HSIU-CHUAN LEE
J
essica Hagedorn’s third novel, Dream Jungle, derives primarily from two events that took place in the Philippines during the 1970s: the discovery of the Tasaday tribe and the filming of Apocalypse Now.1Upon seeing the obituary of Manuel (Manda) Elizalde Jr., the “discoverer” and “protector” of the Tasaday in 1997, Hagedorn decided to juxtapose these two events in a novel, not in order to pass judgment on the anthro-pological discovery (or fraud) or on Francis Ford Coppola’s epic film, but, in her own words, “to capture moments in time”: “these really interesting events all come together between 1971 and 1977. I just really wanted to capture the decadence and turbulence of it, the scholarly back-and-forth about it, the arguments, the mysteries, and sheer excitement” (Aguilar-San Juan 6). To what extent Hagedorn successfully “captured”these moments of the Philippines, in what way, and what this might contribute to the conception of the Philippines in relation to its imperial legacies are questions pertain-ing to the larger issue of the relationship between literature and nation-buildpertain-ing.
elaboration on “purloin” prompts a reading of the Philippines as not simply “stolen” by imperialism but “pro-longed”—via Hagedorn’s fictional creativity—into a community evolving through imperial intrusions, translo-cal displacements, and encounters.
The affinity between literature and the making of the Philippine nation can be traced back to the writings of José Rizal during the Spanish colonial era. Featuring social commentaries that inspired collective dissent against Spanish authorities, Rizal’s writings have been considered foundational to the rise of Philippine national con-sciousness and taken as models for “the Great Filipino Novel” during the American colonization period (Gonzalez 962). Hagedorn’s novels, however, deviate from this nationalist tradition. Born in the Philippines, Hagedorn moved to San Francisco with her family in 1963, and has since maintained a double affiliation with both the United States and the Philippines (Hagedorn, “Exile” 181). Her position as an expatriate Filipina accounts for her ambiguous relationship with the nationalist project of the Philippines. Her postmodern writing strategy, as demonstrated in her first novel Dogeaters, is further manifested in Dream Jungle: the mixture of real-life and fictitious elements, disjointed narrating voices, and gossip-driven fragmentary style distinguish her work from the realistic appeal and epic scope of nationalist writings.
Given the inadequacy of trying to understand Hagedorn’s writings based on a narrowly defined “national allegory,” this essay sets out in search of another model to characterize literature’s engagement with nation. Of pertinence is Neferti Xina M.
Tadiar’s attention to literature’s non-realistic experimental power. In Things Fall Away, Tadiar proposes to look to literature not “for typicality or representable reali-ties,” but for its “creative possibility” that “recasts lived experience so that it no longer takes the form of incontrovertible social fact but instead takes on the experimental character of literature itself ” (17). Moreover, she associates this creative force with literature’s capability to capture “historical experiences that ‘fall away’ from global capi-talist and nation-state narratives of development as well as from social movement nar-ratives of liberation” (5). Literature is compared to “cultural software” (16) that processes the subaltern, the supplementary, and the diminished—experiences exceeding and escaping the structure of the imperialist, the nationalist, and the social liberationist—
with a view to making “other social relations available as potential bases of new polit-ical movements” (11).
Tadiar does not include Hagedorn in her discussion. Yet Hagedorn’s attempt to appropriate historical events into fictional juxtaposition and imaginative transposi-tion makes Dream Jungle a tangible example of what Tadiar describes as literature’s
“tangential” engagement with the Philippine “hegemonic and counterhegemonic forms of political agency” (5). In fact, the title “dream jungle” resonates with Tadiar’s emphasis on the force of “dreams” in structuring social realities (Fantasy 22-24). To grasp the mechanism and consequences of Hagedorn’s “dreams,” this essay draws on the idea of “stealing,” more precisely “purloining,” to comprehend Dream Jungle’s
imaginative intervention into the configuration of the Philippines. I allude to the con-cept of “stealing/purloining” at three levels. First, the national status of the Philippines has been “stolen” by imperial forces not only during the years of colonization but also after the Philippines has formerly declared independence. Second, the Philippine archipelago has been known for its thieves that constitute a perpetual, albeit margin-alized, “banditry” force against colonial control (Ileto 115-16). Being aware of and weaving these two “stealing” forces into her text, Hagedorn demonstrates her resist-ance to both imperial ideology and nationalist constraint by further “purloining” a striking moment of Philippine “neo-coloniality” in her novel. Jacques Lacan’s reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” which elaborates “purloining” not simply as “stealing” but as “prolonging” and “extending” through displaced social relations and shifting discursive structure, offers a critical light to see the Philippines as not simply stolen by empirical forces, but rather “prolonged”—extended—through a complex series of imperial intrusions, translocal displacements, and encounters.
T
he constitution of the Philippines has been inseparable from its colonial histories.The result of three centuries of Spanish colonization, a half-century of American rule, and the Japanese occupation during World War II, the Philippines and its peo-ple, in the words of Vicente L. Rafael, are “permeated with foreign origins, their his-torical realities haunted by the ghosts of colonialism” (9). In the 1970s, the Philippines still struggled under the remains of empire. Not only did the Marcos government rely heavily on the United States’ monetary and military assistance, but Philippine society was permeated by imported Western media and commodities. Also part of this
“imperial haunting,” though less obvious than the neo-colonial presence of the West, is the fact that the idea and contour of the Philippine “nation” is itself an imperial inheritance. First, it was Spanish rule that gave the initially disparate islands a carto-graphical unity, not to mention that the archipelago was named after King Philip II of Spain. Besides, American imperialism, under the guise of benevolent tutelage, instilled in Philippine national formation a “mimicry” nature. Nationalism became an ideal because it was taken as a norm of modernization, a sign of civilization.
The complicity of imperialism and Philippine nationalism vividly played out in the events of the Tasaday and Apocalypse Now. Claimed for a time as a previously unknown “Stone Age” tribe discovered in the remote Mindanao rain forest in 1971, the Tasaday became an overnight sensation, its images widely distributed to an inter-national audience, most notably through NBC News, National Geographic’s pictorial report, and journalist John Nance’s best-seller The Gentle Tasaday. Yet the discovery also raised questions and doubts. Elizalde, the alleged “discoverer” of the Tasaday and
the head of the Private Association for National Minorities (PANAMIN), strictly reg-ulated outsiders’ entry into the rain forest. In 1972 Marcos ordered a 46,299-acre patch of jungle closed as a reserve for the Tasaday, and public access to the tribe was completely forbidden after 1974. Immediately after the overthrow of the Marcos regime in 1986, the Tasaday again grabbed international attention, this time no longer as the anthropological find of the century, but as an elaborate hoax perpetrated by PANAMIN and the Marcos administration. The question of whether the Tasaday formed an isolated, cave-dwelling Palaeolithic group or were local people hired to portray the ultraprimitive has since become a matter of debate in the field of anthro-pology, in the media, and among politicians.2
In hindsight it becomes clear that it is too reductive to try to prove that the Tasaday were either genuine or fake. Since its beginning, the Tasaday event has been more than an anthropological inquiry into a tribal minority. At stake was the com-plicity between the Marcos administration, the United States government, and the global media. First, the discovery of the primitive tribe, and the ensuing Philippine governmental policy to protect the tribespeople, effectively bolstered the “human face” of the Marcos administration and distracted international attentions from the martial law declared in 1972 (Hamilton-Paterson). Second, by proclaiming a reserve around the Tasaday, Marcos might secure, in the name of protecting minor tribes, his and Elizalde’s “exclusive rights” to the natural resources of the area (Berreman 31).
Most essentially, the Tasaday as a “pure” Filipino indigenous group “untouched by all foreign influences” was utilized as “a rallying point for cultural supernationalists”
(Lynch and Llamzon 12). Marcos and Imelda were known for their fascination with anthropology and tribal Filipinos: they were “obsessed with the search for a common Filipino identity, a link with an ur-Filipino” (Hemley 83). The idyllic image of the
“gentle Tasaday” that lived in “a Garden of Eden” (Lindbergh ix), with no hunting skills and no concept of war, became the perfect embodiment of the nation—“the ideal ‘Filipinitude’” needed for conceiving a Philippine identity free from the archi-pelago’s long-term colonial history (Dumont 265).
Ironically, the construction and distribution of this “ur-Filipino” image of the Tasaday was largely the work of Western media. Known and usually criticized for his
“hunger for publicity” (Hemley 36), his taking press as “more important than the sci-entists” (39), Elizalde brought news crews and celebrities such as the aviator Charles Lindbergh and the Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida into the rain forest, generating a
“media rush”: “A television crew had already arrived, soon followed by a myriad of snapshotters, newshounds, special correspondents and free-lancers of all varieties”
(Dumont 263). Or, as Robin Hemley describes, “by 1972 camera crews had choppered
in with dizzying frequency to the Tasaday’s forest enclave, reporters sometimes out-numbering the small group of cave dwellers” (7). Displacing anthropological studies, journalists’ languages dominated the scene and reduced the Tasaday to sellable images and recognizable icons.3
In addition to being fodder for international media, the Tasaday also appealed to American interests in Asia. Jean-Paul Dumont observes that the whole publicity of the event took “American opinion” as “the intended target” (266). Not only was the Tasaday cast as the United States’ humble, self-satisfied, and peace-loving Asian other in contrast to the war-mongering Vietcong, but Dumont also notes the temporal syn-chronization of the discovery of the Tasaday and the American intervention in Vietnam: “Elizalde encountered the Tasaday for the first time on June 7, 1971. Then, on June 13, 1971, the New York Times began publishing the ‘Pentagon Papers,’ which unveiled the plans of the American intervention in Vietnam. In March and April of 1972, when the American reporters were at work on Mindanao among the Tasaday, the aerial bombing of North Vietnam was about to be resumed [. . .] In 1975, Nance’s book was published, the year when South Vietnam fell, an event the American public witnessed on television.” The media’s representation of the two events fed on each other so well that Dumont claims that there was “more than a mere coincidence”
(267). The United States government welcomed the news of the Tasaday for diplo-matic and military strategic reasons. First, the news of the Tasaday diverted the world’s attention from the ongoing unrest in the Philippines, which would otherwise bear witness to the failure of American tutelage. Second, given the fact that the Philippines had turned into an ally of the United States in the latter’s military venture in Vietnam, “domestic unrest in the Philippines looked almost as bad for Washington as for Marcos” because the United States needed the Philippines to be “a loyal, stable aircraft carrier moored within easy reach of Vietnam” (Hamilton-Paterson).
The media’s Tasaday zeal faded after 1975. The same year witnessed the end of the Vietnam War. The Philippines nonetheless remained a part of the American popular imagination, this time most dramatically through the archipelago’s collusion with Hollywood in the filming of Apocalypse Now. The helicopters in this American film were provided by Marcos himself. The monetary deal between Coppola and Marcos is described in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, a documentary by Eleanor Coppola: “The production will pay the military thousands of dollars per day, as well as overtime for the Philippine pilots. In return Francis can use Marcos’s entire fleet of helicopters as long as they are not needed to fight the communist insurgency in the South.” This deal underscored the Philippines’ subsidiary position vis-à-vis the billion-dollar Hollywood industry. The fact that the president’s helicopters were
instruments of both domestic political cleansing and imperial cultural invasion pushes one further to comprehend these as two sides of the same coin.
For Americans, the Philippines proved a convenient extension of their Hollywood film studio. The archipelago provided the backdrop, the props, and its people as cheap extras. A cinematic adaption of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now is known for its brilliant conjunction of Conrad’s critique of European imperialism in Africa and the questioning of the American military inter-vention in Vietnam. One irony, however, is that the film and Eleanor Coppola’s doc-umentary reflect little on their own participation in the American imperial project in the Philippines. As Amy Kaplan points out, “Coppola might be seen to counter American exceptionalism, by scripting the war through Conrad’s text, and placing the Vietnam War in relation to the history of European imperialism. The documentary on the making of the film, however, which stands awkwardly between an exposé and a publicity reel, refuses recognition of the film’s complicity with the imperial context that enables its production” (18).
The Coppolas’s criticism of American imperialism has its limits. It illustrates what Alan Punzalan Isaac observes as the “unrecognizability of the Filipino and the Philippines” in the American racial and imperial imaginary (xvi). Indeed, the Coppolas not only remained silent about the American imperial history in the Philippines, but also rendered the archipelago invisible by figuring it as a geographi-cal substitute for Vietnam/Cambodia. This invisibility, at first sight, is very different from the hyper-visibility the Tasaday discovery gave to the Philippine indigene. A careful scrutiny of the two events nonetheless reveals that both Hollywood and the Western media were self-serving in representing the Philippines. As Coppola trans-formed, through cinematic power, the intractable Philippine landscape into a scenic jungle highlighted by special napalm explosion effects, the media involved in the Tasaday controversy reduced the archipelago’s indigenous cultures to simplistic signs and one-dimensional identities.
W
eaving the Tasaday discovery and the filming of Apocalypse Now into Dream Jungle, Hagedorn is fully aware of the imperialism evoked by the two events.Dream Jungle tackles the ugly side of imperial forces. Created after the image of Elizalde, Zamora López de Legazpi is a colonizer, albeit a belated and ambivalent one. He is known for his bad reputation as a playboy, mixing with different women and wielding power with money inherited from his father. The President in the novel, moreover, is a cruel and calculating politician, who enjoys “silly TV shows” and continues to “believe in the democratic process,” despite the corruption of his government and the unrest of
society (56). Like the real-life Marcos, he turns Zamora’s discovery of the Taobo (read:
“Tasaday”) into “a public-relations coup” by establishing “the President’s Indigenous Minority People’s Foundation” (59). In addition to the descendant of Spanish tycoons and the domestic despot, the “genius” director Tony Pierce and his filming crew are pre-sented as arrogant media imperialists (213). Producing the Hollywood hit film Napalm Sunset, a fictionalized version of Apocalypse Now, the Hollywood filmmakers “walk around here like they own the place,” among whom “Pierce is the worst. Think this country’s nothing but a backdrop for his movie. The people don’t matter, except when they service him and his family” (179).
Dream Jungle teases out the neo-colonial dilemma confronting the Philippines.
Yet the novel does not stop at a critique of imperialism. Instead of writing within the binary confine of the colonial versus the postcolonial, or the imperial versus the national, Hagedorn fleshes out the events of the Tasaday and Apocalypse Now with fic-tional details of the local and the subaltern. While every party involved in the two events attempted to “steal” a piece of the Philippines for its own benefit, Hagedorn in a way also “steals” the two events, yet hers is not so much an imperial “stealing” as an imaginative “purloining.” To clarify the word “purloin” as it is used in Poe’s short story, Lacan draws on the Oxford English Dictionary to elaborate on the meaning of the word’s two parts. The first part is the prefix ,” as found in “purpose,” “pur-chase,” and “purport”; it derives from the Latin “pro-,” carrying the meaning of
“located in front of,” “projecting,” or “substituting for.” The second part, “loin,” is from the Old French word loinger, which, according to Lacan, does not mean au loin (far off), but au long de (alongside). To “purloin” is thus “mettre de côté (to set aside) or, to resort to a colloquialism which plays off the two meanings, mettre à gauche (to put on the left side [literally] and to tuck away)” (“Seminar” 20, emph. Lacan’s).4Change of location is essential to Lacan’s conception of “purloin.”
When something is “purloined,” it is tucked away, no longer clearly available or visible, because it is taken out of its original place, “displaced” or perhaps “misplaced.”
An object usually “disappears” not because it is “gone” (no longer existing), but because it is “misplaced,” not put in the location where we assume it should appear.
Lacan explains this by giving the example of a mislaid book in library: “Even if the book were on an adjacent shelf or in the next slot, it would be hidden there, however visible it may seem there” (“Seminar” 17). The seeming disappearance of the book is due to the change of its structural relationship with other books. Similarly, it is by transposing the Philippines into new imaginative contours that Hagedorn “purloins”
the Philippines.
Dream Jungle juxtaposes materials, links up characters, and relocates plots. The importance of structure or “syntax”—where an object is, what it is next to, and how it is linked to others—is as clear in Dream Jungle as in Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” The experienced Prefect in Poe’s story believes that he has searched “every where” (435, emph. Poe’s)—“every nook and corner of the premises in which it is possible that the paper can be concealed,” but the letter is nowhere to be seen (434). The problem is not that it is no longer inside the apartment of the already-identified thief, Minister D, but that one cannot really discover or “grasp” a space without first understanding its “syn-tax,” which is in turn determined by Minister D’s logic, his way of placing one thing next to another. In this case the letter is in effect not “concealed” but put in a letter-rack, a place so obvious that it is never expected or imagined by the Prefect. According to Lacan, the Prefect fails to see the letter because he sticks too much to his previous experiences, that is, because of his “lack of imagination” (“Seminar” 12).
Dream Jungle juxtaposes materials, links up characters, and relocates plots. The importance of structure or “syntax”—where an object is, what it is next to, and how it is linked to others—is as clear in Dream Jungle as in Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” The experienced Prefect in Poe’s story believes that he has searched “every where” (435, emph. Poe’s)—“every nook and corner of the premises in which it is possible that the paper can be concealed,” but the letter is nowhere to be seen (434). The problem is not that it is no longer inside the apartment of the already-identified thief, Minister D, but that one cannot really discover or “grasp” a space without first understanding its “syn-tax,” which is in turn determined by Minister D’s logic, his way of placing one thing next to another. In this case the letter is in effect not “concealed” but put in a letter-rack, a place so obvious that it is never expected or imagined by the Prefect. According to Lacan, the Prefect fails to see the letter because he sticks too much to his previous experiences, that is, because of his “lack of imagination” (“Seminar” 12).