humility).
This is not to say that the writers and readers of the time had no conception of the economic basis of class
division; it is only to say that it is the moral aspect which affected them most closely (and provided the
affective values of the narrative).

The critique of a materialism that sees love and marriage as instruments for social elevation is part of
this ethical bias. And so is the tendency. to mystify poverty as a moral condition, to see it as the necessary
ground for those natural affections that dignify human beings. (I noted that it should be interesting to look at
the social background of the writers and see to what extent this moral representation is a bourgeois view of
the condition of the lower classes rather than the perception of the poor themselves.)

A second idea that emerges from these stories is the tendency to see this class division as having the
force of a natural condition. Thus the metaphors of langit/yuta and lana/tubig. The reduction of this condition
into a quasi-natural law is seen in the concept of palad, or Fate, and the tendency to invest social division with
a divine sanction (pagbuot sa Ginoo, God’s will). Thus the protagonist in one story laments but accepts the fact
that the world is so made by God that there are people who are rich and oppressive and people who are lowly
and poor. In another, the protagonist is admonished: "This is your fate. Since fate cannot be questioned, you
have to bow down and conform to it. Do not oppose heaven's will.

A third observation is that there is the insistent sense of powerlessness in the characters to change
existing conditions. In most cases, the protagonists simply resign themselves to the fact that the social
distance is too great for them to cross and the story ends with either lamentation or death. And in the
instances where the male protagonist seems close to his goal he is confronted with naked power; he is either
framed up for a crime he did not commit, maimed, or murdered.

Even in the stories where the protagonist achieves his goal it is not the sense of power but wish-
fulfillment that dominates. In two stories reminiscent of the Juan Pusong tales, the poor boy wins the girl
through a ruse; the girl's rich parents agree to have her marry the protagonist rth: is dying only to realize that
it is all a trick and they have been fooled into allowing the marriage. In five cases, the boy becomes rich and
thus attains the same status as the other, an expedience that is less a proof of social mobility as a case of
evasion and wish-fulfillment. In one case, the poor servant who falls in love with his master's daughter wins
her only after she suffers an accident that leaves her so ugly nobody else would have her. In three other cases,
the protagonists attain their goal only because by a passive suffering unto death they force in the antagonists
a change of attitude.

What appears to be the norm is an evasion of the problem that renders the change more apparent
than real. Where change is effected, it is not brought about by the assertion of an active will but by passive
suffering over an indefinite duration. In the five stories where the poor boy becomes educated and rich in a
transformation that takes place over an indeterminate period of time-as in the four stories where the
protagonist goes to the United States and comes back a rich professional-it is a fantasy of social elevation that
is at work, in a symbolic movement that recalls the folkloric motif of the pauper who becomes the prince or
the ugly duckling transformed into a swan.

A fourth observation is that there is the tendency in the stories to end in a kind of emotional stasis.
This is most evident in the stories which conclude with a recourse to the metaphysical consolation of suffering
and the promise of death as the Great Leveller. In one story, the narrator says "earthly happiness is transitory;
what is real is suffering for if there is none we would not be blessed in that other world to which all shall
return." This consolation, a theme familiar in vernacular fiction, serves to moderate or mystify unresolved
tensions. Consequently, the need to face up to the problem is short-circuited and the condition for positive
liberating acts on the social plane is not set.

A fifth observation qualifies the preceding thesis: while passivity and resignation are the dominant
themes, there are stories that signify an impulse to confront the problem in direct, practical terms. In one
story, the poor boy issues a moral appeal to the rich boy to whom his sweetheart is to be forcibly wedded and
has his appeal heeded. At the opposite end we have the story in which the poor boy, whose father starves to
death after being evicted from the farm by the landlord whose daughter the boy loved, settles the score by
killing the heartless landlord and his daughter. Such resolutions, however, are not completely convincing; they
are symbolic enactments of dreams of equality and justice rather than prescriptions for social action.

A further note can be made. The generational character of the conflict-that the protagonists (the
lovers) are of a new generation and the antagonists (the parents) are of the old-by itself suggests change, or
the prospect of change in the values of society. These stories are turned toward the future, although for the
time being-for the writers and readers of this fiction-the shape of that future remains dim.

In sum, I said that while there is a sameness of sensibility underlying the stories, that sameness should
not cancel our consideration of variation in the paradigm. Even the simplest and most conventional literary
work is not reducible to a single isolated motive or effect. If we consider works of art, as Kenneth Burke does,
as "strategies for selecting enemies and allies, for socializing losses, for warding off the evil eye, for
purification, propitiation, and desanctification, consolation and vengeance, admonition and exhortation,
implicit commands or instructions of one sort or another," we see that even the most routinized romance can
combine different motives at the same time. These motives, however, do not have equal force in the text, and
a closer analysis of the play of motives is important.

There is a deep underlying irresolution about how the problem posed can be mastered. I noted that
this is to be expected since social history itself has largely conditioned in the writers and readers of this fiction
a sense of how conditions have remained unchanged through the years and how things in the future maybe as
they are in the present and were in the past. This is the subjectivity reflected in these stories. In turn, the
stories themselves help condition and sustain this kind of subjectivity. As Clifford Geertz says, literary works
"are not merely reflections of a pre-existing sensibility analogically represented; they are positive agents in the
creation and maintenance of such a sensibility."

In conclusion, I wrote that the story of gugmang kabus provides access into the experience, aspirations
and fantasies of people in a rural or proto-urban setting, mostly of the lower and middle classes, the social
group that produced and patronized this type of literature. The glimpses it provides may be fitful but one is
nevertheless led to appreciate a few truths: the moral sensitivity of a people, perhaps reacting in particular to
the erosions of paternalistic landlord-tenant and master-servant bonds said to have begun in the late
nineteenth-century; the sense of powerlessness to heal social divisions, expressed in tendencies to mystify
social problems and cultivate virtues out of poverty and suffering; and yet, with this, the persistence of anxiety
over problems of social and economic inequalities.

The dream of love in these stories is an egalitarian dream. It is a dream of a world where such natural
affections as love are not perverted by social custom or class prejudice. If the dream has remained distant
from the fact, it has at least become a source of spiritual discomfort. And that is as good a beginning as any.
 {4} The paper is schematic and it is obvious that the analyses can be refined and elaborated. (The
analysis is blind to gender relations, for instance.) With such a limited sample, the statistical presentation is
merely indicative rather than probative, meant to illustrate a method rather than cement the arguments. The
paper's final insights, one can argue, are not entirely new and may be gleaned from reading a few selected
texts (as is done in traditional content analysis), but this fact does not cancel the value of a fuller, more
discriminate understanding of a literary form that can be gained from a large mass of texts across time and
space.

An important limitation of the paper is that it is more sociological than literary, and I see now that I
could have paid more attention to questions of literary form, although this would perhaps be more productive
with a larger sample that allows more data on formal and structural variation and change.

I am convinced, however, in the replicability and value of the model. I dealt with only thirty-two stories
from one region, published over a thirty-year period. What larger knowledge can be drawn if one were to
extend the study to other regions and a much longer stretch of time, taking into account the changing social,
cultural, and aesthetic variables in literary production? What truths of sameness and difference can be drawn,
for instance, between the prewar stories that I dealt with and today's mass-produced romances? This is a
project that, as far as I know, has not been carried out.

Today, there appears to be an impasse of sorts in literary studies. The zeal of the "long 1970s" has
flagged. Collection and conservation efforts have slowed down; a large mass of vernacular texts is now
available but remains mostly unstudied; and there is a lack of clarity and consensus on the most productive
approaches to the study of these texts. Moreover scholarship is still biased in favor of single authors, a single
language, and a small set of texts, and attempts at cross-regional studies are rare. (While language is a
limitation for scholars, it need not be so: if we can invest in the promotion of a single, so-called "national"
language, why not invest in something perhaps just as important, the learning of another Philippine
language?)

A few years ago, I was reminded of what I tried to do in 1979 by the work of the controversial critic
Franco Moretti. A US-based Italian critic, Moretti has criticized the inordinate attention literary studies have
given to the fine (often overfine) analysis of canonical texts that represent only a very tiny percentage of
literary works that have been published, thus leaving the rest, perhaps the 99 percent of published works-"the
Great Unread”-practically unexamined.

To correct this, he proposed what he calls the method of "distant reading” against the "close reading"
cultivated by formalist and postmodernist approaches. What "distant reading" means is not entirely new. We
do not read all books in exactly the same way: there are books we skim through, books we read only in part
and selectively, books we read in abridged form or as they have been read by others (“second-hand reading”),
and books that we read with sentence-to-sentence attention. It all depends on the book and our purpose for
reading it. For a scholar interested in how popular or “genre” fiction works, and therefore has to cover large
numbers of texts, distant reading is the tool. For what is “distant” in “distant reading” is not just a way of
reading but the extent or range of the literary field that is covered.

Moretti has ruffled feathers by provocatively saying that there is a way of writing about books
without actually reading them. What he actually means is that the critic can start with an archetype
or model of how, say, a gothic or picaresque novel works, what its constituent elements and
defining strategies are (which, of course, demands a great deal of close reading at the outset).
Then the critic can examine hundreds of examples of the gothic or picaresque novel relatively
quickly without having to read each one of them closely.

Again, this approach is not quite original, as illustrated in multi-text studies of themes like
“the representation of women in Philippine short stories” or my own attempt at seeing how class
division is represented in Cebuano fiction. It also harks back to approaches in folklore studies, such
as Stith Thompson’s “motif-index,” and the more important work of Vladimir Propp and the
Russian Formalists to apply morphological analysis to folktales and other literary forms. What
Moretti has proposed and demonstrated is the application of this approach not just in tracking
“themes” and “motifs” in literature but in understanding the changing morphology of literary
forms through the rigorous application of abstract models and the systematic processing of large
masses of texts across geographical areas and historical periods. His is a grandly ambitious project
that aspires to eventually uncover the laws of the “world literary system.” The aim, he says, is to
make the literary field longer, larger, and deeper: historically longer, geographically larger, and
morphologically deeper.”

Instead of obsessive hermeneutic readings of a single text, he would produce graphs, maps, and trees
based on the inventory and analysis of stylistic features, devices, and other units in hundreds of texts. For this
purpose, Moretti established a digital archive and data-processing facility called Literary Lab ("Lir Lab") at
Stanford University, drawing impetus from the growing popularity of "digital humanities" in American
universities, where double major programs combining computer science with music or literature are offered.

Moretti has done important work in tracing the morphology of the novel (shedding light, for instance,
on the difference between European and Chinese novels). Sometimes, the amount of qualitative analysis he
undertakes to explain, for instance, why the titles of novels over the centuries have shifted from long to short
yields insights that are interesting but underwhelming. Yet his approach offers possibilities for Philippine
literary studies, by shifting the attention away from a few canonical authors and texts to a wider literary field
and the long duree, and offering an alternative to postmodernist readings (which have acquired, for today’s
young scholars, the same status as American New Criticism for their counterparts in the 1950s and 1960s)
with a turn to empirically-grounded quantitative studies.

In modest and practical terms, doing a Morettian study for the smaller field of Philippine literature
does not require new critical skills. What it requires is (1) to shift the attention from the single text to a genre
or subgenre (detective fiction, historical novel, mysteries, romance novels); (2) identify the units of analysis,
the elements, devices, and motifs that make up the structure of a given genre (such as the presence and use
of clues in a detective story); (3) track the patterns and variations in the textual strategies and elements and
their structural relations across regions and historical periods, and (4) investigate the relations of homologies
between the articulation of literary forms and the socio-cultural system to which they belong.

Consider, for example, what the possibilities are if we take the detective story, a highly
conventionalized form in the West, and see how this form has been practiced in the Philippines from the
beginning of the twentieth century to the present (a hundred years and probably a few hundred texts). What
reiterations, resistances, divergences, dead ends, or transgeneric mutations can one find in the Filipino
detective story form? And what will these tell us about conditions of literary production and the larger social
context in which Filipino detective fiction has taken shape? Or what would the imaginary, geographic body of
the nation look like if we map the setting or locale of Filipino novels over the past hundred years? (I
hypothesize that there may be more novels set in the town of Antipolo, the romantic capital of the early
Tagalog novel, than the province of Samar, Palawan, or some other terra incognita in the “national”
literature.) While the findings for such a study may not be wholly surprising, these should provoke a fresh
revaluation of how skewed the literary system is.

Or take up a more challenging project: What are the regions of Philippine literature? Since the 1970s
there has been a foregrounding of the regional constituents of Philippine literature, based on language or
geographic- administrative units, but there is little critical examination (if at all) of how meaningful these
regions or units are. How meaningful are such categories as “Visayan” or “Mindanaoan” writing? To what
extent has the privileging of major languages (like Hiligaynon) excluded minor languages (like Aklanon and
Kiniray-a)? Such problems require what as yet does not exist, a critical “literary geography” of the Philippines,
one that is not based on language alone or, worse, physical geography or politico-administrative divisions.
Such a geography would require cross-linguistic, cross-regional studies of the works that have been produced,
a model of what constitutes a distinct literary formation, and an approach sensitive to the realities of border
zones, cross-border exchanges, and trans-territorial networks. This may be overly ambitious (and I am not
guaranteeing the results will be commensurate to the effort involved) but we need to break out of the
current doldrums in Philippines literary studies. Moretti lends himself quite well to such a project.

(5} In a way, what I am suggesting is a return to the promise raised by Lumbera in 1976, of a critical
scholarship built from “the ground up” through the work of collection, description, documentation, and
classification. It is a promise not quite fulfilled and perhaps we need once again to take the “empirical turn”
away from textual studies driven by a bias for canons or a thinly-grounded fascination with new theories,
toward the analytic mapping of the entire field that constitutes Philippine literature.

The value of Moretti for the present lies mainly in method rather than theory; “distant reading” is not
meant to abolish the hermeneutic or erotic pleasures of “close reading.” For students of literature, technology
is not the final answer; Moretti himself has run into a great deal of criticism; and one is not obliged to use
his entire critical tool kit for the Philippine case. A Morettian study is extremely valuable to work
with; it is not necessarily what one arrives at. But it is an approach that should generate fresh
scholarship in Philippine literary studies. In the Philippines, the value of digital or “computational”
criticism (though not descending from Moretti but other sources) is demonstrated in the admirable
work of Ramon Guillermo in the field of translation studies.

The kind of full-blown “quantitative stylistics” Moretti undertakes— with its computer-generated
“graphs, maps, trees”—is not something I have myself an aptitude or competence for. (An innumerate, I was
slotted to a remedial course called “Review of High School Mathematics” when I entered college, and I
promptly failed in the subject.) But computational criticism is something I would love to see others pursue. It
may appeal to today’s generation of young, technologically-savvy scholars with a strong interest in the
humanities.

It needs to be stressed that this goes far beyond computer play. It involves an immersion in the deep
structure of the body of works Filipinos have written and read. Moretti writes: “Forms are the abstract of
social relationships: so, formal analysis is in its own modest way an analysis of power.” Through
comparative morphology, one discovers how forms change, how symbolic power varies from place to place
and mutates through time. There was a distinct political edge to the project the generation of “the long
1970s” embraced. That edge should stay as vivid today.

The promise raised by de los Reyes in 1889 and Lumbera in 1976 remains. It is time that we infused
new energy into literary studies as well as fresh insights into problems that have been either narrowly or
impressionistically dealt with.