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

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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.
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(COPYRIGHT BY THE AUTHOR, Daryll Jane S. Delgado, April 2008)