Sunday, December 07, 2008
Saturday, December 06, 2008
Fiction as allegiance.
And an allegation.
(paper presented at the UP centennial writers' conference/workshop
at UP Visayas-Tacloban College, Dec. 1-6, 2008)
The burden of representation
As an avid reader and an amateur critic of fiction, I have found that, inevitably, dealing with fiction entails getting to a certain level of inquiry that also, inevitably, leads to one of only two results. One is what Pierre Macherey has termed as the breaking down of the story before questions it is incapable of answering, the other is my breaking down as a reader before a story I am incapable of questioning.
This is hardly unusual. I know that I am not alone in this reading practice or experience. Instead of just asking who the characters are in a story, we ask, for instance: Whose story is this, really? Is it a good/fair/innovative way of rendering these people’s lives? Is this a sound depiction of the subject him/herself? Instead of asking what the story is all about, we ask: What, ultimately, is the story saying about stories, about history, about time? Is this a sensitive rendering of a society, a culture, a social relationship, an event, a phenomenon? Instead of merely asking what the writer wants to say, we ask: What does this say about the writer? Whose interests does the writer serve? Or, even, what does this story want from me as a reader?
These questions, of course, point to concerns that are usually considered as being well beyond the pale of craft, way outside the parameters of form. I cannot disagree more. For sure, these are questions that delve into issues of ideology, representation, language and subjectivity, questions that the creative writer, as it is stressed in workshops time and time again, need not burden herself with. But these are concerns I burden myself with only because I have found that they cannot be disassociated with issues of form. No less than an appreciation of all these other aspects is demanded by fiction itself; and by narratives, in general, primarily because of its very nature, its very form.
My preferred definition of fiction is that which takes into consideration its form and the conditions that give rise to, sustain, or break, the form. Variations of this definition appear in the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Macherey, even Haydn White. Resil Mojares’s work in The Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel also comes to mind. So do the women’s stories in the anthology Fern Garden, edited by Merlie Alunan. Moreover, the stories of Eric Gamalinda, Erwin Castillo, Nick Joaquin, Chari Lucero, Gina Apostol, among others, illustrate the definition further. Their stories celebrate the form, question the boundaries between the mimetic and the marvelous and, in the process, engage quite intensely with the stories’ material and historical conditions. I pay much attention to these aspects because what, as a reader, I demand from (and enjoy about) fiction, are no different from what I, as a writer of it, aspire for. Similarly, the things I am dissatisfied with in some works of fiction are the very same things I want to avoid in my own writing -- monologism, univocalism, and objectivism. Kind of like the traits of this government which I also cannot stand.
I do tend to agree with the idea that fiction is necessarily burdened with issues of representation – not only in the sense of Greek Classical representation as the reproduction of something, or the elaboration of a concept corresponding to a thing perceived; but also in the sense of political, everyday representation as in formal statements made to a higher authority. Representation as the communication of an opinion, or the registration of a protest! More and more, I am seduced by the idea of fiction as a claim, a contention and, sometimes, an allegation.
(I must say that I love the word allegation. Used appropriately, it can be an effective way of stating one’s belief by merely citing the plausible opposite. The exercise of alleging can be an immensely successful way of rendering the tyranny of truth as irrelevant or, at least, relative, conditional. Allegation is a very powerful legal fiction, so to speak.)
I remember a critic from New Zealand, enthusiastically presenting a paper on one of Jessica Hagedorn’s novels, in a literary conference in UP. The critic went on to praise the novel’s style and evocative language, only to be severely critiqued right after. The poor guy did not know what hit him. What more do you want, I’m sure he wanted to ask. Here I am, telling you that I love this novel, by a Filipino writer, about the Philippines, and you complain! What the critic did not anticipate was the ultra sensitivity of the audience – literature teachers, writers, and critics all – to issues of representation. The guy was severely berated for not having recognized that the reading he just offered had long been rendered inoperable, narrow-minded, and generally unsound. His only fault: to praise the book for the wrong claims; and to claim an understanding of the state of the nation, merely through the book. What really struck the audience’s nerve was that this one particular novel by a Fil-am writer was being read by a foreigner as a representation of the entire Philippines. On the contrary, readings of it in Comparative Literature classrooms have tended to treat the novel as being quite unabashedly intended for a foreign audience, and its postmodernist tendencies merely serve to mask the novel’s ideology. At some point, I remember thinking: Well, why the hell not? Why can’t one write for the audience one wants? Would it have made a difference if the author were not a Fil-American, if she were just a Filipino? Would it have made a difference if she wrote about America, instead of the Philippines, and applied the same techniques and strategies?
Apparently, yes, one can and does write for one’s ideal reader. However, one has to always account for one’s subject position, which is revealed by the mere choice of readership. And, nowadays, yes, it does make a difference who you’re writing as, what you’re writing about, and where you’re writing from.
I have my own reading of the novel, and I do tend to go with the postcolonial critique of ideology approach. I submit though that, to a certain extent, the engagement with critical theory – particularly of these kinds – can get out of hand, get in the way of pure reading pleasure. Not to mention how it can get in the way of pure fiction-writing pleasure.
Theory indeed gets in the way. But, isn’t it only right that it should? The complexity of the world we write of and the world we write in demands that it be rendered sensitively and, well, honestly. Whether one writes of a world of simple peasants in the distant Philippine past, or the underground world of punk-gothic individuals in dizzyingly fast-paced urban New Manila, one is still writing of the here and now. One has to, in a sense, theorize the world one writes in, through the fictionalized world one writes of.
All I mean is, there is no turning back, no reclaiming lost innocence, no feigning indifference. One can no longer unread what one has read. There are pressures and demands on the writing and reading of Philippine fiction, in English, at least, that cannot, and should not, be ignored.
Home as a syndrome
As a writer from the Visayas, who is based in Manila, for instance, I cannot help but react, sometimes violently, to pressures for a particular kind of representation in my fiction. I’m sure this is a familiar experience to many. For instance, in national writers workshops, it is almost always expected of us to turn out a story with a strong, local flavor, but rendered from an ironic perspective. I mean, if you merely translate into English a perfectly sensible and successful oral narrative in Waray, for instance, it would surely be considered too simplistic, unimaginative, a failure. But, really, what does local color mean? Does this mean including snippets of conversation, expletives and curses, in the local language for emotional color? Does it involve using Waray terms, written in italics, even for phrases that have an idiomatic equivalent in English? Does this mean writing about rural folks, in idyllic seaside settings, engaging in so-called native – therefore humorous, strange, or fantastic – practices? Because I am very much guilty of all that, of submitting to such pressures and demands. What’s even more unfortunate is that these are pressures I myself exert on my own writing, almost as a matter of course.
The truth is, it is only on occasions like this that I am forced to confront questions that sometimes do spoil the pleasure of writing fiction. Most of the time, I just write what I can, whenever I can. I still believe that a writer’s role is to write. I cannot use the excuse of engaging with theory as a reason for not being able to produce fiction. Neither do I see theory as an impetus to write fiction. I do not write fiction in order to illustrate a theory. I do not write fiction in order to save the country, to improve people’s lives, or to empower the marginalized. There are other activities, other kinds of writing, that I do that, to my mind, would more closely approach those objectives. As a fictionist, my first allegiance is to the story, to memory, to play. My fiction, moreover, aims to play with the concept of fiction itself, with the concept of allegiance even, as well as of memory and remembrance.
My stories have invariably been about home – home as a syndrome, a physiological disorder: a disruption of normal physical or mental functions; a disease or an abnormal condition. The body is in one place, but the heart is someplace else. The language that is used for speech is not the language of one’s secrets. This is the main affliction, an affliction whose symptoms are not always manifest, rather latent. In my stories, the characters are always engaged with and yet distanced from home; but they never really leave it, they bring it with them wherever they go. The struggle is to accept that home is a concept, and a floating, unstable one, too. The struggle is to broaden the concept in order to encompass one’s changing conditions, one’s mobile location, one’s shifting position. The struggle is to not make everyone notice that the character is not always there; that she is, in truth, some place else; that she has actually disappeared, has established her home in the deepest recesses of her mind, a place beyond anyone’s reach.
I remember how, as a child growing up always amidst some twenty other cousins, in a small family compound here in Tacloban, or in Barugo, or Matalom, or Cebu, during the summer, I was always trying to disappear, and it was quite easy to disappear. I did it several times. I simply slipped out of the group of cousins playing out in the yard, to go back up to the house, hide in the room, go through my mother’s bags, rifle through my father’s documents, open cabinets and drawers, climb atop kitchen counters, mix up and blend condiments, write and draw figures on walls, dress and make up the saints, all the while unnoticed and unmissed. This went on for quite some time until one afternoon, when I decided to hide behind the backdoor of my grandparents’ house in Tacloban, to blend with the brooms and mops and cobwebs and dust, for about twelve hours, they say. I stood there without making any movement or sound, watching the maids, some aunts and cousins, go in and out of the house. I remember how I maintained my position even when my cousins and, eventually, the adults started looking for me. I could clearly hear and see people combing the entire house, the entire compound, looking everywhere but behind the backdoor. I stood there even when I could see my mother starting to panic and to blame hapless househelps for my disappearance. I do not, however, for the life of me, remember why I did what I did, or what was going through my mind while I stood there, very, very, very still. Neither do I know what made me step out of the dark, privileged, corner behind the door, in order to blend, inevitably, with the rest of them.
Since then, I don’t think I have been able to hide and disappear without anyone noticing. I did not mind becoming more visible only because I eventually realized that that was actually the best way to obscurity; an obscurity which served my need to observe, to create worlds within a world, story after story.
My head was always filled with stories – real and fabricated, my own and others’, for good and for bad. I think it was my father who first had the inkling that I would one day venture into writing stories, if not jokes. I think the very first time I understood what it took to make people laugh was also the time I understood how language works. I remember that it was one of those evenings, after dinner, the adults were out in the veranda, smoking, having coffee, airing themselves out. I sat next to Tatay and said, in Waray: Let’s say your name is You and my name is Me. Now answer this question: Who is the crazy one between the two of us? Tatay laughed so hard, I was instantly pleased, even if I didn’t have the foggiest idea why he found it so funny. I wasn’t trying to be funny, I don’t even think the idea for what was apparently a joke, was my original. For a while there, I was a major hit. Everyone started telling and retelling my joke, it became deeply embarrassing, especially because I was the last to actually get it. When I finally did get it, I tried formulating similar quips, a few of which elicited a wan response, none of which quite achieved the same kind of sweeping success that the first joke elicited. Until today, I am still trying.
There is nothing special about the stories I write. There is nothing special about me as a writer of stories. Everyone in my family is either a storyteller or a politician, which is basically saying that they are all fictionists. A few of them actually became highly successful writers and many became spectacularly unsuccessful politicians. My point is simply to say that the simple question of why I write has an equally simple answer: given that there have only been two fates, I think I’d rather be a failed writer than a failed politician. As for why I write the way I do and for whom I write, I think it is clear to me now: I write to please those from whom my fiction is derived. This is my fiction, my audacious allegation. Whether or not I actually do please them, can be the subject of another forum, for another time.
(paper presented at the UP centennial writers' conference/workshop
at UP Visayas-Tacloban College, Dec. 1-6, 2008)
The burden of representation
As an avid reader and an amateur critic of fiction, I have found that, inevitably, dealing with fiction entails getting to a certain level of inquiry that also, inevitably, leads to one of only two results. One is what Pierre Macherey has termed as the breaking down of the story before questions it is incapable of answering, the other is my breaking down as a reader before a story I am incapable of questioning.
This is hardly unusual. I know that I am not alone in this reading practice or experience. Instead of just asking who the characters are in a story, we ask, for instance: Whose story is this, really? Is it a good/fair/innovative way of rendering these people’s lives? Is this a sound depiction of the subject him/herself? Instead of asking what the story is all about, we ask: What, ultimately, is the story saying about stories, about history, about time? Is this a sensitive rendering of a society, a culture, a social relationship, an event, a phenomenon? Instead of merely asking what the writer wants to say, we ask: What does this say about the writer? Whose interests does the writer serve? Or, even, what does this story want from me as a reader?
These questions, of course, point to concerns that are usually considered as being well beyond the pale of craft, way outside the parameters of form. I cannot disagree more. For sure, these are questions that delve into issues of ideology, representation, language and subjectivity, questions that the creative writer, as it is stressed in workshops time and time again, need not burden herself with. But these are concerns I burden myself with only because I have found that they cannot be disassociated with issues of form. No less than an appreciation of all these other aspects is demanded by fiction itself; and by narratives, in general, primarily because of its very nature, its very form.
My preferred definition of fiction is that which takes into consideration its form and the conditions that give rise to, sustain, or break, the form. Variations of this definition appear in the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Macherey, even Haydn White. Resil Mojares’s work in The Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel also comes to mind. So do the women’s stories in the anthology Fern Garden, edited by Merlie Alunan. Moreover, the stories of Eric Gamalinda, Erwin Castillo, Nick Joaquin, Chari Lucero, Gina Apostol, among others, illustrate the definition further. Their stories celebrate the form, question the boundaries between the mimetic and the marvelous and, in the process, engage quite intensely with the stories’ material and historical conditions. I pay much attention to these aspects because what, as a reader, I demand from (and enjoy about) fiction, are no different from what I, as a writer of it, aspire for. Similarly, the things I am dissatisfied with in some works of fiction are the very same things I want to avoid in my own writing -- monologism, univocalism, and objectivism. Kind of like the traits of this government which I also cannot stand.
I do tend to agree with the idea that fiction is necessarily burdened with issues of representation – not only in the sense of Greek Classical representation as the reproduction of something, or the elaboration of a concept corresponding to a thing perceived; but also in the sense of political, everyday representation as in formal statements made to a higher authority. Representation as the communication of an opinion, or the registration of a protest! More and more, I am seduced by the idea of fiction as a claim, a contention and, sometimes, an allegation.
(I must say that I love the word allegation. Used appropriately, it can be an effective way of stating one’s belief by merely citing the plausible opposite. The exercise of alleging can be an immensely successful way of rendering the tyranny of truth as irrelevant or, at least, relative, conditional. Allegation is a very powerful legal fiction, so to speak.)
I remember a critic from New Zealand, enthusiastically presenting a paper on one of Jessica Hagedorn’s novels, in a literary conference in UP. The critic went on to praise the novel’s style and evocative language, only to be severely critiqued right after. The poor guy did not know what hit him. What more do you want, I’m sure he wanted to ask. Here I am, telling you that I love this novel, by a Filipino writer, about the Philippines, and you complain! What the critic did not anticipate was the ultra sensitivity of the audience – literature teachers, writers, and critics all – to issues of representation. The guy was severely berated for not having recognized that the reading he just offered had long been rendered inoperable, narrow-minded, and generally unsound. His only fault: to praise the book for the wrong claims; and to claim an understanding of the state of the nation, merely through the book. What really struck the audience’s nerve was that this one particular novel by a Fil-am writer was being read by a foreigner as a representation of the entire Philippines. On the contrary, readings of it in Comparative Literature classrooms have tended to treat the novel as being quite unabashedly intended for a foreign audience, and its postmodernist tendencies merely serve to mask the novel’s ideology. At some point, I remember thinking: Well, why the hell not? Why can’t one write for the audience one wants? Would it have made a difference if the author were not a Fil-American, if she were just a Filipino? Would it have made a difference if she wrote about America, instead of the Philippines, and applied the same techniques and strategies?
Apparently, yes, one can and does write for one’s ideal reader. However, one has to always account for one’s subject position, which is revealed by the mere choice of readership. And, nowadays, yes, it does make a difference who you’re writing as, what you’re writing about, and where you’re writing from.
I have my own reading of the novel, and I do tend to go with the postcolonial critique of ideology approach. I submit though that, to a certain extent, the engagement with critical theory – particularly of these kinds – can get out of hand, get in the way of pure reading pleasure. Not to mention how it can get in the way of pure fiction-writing pleasure.
Theory indeed gets in the way. But, isn’t it only right that it should? The complexity of the world we write of and the world we write in demands that it be rendered sensitively and, well, honestly. Whether one writes of a world of simple peasants in the distant Philippine past, or the underground world of punk-gothic individuals in dizzyingly fast-paced urban New Manila, one is still writing of the here and now. One has to, in a sense, theorize the world one writes in, through the fictionalized world one writes of.
All I mean is, there is no turning back, no reclaiming lost innocence, no feigning indifference. One can no longer unread what one has read. There are pressures and demands on the writing and reading of Philippine fiction, in English, at least, that cannot, and should not, be ignored.
Home as a syndrome
As a writer from the Visayas, who is based in Manila, for instance, I cannot help but react, sometimes violently, to pressures for a particular kind of representation in my fiction. I’m sure this is a familiar experience to many. For instance, in national writers workshops, it is almost always expected of us to turn out a story with a strong, local flavor, but rendered from an ironic perspective. I mean, if you merely translate into English a perfectly sensible and successful oral narrative in Waray, for instance, it would surely be considered too simplistic, unimaginative, a failure. But, really, what does local color mean? Does this mean including snippets of conversation, expletives and curses, in the local language for emotional color? Does it involve using Waray terms, written in italics, even for phrases that have an idiomatic equivalent in English? Does this mean writing about rural folks, in idyllic seaside settings, engaging in so-called native – therefore humorous, strange, or fantastic – practices? Because I am very much guilty of all that, of submitting to such pressures and demands. What’s even more unfortunate is that these are pressures I myself exert on my own writing, almost as a matter of course.
The truth is, it is only on occasions like this that I am forced to confront questions that sometimes do spoil the pleasure of writing fiction. Most of the time, I just write what I can, whenever I can. I still believe that a writer’s role is to write. I cannot use the excuse of engaging with theory as a reason for not being able to produce fiction. Neither do I see theory as an impetus to write fiction. I do not write fiction in order to illustrate a theory. I do not write fiction in order to save the country, to improve people’s lives, or to empower the marginalized. There are other activities, other kinds of writing, that I do that, to my mind, would more closely approach those objectives. As a fictionist, my first allegiance is to the story, to memory, to play. My fiction, moreover, aims to play with the concept of fiction itself, with the concept of allegiance even, as well as of memory and remembrance.
My stories have invariably been about home – home as a syndrome, a physiological disorder: a disruption of normal physical or mental functions; a disease or an abnormal condition. The body is in one place, but the heart is someplace else. The language that is used for speech is not the language of one’s secrets. This is the main affliction, an affliction whose symptoms are not always manifest, rather latent. In my stories, the characters are always engaged with and yet distanced from home; but they never really leave it, they bring it with them wherever they go. The struggle is to accept that home is a concept, and a floating, unstable one, too. The struggle is to broaden the concept in order to encompass one’s changing conditions, one’s mobile location, one’s shifting position. The struggle is to not make everyone notice that the character is not always there; that she is, in truth, some place else; that she has actually disappeared, has established her home in the deepest recesses of her mind, a place beyond anyone’s reach.
I remember how, as a child growing up always amidst some twenty other cousins, in a small family compound here in Tacloban, or in Barugo, or Matalom, or Cebu, during the summer, I was always trying to disappear, and it was quite easy to disappear. I did it several times. I simply slipped out of the group of cousins playing out in the yard, to go back up to the house, hide in the room, go through my mother’s bags, rifle through my father’s documents, open cabinets and drawers, climb atop kitchen counters, mix up and blend condiments, write and draw figures on walls, dress and make up the saints, all the while unnoticed and unmissed. This went on for quite some time until one afternoon, when I decided to hide behind the backdoor of my grandparents’ house in Tacloban, to blend with the brooms and mops and cobwebs and dust, for about twelve hours, they say. I stood there without making any movement or sound, watching the maids, some aunts and cousins, go in and out of the house. I remember how I maintained my position even when my cousins and, eventually, the adults started looking for me. I could clearly hear and see people combing the entire house, the entire compound, looking everywhere but behind the backdoor. I stood there even when I could see my mother starting to panic and to blame hapless househelps for my disappearance. I do not, however, for the life of me, remember why I did what I did, or what was going through my mind while I stood there, very, very, very still. Neither do I know what made me step out of the dark, privileged, corner behind the door, in order to blend, inevitably, with the rest of them.
Since then, I don’t think I have been able to hide and disappear without anyone noticing. I did not mind becoming more visible only because I eventually realized that that was actually the best way to obscurity; an obscurity which served my need to observe, to create worlds within a world, story after story.
My head was always filled with stories – real and fabricated, my own and others’, for good and for bad. I think it was my father who first had the inkling that I would one day venture into writing stories, if not jokes. I think the very first time I understood what it took to make people laugh was also the time I understood how language works. I remember that it was one of those evenings, after dinner, the adults were out in the veranda, smoking, having coffee, airing themselves out. I sat next to Tatay and said, in Waray: Let’s say your name is You and my name is Me. Now answer this question: Who is the crazy one between the two of us? Tatay laughed so hard, I was instantly pleased, even if I didn’t have the foggiest idea why he found it so funny. I wasn’t trying to be funny, I don’t even think the idea for what was apparently a joke, was my original. For a while there, I was a major hit. Everyone started telling and retelling my joke, it became deeply embarrassing, especially because I was the last to actually get it. When I finally did get it, I tried formulating similar quips, a few of which elicited a wan response, none of which quite achieved the same kind of sweeping success that the first joke elicited. Until today, I am still trying.
There is nothing special about the stories I write. There is nothing special about me as a writer of stories. Everyone in my family is either a storyteller or a politician, which is basically saying that they are all fictionists. A few of them actually became highly successful writers and many became spectacularly unsuccessful politicians. My point is simply to say that the simple question of why I write has an equally simple answer: given that there have only been two fates, I think I’d rather be a failed writer than a failed politician. As for why I write the way I do and for whom I write, I think it is clear to me now: I write to please those from whom my fiction is derived. This is my fiction, my audacious allegation. Whether or not I actually do please them, can be the subject of another forum, for another time.
Friday, November 07, 2008
Speculative Non Fiction
That, according to my friend Carl, is the kind of writing that I do. Fancy term for LIES, and FABRICATIONS, really. =)
Watch for his upcoming collection of essays and stories.
Watch for his upcoming collection of essays and stories.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
CSF: creative semi-fiction
Sad, as in “also”
My mother would have been sixty today. She was born in 1948 in a town called Matalom, in the southern part of Leyte. Stories have it that when my mother was young, she would often get ill, suffer strange, undiagnosed, incurable symptoms, the only remedy for which was to bring her back to the town where she was born. At the time, it took almost an entire day to travel from Tacloban, where their family eventually settled, to Matalom, which they visited only once every year, or depending on how often my mother became ill.
My mother had six brothers and sisters, but she was the only one who was born in Matalom, her mother’s hometown. This, her siblings used to say, explains why she took after their mother the most. And, they would always add, also the reason why she took after their mother in the worst ways possible; that is, in terms of mood and disposition.
I never really knew their mother; hence, I find it difficult to relate to her, to even refer to her as grandmother. But, I shall try. Their mother, A___, was a tall, buxom woman, with a polished look about her. In the photographs hanging on the walls of the old house in Matalom and in Tacloban, she is always the tallest among everyone, man or woman, and she always carries herself with a combination of grace and ease; with a skilled, concise execution, which can only be described as stylish in a military way. Most people, however, thought that she was, on the whole, in look and manner, rather severe. Again, I have no direct, personal recollection of her severity or grace. I also do not recall any story about her being demonstrative in her care and affection for her children and her husband, or for anyone, for that matter.
The stories I retain of A___ are, on the whole, inconsequential: how tiny her waist was despite her full figure, how her height and her low, somber voice commanded attention, and how stubborn she was in her refusal to learn any other language but Bisaya. For some reason, people also referred to this language as Kana (the Bisaya term for “that one”, or perhaps the Bisaya pejorative for “Americana”). I have some very curious memory of that voice applied to what I thought was a peculiar language.
I also sometimes remember her smell, which was, invariably, a combination of fresh laundry and sweet-sour fruits. (This was how my mother smelled, too, on Sundays, without the scented lotion and expensive perfume).
A____ died thirteen days after I celebrated my third birthday, a month after my mother turned thirty.
***
It is always of these that my memory of that day is made up: tall men and women, in black and white, milling about, standing in corners; dark figures slumped, arms sagging against reddish-brown wooden seats. A glass is thrown violently to the deep-red, concrete floor, and stepped on by many grieving, angry feet shod in leather. A string of white rosary beads is pulled apart, and the round, tiny crystals slide swiftly off the string and scatter themselves on the floor, under the furniture, and under people’s soles. And then we are being lined up in front of the coffin, arranged according to some logic I could not understand. From being carried in someone’s arms, I am, against my will, settled on the floor next to my siblings and my cousins. My baby brother, who is only a few months old, takes my place in the coveted cradle-arms of some aunt or uncle. There is lightning in my face, and I am temporarily blind. I think it is at this point that I start to cry. But nobody sees.
Nobody hears, either. There are too many languages being spoken all at the same time. And my grandmother’s language is spoken the loudest by more voices than I have ever heard it spoken before. “Kana! Kani! Kana sad! Kani sad!” (which, I thought, translated to “That one! This one! That one is sad! This one is sad!” only to find out, very soon enough, that “sad” only meant “also”, or “too”). And the controversy had merely to do with flowers – over which ones to bring to the chapel, which ones to throw away, or burn.
Nothing of the nine-day wake should be left behind, a nameless grandaunt says emphatically. Unless you want a member of the family to follow suit, another one adds. Very quickly, it is settled. No one dares argue. Bouquets, wreaths, and vases of dried up and decaying flowers are thrown into a sack to join the pyre. Brighter, fresher ones are arranged atop a long, black hearse which, like its passengers, looks “sad sad”, as it waits there, strikingly odd in the otherwise car-less street.
The funeral took place at high noon and I remember the heat.
I cannot ignore the heat. It bears down on us as we walk in a solemn procession from the gates of the cemetery to the small clearing where there is an empty tomb and several priests waiting, their white frocks stiff in the windless air. A____ is the first to stake her claim in the family lot. Eventually, as the years would pass, that clearing would disappear, as it is crowded with more of her family members following her lead, despite the careful adherence to superstition. It becomes too crowded that it would not even accommodate my mother who, on the very day I turn thirty, would be, as some would say, “laid to rest”, away from her family.
At the burial, I cannot take my eyes off my mother’s face, as she watches the cement inevitably applied to the square opening of the gray tomb, sealing the niche (and her mother) off, finally, from the rest of the world. There are several broken flowers strewn all around us. The candles are melting quickly before the harsh heat of the sun. The kids are starting to surreptitiously gather them to form balls of wax. I am slumped against the chest of someone whose face I cannot see. I cannot stop staring at my mother’s face. There is so much going on in it. She has on an expression I have never seen before. I am looking and looking but not understanding the meaning behind it. And then it strikes me: it is almost the same expression she has after dabbing on “White Flower” liniment onto her temples and after inhaling the vapors. It is the look of someone disappearing, fading away. It is a look that is focused on something beyond my ken. It is a look that worries me no end.
***
Matalom, in Bisaya, means sharp. When I think of Matalom, on the contrary, the images are framed in soft light. In my mind, sometimes, I see the houses, the municipio, the plaza, the old church, the ancient trees, the coast and the sea beyond it, neatly arranged, in quaint stillness, underneath a layer of mist. Perhaps this is because my first vivid encounter with the place was through sleep-heavy, glazed eyes, encountering early morning sunlight coming at me in tiny broken streams, through intertwined foliage.
I probably slept through much of that first trip. I only remember that, when I woke up, the car we were in was slowing down, bringing the excited chatter to a hush. When I looked up, we were under a canopy of acacia leaves and branches that were tangled in a complex embrace. I would soon learn to treat the magical welcome arch, as a marker, an unmistakable sign, that we had entered the town proper, if not a different time zone altogether. As a matter of propriety and practice, everything slows down, therefore. In a minute, the plaza starts to loom to our right, and, to our left, the cathedral and the town’s patron saint, San Jose, facing the municipio and the country’s national hero, the other Jose.
My grandmother’s house is located on the same block as the church. Its “dirty kitchen” faces the small, square, black windows of the church rectory. When attending afternoon novena masses, we pass through the backdoor, from the kitchen, and enter the church compound via the rectory. We sometimes see the priests, off duty, strumming guitars, grooming gardens, meditating.
I have heard that, in every generation, at least one of the Tías carries on an illicit conduct with some young Pádre, in the much too short, tree-lined path between the women’s earthly kitchen and the men’s holy ground. It is probably not true, but not hard to imagine. I imagine this: A___ herself as a product of the prohibited passions between a Spanish man of the cloth and an otherwise pious native girl. A____’s mother is fourteen and he forty. She is much too tall for her age and her kind, while he is much too lay for his order and for his own good. It’s all very, very easy to imagine, in fact.
As soon as we passed the church, the driver took a quick left and there it was, the house where my mother was born. There is nothing remarkable, or imaginative, about the house, which, like all the others, looks like a girl’s dress, with concrete walls for a skirt, wooden and capiz windows for a top. The house would be quite easy to miss, save for the bougainvilleas, that climb wildly all over the front of the house, adhering brightly colored papery bracts, that persist for a long time as to be permanent, on the walls.
The car pulled up under the colorful vines. And as soon as the rusty door of the car was opened, before we kids could even get off the orange Ford Fiera, we were untangled from the arms of our yayas, lifted over bags and boxes, and ensconced in the warm hugs and kisses of a hundred Tías. Then the rest of the contingent spilled out of the car, and there were even more combinations of tearful embraces, as the decibel of “Kana! Kani!” chatter rose higher and higher.
“Kana sad! Kani sad!”
No, no one was sad, everybody was happy. They were actually just giving instructions on which bags to unload, which ones to leave behind. That was just how everybody was: nothing was ever not a cause for excitement.
In those times, many, many years ago, we only ever traveled in big, noisy, highly-excitable groups. We filled buses, or rented big vans, even if some of the families had their own private cars. The only time there would be a semblance of silence during the trip was when we passed the steep, winding roads, by the sides of mountains; the chatter would then turn to prayer. As soon as the most challenging part of the road to Matalom was passed, the adults instantly recovered: they sang cheesy songs, told tired old stories, and then passed around the miniature “White Flower” bottle, whose oil they dabbed on their temples, and the vapors they inhaled, like junkies, through their noses.
The last time I was in Matalom was with a much smaller, quieter contingent: my two brothers and two sisters, all of whom I had to baby-sit, without my knowing it. My brothers, who were the real junkies, were then both hooked on mind-altering substances and eardrum-busting sounds. My older sister was trying not to depress herself, while waiting for the results of her board exams. My baby sister was, well, still a baby at the age of twelve. We did not know the real reason for our overextended stay in Matalom, until ten days later when, despite the long distance calls to our parents, they still would not come for us or send us money for bus fare back to Tacloban. We eventually realized that hieing us off to Matalom was Mother’s idea of rehabilitation and spiritual exile for her children, as much as for herself, I suppose.
My baby sister was a mere foil, or an accessory, it turned out: for as long as she was with us, no one had the heart to pull the rug from under our feet, even when we older kids started depressing the hell out of everyone with our posturing. Everybody was charmed by my baby sister’s crystal clear singing voice, and entranced with her almost translucent complexion, not to mention the fact that she was named after my mother, decidedly their favorite among A___‘s children .
I, on the other hand, had just graduated from UP then, had no job, and was forever in black, agonizing over the fact that I could not, had no excuse to, be with my boyfriend who was a journalist in Manila. Before we arrived in Matalom, I was bent on showing everyone that this was all a waste of my time, and that I was there against my will. Of course, I was not able to maintain my position for long. Given the situation, I could not exactly complain about being forced to take a “vacation with my siblings in a seaside town, right across a white-sand resort island”, as my mother put it.
Mother literally packed us off, drove us to the terminal, and paid the bus driver who had already been instructed over the phone, to reserve the first row of seats for us, for the four-hour trip to Matalom. Against our will, she convinced us to go to Matalom at the pretext that it was a matter of obligation.
By then, most of my mother’s brothers and sisters had stopped going to Matalom, or, when they did, they would rather rent rooms at the only beach resort in town, than accept the hospitality offered by their cousins who were then caring for the house. We somehow gathered that there was some dispute over the old house beside the church, and over the land on which that house stood. Perhaps it was because my mother was born in that house that she could not let anything or anyone sway her from staying there or from maintaining ties with her mother’s sister, and her cousins.
We all noticed, moreover, that, indeed, Mother never had severe migraine attacks for the rest of the year, after being in Matalom for only a few days. She, therefore, had a well-founded reason for believing that a two-week stay in the place would cure us of our ills as well.
***
Mother was right, as always. We returned to Tacloban, after being deported to and forcefully rehabilitated in Matalom, healthy, happy, and detoxified, with new haircuts to boot. Our Tías cried, probably with as much relief as with sadness, as we waved to them from the bus. Half of the bus passengers were annoyed, the other half amused, that we had overloaded the bus with all sorts of items we accumulated in our two-week rehab-vacation in Matalom: corals, shells and stones from the beach, funky retro clothes from the ukay ukay, big jars of fiesta food, a sack of fruits, and several old photographs and stolen library books. We promised ourselves that we’d go to Matalom at least once every year, and preferably with the entire family. Even with the whole clan, just like old times!
We are still talking about going to Matalom. One of these days, one of these days, we say. Of course, it never happens. If it ever does, it would only ever be as a very small family that we would go, as it would be as a family without my mother. And, without her, I need to be convinced that we can go back to the way things were, with her siblings and their families, like in the old times, traveling together in one big happy pack.
What we never thought would happen, happened. We lost our mother; the migraines were not just migraines. The ties to her family were severed, not strengthened. And I, for my own little, insignificant part, cannot bear to be anywhere near anyone who has hurt her. My older sister, who is kind and generous, once suggested that we should reach out, be the ones to repair the damage. But I refused. I told her that I am still trying to be angry rather than hurt, at everyone who hurt but never angered our mother. For now, I am content to keep these images of my mother’s life and those who peopled it, underneath a film of vapor; content to condense everything onto paper.
I can not even enter the house in Tacloban, where mother grew up, and where we used to live for years, when my grandfather started to get sick, and until he expired. I hear the house is falling apart. The plants have died, the vines have dried up and detached themselves from the walls, and are now hanging limply like skeletons in the air. I hear the piano is missing, and can no longer be found, while the rest of the furniture have been divided senselessly among the siblings – a ten-seater dining table with only four chairs in one house, a platera without the platos in the other, an aparador without the mirror left behind.
I sometimes see unrecognizable men and women, dark sagging figures on wooden chairs, drinking tuba or cheap rum, and getting drunk in the afternoons, throwing up all over the porch, unmindful of people passing the street. I sometimes see faces, peering at the window, from behind dust-encrusted curtains. Most of the time, though, I just look away whenever I sense movement behind the curtains.
***
A____ was already dead, when I took my first trip to her hometown. Since A____’s death, my mother made it a point for us to visit Matalom as often as we could, perhaps as a way for us, her children, to know and remember A____ more. What I do remember is that as soon as we reached Matalom, everyone spoke differently. My own mother’s tongue shifted swiftly from Waray to Kana, and my poor father, who never acquired the facility for the language, was forced to speak an even more foreign language – Tagalog.
I think I only realized the import of my grandmother’s death, and a little bit of my mother’s sense of loss, when I noticed that no one spoke my grandmother’s language in the house in Tacloban. Not even my mother or her brothers and sisters spoke it, when they were in Tacloban. It was a silence that could not be ignored, especially after I had been to Matalom, where Kana was the only language spoken. And, that was when it hit me: A____was the only with that voice and that language, after all, and it was a sound that I would never ever hear, ever again.
Was this also why my mother had on that expression again, when people started speaking to her, in her mother’s tongue, when we arrived in Matalom?
One afternoon, in the old house in Matalom, while everyone was down in the sala, examining yellowed documents, and sepia photographs, I went up to A____’s room, and forced myself to cry. I dabbed on the strong mentholated liniment at the corners of my eyelids until they stung. I forced my eyes to remain open, even when they were tearing uncontrollably, so I could stare at my face in the mirror, to see how well I could imitate my mother’s expression. This was a few years after A___’s death. I don’t know how, in all those years, I had convinced myself that menthol vapor was all it would take.
A____ died when I was three, my mother thirty. My older sister was four, my younger sister had not yet been born. Of course we were all too young, my mother included, to understand what it would take to complete the numbers game: for me to reach my mother’s age when her own mother died, for my older sister to have her own three year old daughter, and for our baby sister to have to play the role of mother, in our almost-abandoned household.
***
Mother would have been sixty today. At sixty, she would have been happily retired from managing her office and would now be applying Oprah-style, positive management, self-help techniques on her husband who always obliged her, and the rest of the household who were helpless against her. At sixty, she would have been a beautiful young grandmother, and still very much a mother.
I see her through the mist: she is still relatively slim, young-looking for her age, and elegant even in her green Hawaiian-print, housedress. I see her tending the garden– or, at least, supervising someone on how to tend the plants and the vines starting to climb all over the front of our house. I see her trying, again, to change the colors of the wall, the location of the door, of our still-unfinished house, inspired by something she saw in a magazine, or in a dream about the old house in Matalom. I see her at the dining table, which she and my father sometimes liked to use as worktable. She is making “thing to do” lists, plans, inspirational prose, reminders and notes for her children, who have started their own families, and need her now more than ever. She is seated next to my father who, at the age of seventy-six, is still writing pleadings for his non-paying clients; is bent on saving other people but, without my mother, cannot function on his own. I see the two of them being torn away from their work, by the kids – not us, but our children! – who are doing something silly, looking so adorable, making a mess of Mother’s make up, breaking some jewelry, perhaps, wearing my father’s oversized leather shoes, trying to run in them, and falling all over their faces. My mother’s expression softens. This is the kind of chaos that appeals to her, and against which she has no power or a single management skill.
It is her sixtieth birthday. We have already been to church for the six a.m. mass. We are taking a trip to Matalom, A____’s hometown, the place where Mother was born. This was her idea, she made arrangements for everyone and everything. It is a beautiful day, just the right amount of sun and wind; a perfect day to travel with the entire family, indeed. And, of course, because it is my mother we are talking about, family means not only us – who are all home for the occasion—, but also friends, cousins, nieces and nephews, uncles and aunts, and grandaunts, too. Of course, she has forgiven and forgotten past misdeeds, everyone looks to her now to keep ties bound, just like they deferred to A____, her mother, to settle family matters.
Of course, too, every now and then, she remembers A_____, her own mother, who did not even live long enough to reach the age of sixty, who barely knew her grandchildren— all beautiful and bright in their own right, although some of them have to be taught how to be happy, sometimes. She cannot help but think of herself, and how she made it without A____. Has it really been three decades? Why, every time, every single time she remembers, it puzzles her that it still hurts, it still stings, no matter how long it has been. It clutches at her heart, and it induces her to fervent prayer, mindless of the three year old granddaughter who is alarmed at the change in her grandmother’s expression. Oh God, may her children never know such sorrow, may she not have to leave this little one yet, kana sad, kani sad…
It is all very, very easy to imagine, in fact.
***
My mother would have been sixty today. And I am alone in an apartment, in a house that has no history. My husband and I live and work in a noisy, wet city, whose language has adopted us. We surround ourselves with people who do not know anything about us, whom we do not know enough about. Sure, we exchange bits and pieces of ourselves, of our families, sometimes; we highlight certain events, we hide others, we mention the colorful characters, we obliterate the rest. We have degrees in language, in cultural studies, in history. We convert to discourse and fiction and poetry what we have inevitably cut ourselves from. It has become a matter of survival.
I am looking for an excuse to celebrate my mother’s life in this city that has nothing to do with her, except that this is where she died, this is where she left us. And, wherever my mother went, she did bring home with her. I am always looking for excuses to round up old friends and whatever family we can pull in from the vicinity; to gather different tongues in one table and let them speak their language, as long as never about it. Kani sad, has become a matter of survival.
Quezon City
September, 2008
My mother would have been sixty today. She was born in 1948 in a town called Matalom, in the southern part of Leyte. Stories have it that when my mother was young, she would often get ill, suffer strange, undiagnosed, incurable symptoms, the only remedy for which was to bring her back to the town where she was born. At the time, it took almost an entire day to travel from Tacloban, where their family eventually settled, to Matalom, which they visited only once every year, or depending on how often my mother became ill.
My mother had six brothers and sisters, but she was the only one who was born in Matalom, her mother’s hometown. This, her siblings used to say, explains why she took after their mother the most. And, they would always add, also the reason why she took after their mother in the worst ways possible; that is, in terms of mood and disposition.
I never really knew their mother; hence, I find it difficult to relate to her, to even refer to her as grandmother. But, I shall try. Their mother, A___, was a tall, buxom woman, with a polished look about her. In the photographs hanging on the walls of the old house in Matalom and in Tacloban, she is always the tallest among everyone, man or woman, and she always carries herself with a combination of grace and ease; with a skilled, concise execution, which can only be described as stylish in a military way. Most people, however, thought that she was, on the whole, in look and manner, rather severe. Again, I have no direct, personal recollection of her severity or grace. I also do not recall any story about her being demonstrative in her care and affection for her children and her husband, or for anyone, for that matter.
The stories I retain of A___ are, on the whole, inconsequential: how tiny her waist was despite her full figure, how her height and her low, somber voice commanded attention, and how stubborn she was in her refusal to learn any other language but Bisaya. For some reason, people also referred to this language as Kana (the Bisaya term for “that one”, or perhaps the Bisaya pejorative for “Americana”). I have some very curious memory of that voice applied to what I thought was a peculiar language.
I also sometimes remember her smell, which was, invariably, a combination of fresh laundry and sweet-sour fruits. (This was how my mother smelled, too, on Sundays, without the scented lotion and expensive perfume).
A____ died thirteen days after I celebrated my third birthday, a month after my mother turned thirty.
***
It is always of these that my memory of that day is made up: tall men and women, in black and white, milling about, standing in corners; dark figures slumped, arms sagging against reddish-brown wooden seats. A glass is thrown violently to the deep-red, concrete floor, and stepped on by many grieving, angry feet shod in leather. A string of white rosary beads is pulled apart, and the round, tiny crystals slide swiftly off the string and scatter themselves on the floor, under the furniture, and under people’s soles. And then we are being lined up in front of the coffin, arranged according to some logic I could not understand. From being carried in someone’s arms, I am, against my will, settled on the floor next to my siblings and my cousins. My baby brother, who is only a few months old, takes my place in the coveted cradle-arms of some aunt or uncle. There is lightning in my face, and I am temporarily blind. I think it is at this point that I start to cry. But nobody sees.
Nobody hears, either. There are too many languages being spoken all at the same time. And my grandmother’s language is spoken the loudest by more voices than I have ever heard it spoken before. “Kana! Kani! Kana sad! Kani sad!” (which, I thought, translated to “That one! This one! That one is sad! This one is sad!” only to find out, very soon enough, that “sad” only meant “also”, or “too”). And the controversy had merely to do with flowers – over which ones to bring to the chapel, which ones to throw away, or burn.
Nothing of the nine-day wake should be left behind, a nameless grandaunt says emphatically. Unless you want a member of the family to follow suit, another one adds. Very quickly, it is settled. No one dares argue. Bouquets, wreaths, and vases of dried up and decaying flowers are thrown into a sack to join the pyre. Brighter, fresher ones are arranged atop a long, black hearse which, like its passengers, looks “sad sad”, as it waits there, strikingly odd in the otherwise car-less street.
The funeral took place at high noon and I remember the heat.
I cannot ignore the heat. It bears down on us as we walk in a solemn procession from the gates of the cemetery to the small clearing where there is an empty tomb and several priests waiting, their white frocks stiff in the windless air. A____ is the first to stake her claim in the family lot. Eventually, as the years would pass, that clearing would disappear, as it is crowded with more of her family members following her lead, despite the careful adherence to superstition. It becomes too crowded that it would not even accommodate my mother who, on the very day I turn thirty, would be, as some would say, “laid to rest”, away from her family.
At the burial, I cannot take my eyes off my mother’s face, as she watches the cement inevitably applied to the square opening of the gray tomb, sealing the niche (and her mother) off, finally, from the rest of the world. There are several broken flowers strewn all around us. The candles are melting quickly before the harsh heat of the sun. The kids are starting to surreptitiously gather them to form balls of wax. I am slumped against the chest of someone whose face I cannot see. I cannot stop staring at my mother’s face. There is so much going on in it. She has on an expression I have never seen before. I am looking and looking but not understanding the meaning behind it. And then it strikes me: it is almost the same expression she has after dabbing on “White Flower” liniment onto her temples and after inhaling the vapors. It is the look of someone disappearing, fading away. It is a look that is focused on something beyond my ken. It is a look that worries me no end.
***
Matalom, in Bisaya, means sharp. When I think of Matalom, on the contrary, the images are framed in soft light. In my mind, sometimes, I see the houses, the municipio, the plaza, the old church, the ancient trees, the coast and the sea beyond it, neatly arranged, in quaint stillness, underneath a layer of mist. Perhaps this is because my first vivid encounter with the place was through sleep-heavy, glazed eyes, encountering early morning sunlight coming at me in tiny broken streams, through intertwined foliage.
I probably slept through much of that first trip. I only remember that, when I woke up, the car we were in was slowing down, bringing the excited chatter to a hush. When I looked up, we were under a canopy of acacia leaves and branches that were tangled in a complex embrace. I would soon learn to treat the magical welcome arch, as a marker, an unmistakable sign, that we had entered the town proper, if not a different time zone altogether. As a matter of propriety and practice, everything slows down, therefore. In a minute, the plaza starts to loom to our right, and, to our left, the cathedral and the town’s patron saint, San Jose, facing the municipio and the country’s national hero, the other Jose.
My grandmother’s house is located on the same block as the church. Its “dirty kitchen” faces the small, square, black windows of the church rectory. When attending afternoon novena masses, we pass through the backdoor, from the kitchen, and enter the church compound via the rectory. We sometimes see the priests, off duty, strumming guitars, grooming gardens, meditating.
I have heard that, in every generation, at least one of the Tías carries on an illicit conduct with some young Pádre, in the much too short, tree-lined path between the women’s earthly kitchen and the men’s holy ground. It is probably not true, but not hard to imagine. I imagine this: A___ herself as a product of the prohibited passions between a Spanish man of the cloth and an otherwise pious native girl. A____’s mother is fourteen and he forty. She is much too tall for her age and her kind, while he is much too lay for his order and for his own good. It’s all very, very easy to imagine, in fact.
As soon as we passed the church, the driver took a quick left and there it was, the house where my mother was born. There is nothing remarkable, or imaginative, about the house, which, like all the others, looks like a girl’s dress, with concrete walls for a skirt, wooden and capiz windows for a top. The house would be quite easy to miss, save for the bougainvilleas, that climb wildly all over the front of the house, adhering brightly colored papery bracts, that persist for a long time as to be permanent, on the walls.
The car pulled up under the colorful vines. And as soon as the rusty door of the car was opened, before we kids could even get off the orange Ford Fiera, we were untangled from the arms of our yayas, lifted over bags and boxes, and ensconced in the warm hugs and kisses of a hundred Tías. Then the rest of the contingent spilled out of the car, and there were even more combinations of tearful embraces, as the decibel of “Kana! Kani!” chatter rose higher and higher.
“Kana sad! Kani sad!”
No, no one was sad, everybody was happy. They were actually just giving instructions on which bags to unload, which ones to leave behind. That was just how everybody was: nothing was ever not a cause for excitement.
In those times, many, many years ago, we only ever traveled in big, noisy, highly-excitable groups. We filled buses, or rented big vans, even if some of the families had their own private cars. The only time there would be a semblance of silence during the trip was when we passed the steep, winding roads, by the sides of mountains; the chatter would then turn to prayer. As soon as the most challenging part of the road to Matalom was passed, the adults instantly recovered: they sang cheesy songs, told tired old stories, and then passed around the miniature “White Flower” bottle, whose oil they dabbed on their temples, and the vapors they inhaled, like junkies, through their noses.
The last time I was in Matalom was with a much smaller, quieter contingent: my two brothers and two sisters, all of whom I had to baby-sit, without my knowing it. My brothers, who were the real junkies, were then both hooked on mind-altering substances and eardrum-busting sounds. My older sister was trying not to depress herself, while waiting for the results of her board exams. My baby sister was, well, still a baby at the age of twelve. We did not know the real reason for our overextended stay in Matalom, until ten days later when, despite the long distance calls to our parents, they still would not come for us or send us money for bus fare back to Tacloban. We eventually realized that hieing us off to Matalom was Mother’s idea of rehabilitation and spiritual exile for her children, as much as for herself, I suppose.
My baby sister was a mere foil, or an accessory, it turned out: for as long as she was with us, no one had the heart to pull the rug from under our feet, even when we older kids started depressing the hell out of everyone with our posturing. Everybody was charmed by my baby sister’s crystal clear singing voice, and entranced with her almost translucent complexion, not to mention the fact that she was named after my mother, decidedly their favorite among A___‘s children .
I, on the other hand, had just graduated from UP then, had no job, and was forever in black, agonizing over the fact that I could not, had no excuse to, be with my boyfriend who was a journalist in Manila. Before we arrived in Matalom, I was bent on showing everyone that this was all a waste of my time, and that I was there against my will. Of course, I was not able to maintain my position for long. Given the situation, I could not exactly complain about being forced to take a “vacation with my siblings in a seaside town, right across a white-sand resort island”, as my mother put it.
Mother literally packed us off, drove us to the terminal, and paid the bus driver who had already been instructed over the phone, to reserve the first row of seats for us, for the four-hour trip to Matalom. Against our will, she convinced us to go to Matalom at the pretext that it was a matter of obligation.
By then, most of my mother’s brothers and sisters had stopped going to Matalom, or, when they did, they would rather rent rooms at the only beach resort in town, than accept the hospitality offered by their cousins who were then caring for the house. We somehow gathered that there was some dispute over the old house beside the church, and over the land on which that house stood. Perhaps it was because my mother was born in that house that she could not let anything or anyone sway her from staying there or from maintaining ties with her mother’s sister, and her cousins.
We all noticed, moreover, that, indeed, Mother never had severe migraine attacks for the rest of the year, after being in Matalom for only a few days. She, therefore, had a well-founded reason for believing that a two-week stay in the place would cure us of our ills as well.
***
Mother was right, as always. We returned to Tacloban, after being deported to and forcefully rehabilitated in Matalom, healthy, happy, and detoxified, with new haircuts to boot. Our Tías cried, probably with as much relief as with sadness, as we waved to them from the bus. Half of the bus passengers were annoyed, the other half amused, that we had overloaded the bus with all sorts of items we accumulated in our two-week rehab-vacation in Matalom: corals, shells and stones from the beach, funky retro clothes from the ukay ukay, big jars of fiesta food, a sack of fruits, and several old photographs and stolen library books. We promised ourselves that we’d go to Matalom at least once every year, and preferably with the entire family. Even with the whole clan, just like old times!
We are still talking about going to Matalom. One of these days, one of these days, we say. Of course, it never happens. If it ever does, it would only ever be as a very small family that we would go, as it would be as a family without my mother. And, without her, I need to be convinced that we can go back to the way things were, with her siblings and their families, like in the old times, traveling together in one big happy pack.
What we never thought would happen, happened. We lost our mother; the migraines were not just migraines. The ties to her family were severed, not strengthened. And I, for my own little, insignificant part, cannot bear to be anywhere near anyone who has hurt her. My older sister, who is kind and generous, once suggested that we should reach out, be the ones to repair the damage. But I refused. I told her that I am still trying to be angry rather than hurt, at everyone who hurt but never angered our mother. For now, I am content to keep these images of my mother’s life and those who peopled it, underneath a film of vapor; content to condense everything onto paper.
I can not even enter the house in Tacloban, where mother grew up, and where we used to live for years, when my grandfather started to get sick, and until he expired. I hear the house is falling apart. The plants have died, the vines have dried up and detached themselves from the walls, and are now hanging limply like skeletons in the air. I hear the piano is missing, and can no longer be found, while the rest of the furniture have been divided senselessly among the siblings – a ten-seater dining table with only four chairs in one house, a platera without the platos in the other, an aparador without the mirror left behind.
I sometimes see unrecognizable men and women, dark sagging figures on wooden chairs, drinking tuba or cheap rum, and getting drunk in the afternoons, throwing up all over the porch, unmindful of people passing the street. I sometimes see faces, peering at the window, from behind dust-encrusted curtains. Most of the time, though, I just look away whenever I sense movement behind the curtains.
***
A____ was already dead, when I took my first trip to her hometown. Since A____’s death, my mother made it a point for us to visit Matalom as often as we could, perhaps as a way for us, her children, to know and remember A____ more. What I do remember is that as soon as we reached Matalom, everyone spoke differently. My own mother’s tongue shifted swiftly from Waray to Kana, and my poor father, who never acquired the facility for the language, was forced to speak an even more foreign language – Tagalog.
I think I only realized the import of my grandmother’s death, and a little bit of my mother’s sense of loss, when I noticed that no one spoke my grandmother’s language in the house in Tacloban. Not even my mother or her brothers and sisters spoke it, when they were in Tacloban. It was a silence that could not be ignored, especially after I had been to Matalom, where Kana was the only language spoken. And, that was when it hit me: A____was the only with that voice and that language, after all, and it was a sound that I would never ever hear, ever again.
Was this also why my mother had on that expression again, when people started speaking to her, in her mother’s tongue, when we arrived in Matalom?
One afternoon, in the old house in Matalom, while everyone was down in the sala, examining yellowed documents, and sepia photographs, I went up to A____’s room, and forced myself to cry. I dabbed on the strong mentholated liniment at the corners of my eyelids until they stung. I forced my eyes to remain open, even when they were tearing uncontrollably, so I could stare at my face in the mirror, to see how well I could imitate my mother’s expression. This was a few years after A___’s death. I don’t know how, in all those years, I had convinced myself that menthol vapor was all it would take.
A____ died when I was three, my mother thirty. My older sister was four, my younger sister had not yet been born. Of course we were all too young, my mother included, to understand what it would take to complete the numbers game: for me to reach my mother’s age when her own mother died, for my older sister to have her own three year old daughter, and for our baby sister to have to play the role of mother, in our almost-abandoned household.
***
Mother would have been sixty today. At sixty, she would have been happily retired from managing her office and would now be applying Oprah-style, positive management, self-help techniques on her husband who always obliged her, and the rest of the household who were helpless against her. At sixty, she would have been a beautiful young grandmother, and still very much a mother.
I see her through the mist: she is still relatively slim, young-looking for her age, and elegant even in her green Hawaiian-print, housedress. I see her tending the garden– or, at least, supervising someone on how to tend the plants and the vines starting to climb all over the front of our house. I see her trying, again, to change the colors of the wall, the location of the door, of our still-unfinished house, inspired by something she saw in a magazine, or in a dream about the old house in Matalom. I see her at the dining table, which she and my father sometimes liked to use as worktable. She is making “thing to do” lists, plans, inspirational prose, reminders and notes for her children, who have started their own families, and need her now more than ever. She is seated next to my father who, at the age of seventy-six, is still writing pleadings for his non-paying clients; is bent on saving other people but, without my mother, cannot function on his own. I see the two of them being torn away from their work, by the kids – not us, but our children! – who are doing something silly, looking so adorable, making a mess of Mother’s make up, breaking some jewelry, perhaps, wearing my father’s oversized leather shoes, trying to run in them, and falling all over their faces. My mother’s expression softens. This is the kind of chaos that appeals to her, and against which she has no power or a single management skill.
It is her sixtieth birthday. We have already been to church for the six a.m. mass. We are taking a trip to Matalom, A____’s hometown, the place where Mother was born. This was her idea, she made arrangements for everyone and everything. It is a beautiful day, just the right amount of sun and wind; a perfect day to travel with the entire family, indeed. And, of course, because it is my mother we are talking about, family means not only us – who are all home for the occasion—, but also friends, cousins, nieces and nephews, uncles and aunts, and grandaunts, too. Of course, she has forgiven and forgotten past misdeeds, everyone looks to her now to keep ties bound, just like they deferred to A____, her mother, to settle family matters.
Of course, too, every now and then, she remembers A_____, her own mother, who did not even live long enough to reach the age of sixty, who barely knew her grandchildren— all beautiful and bright in their own right, although some of them have to be taught how to be happy, sometimes. She cannot help but think of herself, and how she made it without A____. Has it really been three decades? Why, every time, every single time she remembers, it puzzles her that it still hurts, it still stings, no matter how long it has been. It clutches at her heart, and it induces her to fervent prayer, mindless of the three year old granddaughter who is alarmed at the change in her grandmother’s expression. Oh God, may her children never know such sorrow, may she not have to leave this little one yet, kana sad, kani sad…
It is all very, very easy to imagine, in fact.
***
My mother would have been sixty today. And I am alone in an apartment, in a house that has no history. My husband and I live and work in a noisy, wet city, whose language has adopted us. We surround ourselves with people who do not know anything about us, whom we do not know enough about. Sure, we exchange bits and pieces of ourselves, of our families, sometimes; we highlight certain events, we hide others, we mention the colorful characters, we obliterate the rest. We have degrees in language, in cultural studies, in history. We convert to discourse and fiction and poetry what we have inevitably cut ourselves from. It has become a matter of survival.
I am looking for an excuse to celebrate my mother’s life in this city that has nothing to do with her, except that this is where she died, this is where she left us. And, wherever my mother went, she did bring home with her. I am always looking for excuses to round up old friends and whatever family we can pull in from the vicinity; to gather different tongues in one table and let them speak their language, as long as never about it. Kani sad, has become a matter of survival.
Quezon City
September, 2008
Thursday, August 14, 2008
today, two remarkable things
happened in my classes.
in my composition class, i discovered a writer. unfortunately, i also discovered that among everyone, she had the most number of cuts and the least number of submissions. i had more than one reasons to give her an F for her advisory mark, which i have just submitted to the department, but i decided to be selfish. i decided i want to keep her in this class. but she will definitely hear it from me. as i also want to hear more from her.
in my literature class, i saw the kids mature in an hour. we were discussing the element of point of view and how it not only delimits the reader's scope of vision, controls the reader's reaction, but also reveals subjectivity and subject-position. i did not use these last two terms, or go into psychoanalytical critique, but illustrated the concepts by way of facilitating the discussion of a particular story. this is not what was remarkable about today's class. what really made my day was how smooth and steady and calm the discussion went. the students raised their hands one after the other, gave each other time to speak, listened to each other's answers and then responded (to their classmates' comments and to the story) not only critically and intelligently, but most of all, compassionately. normally, i restrict myself to just getting students to arrive at a comfortable critical stance, in relation to the story and the larger social context. and that, in itself, is a not the easiest thing to accomplish. after a lot of work, towards the end of the sem, i am hardly able to take pride in seeing them (or some of them, sometimes even just a few of them) arriving at that stance, confidently and comfortably using a particular critical (political) framework, employing a new vocabulary, and basically thinking unlike an over-indulged or over-eager freshman. this sem, i don't know what happened. or maybe i missed it. but before i knew it, [practically] the entire class matured as readers (and as persons), and even overshot my expectations. i cannot claim any credit for it. but let me revel in it. today's was probably the least exciting, certainly one of the most orderly, of discussions i have ever handled. i am one to encourage and instigate a boisterous, lively, sometimes out of hand, exchange, which usually characterize the discussions in this particular class. today, i didn't have to instigate anything. i barely did any facilitating, truthfully.
it wasn't so much the wonderful exchange that struck me, it was the graceful quieting that i witnessed after the discussion.
in my composition class, i discovered a writer. unfortunately, i also discovered that among everyone, she had the most number of cuts and the least number of submissions. i had more than one reasons to give her an F for her advisory mark, which i have just submitted to the department, but i decided to be selfish. i decided i want to keep her in this class. but she will definitely hear it from me. as i also want to hear more from her.
in my literature class, i saw the kids mature in an hour. we were discussing the element of point of view and how it not only delimits the reader's scope of vision, controls the reader's reaction, but also reveals subjectivity and subject-position. i did not use these last two terms, or go into psychoanalytical critique, but illustrated the concepts by way of facilitating the discussion of a particular story. this is not what was remarkable about today's class. what really made my day was how smooth and steady and calm the discussion went. the students raised their hands one after the other, gave each other time to speak, listened to each other's answers and then responded (to their classmates' comments and to the story) not only critically and intelligently, but most of all, compassionately. normally, i restrict myself to just getting students to arrive at a comfortable critical stance, in relation to the story and the larger social context. and that, in itself, is a not the easiest thing to accomplish. after a lot of work, towards the end of the sem, i am hardly able to take pride in seeing them (or some of them, sometimes even just a few of them) arriving at that stance, confidently and comfortably using a particular critical (political) framework, employing a new vocabulary, and basically thinking unlike an over-indulged or over-eager freshman. this sem, i don't know what happened. or maybe i missed it. but before i knew it, [practically] the entire class matured as readers (and as persons), and even overshot my expectations. i cannot claim any credit for it. but let me revel in it. today's was probably the least exciting, certainly one of the most orderly, of discussions i have ever handled. i am one to encourage and instigate a boisterous, lively, sometimes out of hand, exchange, which usually characterize the discussions in this particular class. today, i didn't have to instigate anything. i barely did any facilitating, truthfully.
it wasn't so much the wonderful exchange that struck me, it was the graceful quieting that i witnessed after the discussion.
Saturday, August 09, 2008
this is how i want my formalism explained
by a bad-ass writer who thinks that "magic realism sucks", and that there are only two things in life that are truly enjoyable: "Borges and making love".
***
"Yes, plots are a strange matter. I believe, even though there may be many exceptions, that at a certain moment a story chooses you and won’t leave you in peace. Fortunately, that’s not so important—the form, the structure, always belong to you, and without form or structure there’s no book, or at least in most cases that’s what happens. Let’s say the story and the plot arise by chance, that they belong to the realm of chance, that is, chaos, disorder, or to a realm that’s in constant turmoil (some call it apocalyptic). Form, on the other hand, is a choice made through intelligence, cunning and silence, all the weapons used by Ulysses in his battle against death. Form seeks an artifice; the story seeks a precipice. Or to use a metaphor from the Chilean countryside (a bad one, as you’ll see): It’s not that I don’t like precipices, but I prefer to see them from a bridge."
(Roberto Bolaño, in an interview with Carmen Boullosa, BOMB Magazine, Issue 78 Winter 2002, LITERATURE)
***
"Yes, plots are a strange matter. I believe, even though there may be many exceptions, that at a certain moment a story chooses you and won’t leave you in peace. Fortunately, that’s not so important—the form, the structure, always belong to you, and without form or structure there’s no book, or at least in most cases that’s what happens. Let’s say the story and the plot arise by chance, that they belong to the realm of chance, that is, chaos, disorder, or to a realm that’s in constant turmoil (some call it apocalyptic). Form, on the other hand, is a choice made through intelligence, cunning and silence, all the weapons used by Ulysses in his battle against death. Form seeks an artifice; the story seeks a precipice. Or to use a metaphor from the Chilean countryside (a bad one, as you’ll see): It’s not that I don’t like precipices, but I prefer to see them from a bridge."
(Roberto Bolaño, in an interview with Carmen Boullosa, BOMB Magazine, Issue 78 Winter 2002, LITERATURE)
Monday, July 28, 2008
have i said it lately, that i love...
Ian McEwan? I do! I do!
***
"The dream, surely, Zadie, that we all have, is to write this beautiful paragraph that actually is describing something but at the same time in another voice is writing a commentary on its own creation, without having to be a story about a writer."
-- IM in a conversation with another favorite,
Zadie Smith.(August 2005 issue of Believer magazine)
***
"The dream, surely, Zadie, that we all have, is to write this beautiful paragraph that actually is describing something but at the same time in another voice is writing a commentary on its own creation, without having to be a story about a writer."
-- IM in a conversation with another favorite,
Zadie Smith.(August 2005 issue of Believer magazine)
ang guapo ni adam sa libro na 'to! at na gets ni krip!
please read sir krip's latest column:
http://philstar.com/index.php?Arts%20and%20Culture&p=49&type=2&sec=40&aid=2008072715
Adam & the eve of our poetry: Read Doveglion
KRIPOTKIN By Alfred A. Yuson
Monday, July 28, 2008
http://philstar.com/index.php?Arts%20and%20Culture&p=49&type=2&sec=40&aid=2008072715
Adam & the eve of our poetry: Read Doveglion
KRIPOTKIN By Alfred A. Yuson
Monday, July 28, 2008
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Encountering the Self (or more unsolicitied critiques)
as well as a few solicitied ones, for carljoe. this one here's a consolidated critique of a couple of short stories. this essay forms part of chapter 5 (i think) of my thesis.
Encountering the Self, Lack, and Desire
in Philippine Urban Fantasy,Horror and Ghost Stories
Not considering the stories in Nick Joaquin’s Tropical Gothic (first published in 1972), it was only in the last few years when collections of supernatural, horror or ghost stories saw publication by the country’s major commercial and academic publishers. Since 2003, with the publication of a series of urban ghost story collections Best Philippine Ghost Stories whose authors were mainly unknown or literally anonymous, there have been at least four more anthologies of horror/ghost/supernatural stories that have come out, three of which were put together by, and contain works of, young writers, mostly in their twenties and thirties. This is a remarkable development considering that prior to this, no anthologies of such nature were being put out by publishers.
Interestingly, it was the UP Press which published the first such anthology called Nine Supernatural Stories (2004). After a year and a half, the UP Press put out another collection of the same genre, entitled Damaged People— Tales of the Gothic Punk (2006), also by a young fictionist, Karl De Mesa. De Mesa’s works, however, while sharing many features and qualities with the supernatural stories, are ultimately in a category of their own. They are not so much supernatural, as “punk-gothic”, employing a different set of strategies and displaying more varied influences, particularly from the “punk”— anti-establishment youth movement/attitude. (As such, they are separately discussed, in another paper).
Another significant development along these lines is the publication of the three-volume anthology Philippine Speculative Fiction, spearheaded by Dean Francis Alfar, himself one of the foremost practitioners of genre fiction writing. These anthologies are comprised of stories that employ fantasy, among other narrative modes, in various ways, resulting likewise in various types and genres.
In their introduction to the anthology Nine Supernatural Stories, April Yap and Lara Saguisag, remark on the unexpected paucity of supernatural fiction in our written literature, considering the popularity of the ghost story and the abundance of supernatural characters in our collective imagination. In one of the few fora centered on supernatural, fantasy and science fiction (November, 2004) sponsored by the UP Institute of Creative Writing (UP ICW) the invited authors, particularly Emil Flores of UP lamented the fact that the only indicators that the supernatural and fantasy holds some importance in these times, are the highly popular fantasy soap operas featuring mutated and mutilated local mythical characters, aired every evening by the country’s two largest TV networks. Three years and several anthologies and single-author collections later, perhaps there are more than enough indicators that fantasy holds some importance in these particular times.
In the area of written narratives, one related local study done by Yvette Natalie Tan, “In(Visible) Monster: the Theory and Praxis of Horror in Philippine Short Fiction in English” (MA Thesis, UP, 2005), tackles the elements of horror seen in Philippine short fiction in English. It is interesting in that it offers different categories of horror images in the fiction pieces she studied. The horror images according to Tan are sourced from either: (1)Ethnic-Native Practices; (2) Western Practices; and (3) the often contradicting combination of Native Filipino and Western Practices.
Given that Philippine short story in English is dominantly realist, Tan attempts to present an interesting enough standpoint (by examining the elements of horror) from which to view the stories. Her study, however, does not focus on the horror fiction genre per se, and her approach and treatment are limited to a close reading of images and metaphors. Tan’s study succeeds in showing that what are generally considered as serious, realist literature in academe do make use of horror elements that are more commonly seen in “non-serious” and non realist genres.
My paper is not so much interested in elevating to the level of serious fiction the status of the supernatural horror genre, or genre fiction in general. It is, however, interested in studying them as already significant narratives that function in the articulation or subversion of concepts of self.
It is interesting to note that most of the anthologized Philippine short stories in English that employ fantasy as a narrative mode while exploring the mysterious and miraculous, also deal with the gloomy and the grotesque, the horrific and the macabre, whether in terms of theme and subject matter, or of setting and atmosphere. Moreover, in most of the stories, the plot unfolds in urban settings, the city’s decay and chaos serving as an important backdrop for the subject’s deracination, rupture, and fragmentation. For the few stories not set amidst the heady, confusing, and also alienating city, the narratives are set against eerie, lonely provincial locations, featuring daunting, colonial mansions; vast haciendas; and sinister landscapes.
Indeed, the stories taken up in this paper vary greatly from one another but perhaps the one quality they share is the preoccupation with or the assumption of the existence of “Other” strange beings, elusive elementals, chilling unseen presences. Most of the stories are also premised on first-time occurrences, highlighting the fear of the unknown. It is the mystery, after all, that terrifies. And my reading is partly an attempt to reveal that no mystery is more terrifying than that which involves the subject’s struggle, through narrativization, to keep certain desires unknown to others, but most of all to the self.
In an attempt to analyze and to illustrate the range of possibilities that the employment of fantasy produces in a text, I have selected a couple of stories from four different anthologies, (from Nine Supernatural Stories, ed. Lara Saguisag and April Yap; Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 1, Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 2, ed. Dean Francis Alfar; and Afraid, ed. Danton Remoto). More specifically, I shall look into the concepts of subjectivity that are produced, explored, or subverted, in Philippine urban fantasy, ghost and horror stories in English.
The concept of subjectivity that operates in this paper is anchored on the concepts of Jacques Lacan, through Catherine Belsey, who explains that subjectivity is related to the concept of individual “consciousness” a “consciousness-in-itself, as distinct from a consciousness of something”, and, more specifically, a “consciousness of self”. Thus, “subjectivity” implies that this “consciousness depends on differentiation, and specifically… differentiation between ‘I’ and ‘you’” (55-56), or the subject and the Other. This differentiation is “a process made possible by language” (56). The preoccupation with the Other may also then be read here as a preoccupation with the self. It is also in this sense that “Fantasy is a field of symbolically structured meaning (the unconscious) that shapes and regulates our desires…” (Tadiar 9).
This study tackles these basic questions: What concepts of subjectivity emerge in the production of the strange, absolutely ‘other’ and different? How, and to what end, are elements of realism and aspects of reality subverted in the Philippine urban fantasy ghost and horror stories?
In order to address the texts’ problematic, the stories in this paper are viewed as corresponding to a gap in the self, such that the focus of the approach is that site in the narrative wherein the social and psychological spaces intersect. This site or location corresponds closely to the location of fantasy— in the indeterminate space between mimetic and marvelous— as it is understood in this study. From a purely psychoanalytic framework, this site, wherein resides the so-called Lacanian Thing (Das Ding) is the leftover space after the process of symbolic signification has been completed. Fantasy, as a narrative mode, accommodates the display of leftover, excessive, “un-interpretible” elements after castration, thereby effectively reminding us of the cost of actualizing the process of signification and the movement toward cultural order.
Employing a psychoanalytic and structural framework in the study of classic and contemporary horror stories and films, Stefan Gullatz, for instance, states that at the core of horror narratives is a site of leftover or excess responses which cannot be accounted for by the ideological subject. According to Gullatz, this site is
"…that which cannot be signified at all, despite repeated attempts, and thus, in the popular imagination persists only as an inert, meaningless, amorphous mass. There is a constitutive void at the heart of the symbolic order designating its inconsistency. Any object that is elevated to this site becomes associated with a traumatic, excessive enjoyment and will be perceived to be radically at odds with the socio-linguistic universe of flexible meanings and controllable emotions in which 'normal' beings can live and breathe." (www.horschamp. qc.ca/ new_offscreen /lacan.html)
The source of horror, in this sense, is the prospect of having to encounter those elements which have been ejected by the self from its consciousness, a process the subject has to go through in order for the self to exist in and coexist with society. (www.horschamp. qc.ca/ new_offscreen /lacan.html).
Robert Miles in Gothic Writing echoes Gullatz’s findings in his own exploration of the horror and the gothic quality in English gothic novels. Miles notes that the qualities ascribed to the term gothic, which is generally related to a variety of the English novel that surfaced in the mid-eighteenth century, has not really changed in terms of plots, motifs and figures. This consistency, repetition, and recycling of themes and styles are seen by Miles to be an indication of a powerful drive, and of a symbolic disparity in the social self, an issue which remains relevant until now, as evidenced by the lively practice of gothic or horror fiction writing at present (Miles 1).
Rosemary Jackson further echoes Miles’s suggestion of a powerful drive seen behind the production of horror narratives, but advances further and identifies this drive as unconscious desire. Likewise, Jackson identifies the site which Gullatz mentions in his study as an ideological site. As Jackson explains, it is through the expressive functions of fantasy that it is able to indicate or point to the seemingly precarious foundation of cultural order “for it opens up, for a brief moment, on to disorder, on to illegality, on to that which lies outside the law, that which is outside dominant value systems…” In doing so, fantasy also “traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made ‘absent’” (3-4).
My initial observations and assumptions about Philippine urban fantasy ghost and horror stories point to the idea that these stories are necessarily fragmentary and often inchoate, and the very form is itself an articulation of an attitude towards realist fiction, if not reality itself. This stand acquires more significance when we consider the very concept of realism as being culturally contingent. Catherine Belsey has renewed the interest in realist fiction and how it creates subjects out of its readers, by seeming to be transparent. Belsey also explains that the concept of realism is never stable, that it changes and, over the years, has made increasing demands on the form, as certain groups and movements have aspired for ever increased verisimilitude in art (47). Belsey also says that “even in fantasy, events, however improbable in themselves, are related to each other in familiar ways” (48).
Belsey then opens the possibility and reinforces the value of studying narratives such as the pieces being included in this study, by pointing out that “the plausibility of individual signifieds is far less important to the reading process than the familiarity of the connections between the signifiers. It is the set of relationships between characters or events, or between characters and events, which makes fantasy convincing” (47).
Another assumption this paper rests on, even as it does not submit to a purely psychoanalytical approach, is that there is a very palpable “schizoid” aspect to the stories which, in discussions about the Gothic novel and its progenies and descendant forms, has already been identified as not just an aesthetic device or decision, but more of an indication of a fissure, a fracture, or a wound, in the social self or the subject, which the writing of it is an attempt to address (Miles 1).
This paper considers the stories here as a discursive site, a coherent code for the representation of a disjointed subjectivity, a code that is often organized along structuralist principles (Miles 2), a la Todorov. However, I would like to posit that this site may be viewed as an unstable system, for these structuralist principles—clear binaries and opposites, such as light and dark, good and bad, humans versus non-humans—are themselves thwarted within the narratives. As the succeeding sections shall endeavor to illustrate, the stories or narratives studied in this paper contain different discourses in competition with each other, and are always in the process of revising one another.
Absence and Lack as signifiers of fear
In “The Man Who came Home” (Basilio, 85-91) and “Street Corner” (Javier, 46-52) from the Nine Supernatural Stories anthology, and, to a certain extent, “Room 1119” (Cheng, 11-16) from the Afraid anthology, terror arises when the sense of balance is threatened, when the very fiber of the character’s manhood is put to the test. In these three stories, the dominant speaking subject is a middleclass male, the series of [unfortunate] events told from his standpoint, and the state of affairs being problematized are directly/indirectly caused by the absence of the female partner. The woman here then becomes doubly absent, not merely rendered as a symbol of absence. But it is precisely because the symbol of absence is absent, that she is very much present.
In “The Man Who came Home”, for instance, the story opens with the narrator, a young professional, coming home to an empty middle-class condominium unit, for the first time, without his wife. The rest of the story takes pains then to highlight this absence, and to evoke the heightened solitary and terrible experience of the male subject by underlining the male subject’s conflicted reaction towards himself and the situation he finds himself in:
"Dante… said that the reason he came early was that he was the only one who didn’t care about his job as much as the others would. But this wasn’t entirely true… Dante told Jimmy that he was already out of the corporate game, the rat race, the desire for promotion and recognition, but he wasn’t sure if the guard understood what he was talking about… He just didn’t want Jimmy to get any bright ideas, especially since Dante knew that Mrs. Victoria, who lived two doors down to their left, was having an affair with one of her husband’s subordinates. Or at least, that was according to Leah, his wife, who said that she got it from one of the Victorias’ maids she once met at the hall and who was later fired." (86)
Here we also glimpse the reality of the young professional man whose position seems to be always under threat. He has a well-paying job that he does not really desire, but has to keep because it provides his life a semblance of stability, and himself some sense of power: “… being a bank manager already gave him a full plate at dinner, what with small and medium-scale enterprises in his area sprouting like mushrooms after a rainstorm and each of them asking for loans and letters of credit.” (86)
Despite what he is able to provide for himself and his wife, he is not a fully satisfied man, his life being one of compromises. Even the space he is occupying has to be a compromised space, his and his wife’s lives vulnerable to all kinds of interpretation from the people with whom they share space in the building. The mention of domestic rumors is a threat to him who values his independence and privacy. He is careful to show the guard, Jimmy, that he is liberal enough since he allows his wife to go out with office mates, that he knows exactly where his wife is going and what she is doing, and that she is able to do such things only with his blessing. The young man is ultra conscious about what kind of image to present to the other man, Jimmy, who, the story is careful to point out, obviously occupies a lower, inferior social status.
The husband’s conflicted reaction to his wife watching something cheap and kitschy although he knows her to not be “baduy” is parallel to his unsettled feeling about her going off alone, and him coming home to an empty condominium unit.
"Thankfully, Jimmy didn’t bother to ask him what movie it was they saw because it was a cheap bold flick starring Richard Gomez, Pops Fernandez, and Joyce Jimenez. Dante didn’t want him to think that his wife was baduy because she really wasn’t." (86)
The internal conflicts also have to be faced then, all the time. What the husband desires is utopia, balance, harmony, which he also knows to be very difficult to attain, and perhaps the source of fear is the realization that none of these is attainable.
"Although he didn’t believe in anything even vaguely supernatural, he was nonetheless disturbed by the thought of spending the whole time waiting for his wife alone in their unit, let alone the whole floor… He was the only one on the floor for the night, and so what? He could handle himself; he was a man; that was the whole point of spending a couple of hours every week in the gym." (87)
He has to constantly assure himself of his manhood and his social position, he wants the other man, Jimmy, to know where he stands, to know which position he occupies, but he is also very affected by what Jimmy says.
This is then the function of the narrative – to assure and constantly reassure him of his position. He has to create this narrative about himself and for himself, to keep his fears and anxieties about the palpable instability of his life under wraps.
Throughout the story we are shown an unmistakable expression of his aspirations, an idealization of a preferred reality, an image, a re-presentation. It is the male, the husband talking here, after all, re-presenting their lives to Others, to the guard, for instance, whose opinion he somehow values. Moreover, the Subject (the husband) here seeks to inscribe a “lack”, a sense of inferiority and inadequacy in the Other (i.e., the guard, the wife), in order to secure his own position in relation to the Other.
The almost obsessive reiteration of the husband’s masculinity is also a ploy to make readers ambivalent about the situation, but it mostly cements the fact that this character takes comfort in his being male, and thinks that this is his last bastion, against all forces that threaten him and his position. And so, after we are given a glimpse into everything that happens in what seems to be an unusual night in the life of this self-assured yuppy, the narrative takes us finally to the point of intersection between the natural, logical, practical world and that of the supernatural; the moment at which the familiar world gives in to the necessary demands of the supernatural.
"… he felt a gust of cold wind blast through the wide-open living room window. It got so cold that he, who had been waiting for his wife to arrive for the past half-hour, had felt it in his bones and begun to shiver… He felt that there was something mysterious about that wind, coming in like that on a hot night like this one, catching him by surprise. Since he liked to believe that he was a logical man, he quickly dismissed the thought, although he could not ignore the chill he felt when the wind rushed in… Dante, like the dutiful husband he was, tried to get up to close the windows…Before Dante could even get up, somebody tapped him twice on the shoulder…
With much resolve, he finally looked over his shoulder." (90-91)
When the man resolves to finally stare fear in the face, there is nothing there. The story does not provide a figure we can make out, anyway; it does not have to anymore. The signifier is absence itself; the ghostly presence of the absence, is the signified fear. We do not have to know what happens to the man who came home, without his wife –because that in itself is a scary situation (one worth telling as a supernatural horror story, indeed).
Willard Cheng’s “Room 1119”, on the other hand, has the feel of a personal essay, a testimony, complete with a postscript and footnotes. The story is a first-person account of the unusual experiences of a young Ateneo male student who lives alone in a flat in a twenty-story condominium building, much like the residential building which serves as a setting for “The Man Who Came Home”. The testimony mode used in the story implies that the narrator has an assumed listener, or the narrator naturally assumes, is used to assuming, that someone is listening. The events that he narrates are not actually so unusual, or “disturbing” in themselves. Again, similar to the concerns of the Husband in “The Man Who Came Home”, much of the horror of the situation arises from the young student’s being alone, and from his anxieties arising from the need to accomplish tasks, which the “disturbing episodes” prohibit him from doing.
"My computer would now start to open by itself , many times, when I came out of the bathroom. One night, when I was typing, a loaf of bread fell from the glass dining table… the doorbell rang in the middle of the night…" (14)
All of these are clearly non-threatening, and leads one to think that perhaps the threat is not so much external as internal. It is the psychological space which is under attack. The culmination, in fact, of al these “disturbing episodes” is no different from what the Husband in “The Man Who Came Home” experiences:
"... it was finally during bedtime when I strongly felt a spirit’s presence… I woke up when the right side of my body felt cold, as if somebody just lay beside me." (14)
But, whereas Basilio’s story ends very interestingly (and cleverly) with the husband looking behind his shoulder to stare at the disturbing presence, and offers no more explication, or resolution, Cheng’s story ends (quite funnily) with the narrator's attempt to make peace with the presence, the invisible roommate:
“I had the sense that the spirit in the apartment did not want me to move out…” (16).
All this is, of course, the narrator’s own convenient interpretation (illusion, or fantasy), because there is no actual encounter with the so-called invisible roommate, no clear sign as to what she (because the narrator assumes it to be a woman) wants from the narrator. Here, again, is a case of the subject imbuing the Other, not only with a gender – woman, who is a symbol of absence— but also with a sense of need, and desire. Moreover, the narrator does not so much desire to expel this paradoxical absent presence from the room, but seeks instead to fuse with it, to “make peace” with it. And, of course, when the narrator leaves the place, he is convinced that “the spirit” desires for him to stay as well.
In Carljoe Javier’s “Street Corner” the main character is an adolescent male who finds himself going back to, and forever psychologically rooted in, a particular spot on the street corner where his girlfriend was accidentally killed. The story hinges itself on the suddenness, the unexpectedness, of the condition that threw the boy into the very situation he was confronting. His curse is that he cannot get out of it, not by himself and his very limited human capabilities and assumptions anyway.
"The accidents occurred on the same date that Katy was killed, the 21st. Each month brought a new driver with a red taxi, but never him. And I prayed each time that it was him, that it would be over. But at the same time I wanted it to go on, because an end to the vigil would mean an end to Katy and me.
This was my way of paying her back. And it was my only chance to be with her. The warmth of her body that I used to feel was replaced by the paralyzing shiver that she greeted me with every time. But I could still feel her, know that she was with me." (47-48)
Here we are given a glimpse into how the two very powerful emotions that drive the story – fear and guilt – are also rooted in the young characters’ first sexual encounter, one that the girl was unwilling to participate in. Fear and guilt then become inextricable from the suppression/fulfillment of the boy’s desire.
"…I was still frustrated about the day before. We cut classes and went to SM to see a movie. During the movie I kissed her and forced my tongue into her mouth. At first she pulled away, but when she asked me if I loved her and I told her that I did, she gave in. She gave in to much more. Each time I tried something she resisted at first, but I assured her that I loved her, and told her that if she loved me she’d do it… When we finished I was tired and slumped back into my seat. Katy looked like she wanted to cry, like she wanted to say something to me but was holding it back. I couldn’t understand what could’ve been wrong; it was my first time too, but I wasn’t reacting to it the way that she did. I was actually pretty proud of myself." (49-50)
Guilt and fear, extreme grief, sexual frustration, are all a function of the desiring subject, who is also characterized by lack, unfulfilled desires. This story, much like “The Man…” takes effort to present the outside reality in order to emphasize the breakdown of the internal world; is grounded in the mimetic and yet is diametrically opposed to it.
In stories such as these, fantasy as a narrative mode functions to critique representation by rendering the crucial scenes, “the horror turn” purposefully ambiguously. It is remarkable how the flashbacks, reconfigured events in the mind, are the scenes that are rendered realistically, while the scenes in the narrators’ present are located in the realm of fantasy, existing in the underside of reality. This may be read as not a mere inversion of reality, but rather an attempt to question the very foundation, the structures, upon which ground rules and conventional notions of reality are founded. Robert Miles in Gothic Writing posits the idea of a “Gothic turn” by which he means “an inner momentum to break open ideological figures, the tendency of Gothic writing to turn upwards hidden discursive seams, to reveal concealed lines of power” (6).
The above-mentioned stories also seem to operate on a kind of presence/absence principle, revealing that the self is never stable, that the social self has many layers, that it is a construction (of ideology), and thus subject of and subject to psycho-social economies. More interestingly, the stories illustrate that, in the subject’s constitution or formation, the Other becomes, necessarily the locus of all subjectifying practices.
Fantasy and sustained reversals
In the other stories, it is not so much presence or absence which are the issues. In stories like Adel Gabot’s “Beggar of Description” (Nine Supernatural Stories 3-14) , the central metaphor for the site wherein resides the source of terror is a wound, a disfigurement, a physical defect. And whereas in the stories discussed above, the principle at work is absence and presence, in Gabot’s story, it is reversal, a changing of places, and thwarted expectations.
The story “Beggar of Description” opens with a scene showing a middle class mother and her child forced to take a jeepney ride one rainy morning. The story takes off from this situation which is carefully pointed out as being out of the ordinary, the opening descriptions highlighting the discomfort of the woman at being thrown in the company of strangers, the common public, in a confined space. The experience is brought to its most terrifying when a beggar enters the jeepney. The beggar is right away portrayed as a threat, but whose character goes through a reversal (as the experience is also inverted in the manufactured narrative in the female character’s memory), when he performs a miracle—wiping away and absorbing an imperfection, a live scar, from a baby’s face.
Bordering on the cliche, the beggar who is the symbol of terror in the story, is rendered also as the extreme Other. The detailed description of the beggar’s features, as well as the mother’s rapt attention on him, are really constitutive of the perceiving subject’s (the woman’s) desire. Here, once more, is a discourse on the subject’s need to inscribe a lack in the Other, in order to claim her position as the Other’s object of desire. It is necessary that the Other be portrayed as lacking in an almost non-human sense; as extremely dirty and therefore dangerous, in order to fulfill the subject’s illusion of wholeness. It is, after all, only by rendering the other in such a manner, by stressing the difference, the dirt and disfigurement, that the subject finds sense in her own self and the situation she finds herself in.
"…If Elli hadn’t suddenly drawn against me, it would have been some time before I realized we had an extra passenger. But then again, I think the smell would have alerted me before long.
The man was filthy. And that was being kind… He wore tattered, blackened clothes that were more hole than fabric, held together by grime. Old and thin, the man had long, wet oily hair plastered to his head like a greasy shawl. He was veined with light brown lines where the rain had eroded the dirt on his skin. I supposed I should be thankful that the downpour had washed him off a little. He clung to the bars at the back of the jeep and left grease marks on them.
It didn’t seem to bother him much that the jeep was full; I don’t think it mattered – empty or not, he’d likely just hang on to the back anyway. I felt Elli relax against me as she realized that the taong grasa had no intention of forcing himself inside and finding a seat. She looked as relieved as the other passengers, and I imagined my face reflected similar sentiments… I took a surreptitious look at our new passenger and was more appalled by what I saw; he was worse off on close inspection.
He looked like he could keep a team of doctors busy for a whole day straight. He had running and bleeding sores; in fact, he seemed to have a scar on every other pore, and sores in between. A nasty, scabbed and pus-crusted gash on his elbow looked raw and bleeding. If they ever got him to sit still long enough to be treated, I don’t think the doctors at Sta. Isabel would know where to start." (8-9)
Fantasy, in this story, sets the stage for the configurations of desire (literally illustrated in the spatial arrangement, the confines of a jeepney, which brings into focus the manner in which the Subject’s desire is “arranged” in relation to the Other). And yet, paradoxically, fantasy also erases the limits of desire—dramatized in the scene when the Taong Grasa, a person characterized by grease and dirt, removes, erases, a permanent wound and disfigurement in the baby.
What is more interesting to note is how the supernatural/horror turn—the point in the narrative when the natural and supernatural spaces intersect, or disappear—happens in the story, and later reveals itself to be not just a questioning of everyday reality, but a necessary truth for the woman, who has to believe that there is a kernel of spiritual profundity hidden in every new experience. Thus, the boundaries of the “stage” for the configuration of desires are erased, or at least extended.
"Sometimes when I sit thinking, I dread the moment I actually do find him because I don’t think I know what I’ll do. A large part of me wishes I forget the whole thing. Perhaps I’m better off not knowing. But I can’t let it go.
On that day, several things conspired to make me a witness to something that has changed my life. It was one of those rare cusps when things come together for no apparent reason and have dramatic effects on lives. Some people win lotteries, and some have the unfortunate luck to step in the path of a stray bullet." (3)
The story does not end with the so-called horror turn, with the taong grasa performing a miracle on the poor baby, it ends with an exposition about how the woman provides the poor mother and daughter in the jeepney employment and education, after the experience they shared in the jeepney. This story is evidently very catholic, very middle-class, very urban. There is in this story another, a stronger, narrative about the need to save and be a savior, the play of a discourse of power vis-a-vis desire. Yes, it is the beggar, the Other, who turns out to be the miracle performer, but in the end it is the woman and her family, who are the real heroes, according to the narrative woven by the subject (the mother) around herself.
Emil Flores’s story “Ghosts of Infinity” also deals with reversals, but of a different kind. Flores’s story stands out in this collection because it features qualities of a detective story (it has an investigator for a character), a mystery (there is a puzzle that he is seeking to solve), and investigative news documentary (it closely follows events and actions by the hour, and its headings mimic the form of a tv script). The allusion to factual life stops there, however, and the rest of the story teeters between the mimetic and the marvelous, questioning representation and producing new subjectivities. The TV evangelist and the Professor are recognizable as humans, but they are also “Lemurians” from “beyond this world” (34). The investigators find out that they are not just investigating the case of a missing person, but also of beings who do not leave the earth, persons who do not die, but rather transform themselves into TV evangelists and university professors.
Flores's stry is interesting in that of all the stories in the Supernatural anthology, this is the only one that sources its “supernaturalness” from religious practices and anomalies. While at it, the story also seems to be taking a jab at Philippine media for capitalizing on this, and at Filipino viewers for being easily duped and numbed by media into thoughtlessness:
"The cops were supposed to be investigating an abduction right in their own backyard but instead, the ones on duty were watching TV. I guess with meager pay comes meager work… I took a peek at the 14-inch television set sitting on top of a rusty green filing cabinet. It was the “Infinite Dream Crusade with Daniel Salvacion.” And there he was, the one who asked the Bureau to find the missing Dizon. I wanted to talk to the Dreamer but I had to schedule an appointment with him for my investigation. He was concerned but apparently his show came first… he espoused the power of dreams… Perfect for people who have nothing left but dreams." (26-27)
The story likewise draws attention to the pervasiveness of the unnatural or “supernatural” in Philippine daily life and how, because of this pervasiveness, they become “natural”. As the investigator character says, “It’s hard to tell which is real and what is imagined” (37).
Like the other stories in the four anthologies taken up in the paper, the illusion of wholeness, as is the very search itself, remains a central concern. In this case, the investigation is being carried out in order to solve a puzzle; to fill the gaps in, and lend logic to the narrative. Moreover, the fulfillment of this desire for wholeness/unitariness (of the narrative puzzle, and of the self) is always only illusory and impermanent. What is striking about this particular story, “Ghosts of Infinity”, is that its narrative is structured in such a way that highlights the illusoriness rather than glosses it over. The story ends on an uncertain note: The Professor who was abducted has gone crazy, while the perpetrator of evil, who is also a contributor to politicians’ campaign funds, retains his image as an evangelist on TV.
(To be continued)
Encountering the Self, Lack, and Desire
in Philippine Urban Fantasy,Horror and Ghost Stories
Not considering the stories in Nick Joaquin’s Tropical Gothic (first published in 1972), it was only in the last few years when collections of supernatural, horror or ghost stories saw publication by the country’s major commercial and academic publishers. Since 2003, with the publication of a series of urban ghost story collections Best Philippine Ghost Stories whose authors were mainly unknown or literally anonymous, there have been at least four more anthologies of horror/ghost/supernatural stories that have come out, three of which were put together by, and contain works of, young writers, mostly in their twenties and thirties. This is a remarkable development considering that prior to this, no anthologies of such nature were being put out by publishers.
Interestingly, it was the UP Press which published the first such anthology called Nine Supernatural Stories (2004). After a year and a half, the UP Press put out another collection of the same genre, entitled Damaged People— Tales of the Gothic Punk (2006), also by a young fictionist, Karl De Mesa. De Mesa’s works, however, while sharing many features and qualities with the supernatural stories, are ultimately in a category of their own. They are not so much supernatural, as “punk-gothic”, employing a different set of strategies and displaying more varied influences, particularly from the “punk”— anti-establishment youth movement/attitude. (As such, they are separately discussed, in another paper).
Another significant development along these lines is the publication of the three-volume anthology Philippine Speculative Fiction, spearheaded by Dean Francis Alfar, himself one of the foremost practitioners of genre fiction writing. These anthologies are comprised of stories that employ fantasy, among other narrative modes, in various ways, resulting likewise in various types and genres.
In their introduction to the anthology Nine Supernatural Stories, April Yap and Lara Saguisag, remark on the unexpected paucity of supernatural fiction in our written literature, considering the popularity of the ghost story and the abundance of supernatural characters in our collective imagination. In one of the few fora centered on supernatural, fantasy and science fiction (November, 2004) sponsored by the UP Institute of Creative Writing (UP ICW) the invited authors, particularly Emil Flores of UP lamented the fact that the only indicators that the supernatural and fantasy holds some importance in these times, are the highly popular fantasy soap operas featuring mutated and mutilated local mythical characters, aired every evening by the country’s two largest TV networks. Three years and several anthologies and single-author collections later, perhaps there are more than enough indicators that fantasy holds some importance in these particular times.
In the area of written narratives, one related local study done by Yvette Natalie Tan, “In(Visible) Monster: the Theory and Praxis of Horror in Philippine Short Fiction in English” (MA Thesis, UP, 2005), tackles the elements of horror seen in Philippine short fiction in English. It is interesting in that it offers different categories of horror images in the fiction pieces she studied. The horror images according to Tan are sourced from either: (1)Ethnic-Native Practices; (2) Western Practices; and (3) the often contradicting combination of Native Filipino and Western Practices.
Given that Philippine short story in English is dominantly realist, Tan attempts to present an interesting enough standpoint (by examining the elements of horror) from which to view the stories. Her study, however, does not focus on the horror fiction genre per se, and her approach and treatment are limited to a close reading of images and metaphors. Tan’s study succeeds in showing that what are generally considered as serious, realist literature in academe do make use of horror elements that are more commonly seen in “non-serious” and non realist genres.
My paper is not so much interested in elevating to the level of serious fiction the status of the supernatural horror genre, or genre fiction in general. It is, however, interested in studying them as already significant narratives that function in the articulation or subversion of concepts of self.
It is interesting to note that most of the anthologized Philippine short stories in English that employ fantasy as a narrative mode while exploring the mysterious and miraculous, also deal with the gloomy and the grotesque, the horrific and the macabre, whether in terms of theme and subject matter, or of setting and atmosphere. Moreover, in most of the stories, the plot unfolds in urban settings, the city’s decay and chaos serving as an important backdrop for the subject’s deracination, rupture, and fragmentation. For the few stories not set amidst the heady, confusing, and also alienating city, the narratives are set against eerie, lonely provincial locations, featuring daunting, colonial mansions; vast haciendas; and sinister landscapes.
Indeed, the stories taken up in this paper vary greatly from one another but perhaps the one quality they share is the preoccupation with or the assumption of the existence of “Other” strange beings, elusive elementals, chilling unseen presences. Most of the stories are also premised on first-time occurrences, highlighting the fear of the unknown. It is the mystery, after all, that terrifies. And my reading is partly an attempt to reveal that no mystery is more terrifying than that which involves the subject’s struggle, through narrativization, to keep certain desires unknown to others, but most of all to the self.
In an attempt to analyze and to illustrate the range of possibilities that the employment of fantasy produces in a text, I have selected a couple of stories from four different anthologies, (from Nine Supernatural Stories, ed. Lara Saguisag and April Yap; Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 1, Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 2, ed. Dean Francis Alfar; and Afraid, ed. Danton Remoto). More specifically, I shall look into the concepts of subjectivity that are produced, explored, or subverted, in Philippine urban fantasy, ghost and horror stories in English.
The concept of subjectivity that operates in this paper is anchored on the concepts of Jacques Lacan, through Catherine Belsey, who explains that subjectivity is related to the concept of individual “consciousness” a “consciousness-in-itself, as distinct from a consciousness of something”, and, more specifically, a “consciousness of self”. Thus, “subjectivity” implies that this “consciousness depends on differentiation, and specifically… differentiation between ‘I’ and ‘you’” (55-56), or the subject and the Other. This differentiation is “a process made possible by language” (56). The preoccupation with the Other may also then be read here as a preoccupation with the self. It is also in this sense that “Fantasy is a field of symbolically structured meaning (the unconscious) that shapes and regulates our desires…” (Tadiar 9).
This study tackles these basic questions: What concepts of subjectivity emerge in the production of the strange, absolutely ‘other’ and different? How, and to what end, are elements of realism and aspects of reality subverted in the Philippine urban fantasy ghost and horror stories?
In order to address the texts’ problematic, the stories in this paper are viewed as corresponding to a gap in the self, such that the focus of the approach is that site in the narrative wherein the social and psychological spaces intersect. This site or location corresponds closely to the location of fantasy— in the indeterminate space between mimetic and marvelous— as it is understood in this study. From a purely psychoanalytic framework, this site, wherein resides the so-called Lacanian Thing (Das Ding) is the leftover space after the process of symbolic signification has been completed. Fantasy, as a narrative mode, accommodates the display of leftover, excessive, “un-interpretible” elements after castration, thereby effectively reminding us of the cost of actualizing the process of signification and the movement toward cultural order.
Employing a psychoanalytic and structural framework in the study of classic and contemporary horror stories and films, Stefan Gullatz, for instance, states that at the core of horror narratives is a site of leftover or excess responses which cannot be accounted for by the ideological subject. According to Gullatz, this site is
"…that which cannot be signified at all, despite repeated attempts, and thus, in the popular imagination persists only as an inert, meaningless, amorphous mass. There is a constitutive void at the heart of the symbolic order designating its inconsistency. Any object that is elevated to this site becomes associated with a traumatic, excessive enjoyment and will be perceived to be radically at odds with the socio-linguistic universe of flexible meanings and controllable emotions in which 'normal' beings can live and breathe." (www.horschamp. qc.ca/ new_offscreen /lacan.html)
The source of horror, in this sense, is the prospect of having to encounter those elements which have been ejected by the self from its consciousness, a process the subject has to go through in order for the self to exist in and coexist with society. (www.horschamp. qc.ca/ new_offscreen /lacan.html).
Robert Miles in Gothic Writing echoes Gullatz’s findings in his own exploration of the horror and the gothic quality in English gothic novels. Miles notes that the qualities ascribed to the term gothic, which is generally related to a variety of the English novel that surfaced in the mid-eighteenth century, has not really changed in terms of plots, motifs and figures. This consistency, repetition, and recycling of themes and styles are seen by Miles to be an indication of a powerful drive, and of a symbolic disparity in the social self, an issue which remains relevant until now, as evidenced by the lively practice of gothic or horror fiction writing at present (Miles 1).
Rosemary Jackson further echoes Miles’s suggestion of a powerful drive seen behind the production of horror narratives, but advances further and identifies this drive as unconscious desire. Likewise, Jackson identifies the site which Gullatz mentions in his study as an ideological site. As Jackson explains, it is through the expressive functions of fantasy that it is able to indicate or point to the seemingly precarious foundation of cultural order “for it opens up, for a brief moment, on to disorder, on to illegality, on to that which lies outside the law, that which is outside dominant value systems…” In doing so, fantasy also “traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made ‘absent’” (3-4).
My initial observations and assumptions about Philippine urban fantasy ghost and horror stories point to the idea that these stories are necessarily fragmentary and often inchoate, and the very form is itself an articulation of an attitude towards realist fiction, if not reality itself. This stand acquires more significance when we consider the very concept of realism as being culturally contingent. Catherine Belsey has renewed the interest in realist fiction and how it creates subjects out of its readers, by seeming to be transparent. Belsey also explains that the concept of realism is never stable, that it changes and, over the years, has made increasing demands on the form, as certain groups and movements have aspired for ever increased verisimilitude in art (47). Belsey also says that “even in fantasy, events, however improbable in themselves, are related to each other in familiar ways” (48).
Belsey then opens the possibility and reinforces the value of studying narratives such as the pieces being included in this study, by pointing out that “the plausibility of individual signifieds is far less important to the reading process than the familiarity of the connections between the signifiers. It is the set of relationships between characters or events, or between characters and events, which makes fantasy convincing” (47).
Another assumption this paper rests on, even as it does not submit to a purely psychoanalytical approach, is that there is a very palpable “schizoid” aspect to the stories which, in discussions about the Gothic novel and its progenies and descendant forms, has already been identified as not just an aesthetic device or decision, but more of an indication of a fissure, a fracture, or a wound, in the social self or the subject, which the writing of it is an attempt to address (Miles 1).
This paper considers the stories here as a discursive site, a coherent code for the representation of a disjointed subjectivity, a code that is often organized along structuralist principles (Miles 2), a la Todorov. However, I would like to posit that this site may be viewed as an unstable system, for these structuralist principles—clear binaries and opposites, such as light and dark, good and bad, humans versus non-humans—are themselves thwarted within the narratives. As the succeeding sections shall endeavor to illustrate, the stories or narratives studied in this paper contain different discourses in competition with each other, and are always in the process of revising one another.
Absence and Lack as signifiers of fear
In “The Man Who came Home” (Basilio, 85-91) and “Street Corner” (Javier, 46-52) from the Nine Supernatural Stories anthology, and, to a certain extent, “Room 1119” (Cheng, 11-16) from the Afraid anthology, terror arises when the sense of balance is threatened, when the very fiber of the character’s manhood is put to the test. In these three stories, the dominant speaking subject is a middleclass male, the series of [unfortunate] events told from his standpoint, and the state of affairs being problematized are directly/indirectly caused by the absence of the female partner. The woman here then becomes doubly absent, not merely rendered as a symbol of absence. But it is precisely because the symbol of absence is absent, that she is very much present.
In “The Man Who came Home”, for instance, the story opens with the narrator, a young professional, coming home to an empty middle-class condominium unit, for the first time, without his wife. The rest of the story takes pains then to highlight this absence, and to evoke the heightened solitary and terrible experience of the male subject by underlining the male subject’s conflicted reaction towards himself and the situation he finds himself in:
"Dante… said that the reason he came early was that he was the only one who didn’t care about his job as much as the others would. But this wasn’t entirely true… Dante told Jimmy that he was already out of the corporate game, the rat race, the desire for promotion and recognition, but he wasn’t sure if the guard understood what he was talking about… He just didn’t want Jimmy to get any bright ideas, especially since Dante knew that Mrs. Victoria, who lived two doors down to their left, was having an affair with one of her husband’s subordinates. Or at least, that was according to Leah, his wife, who said that she got it from one of the Victorias’ maids she once met at the hall and who was later fired." (86)
Here we also glimpse the reality of the young professional man whose position seems to be always under threat. He has a well-paying job that he does not really desire, but has to keep because it provides his life a semblance of stability, and himself some sense of power: “… being a bank manager already gave him a full plate at dinner, what with small and medium-scale enterprises in his area sprouting like mushrooms after a rainstorm and each of them asking for loans and letters of credit.” (86)
Despite what he is able to provide for himself and his wife, he is not a fully satisfied man, his life being one of compromises. Even the space he is occupying has to be a compromised space, his and his wife’s lives vulnerable to all kinds of interpretation from the people with whom they share space in the building. The mention of domestic rumors is a threat to him who values his independence and privacy. He is careful to show the guard, Jimmy, that he is liberal enough since he allows his wife to go out with office mates, that he knows exactly where his wife is going and what she is doing, and that she is able to do such things only with his blessing. The young man is ultra conscious about what kind of image to present to the other man, Jimmy, who, the story is careful to point out, obviously occupies a lower, inferior social status.
The husband’s conflicted reaction to his wife watching something cheap and kitschy although he knows her to not be “baduy” is parallel to his unsettled feeling about her going off alone, and him coming home to an empty condominium unit.
"Thankfully, Jimmy didn’t bother to ask him what movie it was they saw because it was a cheap bold flick starring Richard Gomez, Pops Fernandez, and Joyce Jimenez. Dante didn’t want him to think that his wife was baduy because she really wasn’t." (86)
The internal conflicts also have to be faced then, all the time. What the husband desires is utopia, balance, harmony, which he also knows to be very difficult to attain, and perhaps the source of fear is the realization that none of these is attainable.
"Although he didn’t believe in anything even vaguely supernatural, he was nonetheless disturbed by the thought of spending the whole time waiting for his wife alone in their unit, let alone the whole floor… He was the only one on the floor for the night, and so what? He could handle himself; he was a man; that was the whole point of spending a couple of hours every week in the gym." (87)
He has to constantly assure himself of his manhood and his social position, he wants the other man, Jimmy, to know where he stands, to know which position he occupies, but he is also very affected by what Jimmy says.
This is then the function of the narrative – to assure and constantly reassure him of his position. He has to create this narrative about himself and for himself, to keep his fears and anxieties about the palpable instability of his life under wraps.
Throughout the story we are shown an unmistakable expression of his aspirations, an idealization of a preferred reality, an image, a re-presentation. It is the male, the husband talking here, after all, re-presenting their lives to Others, to the guard, for instance, whose opinion he somehow values. Moreover, the Subject (the husband) here seeks to inscribe a “lack”, a sense of inferiority and inadequacy in the Other (i.e., the guard, the wife), in order to secure his own position in relation to the Other.
The almost obsessive reiteration of the husband’s masculinity is also a ploy to make readers ambivalent about the situation, but it mostly cements the fact that this character takes comfort in his being male, and thinks that this is his last bastion, against all forces that threaten him and his position. And so, after we are given a glimpse into everything that happens in what seems to be an unusual night in the life of this self-assured yuppy, the narrative takes us finally to the point of intersection between the natural, logical, practical world and that of the supernatural; the moment at which the familiar world gives in to the necessary demands of the supernatural.
"… he felt a gust of cold wind blast through the wide-open living room window. It got so cold that he, who had been waiting for his wife to arrive for the past half-hour, had felt it in his bones and begun to shiver… He felt that there was something mysterious about that wind, coming in like that on a hot night like this one, catching him by surprise. Since he liked to believe that he was a logical man, he quickly dismissed the thought, although he could not ignore the chill he felt when the wind rushed in… Dante, like the dutiful husband he was, tried to get up to close the windows…Before Dante could even get up, somebody tapped him twice on the shoulder…
With much resolve, he finally looked over his shoulder." (90-91)
When the man resolves to finally stare fear in the face, there is nothing there. The story does not provide a figure we can make out, anyway; it does not have to anymore. The signifier is absence itself; the ghostly presence of the absence, is the signified fear. We do not have to know what happens to the man who came home, without his wife –because that in itself is a scary situation (one worth telling as a supernatural horror story, indeed).
Willard Cheng’s “Room 1119”, on the other hand, has the feel of a personal essay, a testimony, complete with a postscript and footnotes. The story is a first-person account of the unusual experiences of a young Ateneo male student who lives alone in a flat in a twenty-story condominium building, much like the residential building which serves as a setting for “The Man Who Came Home”. The testimony mode used in the story implies that the narrator has an assumed listener, or the narrator naturally assumes, is used to assuming, that someone is listening. The events that he narrates are not actually so unusual, or “disturbing” in themselves. Again, similar to the concerns of the Husband in “The Man Who Came Home”, much of the horror of the situation arises from the young student’s being alone, and from his anxieties arising from the need to accomplish tasks, which the “disturbing episodes” prohibit him from doing.
"My computer would now start to open by itself , many times, when I came out of the bathroom. One night, when I was typing, a loaf of bread fell from the glass dining table… the doorbell rang in the middle of the night…" (14)
All of these are clearly non-threatening, and leads one to think that perhaps the threat is not so much external as internal. It is the psychological space which is under attack. The culmination, in fact, of al these “disturbing episodes” is no different from what the Husband in “The Man Who Came Home” experiences:
"... it was finally during bedtime when I strongly felt a spirit’s presence… I woke up when the right side of my body felt cold, as if somebody just lay beside me." (14)
But, whereas Basilio’s story ends very interestingly (and cleverly) with the husband looking behind his shoulder to stare at the disturbing presence, and offers no more explication, or resolution, Cheng’s story ends (quite funnily) with the narrator's attempt to make peace with the presence, the invisible roommate:
“I had the sense that the spirit in the apartment did not want me to move out…” (16).
All this is, of course, the narrator’s own convenient interpretation (illusion, or fantasy), because there is no actual encounter with the so-called invisible roommate, no clear sign as to what she (because the narrator assumes it to be a woman) wants from the narrator. Here, again, is a case of the subject imbuing the Other, not only with a gender – woman, who is a symbol of absence— but also with a sense of need, and desire. Moreover, the narrator does not so much desire to expel this paradoxical absent presence from the room, but seeks instead to fuse with it, to “make peace” with it. And, of course, when the narrator leaves the place, he is convinced that “the spirit” desires for him to stay as well.
In Carljoe Javier’s “Street Corner” the main character is an adolescent male who finds himself going back to, and forever psychologically rooted in, a particular spot on the street corner where his girlfriend was accidentally killed. The story hinges itself on the suddenness, the unexpectedness, of the condition that threw the boy into the very situation he was confronting. His curse is that he cannot get out of it, not by himself and his very limited human capabilities and assumptions anyway.
"The accidents occurred on the same date that Katy was killed, the 21st. Each month brought a new driver with a red taxi, but never him. And I prayed each time that it was him, that it would be over. But at the same time I wanted it to go on, because an end to the vigil would mean an end to Katy and me.
This was my way of paying her back. And it was my only chance to be with her. The warmth of her body that I used to feel was replaced by the paralyzing shiver that she greeted me with every time. But I could still feel her, know that she was with me." (47-48)
Here we are given a glimpse into how the two very powerful emotions that drive the story – fear and guilt – are also rooted in the young characters’ first sexual encounter, one that the girl was unwilling to participate in. Fear and guilt then become inextricable from the suppression/fulfillment of the boy’s desire.
"…I was still frustrated about the day before. We cut classes and went to SM to see a movie. During the movie I kissed her and forced my tongue into her mouth. At first she pulled away, but when she asked me if I loved her and I told her that I did, she gave in. She gave in to much more. Each time I tried something she resisted at first, but I assured her that I loved her, and told her that if she loved me she’d do it… When we finished I was tired and slumped back into my seat. Katy looked like she wanted to cry, like she wanted to say something to me but was holding it back. I couldn’t understand what could’ve been wrong; it was my first time too, but I wasn’t reacting to it the way that she did. I was actually pretty proud of myself." (49-50)
Guilt and fear, extreme grief, sexual frustration, are all a function of the desiring subject, who is also characterized by lack, unfulfilled desires. This story, much like “The Man…” takes effort to present the outside reality in order to emphasize the breakdown of the internal world; is grounded in the mimetic and yet is diametrically opposed to it.
In stories such as these, fantasy as a narrative mode functions to critique representation by rendering the crucial scenes, “the horror turn” purposefully ambiguously. It is remarkable how the flashbacks, reconfigured events in the mind, are the scenes that are rendered realistically, while the scenes in the narrators’ present are located in the realm of fantasy, existing in the underside of reality. This may be read as not a mere inversion of reality, but rather an attempt to question the very foundation, the structures, upon which ground rules and conventional notions of reality are founded. Robert Miles in Gothic Writing posits the idea of a “Gothic turn” by which he means “an inner momentum to break open ideological figures, the tendency of Gothic writing to turn upwards hidden discursive seams, to reveal concealed lines of power” (6).
The above-mentioned stories also seem to operate on a kind of presence/absence principle, revealing that the self is never stable, that the social self has many layers, that it is a construction (of ideology), and thus subject of and subject to psycho-social economies. More interestingly, the stories illustrate that, in the subject’s constitution or formation, the Other becomes, necessarily the locus of all subjectifying practices.
Fantasy and sustained reversals
In the other stories, it is not so much presence or absence which are the issues. In stories like Adel Gabot’s “Beggar of Description” (Nine Supernatural Stories 3-14) , the central metaphor for the site wherein resides the source of terror is a wound, a disfigurement, a physical defect. And whereas in the stories discussed above, the principle at work is absence and presence, in Gabot’s story, it is reversal, a changing of places, and thwarted expectations.
The story “Beggar of Description” opens with a scene showing a middle class mother and her child forced to take a jeepney ride one rainy morning. The story takes off from this situation which is carefully pointed out as being out of the ordinary, the opening descriptions highlighting the discomfort of the woman at being thrown in the company of strangers, the common public, in a confined space. The experience is brought to its most terrifying when a beggar enters the jeepney. The beggar is right away portrayed as a threat, but whose character goes through a reversal (as the experience is also inverted in the manufactured narrative in the female character’s memory), when he performs a miracle—wiping away and absorbing an imperfection, a live scar, from a baby’s face.
Bordering on the cliche, the beggar who is the symbol of terror in the story, is rendered also as the extreme Other. The detailed description of the beggar’s features, as well as the mother’s rapt attention on him, are really constitutive of the perceiving subject’s (the woman’s) desire. Here, once more, is a discourse on the subject’s need to inscribe a lack in the Other, in order to claim her position as the Other’s object of desire. It is necessary that the Other be portrayed as lacking in an almost non-human sense; as extremely dirty and therefore dangerous, in order to fulfill the subject’s illusion of wholeness. It is, after all, only by rendering the other in such a manner, by stressing the difference, the dirt and disfigurement, that the subject finds sense in her own self and the situation she finds herself in.
"…If Elli hadn’t suddenly drawn against me, it would have been some time before I realized we had an extra passenger. But then again, I think the smell would have alerted me before long.
The man was filthy. And that was being kind… He wore tattered, blackened clothes that were more hole than fabric, held together by grime. Old and thin, the man had long, wet oily hair plastered to his head like a greasy shawl. He was veined with light brown lines where the rain had eroded the dirt on his skin. I supposed I should be thankful that the downpour had washed him off a little. He clung to the bars at the back of the jeep and left grease marks on them.
It didn’t seem to bother him much that the jeep was full; I don’t think it mattered – empty or not, he’d likely just hang on to the back anyway. I felt Elli relax against me as she realized that the taong grasa had no intention of forcing himself inside and finding a seat. She looked as relieved as the other passengers, and I imagined my face reflected similar sentiments… I took a surreptitious look at our new passenger and was more appalled by what I saw; he was worse off on close inspection.
He looked like he could keep a team of doctors busy for a whole day straight. He had running and bleeding sores; in fact, he seemed to have a scar on every other pore, and sores in between. A nasty, scabbed and pus-crusted gash on his elbow looked raw and bleeding. If they ever got him to sit still long enough to be treated, I don’t think the doctors at Sta. Isabel would know where to start." (8-9)
Fantasy, in this story, sets the stage for the configurations of desire (literally illustrated in the spatial arrangement, the confines of a jeepney, which brings into focus the manner in which the Subject’s desire is “arranged” in relation to the Other). And yet, paradoxically, fantasy also erases the limits of desire—dramatized in the scene when the Taong Grasa, a person characterized by grease and dirt, removes, erases, a permanent wound and disfigurement in the baby.
What is more interesting to note is how the supernatural/horror turn—the point in the narrative when the natural and supernatural spaces intersect, or disappear—happens in the story, and later reveals itself to be not just a questioning of everyday reality, but a necessary truth for the woman, who has to believe that there is a kernel of spiritual profundity hidden in every new experience. Thus, the boundaries of the “stage” for the configuration of desires are erased, or at least extended.
"Sometimes when I sit thinking, I dread the moment I actually do find him because I don’t think I know what I’ll do. A large part of me wishes I forget the whole thing. Perhaps I’m better off not knowing. But I can’t let it go.
On that day, several things conspired to make me a witness to something that has changed my life. It was one of those rare cusps when things come together for no apparent reason and have dramatic effects on lives. Some people win lotteries, and some have the unfortunate luck to step in the path of a stray bullet." (3)
The story does not end with the so-called horror turn, with the taong grasa performing a miracle on the poor baby, it ends with an exposition about how the woman provides the poor mother and daughter in the jeepney employment and education, after the experience they shared in the jeepney. This story is evidently very catholic, very middle-class, very urban. There is in this story another, a stronger, narrative about the need to save and be a savior, the play of a discourse of power vis-a-vis desire. Yes, it is the beggar, the Other, who turns out to be the miracle performer, but in the end it is the woman and her family, who are the real heroes, according to the narrative woven by the subject (the mother) around herself.
Emil Flores’s story “Ghosts of Infinity” also deals with reversals, but of a different kind. Flores’s story stands out in this collection because it features qualities of a detective story (it has an investigator for a character), a mystery (there is a puzzle that he is seeking to solve), and investigative news documentary (it closely follows events and actions by the hour, and its headings mimic the form of a tv script). The allusion to factual life stops there, however, and the rest of the story teeters between the mimetic and the marvelous, questioning representation and producing new subjectivities. The TV evangelist and the Professor are recognizable as humans, but they are also “Lemurians” from “beyond this world” (34). The investigators find out that they are not just investigating the case of a missing person, but also of beings who do not leave the earth, persons who do not die, but rather transform themselves into TV evangelists and university professors.
Flores's stry is interesting in that of all the stories in the Supernatural anthology, this is the only one that sources its “supernaturalness” from religious practices and anomalies. While at it, the story also seems to be taking a jab at Philippine media for capitalizing on this, and at Filipino viewers for being easily duped and numbed by media into thoughtlessness:
"The cops were supposed to be investigating an abduction right in their own backyard but instead, the ones on duty were watching TV. I guess with meager pay comes meager work… I took a peek at the 14-inch television set sitting on top of a rusty green filing cabinet. It was the “Infinite Dream Crusade with Daniel Salvacion.” And there he was, the one who asked the Bureau to find the missing Dizon. I wanted to talk to the Dreamer but I had to schedule an appointment with him for my investigation. He was concerned but apparently his show came first… he espoused the power of dreams… Perfect for people who have nothing left but dreams." (26-27)
The story likewise draws attention to the pervasiveness of the unnatural or “supernatural” in Philippine daily life and how, because of this pervasiveness, they become “natural”. As the investigator character says, “It’s hard to tell which is real and what is imagined” (37).
Like the other stories in the four anthologies taken up in the paper, the illusion of wholeness, as is the very search itself, remains a central concern. In this case, the investigation is being carried out in order to solve a puzzle; to fill the gaps in, and lend logic to the narrative. Moreover, the fulfillment of this desire for wholeness/unitariness (of the narrative puzzle, and of the self) is always only illusory and impermanent. What is striking about this particular story, “Ghosts of Infinity”, is that its narrative is structured in such a way that highlights the illusoriness rather than glosses it over. The story ends on an uncertain note: The Professor who was abducted has gone crazy, while the perpetrator of evil, who is also a contributor to politicians’ campaign funds, retains his image as an evangelist on TV.
(To be continued)
Sunday, July 20, 2008
so, i say...
THANK YOU FOR THE MUSIC!
and who, who among you, who? who can live without it? i ask, in all honesty. what would life be? without a song, or a dance, what are we? so, i say: thank you for the music, for giving it to me!
and yes, quite apparently, i just came from gateway's last full show of Mama Mia! been meaning to watch it much sooner, on opening day, actually, but i had to give in to husband weng's earnest request (and uber-enthusiasm, and uber-preparation) for The Dark Knight, which i enjoyed thoroughly. we watched the first run on the first day at the globe platinum theater, on an empty stomach (because there was no time for breakfast. i finished tuloy two and a half buckets of popcorn! pero free naman, so okay lang). point is, how could i not have enjoyed it? consider the lineup naman -- i mean, really. need i really say more? and consider the record-breaking 66 million dollar debut! i won't even bother adding my two cents worth to it. just read the raves and reviews, all of which i agree with. but, Mamma Mia! i love. read sir butch's take on it here:"http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/MyBlog.html#bdx238219897" happy siya! and abba lyrics notwithstanding, i really have been thinking and talking about, (and also singing and dancing to) music a lot these past few days. in the last three consecutive days, to be exact. and, on such days, when life is filled with endless criminal and civil cases to read, all i can say is... thank you for the music! god, abba songs are still playing in my head. and the image of stellan skaarsgard, colin firth, and pierce brosnan in sequined, flared overalls, and platform shoes is, i think, permanently etched in my memory, too. and it's like my mind is grinning, while i'm singing inside it. that's like clinical craziness already, right? but, beyond the embarrassingly merry and loud laughter and the involuntary joyful singing that the film elicits from the viewers, there's meryl streep's excellent performance, the experience of which is always worth paying for. worth ruining the no-more-than-once-a-week film viewing budget for.
and who, who among you, who? who can live without it? i ask, in all honesty. what would life be? without a song, or a dance, what are we? so, i say: thank you for the music, for giving it to me!
and yes, quite apparently, i just came from gateway's last full show of Mama Mia! been meaning to watch it much sooner, on opening day, actually, but i had to give in to husband weng's earnest request (and uber-enthusiasm, and uber-preparation) for The Dark Knight, which i enjoyed thoroughly. we watched the first run on the first day at the globe platinum theater, on an empty stomach (because there was no time for breakfast. i finished tuloy two and a half buckets of popcorn! pero free naman, so okay lang). point is, how could i not have enjoyed it? consider the lineup naman -- i mean, really. need i really say more? and consider the record-breaking 66 million dollar debut! i won't even bother adding my two cents worth to it. just read the raves and reviews, all of which i agree with. but, Mamma Mia! i love. read sir butch's take on it here:"http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/MyBlog.html#bdx238219897" happy siya! and abba lyrics notwithstanding, i really have been thinking and talking about, (and also singing and dancing to) music a lot these past few days. in the last three consecutive days, to be exact. and, on such days, when life is filled with endless criminal and civil cases to read, all i can say is... thank you for the music! god, abba songs are still playing in my head. and the image of stellan skaarsgard, colin firth, and pierce brosnan in sequined, flared overalls, and platform shoes is, i think, permanently etched in my memory, too. and it's like my mind is grinning, while i'm singing inside it. that's like clinical craziness already, right? but, beyond the embarrassingly merry and loud laughter and the involuntary joyful singing that the film elicits from the viewers, there's meryl streep's excellent performance, the experience of which is always worth paying for. worth ruining the no-more-than-once-a-week film viewing budget for.
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Constructions and Disruptions of Jouissance
in Salamanca by Dean Francis Alfar
The novel Salamanca (2005) (as are the stories in the Philippine Speculative Fiction anthologies) by Dean Francis Alfar is an interesting object of study because it is probably the very first Filipino novel in English written by a Filipino writer who openly declares himself as an advocate and practitioner of non-realist (what he terms as “speculative”) writing. Alfar opens his introduction to Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 1 with the declaration: “I am a fantasist at heart” (vii), and further into the essay defines speculative fiction as “the literature of the fantastic”, asserting further that “to find the fantastic, we must create the fantastic…. And so this anthology” (viii). If Alfar’s Salamanca were to be studied as the paradigmatic Philippine “spec fic” novel,
and the stories in the Philippine Speculative Fiction anthology be considered as Alfar’s best examples of “spec fic” and the fantastic, then the findings of such a study would certainly point to very interesting ideas about the sense of fantasy and speculation that these “spec fic” writers have. It is certainly worth looking into the assumptions about fantasy that operate in these stories.
Fantasy, as it is used in this thesis, is a narrative mode that operates in the ambiguous spaces between the mimetic and the marvelous. It is also understood here as a mode driven by desire, which brings out and points to questions of the unconscious. It is, in other words, a field of symbolically structured meaning that structures even as it disrupts notions of the ‘real’ (Tadiar 9). What manifests as fantasy can only have been registered in the unconscious, which is why fantasy is driven strongly by desire. Fantasy as literature of desire is therefore able to point to the lack, and remind us of what has been left out with the entry of the self into the symbolic order; in the continuous process of subjectification, in the name of social/cultural order.
In novels like Cave and Shadows (Nick Joaquin), Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café (Alfred Yuson), and The Firewalkers (Erwin Castillo), fantasy is employed in a manner that seems to take into account not only its disruptive (or subversive) properties, but its ordering and “structuring” functions as well. In these novels, fantasy reveals the location occupied by fragmented subjectivities to be a location of sustained ambiguity beyond the mimetic, but does not quite become marvelous. It is a location that necessarily requires the mimetic and falls just a step behind the marvelous. The location occupied by fantasy is a fertile ground for questioning and subversion (in the case of these three novels, what is being questioned are notions of representation and subjectivity in relation to history and nation), allowing for the production of multiple narratives and multiple subjectivities.
Fantasy in the novel Salamanca (2005), as well as in the stories from the Philippine Speculative Fiction 1 (2005) and Philippine Speculative Fiction 2 (2006) anthologies, written by Alfar operates differently from how fantasy operates in the other novels mentioned above. Perhaps, this is the main question that should be looked into: In what ways is Alfar’s novel Salamanca different from the other novels that also make use of fantasy and other non-realist narrative strategies and modes? To what extent is this novel Salamanca able to express, undermine, or subvert culturally dominant notions of representations of subjectivity and of history?
In Salamanca, only a minimal portion occupies the space between mimetic and marvelous, as most of it is either mimetic or marvelous. Going by Slavoj Zizek’s approach, another interesting aspect to look into are the manifestations of “hidden fantasy” in the less marvelous and more mimetic parts of the book: character motivation in relation to the betrayal, the sacrifice, the sexual transgressions; the power play and power struggles; and the shifting of roles among characters of different sexualities and genders. Understanding the motivations of characters will yield an understanding of the notions about subjectivity explored in the novel; about the drives that characterize fantasy as a narrative mode and, perhaps, about narratives and meaning-making that the novel explores, in particular sequences where fantasy is used as a narrative mode.
Salamanca is “a rapturous tale of love found, lost and rediscovered involving killer typhoons, amorous townsfolk, and an American missionary who curses in several languages…. At its heart is… a love story between two persons… [that] subtly traces the many permutations of love from romantic to authentic” where “In true magic realist fashion, love not only transforms the persons involved but warps the very landscape around them” as Miguel Escaño describes in his essay “Love in the Time of Solitude” (Current Magazine, Sept/Oct 2006). It is precisely because the novel is, “at its heart, a love story” that its employment of fantasy as a narrative mode is worth looking into.
The scenes in the novel that are rendered in fantasy are symptomatic of the
configurations of the excesses and lack of its characters (or of the subject), that cannot be accommodated by classic-realist strategies of characterization. A study of the novel’s characterization through an examination of the manner in which each character’s desire and jouissance are configured leads to an understanding of the subject’s being incomplete, and always under construction.
Salamanca is made up of three major parts or chapters – “Gaudencio and Jacinta”, “Men, women and other fictions”, and “Letters to Filomena” – each of which corresponds to a particular phase in the intertwined lives of the characters Gaudencio Rivera and Jacinta Cordova, but mainly that of Gaudencio’s. The first part of the novel, “Gaudencio and Jacinta” details the arrival of Gaudencio in Tagbaoran, Palawan, his pursuit of, union with, and separation from Jacinta. The second part recounts the rise of Gaudencio in the literary world, his travels, and his string of sexual affairs with different men and women. Meanwhile, in the same part of the book, the very ordinary life of now ordinary woman Jacinta is also narrated. Here is also where another character, Bau Long Hyunh, the Vietnamese refugee, is introduced. The third and last part of the novel, is all about the family life of Gaudencio and Jacinta, which takes place entirely in different parts of Manila, and is narrated mainly through Jacinta’s letters to Filomena. If, in the second part of the novel, Gaudencio acquires his success as a writer by narrating and fictionalizing the events of their lives in Tagbaoran, in this part of the novel it is Jacinta who is the writer, who resorts to writing and narrativizing as a mode of survival. The novel, in fact, ends with one of Jacinta’s letters, the only one she wrote for Gaudencio, and which is revealed to him only after Jacinta’s death.
The character of Gaudencio is described as a “dissolute author” with “prodigious sexuality” who thinks of himself as a “gifted writer… often able to crystallize miraculous observations of mundane things… [but] sometimes blinded to more important matters” (1) like the fact that “ultimately, women were necessary to continue humanity’s existence, even if, occasionally, men proved to be better bedmates” (1-2). He is a chauvinist and very patriarchal, even as he crosses genders to satisfy his sexual needs. He is also characterized as being filled with his own sense of self-importance. Consistent with the writer cliché, he exploits other people’s lives to enrich his stories. He is at his most benevolent, and even heroic, only in Tagbaoran, when he was caught up in his veneration of Jacinta.
Gaudencio’s pursuit of Jacinta is really a pursuit of jouissance— “pleasure of a brute physical kind, the paradigm of which is the pleasure of orgasm” (Evans 4). Such that, when Gaudencio acquires it (and her), he had nowhere else to go but down, and away from the island, which no longer serves him any enjoyment, or jouissance. The matter of his marriage’s consummation, the physical union, proved inconsequential compared to the difficult pleasure of acquiring her. “Jouissance is thus lifted out of the register of the satisfaction of a biological need, and becomes instead the paradoxical satisfaction which is found in pursuing an eternally unsatisfied desire.” (Evans 5) This explains why Gaudencio was not interested in physically consummating his marriage to Jacinta. Thus, on the eleventh day of his marriage, after pursuing Jacinta aggressively through profuse letters, and with death-defying antics during a violent storm, he decides to leave her for his friend and sometime sexual partner Cesar Abalos, and the island of Palawan for the city of Manila, and eventually for Los Angeles in America. The entirety of Gaudencio’s narrated life may, in fact, be read as a story of one man’s pursuit of and efforts to sustain jouissance. In other words, a story about (and driven by) the pleasure of desiring.
The nuances of the concepts of jouissance and desire in Lacan’s lectures, are explained by Dylan Evans, as a complex operation wherein
…‘the subject does not simply satisfy a desire, he enjoys [jouit] desiring, and
this is an essential dimension of his jouissance’… In other words, desire is not
a movement towards an object that could satisfy it, and is therefore to be
conceived of as a movement which is pursued endlessly, simply for the enjoyment
(jouissance) of pursuing it. (5)
The satisfaction is paradoxical because while jouissance seems to be desire’s end, desire is necessarily “predicated on a lack of jouissance, since one can only desire what one does not have” (6). As Zizek likewise explains: “desire and jouissance are inherently antagonistic, exclusive even. Desire’s raison d’être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire” (214).
The construction of Gaudencio’s character – “a dissolute writer” with “prodigious sexuality” (1) – is interesting in that it makes an almost too obvious point about the insatiability and instability of the subject who is literally constituted by language (a writer) and driven by desire (characterized by prodigious sexuality).
Jacinta, meanwhile, is initially characterized by “beauty of such purity and perfection that the walls of the house she lived in turned transparent long ago, to allow both sunlight and moonlight to illuminate her incandescence” (2-3).
It is interesting to note that what actually makes Jacinta beautiful is the subject’s desire for her. Jacinta’s subjectivity is anchored on her being Othered, her subject-position is defined primarily by those who desire her. The glass walls that encase her (and render her vulnerable and exposed) may therefore be read as symbolic of her paradoxical situation: being within, but also out of, reach. Moreover, she becomes the signifier for all that is unsatisfiable and unsatisfied. When Gaudencio acquires her and then leaves her, consequently, she loses her beauty as well.
The immediate effect on Jacinta of her husband’s abrupt leavetaking was the diminishment of her unearthly beauty. The smooth skin on her face was interrupted by demarcations of grief, her hair lost its sheen, and the temperature that several times had threatened to consume her retreated into her numb heart. She stopped smiling as her facial muscles commiserated with her internal sorrow, and in a matter of days became as ordinary as any woman in town. (41)
In the novel, Jacinta eventually recovers from the tragedy and embarrassment of Gaudencio’s betrayal (even if she does not recover her lost beauty) and falls in love with another man, a Vietnamese refugee who was brought to the shores of Jacinta’s island by towering, tempestuous waves (55-57). It is interesting to note how the characters of Jacinta and Bau are paralleled to each other: they are, in a sense, both outcasts, both aliens or other-worldly, and both defined by difference. Moreover, what drew them together were forces beyond their control. In contrast, the character of Gaudencio is defined by control— he makes a living by molding life experiences into fiction, and, more obviously, he can come and go whenever and wherever he desires.
Taking off from Freud’s idea about the relationship between economic necessity and the repression of desire, Terry Eagleton stated that “what has dominated human history to date is the need to labour; and for Freud that harsh necessity means that we must repress some of our tendencies to pleasure and gratification” (131). Indeed, in this novel, the extent to which the characters are independent and mobile is, of course, also a function of their economic condition, another divide that positions Jacinta and Bau together on one side, and Gaudencio on the other.
Salamanca, however, also takes pains to render the characters in a manner other than classic-realist (or social realist), mainly through sustained, unexplained ambiguities (i.e., the glass walls that encase/define Jacinta; the towering waves that brought Bau to Palawan; the unexplainable and unexplained source of Gaudencio’s writing prowess and sexual appeal), and multiple narratives, similar to the strategies employed in the other novels earlier mentioned. There is, likewise, an assumption that narratives are necessary to construct a subject, a strategy which dramatizes the idea of the constitution of the subject through language. In order to make sense of Bau’s alien presence in the town, for instance, many narratives are woven around him, each of which competes for impossibility. Similarly, the changes in the characters of Gaudencio and Jacinta are narrativized in several non-mimetic ways. Beyond these strategies, however, what calls attention is the manner in which the characters’ lives are related to, or dependent on, each other. Ultimately, what links the characters together is desire, particularly the manner by which each attempts to organize the other’s desire, and, in the process, creates several subjectivities, if not subject-positions.
Jacinta, Bau, and even Cesar Abalos and are all subjects of and subject to Gaudencio’s jouissance and desire. Interestingly, in all three characters, jouissance operates in a manner that is contrary to Gaudencio’s. In their case, and more particularly in Jacinta’s case, “jouissance is no longer simply equated with the sensation of pleasure, but also comes to designate the opposite sensation, one of physical or mental suffering” (Evans 6).
Evans takes off from later Lacanian concepts about jouissance and explains that this understanding of jouissance should not be likened to masochism. According to him, “In masochism, pain is a means to pleasure; pleasure is taken in the very fact of suffering itself, so that it becomes difficult to distinguish pleasure from pain. With jouissance, on the other hand, pleasure and pain remain distinct; no pleasure is taken in the pain itself, but the pleasure cannot be obtained without paying the price of suffering” (6). To illustrate: Jacinta suffers in silence in the two occasions that she is severed from the object of her desire. In the second occasion, when she is separated from Bau, the price of suffering is the promise and possibility of reunion. Her jouissance is, therefore, ineffable, inexpressible in more ways than one – hers is unexplainable and bottomless, and, consequently one that arouses envy and jealousy.
When Gaudencio suddenly decides to “settle the matter of his prodigious sexuality and beget a child”, to “part the gossamer curtain that separated childhood from the real world” (1) this is to be understood as a decision to take up a part in the social order. But, whereas the same could have been achieved by “begetting” any other woman’s child, it is necessary that Gaudencio begets Jacinta’s, not only because she happens to be conveniently still legally married to him, but because Gaudencio desires Jacinta in a very significant way: Gaudencio seeks to be the constant object of the Other’s desire.
It is precisely Jacinta’s jouissance that Gaudencio is jealous of, and which he wants castrated in order for him and Jacinta to become part of a social unit, a family. This also fulfills another function for Gaudencio: for him to inscribe a lack in Jacinta, and therefore be the one to fill it.
Jacinta’s jouissance can be accurately described as “feminine jouissance”, and also the “jouissance of the Other”, which would explain why Gaudencio desires to organize and reconfigure it. “Feminine jouissance is… a qualitatively different form” of jouissance. It is “beyond the phallus”, and is something only the Other (in Lacan’s case, most of the time the other sex, or the female) has access to. Moreover, “this jouissance does relate to the Other as such,” as another (or an Other), kind of jouissance which often led Lacan to describe it in terms of a “mystical experience” illustrated by: "The image…of Bernini’s St. Theresa, about to be pierced by the golden spear of the angel. As is clear from St. Theresa’s own description of the event, this moment of mystical ecstasy is strongly suggestive of orgasmic enjoyment, and Lacan remarks in Seminar XX that one has only to look at the statue to realize that Saint Theresa is coming” (10).
Jacinta’s pleasure points are, therefore, out of Gaudencio’s reach; and are “ineffable” (Evans 10). Moreover, Jacinta’s is not only “feminine jouissance” but also “jouissance of the Other” which Lacan refers to as a “mirage... a jouissance which is only accessible to the Other” (Evans 10). The “jouissance of the Other” is an illusion of the subject that other people are happier, more satisfied, more complete. Jacinta’s silent acceptance of Gaudencio’s will disturbs the pattern and configuration of Gaudencio’s own fantasy in the sense that the subject (Gaudencio) always needs to inscribe a sense of inadequacy, a “lack” in the Other (Jacinta). Gaudencio requires proof that Jacinta is not complete, so he can elaborate his own desire and inscribe himself in Jacinta as the Other’s constant “object of desire”. Jacinta’s silent acceptance is the exact kind of ambivalence that characterizes “feminine jouissance” and “jouissance of the Other”, and eventually serves to fuel Gaudencio’s desire: “a movement which is pursued endlessly, simply for the enjoyment (jouissance) of pursuing it” (Evans 5).
Jacinta, for her part, is able to survive her separation from Bau Long Huynh (as a result of being coerced by Gaudencio to fulfill her wifely duties to him) by writing letters to her friend Filomena. But it is also, quite paradoxically, the distance, and the suspension of their (Jacinta’s and Bau’s) time together, from which Jacinta derives jouissance. And this is why Gaudencio can not really gain access to her—despite begetting several children from her—enough to fully impose his will on her.
Castration, lack, and the jouissance of the Other are important Lacanian concepts which would clarify this analysis further. In Lacan’s discussion of the “jouissance of the Other”, he explains that the origin of this kind of jouissance is rooted in the child’s endless attempts to be the object of the parents’, most of the time the mother’s, desire. The mother being the “primordial Other” (Evans 8) “must show some sign of incompleteness, fallibility, or deficiency… the mOther must demonstrate that she is a desiring (and thus also a lacking and alienated) subject, that she too has submitted to the splitting/barring action of language…” (Fink 53-54). When, in the child’s eyes, the mother is “complete, self-sufficient, and happy with herself independently of the child… this leaves no space for the child, [and] the child attempts to inscribe a lack in the Other, by seeking to introduce… a note of anxiety in the mother, perhaps by screaming or refusing to eat” (Evans 8-9). As the child develops, becomes a subject (that is, joins the symbolic realm; becomes constituted by language, as much as the subject constitutes language) “the memory of the first impression of the mother’s complete jouissance will persist in the illusion of a superabundant jouissance accessible only to the Other” (Evans 9).
Jacinta’s jouissance is seemingly drained away and forcefully renounced, in the name of social and cultural order, in the name of marriage, but this sacrificed jouissance returns in a more or less spectacular way, spectacular enough to disturb classic-realist conventions of representation. This is so because there is “no hygienic way to eliminate this excess bodily jouissance which is surplus to the requirements of utility… as Lacan claims, it cannot simply be disposed of… Lacan himself goes on… to link jouissance to Marx’s concept of surplus value, and coins the term ‘surplus jouissance’ (plus-de-jouir)” (Evans 20). Because of the surplus nature of this jouissance, its manifestation can only be rendered in fantasy, as when Jacinta’s unearthly beauty is restored just before she dies, and the walls of her family’s house turn to glass, reminiscent of her own home in Palawan (158-159).
The employment of the fantasy mode to render this important scene should have succeeded in “infiltrating, opening spaces where unity had been assumed... [to] propose latent ‘other’ meanings or realities behind the possible of the known” (Jackson 23). But the subversive potential of fantasy in this crucial part of the novel, its “salamanca” is subsumed by another mode, a letter from Jacinta to her husband, which their son Antonio gives to Gaudencio after Jacinta’s funeral. The novel, in fact, ends with this very letter:
My dear Dencio,
After everything, you must know that I love you.
Yours,
Intang (159)
A single line is all it takes to reaffirm the ideology that fantasy temporarily subverts. After everything that Jacinta is made to go through and quietly acquiesce to; after the violent process of castration “the operation by which jouissance is drained away from the body”, is Gaudencio finally able to obtain her love? This concluding movement in the novel is actually more complex than it seems, and reveals multiple, contradictory findings.
While Jacinta’s jouissance was drained away from her [body], and important forces and drives were repressed in the name of marriage, in the process of castration, one must also remember that, as Lacan clarifies, castration is primarily a symbolic operation of language. Moreover, this operation of language produces surplus that cannot be dissipated entirely by castration, and this surplus manifests itself through language that is inexpressible; inexpressible in the sense that it cannot be take out of its source.
Therefore, on the one hand, it is possible to read the letter as an affirmation of Jacinta’s own desires; as Jacinta’s revenge, her way of punishing Gaudencio, giving him what he desires, but only from the grave. After imposing Gaudencio’s will on her, after draining away her jouissance, Jacinta leaves Gaudencio nothing but a dead woman’s words, the “element of the symptom that cannot be interpreted, that kernel of jouissance that cannot be drained away” (Evans 13; emphasis mine). What Gaudencio has is a declaration, not a demonstration.
On the other hand, this ambivalence is just what Gaudencio needs to restore his place in Jacinta (the Other) as her constant object of desire. By ending the novel in this manner, the text has also managed to show how Gaudencio has succeeded in inscribing himself in the Other’s desire, even if the Other can no longer demonstrate it. The fantastic, after all, “is literature in which definitive meanings are unknown: objects no longer serve transcendent purposes, so that means have replaced ends” (Jackson, 18). In other words, the domain of fantasy is the desire for, and not always the acquisition of, the object, as illustrated by the consistent character motivation of Gaudencio from the novel’s beginning until its end. It is in this sense that fantasy is “sovereign (only) in the desire for the object, not the possession of it” (Jackson 18).
Furthermore, if indeed “The presentation of impossibility is not by itself a radical activity since texts subvert only if the reader is disturbed by their dislocated narrative form” (Jackson23) another aspect worth looking into is the manner in which the novel Salamanca attempts to “dislocate” the narrative.
As mentioned earlier, the manifestations of fantasy, as a narrative mode, in Alfar’s Salamanca vary significantly from those in the other Filipino novels previously mentioned. Fantasy, as a mode that operates in the spaces between the mimetic and the marvelous – going by the definition of Rosemary Jackson, which this study anchors on –is not the dominant narrative mode in Salamanca. Except for one (Jacinta’s death in their family home), all the fantasy sequences in the novel take place outside the urban setting. In other words, it requires that something, in this case the sea, be traversed in order to get to the location of fantasy. In this novel, there is a portal between the real and the unreal that needs to be crossed for the fantasy to operate; a clear signal is turned on, to signify that one has gone beyond the realm of the real, of the mimetic. In other words, the space where the supposed fantasy is located is very distinctively, very clearly, not real. Moreover, it seems to be associated only with non-urban practices, rituals, and beliefs. Whereas, in the novels like Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café, or The Firewalkers, and particularly Cave and Shadows, fantasy exists in the ambiguous space between mimetic and marvelous, along an axis where there is no such thing as real or unreal, precisely because it is this notion which fantasy questions. Fantasy in the three novels is anti-real, while in Salamanca it seems more non-real, therefore closer to “marvelous”.
Another way that Salamanca’s dislocation of the narrative is not as radical as in the other novels is in the way it explores the mimetic ground. While, as in the other novels, Salamanca takes care to ground the narrative in a specific juncture in history, even making references to actual persons and actual newspaper headline events, the mimetic assumptions (which much of the best samples of fantasy are able to question and subvert through continual reversal) is presented here in a rather trivial manner. It is trivial in the sense that the historical context, despite several references to it, functions mostly as a backdrop, and mainly to achieve verisimilitude. In fact, the manner of integrating history into the narrative is done mainly through the fetishizing of common nuggets of knowledge.
Clearly, history is not the novel’s main concern. The novel, after all, is ultimately, a love story. The main narrative line – that of the couple’s life and love story – is one that could have taken place at any historical time and place in the Philippines, or in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Latin America, or in Ben Okri’s Africa. The development and trajectories that the major characters take are not much influenced by the sense of the country’s history that the novel, at different points, takes pains to render.
Moreover, despite the attempts to ‘dislocate the narrative form’ through the use of circularity rather than linearity, the ‘presentation of impossibilities’ through the use of fantasy, the rendering of ambiguity to character motivations, the novel falls short of becoming truly subversive, because of the reinscription of dominant patriarchal-capitalist ideology, as seen in the mobility, motivations, and in the affirmation of the will of Gaudencio, in relation to the other characters in the novel.
When it comes to works that employ fantasy as a narrative mode that is neither uncanny nor supernatural, neither mimetic nor marvelous, “a more subtle and subversive use of the fantastic appears with works which threaten to disrupt or eat away at the syntax or structure by which order is made (Jackson 72).” And when texts that employ fantasy as a narrative mode are unsuccessful in this aspect, they merely serve the purpose of affirming and re-confirming dominant, institutional order by defusing disturbing, unconscious impulses, and providing instead a safer, vicarious fulfillment of desire that effectively neutralizes the impulse for transgression and subversion. Salamanca does not quite succeed in the “subtle and subversive use of the fantastic”, but it is an important object of study in that it is illustrative of the dual expressive function of fantasy, where expression is seen in the sense of articulation, as well as in the sense of a neutralizing purgation of disturbing, potentially subversive impulses.
Works cited
Alfar, Dean. Ed. Philippine Speculative Fiction. Quezon City: Kestrel, 2005.
-- Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol 2. Quezon City: Anvil, 2006
-- Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol 3. Quezon City: Anvil, 2007.
Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Castillo, Erwin. The Firewalkers. Quezon City: UP Press, 1992.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minnesota: The Univ. of MN Press, 1996.
Escano, Miguel. ____________ (full citation to be added later)
Evans, Dylan. “From Kantian Ethics to Mystical Experience: An Exploration of Jouissance.” Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. ed. Danny Nobus. New York: Other Press, 1999.
Grigg, Rusell. “From the Mechanism of Psychosis to the Universal Condition of the Symptom: On Foreclosure.” Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. ed. Danny Nobus. New York: Other Press,1999.
Gullatz, Stephen. “Exquisite Ex-timacy: Jacques Lacan vis-à-vis Contemporary Horror.” 31 March 2001..
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Joaquin, Nick. Cave and Shadows. Manila: Anvil, 1983.
Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch. London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001.
---. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch. London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001.
---. “The Signification of the Phallus.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. ed. Vincent B. Leitch. London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001.
Tadiar, Neferti Xina M. Fantasy-production: Sexual Economies and other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2003.
Yuson, Alfred. Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café. Quezon City: UP Press, 1988.
Zizek, Slavoj. “The Seven Veils of Fantasy.” Key Concepts of Lacanian
Psychoanalysis. ed. Dany Nobus. New York: Other Press, 1999.
--The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1998.
(COPYRIGHT BY THE AUTHOR, Daryll Jane S. Delgado, April 2008)
The novel Salamanca (2005) (as are the stories in the Philippine Speculative Fiction anthologies) by Dean Francis Alfar is an interesting object of study because it is probably the very first Filipino novel in English written by a Filipino writer who openly declares himself as an advocate and practitioner of non-realist (what he terms as “speculative”) writing. Alfar opens his introduction to Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 1 with the declaration: “I am a fantasist at heart” (vii), and further into the essay defines speculative fiction as “the literature of the fantastic”, asserting further that “to find the fantastic, we must create the fantastic…. And so this anthology” (viii). If Alfar’s Salamanca were to be studied as the paradigmatic Philippine “spec fic” novel,
and the stories in the Philippine Speculative Fiction anthology be considered as Alfar’s best examples of “spec fic” and the fantastic, then the findings of such a study would certainly point to very interesting ideas about the sense of fantasy and speculation that these “spec fic” writers have. It is certainly worth looking into the assumptions about fantasy that operate in these stories.
Fantasy, as it is used in this thesis, is a narrative mode that operates in the ambiguous spaces between the mimetic and the marvelous. It is also understood here as a mode driven by desire, which brings out and points to questions of the unconscious. It is, in other words, a field of symbolically structured meaning that structures even as it disrupts notions of the ‘real’ (Tadiar 9). What manifests as fantasy can only have been registered in the unconscious, which is why fantasy is driven strongly by desire. Fantasy as literature of desire is therefore able to point to the lack, and remind us of what has been left out with the entry of the self into the symbolic order; in the continuous process of subjectification, in the name of social/cultural order.
In novels like Cave and Shadows (Nick Joaquin), Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café (Alfred Yuson), and The Firewalkers (Erwin Castillo), fantasy is employed in a manner that seems to take into account not only its disruptive (or subversive) properties, but its ordering and “structuring” functions as well. In these novels, fantasy reveals the location occupied by fragmented subjectivities to be a location of sustained ambiguity beyond the mimetic, but does not quite become marvelous. It is a location that necessarily requires the mimetic and falls just a step behind the marvelous. The location occupied by fantasy is a fertile ground for questioning and subversion (in the case of these three novels, what is being questioned are notions of representation and subjectivity in relation to history and nation), allowing for the production of multiple narratives and multiple subjectivities.
Fantasy in the novel Salamanca (2005), as well as in the stories from the Philippine Speculative Fiction 1 (2005) and Philippine Speculative Fiction 2 (2006) anthologies, written by Alfar operates differently from how fantasy operates in the other novels mentioned above. Perhaps, this is the main question that should be looked into: In what ways is Alfar’s novel Salamanca different from the other novels that also make use of fantasy and other non-realist narrative strategies and modes? To what extent is this novel Salamanca able to express, undermine, or subvert culturally dominant notions of representations of subjectivity and of history?
In Salamanca, only a minimal portion occupies the space between mimetic and marvelous, as most of it is either mimetic or marvelous. Going by Slavoj Zizek’s approach, another interesting aspect to look into are the manifestations of “hidden fantasy” in the less marvelous and more mimetic parts of the book: character motivation in relation to the betrayal, the sacrifice, the sexual transgressions; the power play and power struggles; and the shifting of roles among characters of different sexualities and genders. Understanding the motivations of characters will yield an understanding of the notions about subjectivity explored in the novel; about the drives that characterize fantasy as a narrative mode and, perhaps, about narratives and meaning-making that the novel explores, in particular sequences where fantasy is used as a narrative mode.
Salamanca is “a rapturous tale of love found, lost and rediscovered involving killer typhoons, amorous townsfolk, and an American missionary who curses in several languages…. At its heart is… a love story between two persons… [that] subtly traces the many permutations of love from romantic to authentic” where “In true magic realist fashion, love not only transforms the persons involved but warps the very landscape around them” as Miguel Escaño describes in his essay “Love in the Time of Solitude” (Current Magazine, Sept/Oct 2006). It is precisely because the novel is, “at its heart, a love story” that its employment of fantasy as a narrative mode is worth looking into.
The scenes in the novel that are rendered in fantasy are symptomatic of the
configurations of the excesses and lack of its characters (or of the subject), that cannot be accommodated by classic-realist strategies of characterization. A study of the novel’s characterization through an examination of the manner in which each character’s desire and jouissance are configured leads to an understanding of the subject’s being incomplete, and always under construction.
Salamanca is made up of three major parts or chapters – “Gaudencio and Jacinta”, “Men, women and other fictions”, and “Letters to Filomena” – each of which corresponds to a particular phase in the intertwined lives of the characters Gaudencio Rivera and Jacinta Cordova, but mainly that of Gaudencio’s. The first part of the novel, “Gaudencio and Jacinta” details the arrival of Gaudencio in Tagbaoran, Palawan, his pursuit of, union with, and separation from Jacinta. The second part recounts the rise of Gaudencio in the literary world, his travels, and his string of sexual affairs with different men and women. Meanwhile, in the same part of the book, the very ordinary life of now ordinary woman Jacinta is also narrated. Here is also where another character, Bau Long Hyunh, the Vietnamese refugee, is introduced. The third and last part of the novel, is all about the family life of Gaudencio and Jacinta, which takes place entirely in different parts of Manila, and is narrated mainly through Jacinta’s letters to Filomena. If, in the second part of the novel, Gaudencio acquires his success as a writer by narrating and fictionalizing the events of their lives in Tagbaoran, in this part of the novel it is Jacinta who is the writer, who resorts to writing and narrativizing as a mode of survival. The novel, in fact, ends with one of Jacinta’s letters, the only one she wrote for Gaudencio, and which is revealed to him only after Jacinta’s death.
The character of Gaudencio is described as a “dissolute author” with “prodigious sexuality” who thinks of himself as a “gifted writer… often able to crystallize miraculous observations of mundane things… [but] sometimes blinded to more important matters” (1) like the fact that “ultimately, women were necessary to continue humanity’s existence, even if, occasionally, men proved to be better bedmates” (1-2). He is a chauvinist and very patriarchal, even as he crosses genders to satisfy his sexual needs. He is also characterized as being filled with his own sense of self-importance. Consistent with the writer cliché, he exploits other people’s lives to enrich his stories. He is at his most benevolent, and even heroic, only in Tagbaoran, when he was caught up in his veneration of Jacinta.
Gaudencio’s pursuit of Jacinta is really a pursuit of jouissance— “pleasure of a brute physical kind, the paradigm of which is the pleasure of orgasm” (Evans 4). Such that, when Gaudencio acquires it (and her), he had nowhere else to go but down, and away from the island, which no longer serves him any enjoyment, or jouissance. The matter of his marriage’s consummation, the physical union, proved inconsequential compared to the difficult pleasure of acquiring her. “Jouissance is thus lifted out of the register of the satisfaction of a biological need, and becomes instead the paradoxical satisfaction which is found in pursuing an eternally unsatisfied desire.” (Evans 5) This explains why Gaudencio was not interested in physically consummating his marriage to Jacinta. Thus, on the eleventh day of his marriage, after pursuing Jacinta aggressively through profuse letters, and with death-defying antics during a violent storm, he decides to leave her for his friend and sometime sexual partner Cesar Abalos, and the island of Palawan for the city of Manila, and eventually for Los Angeles in America. The entirety of Gaudencio’s narrated life may, in fact, be read as a story of one man’s pursuit of and efforts to sustain jouissance. In other words, a story about (and driven by) the pleasure of desiring.
The nuances of the concepts of jouissance and desire in Lacan’s lectures, are explained by Dylan Evans, as a complex operation wherein
…‘the subject does not simply satisfy a desire, he enjoys [jouit] desiring, and
this is an essential dimension of his jouissance’… In other words, desire is not
a movement towards an object that could satisfy it, and is therefore to be
conceived of as a movement which is pursued endlessly, simply for the enjoyment
(jouissance) of pursuing it. (5)
The satisfaction is paradoxical because while jouissance seems to be desire’s end, desire is necessarily “predicated on a lack of jouissance, since one can only desire what one does not have” (6). As Zizek likewise explains: “desire and jouissance are inherently antagonistic, exclusive even. Desire’s raison d’être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire” (214).
The construction of Gaudencio’s character – “a dissolute writer” with “prodigious sexuality” (1) – is interesting in that it makes an almost too obvious point about the insatiability and instability of the subject who is literally constituted by language (a writer) and driven by desire (characterized by prodigious sexuality).
Jacinta, meanwhile, is initially characterized by “beauty of such purity and perfection that the walls of the house she lived in turned transparent long ago, to allow both sunlight and moonlight to illuminate her incandescence” (2-3).
It is interesting to note that what actually makes Jacinta beautiful is the subject’s desire for her. Jacinta’s subjectivity is anchored on her being Othered, her subject-position is defined primarily by those who desire her. The glass walls that encase her (and render her vulnerable and exposed) may therefore be read as symbolic of her paradoxical situation: being within, but also out of, reach. Moreover, she becomes the signifier for all that is unsatisfiable and unsatisfied. When Gaudencio acquires her and then leaves her, consequently, she loses her beauty as well.
The immediate effect on Jacinta of her husband’s abrupt leavetaking was the diminishment of her unearthly beauty. The smooth skin on her face was interrupted by demarcations of grief, her hair lost its sheen, and the temperature that several times had threatened to consume her retreated into her numb heart. She stopped smiling as her facial muscles commiserated with her internal sorrow, and in a matter of days became as ordinary as any woman in town. (41)
In the novel, Jacinta eventually recovers from the tragedy and embarrassment of Gaudencio’s betrayal (even if she does not recover her lost beauty) and falls in love with another man, a Vietnamese refugee who was brought to the shores of Jacinta’s island by towering, tempestuous waves (55-57). It is interesting to note how the characters of Jacinta and Bau are paralleled to each other: they are, in a sense, both outcasts, both aliens or other-worldly, and both defined by difference. Moreover, what drew them together were forces beyond their control. In contrast, the character of Gaudencio is defined by control— he makes a living by molding life experiences into fiction, and, more obviously, he can come and go whenever and wherever he desires.
Taking off from Freud’s idea about the relationship between economic necessity and the repression of desire, Terry Eagleton stated that “what has dominated human history to date is the need to labour; and for Freud that harsh necessity means that we must repress some of our tendencies to pleasure and gratification” (131). Indeed, in this novel, the extent to which the characters are independent and mobile is, of course, also a function of their economic condition, another divide that positions Jacinta and Bau together on one side, and Gaudencio on the other.
Salamanca, however, also takes pains to render the characters in a manner other than classic-realist (or social realist), mainly through sustained, unexplained ambiguities (i.e., the glass walls that encase/define Jacinta; the towering waves that brought Bau to Palawan; the unexplainable and unexplained source of Gaudencio’s writing prowess and sexual appeal), and multiple narratives, similar to the strategies employed in the other novels earlier mentioned. There is, likewise, an assumption that narratives are necessary to construct a subject, a strategy which dramatizes the idea of the constitution of the subject through language. In order to make sense of Bau’s alien presence in the town, for instance, many narratives are woven around him, each of which competes for impossibility. Similarly, the changes in the characters of Gaudencio and Jacinta are narrativized in several non-mimetic ways. Beyond these strategies, however, what calls attention is the manner in which the characters’ lives are related to, or dependent on, each other. Ultimately, what links the characters together is desire, particularly the manner by which each attempts to organize the other’s desire, and, in the process, creates several subjectivities, if not subject-positions.
Jacinta, Bau, and even Cesar Abalos and are all subjects of and subject to Gaudencio’s jouissance and desire. Interestingly, in all three characters, jouissance operates in a manner that is contrary to Gaudencio’s. In their case, and more particularly in Jacinta’s case, “jouissance is no longer simply equated with the sensation of pleasure, but also comes to designate the opposite sensation, one of physical or mental suffering” (Evans 6).
Evans takes off from later Lacanian concepts about jouissance and explains that this understanding of jouissance should not be likened to masochism. According to him, “In masochism, pain is a means to pleasure; pleasure is taken in the very fact of suffering itself, so that it becomes difficult to distinguish pleasure from pain. With jouissance, on the other hand, pleasure and pain remain distinct; no pleasure is taken in the pain itself, but the pleasure cannot be obtained without paying the price of suffering” (6). To illustrate: Jacinta suffers in silence in the two occasions that she is severed from the object of her desire. In the second occasion, when she is separated from Bau, the price of suffering is the promise and possibility of reunion. Her jouissance is, therefore, ineffable, inexpressible in more ways than one – hers is unexplainable and bottomless, and, consequently one that arouses envy and jealousy.
When Gaudencio suddenly decides to “settle the matter of his prodigious sexuality and beget a child”, to “part the gossamer curtain that separated childhood from the real world” (1) this is to be understood as a decision to take up a part in the social order. But, whereas the same could have been achieved by “begetting” any other woman’s child, it is necessary that Gaudencio begets Jacinta’s, not only because she happens to be conveniently still legally married to him, but because Gaudencio desires Jacinta in a very significant way: Gaudencio seeks to be the constant object of the Other’s desire.
It is precisely Jacinta’s jouissance that Gaudencio is jealous of, and which he wants castrated in order for him and Jacinta to become part of a social unit, a family. This also fulfills another function for Gaudencio: for him to inscribe a lack in Jacinta, and therefore be the one to fill it.
Jacinta’s jouissance can be accurately described as “feminine jouissance”, and also the “jouissance of the Other”, which would explain why Gaudencio desires to organize and reconfigure it. “Feminine jouissance is… a qualitatively different form” of jouissance. It is “beyond the phallus”, and is something only the Other (in Lacan’s case, most of the time the other sex, or the female) has access to. Moreover, “this jouissance does relate to the Other as such,” as another (or an Other), kind of jouissance which often led Lacan to describe it in terms of a “mystical experience” illustrated by: "The image…of Bernini’s St. Theresa, about to be pierced by the golden spear of the angel. As is clear from St. Theresa’s own description of the event, this moment of mystical ecstasy is strongly suggestive of orgasmic enjoyment, and Lacan remarks in Seminar XX that one has only to look at the statue to realize that Saint Theresa is coming” (10).
Jacinta’s pleasure points are, therefore, out of Gaudencio’s reach; and are “ineffable” (Evans 10). Moreover, Jacinta’s is not only “feminine jouissance” but also “jouissance of the Other” which Lacan refers to as a “mirage... a jouissance which is only accessible to the Other” (Evans 10). The “jouissance of the Other” is an illusion of the subject that other people are happier, more satisfied, more complete. Jacinta’s silent acceptance of Gaudencio’s will disturbs the pattern and configuration of Gaudencio’s own fantasy in the sense that the subject (Gaudencio) always needs to inscribe a sense of inadequacy, a “lack” in the Other (Jacinta). Gaudencio requires proof that Jacinta is not complete, so he can elaborate his own desire and inscribe himself in Jacinta as the Other’s constant “object of desire”. Jacinta’s silent acceptance is the exact kind of ambivalence that characterizes “feminine jouissance” and “jouissance of the Other”, and eventually serves to fuel Gaudencio’s desire: “a movement which is pursued endlessly, simply for the enjoyment (jouissance) of pursuing it” (Evans 5).
Jacinta, for her part, is able to survive her separation from Bau Long Huynh (as a result of being coerced by Gaudencio to fulfill her wifely duties to him) by writing letters to her friend Filomena. But it is also, quite paradoxically, the distance, and the suspension of their (Jacinta’s and Bau’s) time together, from which Jacinta derives jouissance. And this is why Gaudencio can not really gain access to her—despite begetting several children from her—enough to fully impose his will on her.
Castration, lack, and the jouissance of the Other are important Lacanian concepts which would clarify this analysis further. In Lacan’s discussion of the “jouissance of the Other”, he explains that the origin of this kind of jouissance is rooted in the child’s endless attempts to be the object of the parents’, most of the time the mother’s, desire. The mother being the “primordial Other” (Evans 8) “must show some sign of incompleteness, fallibility, or deficiency… the mOther must demonstrate that she is a desiring (and thus also a lacking and alienated) subject, that she too has submitted to the splitting/barring action of language…” (Fink 53-54). When, in the child’s eyes, the mother is “complete, self-sufficient, and happy with herself independently of the child… this leaves no space for the child, [and] the child attempts to inscribe a lack in the Other, by seeking to introduce… a note of anxiety in the mother, perhaps by screaming or refusing to eat” (Evans 8-9). As the child develops, becomes a subject (that is, joins the symbolic realm; becomes constituted by language, as much as the subject constitutes language) “the memory of the first impression of the mother’s complete jouissance will persist in the illusion of a superabundant jouissance accessible only to the Other” (Evans 9).
Jacinta’s jouissance is seemingly drained away and forcefully renounced, in the name of social and cultural order, in the name of marriage, but this sacrificed jouissance returns in a more or less spectacular way, spectacular enough to disturb classic-realist conventions of representation. This is so because there is “no hygienic way to eliminate this excess bodily jouissance which is surplus to the requirements of utility… as Lacan claims, it cannot simply be disposed of… Lacan himself goes on… to link jouissance to Marx’s concept of surplus value, and coins the term ‘surplus jouissance’ (plus-de-jouir)” (Evans 20). Because of the surplus nature of this jouissance, its manifestation can only be rendered in fantasy, as when Jacinta’s unearthly beauty is restored just before she dies, and the walls of her family’s house turn to glass, reminiscent of her own home in Palawan (158-159).
The employment of the fantasy mode to render this important scene should have succeeded in “infiltrating, opening spaces where unity had been assumed... [to] propose latent ‘other’ meanings or realities behind the possible of the known” (Jackson 23). But the subversive potential of fantasy in this crucial part of the novel, its “salamanca” is subsumed by another mode, a letter from Jacinta to her husband, which their son Antonio gives to Gaudencio after Jacinta’s funeral. The novel, in fact, ends with this very letter:
My dear Dencio,
After everything, you must know that I love you.
Yours,
Intang (159)
A single line is all it takes to reaffirm the ideology that fantasy temporarily subverts. After everything that Jacinta is made to go through and quietly acquiesce to; after the violent process of castration “the operation by which jouissance is drained away from the body”, is Gaudencio finally able to obtain her love? This concluding movement in the novel is actually more complex than it seems, and reveals multiple, contradictory findings.
While Jacinta’s jouissance was drained away from her [body], and important forces and drives were repressed in the name of marriage, in the process of castration, one must also remember that, as Lacan clarifies, castration is primarily a symbolic operation of language. Moreover, this operation of language produces surplus that cannot be dissipated entirely by castration, and this surplus manifests itself through language that is inexpressible; inexpressible in the sense that it cannot be take out of its source.
Therefore, on the one hand, it is possible to read the letter as an affirmation of Jacinta’s own desires; as Jacinta’s revenge, her way of punishing Gaudencio, giving him what he desires, but only from the grave. After imposing Gaudencio’s will on her, after draining away her jouissance, Jacinta leaves Gaudencio nothing but a dead woman’s words, the “element of the symptom that cannot be interpreted, that kernel of jouissance that cannot be drained away” (Evans 13; emphasis mine). What Gaudencio has is a declaration, not a demonstration.
On the other hand, this ambivalence is just what Gaudencio needs to restore his place in Jacinta (the Other) as her constant object of desire. By ending the novel in this manner, the text has also managed to show how Gaudencio has succeeded in inscribing himself in the Other’s desire, even if the Other can no longer demonstrate it. The fantastic, after all, “is literature in which definitive meanings are unknown: objects no longer serve transcendent purposes, so that means have replaced ends” (Jackson, 18). In other words, the domain of fantasy is the desire for, and not always the acquisition of, the object, as illustrated by the consistent character motivation of Gaudencio from the novel’s beginning until its end. It is in this sense that fantasy is “sovereign (only) in the desire for the object, not the possession of it” (Jackson 18).
Furthermore, if indeed “The presentation of impossibility is not by itself a radical activity since texts subvert only if the reader is disturbed by their dislocated narrative form” (Jackson23) another aspect worth looking into is the manner in which the novel Salamanca attempts to “dislocate” the narrative.
As mentioned earlier, the manifestations of fantasy, as a narrative mode, in Alfar’s Salamanca vary significantly from those in the other Filipino novels previously mentioned. Fantasy, as a mode that operates in the spaces between the mimetic and the marvelous – going by the definition of Rosemary Jackson, which this study anchors on –is not the dominant narrative mode in Salamanca. Except for one (Jacinta’s death in their family home), all the fantasy sequences in the novel take place outside the urban setting. In other words, it requires that something, in this case the sea, be traversed in order to get to the location of fantasy. In this novel, there is a portal between the real and the unreal that needs to be crossed for the fantasy to operate; a clear signal is turned on, to signify that one has gone beyond the realm of the real, of the mimetic. In other words, the space where the supposed fantasy is located is very distinctively, very clearly, not real. Moreover, it seems to be associated only with non-urban practices, rituals, and beliefs. Whereas, in the novels like Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café, or The Firewalkers, and particularly Cave and Shadows, fantasy exists in the ambiguous space between mimetic and marvelous, along an axis where there is no such thing as real or unreal, precisely because it is this notion which fantasy questions. Fantasy in the three novels is anti-real, while in Salamanca it seems more non-real, therefore closer to “marvelous”.
Another way that Salamanca’s dislocation of the narrative is not as radical as in the other novels is in the way it explores the mimetic ground. While, as in the other novels, Salamanca takes care to ground the narrative in a specific juncture in history, even making references to actual persons and actual newspaper headline events, the mimetic assumptions (which much of the best samples of fantasy are able to question and subvert through continual reversal) is presented here in a rather trivial manner. It is trivial in the sense that the historical context, despite several references to it, functions mostly as a backdrop, and mainly to achieve verisimilitude. In fact, the manner of integrating history into the narrative is done mainly through the fetishizing of common nuggets of knowledge.
Clearly, history is not the novel’s main concern. The novel, after all, is ultimately, a love story. The main narrative line – that of the couple’s life and love story – is one that could have taken place at any historical time and place in the Philippines, or in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Latin America, or in Ben Okri’s Africa. The development and trajectories that the major characters take are not much influenced by the sense of the country’s history that the novel, at different points, takes pains to render.
Moreover, despite the attempts to ‘dislocate the narrative form’ through the use of circularity rather than linearity, the ‘presentation of impossibilities’ through the use of fantasy, the rendering of ambiguity to character motivations, the novel falls short of becoming truly subversive, because of the reinscription of dominant patriarchal-capitalist ideology, as seen in the mobility, motivations, and in the affirmation of the will of Gaudencio, in relation to the other characters in the novel.
When it comes to works that employ fantasy as a narrative mode that is neither uncanny nor supernatural, neither mimetic nor marvelous, “a more subtle and subversive use of the fantastic appears with works which threaten to disrupt or eat away at the syntax or structure by which order is made (Jackson 72).” And when texts that employ fantasy as a narrative mode are unsuccessful in this aspect, they merely serve the purpose of affirming and re-confirming dominant, institutional order by defusing disturbing, unconscious impulses, and providing instead a safer, vicarious fulfillment of desire that effectively neutralizes the impulse for transgression and subversion. Salamanca does not quite succeed in the “subtle and subversive use of the fantastic”, but it is an important object of study in that it is illustrative of the dual expressive function of fantasy, where expression is seen in the sense of articulation, as well as in the sense of a neutralizing purgation of disturbing, potentially subversive impulses.
Works cited
Alfar, Dean. Ed. Philippine Speculative Fiction. Quezon City: Kestrel, 2005.
-- Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol 2. Quezon City: Anvil, 2006
-- Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol 3. Quezon City: Anvil, 2007.
Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Castillo, Erwin. The Firewalkers. Quezon City: UP Press, 1992.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minnesota: The Univ. of MN Press, 1996.
Escano, Miguel. ____________ (full citation to be added later)
Evans, Dylan. “From Kantian Ethics to Mystical Experience: An Exploration of Jouissance.” Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. ed. Danny Nobus. New York: Other Press, 1999.
Grigg, Rusell. “From the Mechanism of Psychosis to the Universal Condition of the Symptom: On Foreclosure.” Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. ed. Danny Nobus. New York: Other Press,1999.
Gullatz, Stephen. “Exquisite Ex-timacy: Jacques Lacan vis-à-vis Contemporary Horror.” 31 March 2001.
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Joaquin, Nick. Cave and Shadows. Manila: Anvil, 1983.
Lacan, Jacques. “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch. London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001.
---. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch. London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001.
---. “The Signification of the Phallus.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. ed. Vincent B. Leitch. London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001.
Tadiar, Neferti Xina M. Fantasy-production: Sexual Economies and other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2003.
Yuson, Alfred. Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café. Quezon City: UP Press, 1988.
Zizek, Slavoj. “The Seven Veils of Fantasy.” Key Concepts of Lacanian
Psychoanalysis. ed. Dany Nobus. New York: Other Press, 1999.
--The Plague of Fantasies. New York: Verso, 1998.
(COPYRIGHT BY THE AUTHOR, Daryll Jane S. Delgado, April 2008)
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