i have finally bound

my thesis. and also myself, to everything i wrote in that manuscript. i am so exhausted. but also still a bit out there, i mean not fully here yet, not fully grounded yet. but here, i am sharing the concluding essay of that study, for joel and all the others who keep asking me about it and coming away from conversations with me still baffled about what i did, or tried to do, in my thesis.



From Narratives of Subversion to a Politics of Survival
(A Conclusion)


Every meaning-making act is a narrative. Every narrative addresses itself to a subject. Narratives facilitate and even function as accomplices in the ideological formation of the subject. The subject is ultimately the site of negotiation and disruption of elements of social economies and psychic systems. Narrative modes driven by unconscious desire – like fantasy – can function as a mode of subversion, undermining subjectifying notions and mechanisms purveyed by narratives that make use of the classic realist mode. These then are the basic premises that my study rests on. That this is a study focusing on fantasy as a narrative mode in relation to larger concepts of narrativity and subjectivity, as seen in a mix of previously studied as well as never-studied set of Philippine texts, is what provides it relevance. That this is a study making an attempt to theorize on fantasy and subjectivity as expressed across a good selection of Philippine contemporary novels and short stories in English, is its challenge.

The focus of my study is fantasy, and fantasy is such a common term, with many practical and varied uses. It is for this reason that what I have tried to do in this study is both easy and difficult. Easy because of the wide range of possibilities that the familiarity and commonness of the term lends itself to, and also difficult because the subject matter resists containment. What I have tried to do in this study is pretty simple. Among other things that I ended up doing in the course of this study: I explored the uses, definitions, and ramifications of the term Fantasy in the area of Literature, particularly Philippine Contemporary fiction in English, even as I was careful to always take into consideration the non-literary employment of the term.

Dictionary definitions of the term “fantasy” are usually divided into two categories. One is anchored on the notion of reality, which places the term “Fantasy” directly opposite to, or as an antonym of the nouns truth and realism, thus that of the imagination, as fancy, as invention, as make-believe. According to the Oxford American Dictionary (2007): Fantasy refers to “the faculty or activity of imagining things, esp. things that are impossible or improbable” and also to “the product of this faculty or activity”. It is interesting to note that, as the first set of definitions suggests, fantasy is both the “activity of imagining things” as well as “the product of this activity”. My study rests on this paradox: “fantasy” is a narrative mode which is both the activity of the unconscious as well as its product.

The second category of definitions, relate the term “fantasy” more directly to desire, particularly to that of aspirations, hopes, wishes, and dreams, as well as delusions and illusions. As in: “a fanciful mental image, typically one on which a person dwells at length or repeatedly and which reflects their conscious or unconscious wishes”. Even the early uses and the origin of the term “fantasy” also reflect this paradox. According to the Oxford American Dictionary (2007), the word’s etymology suggests a paradoxical notion of the term “fantasy” as both “imagination” which is invisible to the naked eye, but also “appearance” and “to make visible”.

Indeed, the very range of definitions and uses of the term “fantasy” already point to its being an ideal mode of questioning and of subversion. To a certain extent, this is what “Narratives of Subversion” has tried to illustrate. My study made full use of and derived, many benefits, and perhaps some bold suggestions for future literary and critical studies, from the varied and paradoxical notions, definitions and uses of the term fantasy. In order to give justice to the multiple uses and dimensions of the term, my own employment of the term “fantasy”, therefore, had to be derived from more than one discipline.

The main question that this study sought to answer was: “In what ways does fantasy, a narrative mode, operate as a mode of subversion in Philippine Contemporary Fiction in English from the 1980s to the present”. In relation to this problematique, my study also sought to answer these related questions:

1. What is the location of fantasy in relation to other narrative modes, both realist and non-realist, that are employed in Philippine contemporary fiction in English?

2. In what ways is fantasy a narrative mode driven by and constitutive of desire, operating within and as ideology?

3. In what ways does fantasy as a narrative mode make apparent/express, undermine, or subvert culturally [ideologically] dominant notions of subjectivity and representation?

Drawing heavily on the ideas of Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser (and their many interpreters), and taking off from the theoretical suggestions of Slavoj Zizek, Neferti Xina Tadiar and Rosemary Jackson, I attempted to examine the manifestations of fantasy in two sets of texts: (1) previously studied (if not canonical) Philippine texts, and (2) very recent (“pop”) fiction of young writers. The goal of the study was to interrogate a narrative mode that is generally considered as escapist, a mode for popular, “non-literary” , therefore “not serious” fiction. What I have tried to do is to articulate the subversive qualities of the use of fantasy as a narrative mode as seen in a cross section of both “literary” (academic) and so-called pop fiction.

The most apparent features shared by the primary materials included in this study are: the use of fantasy as narrative mode and similarity in structural characteristics; structure not only in the sense of narrative structure, but also in the sense of the ideological and unconscious that frame the texts. Moreover, this study finds that the structural similarities observed in the texts are among the manifestations of the employment of a fantasy mode and are likewise derived from, or driven by, similar unconscious desires.

Cave and Shadows by Nick Joaquin approximates the structure of a “whodunit” or a detective story, where the main narrative revolves around Jack Henson’s investigation of Nenita Coogan’s mysterious death. This narrative, however, is regularly interrupted by interpolating historical narratives, just as Henson’s search for answers is constantly disrupted by meaningless or irrational images, the nature of which remain ambiguous until the novel’s end. Fantasy in Joaquin’s novel manifests then in the spaces between official/rational narratives and those unofficial, but equally persistent narratives; in the sustained ambiguities of images that interpolate their perceivers, leading to the questioning of subjectivities; and in the repetition and reversals of characters across a period of four hundred years. The novel’s open ending, and unresolved ambiguities – seen in the destruction of old structures, and Jack Henson’s “broken” state— go against conventional notions of representation and subjectivity.

Alfred Yuson’s Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café and Erwin Castillo’s The Firewalkers are both historiographic metafiction texts that manipulate and eventually discard notions of unity of time, space, and character. Fantasy manifests in these texts primarily in their refusal to observe such realist conventions. They feature instead “spatio-plural” (mutiple) narratives, and fragmented and dismembered subjectivities. Moreover, these strategies are employed in order to counter univocal representation of history, revealing instead how, through the rendering of the locals as Other, and characterizing them as perennially “lacking”, the desire of the foreign elements in the community are revealed.

Dean Francis Alfar’s Salamanca attempts to ‘dislocate the narrative form’ through the employment of circularity rather than linearity, the ‘presentation of impossibilities’ through the use of fantasy, and the rendering of ambiguity to character motivations. While the novel falls short of becoming truly subversive, because of the reinscription of dominant ideology, as seen in the character motivations, and in the affirmation of the will of, Gaudencio in relation to the other characters in the novel, it succeeds in creating multiple subjectivities, and in displaying how fantasy operates in the configurations of desire.

The urban fantasy and ghost stories from Nine Supernatural Stories, Afraid, and Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 1 and Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 2, articulate the instability and decenteredness of the subject in highly contested, psychological spaces in the city. Fantasy in these stories operates in various ways and repeatedly attempts to make up for a lack resulting from constraints. In all of the stories taken up for this section, fantasy reveals the incompleteness and instability of subjectivity; how it is constantly constructed and reconstructed.

In Karl de Mesa’s Damaged People-Tales of the Punk-gothic it would not be too unreasonable to say that what are exhibited are manifestations of Philippine fantasy in the extreme. The stories in Damaged People are likewise set against an urban backdrop, but the city that is featured here is the city that we do not normally see in Philippine fiction. It is a city that has been eroded and corroded. It features characters that are non-repressed. Fantasy in these stories manifests itself as a mode driven by the most fundamental of desires.

These various novels and short stories show how fantasy functions in diverse ways, contingent upon the various ideological, political and economic determinants of the texts’ production. In the texts studied, the following qualities of fantasy were illustrated:

1. Fantasy as a narrative mode that operates in the hesitation between the mimetic and the marvelous;
2. Fantasy as literature of desire, which seeks that which is experienced as absence and loss;
3. Fantasy as literature of subversion, indicating or pointing to the seemingly precarious foundation of order;


Fantasy is at its most subversive, however, when it not only displays the construction of the subject, the castration complex, and repressed desires, but also when fantasy moves to change the relations and points of contact of the imaginary and the symbolic. In doing so, fantasy reveals the text’s unconscious, the ideology at work, and also provides spaces to disrupt the work of ideology, such as what is illustrated by the novels and stories that employ fantasy as a narrative. Fantasy, thereby, also provides for spaces and possibilities for radical, transgressive, cultural transformation by rendering the boundaries between realms (i.e., mimetic and marvelous, imaginary and symbolic, etc.) fluid and ambiguous; providing new or other subjectivities as a result of the reversal of the process of subjectification and a rejection of dominant modes of representation.

The findings of this study lend themselves to multiple readings as well: (1) that fantasy as a narrative mode is significant and necessary, beyond being a novel and exciting narrative mode that goes against realist conventions; (2) that contrary to the notion of fantasy as escape from reality, it reveals instead a more disturbing dissatisfaction, a restlessness, an indeterminacy within the subject; (3) that it is an ideal site of subversion, and may be recuperated for larger, more complex discussions of social, cultural issues on gender, class, and race, among others.

The framework that is offered in this study may then be used for a re-reading (and the recuperation of the subversive potentials) of older, neglected texts which make us of fantasy as a narrative mode. Likewise, it can be used to study the stories and novels in the fantastic that are being produced as of this writing.

Ultimately, the larger project of this study is to examine other ideological, “desiring practices” engaged in by the subject beyond those seen in fiction, and more towards material practices transcending the domain of art itself. This study offers the suggestion that what are now textual manifestations of the employment of fantasy as a narrative mode, may perhaps be read as a kind of “politics of survival”-- the ways and means by which the subject articulates his/her understanding of the ideological, political and economic determinants of his/her conditions.

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. “From Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” New Historicism and Cultural Materialism – A Reader. London: Arnold, 1996.


Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York: Routledge, 1991.


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.


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)