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)

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

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)

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.

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)

dear god, here we go again.

please, please, please,
let me, let me, let me
get what i want this time.

(apologies/salamat to morrissey. this is my prayer for d., fellow libran and damon albarn-morrissey-sting-stipe lover)

i still love garcia marquez

and i'm taking back everything i may have said to the effect that i don't anymore. i have recently finished reading Vivir Para Contarla (Living to tell the tale). i got my copy four years ago, as a gift from my cousin, but I only sat down to it last week. i read it overnight only because it is such a wonderful reminder of the world we are in when we read anything by garcia marquez. besides, he might not have long to live, and might not have much to write. god forbid. simba ko.



i'll post a more thorough review next time. or i might not, unless i find a way to detach myself a little bit more from the text. i can't help it, my response was -- as it has always been, when it comes to works of his -- very personal. and it goes back to the very first time i held a garcia marquez book in my hands. i can't help but associate it with so many other important things and events that are very personal to me as well. you see, my first exposure to garcia marquez was through One Hundred Years of Solitude. i still remember very vividly the day i discovered the book. it was my first day as a resident in kalayaan residence hall in UP. feeling like a millionaire, as i had just received, for the first time ever in my entire life of sixteen years, my entire allowance for the month, i proceeded to do a little book shopping at the booksale in the UP shopping center. and there it was, included in a pile of booksale books on super sale, its cover and title pages missing, but all the other pages still intact. i thought the title, which i just read from the header, was intriguing. i read the first few pages and, there is no other way to say it except to say that, they blew me away. i had no idea who garcia marquez was, what the book was all about, but as soon as i started reading it i couldn't stop. i decided to forgo sleep, breakfast, lunch, classes the following day (as i was bound to do for many more days and years to come). i was pleasantly shocked and embarrassed to find out later that garcia marquez was who/what he was and that, in my cousin's house , there was a shelf-full of garcia marquez books. and so, of course, i read all of them that entire semester. oh, and this is the same cousin who gave me my copy of Vivir -- see, there is a connection, some kind of organic unity here, after all!

Alagad daw… (or why I envy Voltaire Oyzon)

I envy Voltaire Oyzon. I think I am more than a little jealous of him. He knows of what he writes, he owns the tool which he uses to write, his imagination knows no bounds, no hesitation, no fear.

Astig hi Voltaire. Diri ko ma-imagine kun gin ano niya pagbug-os hini nga mga siday, ngan maaram ako nga diri la ini asya it iya kaya suraton. No wonder, waray magruha-duha pag-translate para ha iya an makarit nga hi Merlie Alunan, ngan an iba pa nga up-and-coming writers, Janis Salvacion, Anna Laurice Jo, ngan Harvey Fiji, ngan an iba pa nga binmulig hini nga project.

Kamakauurit ni Voltaire. Kakakarit ni Voltaire. Grabe it imagination ni Voltaire. Grabe kay tungod nga kontrolado, pero malabad.

What I mean to say is, the imagination that the poems display in this collection is grounded in the only way that poems should be grounded: they create in the reader a secure and yet disconcerting feeling of being in touch with the a strange and yet knowable reality and with very personal sentiments. And, as a reader, you cannot help but feel very honored and privileged to be granted access to this writer’s reality and feelings, because the reality, rather, the realities that he offers, are rarely seen in Philippine poetry, perhaps because most of us cannot bear or afford to take stock of some of these realitie. Voltaire, on the other hand, stares at them, and engages in them, with eyes wide open, and with heart aflame. The realities that he offers are painful and beautiful. These are the realities of love and war, of globalization and ancient history, of poverty and natural wealth, of friendships and deaths. To say that what is most admirable about this collection is the emotional potency as well as the vulnerability of the poems, is to say that we are in the presence of a writer whose maturity is well beyond his years.

Umayon ako han tanan nga mga siday dinhi hini nga collection. Pero may mga special favorites ako. An akon mga paborito an mga siday nga may “conceit”, “wit”, “humor” ngan “irony”, an mga napabuyayaw, napa-tawa, napaurit, ngan napa-uga. May mga siday dinhi nga an trajectory han ira conciseness na-remind ha akon han mga metaphysical poets. May ada liwat mga poems nga napakalas an pagka postmodern nga iba nga klase, baga hin post-postmodern— mas matarom, mas “ironic”.

Gusto ko igtampalo ha mga napaka-postmodern na mga Filipino writers an iya “An Talipsay han Gugma” (“The Love Curve”), gusto ko iparayaw ha akon mga kilala nga writers na aktibista, ngan mga post-colonial nga kritiko, an iya simple, pero halarom ngan mapait nga “Didto ha Amon”, “Tawgi” ngan “Hi Salvador Magsusundalo” (Salvador will enter the Army”). May mga paborito ako, sugad han “Kan Toytoy pag-asoy han agsob nga karantahay ha ira balay”, nga diri ko gusto i-analyze hin duro, kay nadiri ako nga maruba. Instinctive it iya ginhuhugot nga response. Pa-uga ba. Siyempre, an title poem nga “An Maupay ha Mga Waray”, pa-uga liwat. Simple, bug-os hin duro, pero amo gihap, may trajectory nga napa-expand hit iya karuyag signgon, it iya meaningfulness diri contained.

Of course, if you do not speak or read Waray, some of the crispness, and the humor and irony, inherent in the sound of the original language are sometimes lost. But the translations are more than competent. In most cases, the translated versions stand on their own. The mere fact that Merlie Alunan did the translations for many of the poems here should be another big reason to get this book.

Pero an usa nga butang nga akon gud naayunan hini nga mga siday: an iya pulitika. The poems deal with such a wide range of subjects and emotions; they are carried by the various and varying voices of their speakers, but the politics of the entire collection is very stable, very clear. I will not name it. It is not for me to name it. It is enough for me that I see it. And I know you will too, and it will change you, when you read this book.

Nakaghuna-huna gud ako hin maupay kahuman ko pagbasa hini nga collection. Feeling ko bumaltok ako. Feeling ko may naabre nga gutiay nga bintana ha kalibutan, gutiay pero multifaceted, ngan importante hin duro, it “view” nga iya ginpapakita.

Alagad daw ano hi Voltaire. Kasumo. Kalabad. Kakarit.

april boys

just had to have it

my lost in translation moment.



after my mano po moment with cousin.

here's where i am, and here's how Bob Dylan does it

according to an article on Vanity Fair (http://www.vanityfair.com/ontheweb/blogs/daily/2008/04/dylan.html)

Mint Julep: "Put the mint leaves, powdered sugar and water in a Collins glass. Fill the glass with shaved or crushed ice and then add bourbon. Top that off with more ice. I like to garnish mine with a mint sprig. Serve it with a straw. Two or three of those and anything sounds good!"

Rum-Cola mix: "Let me give you my recipe for a rum and Coca-Cola. Take a tall glass, put some ice in it, two fingers of Bombay rum, and a bottle of Coca-Cola. Shake it up well and go drink it in the sunshine!"

ahh. sounds like my kind of summer drink alright. having such tiny fingers though, i'd do it with four instead of two fingers. and i know that sounded very wrong. but who cares? i am in taipei and i am too shy scared sino-phobic (acdg to larry) to drink alone at the bar. so i've been salivating, sort of. i don't want to touch the minibar because it's a bit sad. i mean, i know i'd be sad after, drinking alone like that. but the night is young, we'll see... walked around for about two hours. okay naman. everyone has such thin arms and such slim legs.i do believe skinny pants were invented with these people in mind. looks really nice on the women, of course not on the men. the men just look uninspired and uninspiring, generally. i've been taking very inspired pictures of the women on the streets. i could easily have been this white balding man next to me, ogling the pretty taiwanese, from the safety of US territory: starbucks, of course. i've also been taking pictures of all these colorful foodstalls, but of course i dare not try them, i'm waiting for my cousin to arrive here this weekend so i can have someone to try all of them food, and maybe get allergies, with. haaay. there indeed comes a time in one's life, when one becomes no longer the adventurous spirit one thought one was, and one starts referring to oneself in this weird manner. (my pathetic attempts to sound like the mind of the old guy next to me). seriously, i find myself thinking of how things would have been so much more interesting if i were with, say, husband weng (not only because it is nice to be with husband all day, all night, always, but also because someone can take my picture with the prett girls in the background), or jet as in our macau audit, or tatay because he carries history lesons and trivia with him wherever he goes, or derek because we'd have a grand time minding people's haircuts and hoarding little electronic gadgets, or aimee because she can pass herself off as a taiwanese girl, or dennis because he is the real foodie, or dawn because we both have an insatiable interest and indefatigable faith in bargain shopping, and nanay becasue she is so snooty, it is always a worthy challenge trying to please her... oh well. now i am getting sad. i might as well give that mini bar more serious thought.

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)