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)