Representation and Spectacle in Dogeaters

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Desiring Images: Representation and Spectacle in Dogeaters Myra Mendible

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Florida Gulf Coast University Published online: 26 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Myra Mendible (2002) Desiring Images: Representation and Spectacle in Dogeaters , Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 43:3, 289-304, DOI: 10.1080/00111610209602186 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00111610209602186

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Desiring Images: Representation and Spectacle in Dogeaters

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To the extent that necessity is socially dreamed, the dream becomes necessary. The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modem society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep. - G u y Debord, The Society of the Spectacle T h e following description of an Imelda Marcos “performance” during a 1965 political rally in Manila suggests the unstable boundaries between politics and spectacle, authority and image making, captivation and captivity: Led to the microphone, she touches it, and prepares to sing her winning repertoire. [. . .] She has lost weight considerably I. . .] it is a slight and vulnerable back that rises above the scoop of her neckline. [. . .] She knows the excitement of power-the crowd waits, like a trapped and unresisting prey, for Imelda to begin using that power. [. . . TJhe old charisma, with its look of suffering, potent tonight as never before, the brilliance of beauty commingling with the brilliance of pain, the haunted, agonized, tragic look encircling the plaza and holding her audience in thrall. (qtd. in Polotan, 59-60) By playing on powerful images and myths produced and nurtured by a ruling elite, power represents itself to a spectator society in captivating and familiar forms. Spectators at these events willingly submit to political manipulation and control: Imelda’s meticulous performance evokes images of feminine vulnerability and subjugation that both mediate and reflect (her husband’s) political authority. Whereas Imelda’s female beauty appears to deflect state power, her “tragic look” and “slight and vulnerable” body narrate the people’s history of oppresSPRING, VOL. 43, NO. 3

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sion. Imelda’s performance is textualized to the degree that it is inscribed by a Philippine history of colonization and repressive regimes and loaded with patriotic (patriarchal) imagery. Her body is the locus of conflicting signs, both vulnerable and powerful; as the national text through which subjects reflect their own desires and authorize their own subjugation, Imelda lulled her “trapped and unresisting prey” into political slumber. Set in Marcos-era Manila, Dogeaters reflects Jessica Hagedorn’s attempt to “subvert, exorcise, celebrate” the contradictory myths and desires that play on the Filipino sensibility.’ The text offers a kaleidoscopic view of a Philippine society shaped by radically conflicting social, political, and economic interests. In this schizoid codtext, religious and cinematic images, folk myths, public displays, and private desires overlap and vie for power. Mass-produced images provide the stuff of collective dreams, cultural memories, and political control. Hagedorn’s cast of voyeurs and dreamers is caught in the spectator’s bind that Debord has so aptly described: “the more [the spectator] contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he under-. stands his own existence and his own desires” (para. 30). In Hagedorn’s spectacle-text, characters exist in a disjointed, irreconcilable, and insubstantial present where truths are constructed or altered at will, and the only nearly reliable source of information is the fsismis (gossip) disseminated by the locals. Dogeaters reflects the conditions of its own production by incorporating postmodem features such as disruptive intertextual dialogues, temporal and causal dislocations, unreliable subjectivities, and historical pastiche. The story unfolds through an array of speakers, various textual fragments, and seemingly disconnected scenarios and events. These techniques make a display of the text’s instability and artifice. Written on her own terms “in the English I reclaim as a Filipino: the English mixed with Spanish and Tagalog,”* the text includes “fragments of overheard dialogue, newspaper clippings, found historical documents, soap opera plots, the script for a radio melodrama” (Conference 148). Hagedorn’s representation dramatizes the confusion and complexity of a nation poised in the balance of postmodern and postcolonial conditions. The narrative ironically posits the problem of representation in a cultural-political environment where that which is made visibly “true” is precisely most insubstantial and suspect. In so doing, Hagedorn comments on the socioeconomicagenda that underlies postmodern image production. Postmodernism signals the dissolution of prescribed social meaning into a vast playground of competing images; it dissociates cause and effect and concentrates “on the seductiveness of means and a concomitant disavowal of ends” (Polan 59). This disavowal signals the instability of the claims of knowledge at the present time, but more important, it insists on the temporary, provisional, and indeterminate status of all meanings and subjectivities. Revolutionary incentives thereby appear as insignificant (spectacular) gestures. The desire to (re)constitute or (re)present a coherent sense of self, history, or culture is dismissed as part and parcel of the world of the simulacrum. 290

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In Hagedorn’s Marcos-era Manila, the spectacle of culture actually preempts cultural recuperation: Dozens of Filipino construction workers perish constructing a theatre that will showcase a dictator’s devotion to foreign films; an aspiring actor named Orlando who calls himself Romeo is randomly cast as subversive and assassinated; a male prostitute supports his heroin addiction by selectively playing out exotic stereotypes for his Western clientele; and impoverished women shed tears for the hapless heroine of a daily radio show. While their dictators flourish on the world stage, Hagedorn’s characters dream themselves to be actors in Hollywood movies, often confusing cinematic events with personal memories; they produce themselves in the image of another’s desire, watch themselves reenacting a living performance, or attempt to read the shadows that inhabit their surroundings. In Hagedorn’s spectacle-text, characters remain “happy and lost” in artificial memories and ill-fitting dreams sent from abroad, conceding power to those who run the show. They emerge as representations of a people set adrift without a decipherable cultural past in a nation “evolved from one of the world’s longest spans of Western imperial rule” (Karnow 9); a nation where history is recounted by a popular saying: “Filipinos spent four centuries in a Spanish convent and fifty years in Hollywood.” Although postmodern aesthetics tends to privilege spectacle over meaning, the production of spectacle assumes, in itself, an ideological function. For those Third World nations historically located on the receiving end of naming and signification projects, the adoption of a postmodern stance offers, in Dana Polan’s apt description of spectacle, “an imagistic surface of the world as a strategy of containment against any depth of involvement with that world” (63). Still enmeshed in the various institutional, social, and epistemological mechanisms installed and sustained by a signifying system of Western supremacy, the Philippines exemplifies Stuart Hall’s remark that “postmodernism is about how the world dreams itself ‘American”’ (46). While Americans may be increasingly enamored of (our own) advertising images of exotic others as novelty ethnic commodities, neocolonial culture tends to import and internalize American images in lieu of producing meaningful Filipino models of identity and social change. The Philippines may have been shaped “in America’s image” as Stanley Karnow proposes (a self-image that still undermines efforts to decolonize the Filipino psyche), but it exists in a Third-World economic reality where first-world images are indeed simulacra-models for which originals never e ~ i s t e d . ~ Hagedorn has remarked that she, like most Filipinos, “was brainwashed from infancy to look outside the indigenous culture for guidance and in~piration.”~ [We were] taught that the label “Made in the U S A . ” meant automatic superiority, taught that Filipinos are inherently lazy, shiftless, and undependable. Our only talent, it seems, is for mimicry. (Conference 147) In her debut novel, Hagedorn exploits this professed talent for mimicry. While transgressing the limits of its genre, Dogeaters foregrounds the act of representaSPRING, VOL. 43, NO. 3

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tion as both semiotic and mimetic activity. As a performance artist, Hagedorn brings to her work an attention to visual imagery that spectacularizesthe “chaotic, hybrid, and exhilarating” culture of her homeland (Conference 146). The multiple narrators throughout the text are engaged in a process of self-creation that mirrors the act of writing. Their representations reflect the fictive nature of a postmodern moment that in Baudrillard‘s words is “dominated by images.” Consequently, they expose the shifting and unsteady bases of all representation and mimic the performative will of postmodern image making. The multiple narrators subvert the authority of any master script and offer their Western readers a fascinating and confusing display of “exotic” subjects.As self-conscious,authorized spectacle, the text mimics a postmodern gesture of deferred meaning. It represents the problematic status of social critique in a postmodern environment where “oppositions between surface and depth, the authentic and the inauthentic, the imaginary and the real, signifier and signified seem to have broken down” (Rogin 9). Hagedorn sets the stage for the events in Dogeaters with an excerpt from Jean Mallat’s authoritative (presumably factual) 1846 study, The Philippines. In a tone that recalls Trinh Minh-ha’s description of anthropology as “a chatty talk. [. . .] finally better defined as ‘gossip”’ (68), Mallat explains that Filipinos “have the greatest respect for sleeping persons, and the greatest curse they can pronounce against anybody is to wish that he die in his sleep.” He confides to his readers that Filipinos “cannot abide the idea of waking a sleeping person.” With this opening remark, Hagedorn immediately sets in motion a critique of collective passivity-a critique that invariably comments on the political usefulness of pacifying spectacles. Mallat’s confidential tone invites the reader’s gaze: “They” are the object of scrutiny, the exotic spectacle presented for our information and knowledge, the natives as imagined (theorized) by the “nativist.” In this way, we are invited to attend the world of the text as spectacle. Where should the story begin, then, but at the movies, where dreaming is a social event? The opening pages of the novel initiate and confirm this desire for collective dreaming: It is 1956 in Manila’s “Foremost! First-Run! English Movies Only!” Avenue Theater. A girl named Rio sits in the balcony and watches All That Heaven Allows. She is captivated, along with her rowdy cousin Pucha, by this celluloid version of Americans in love: handsome Rock Hudson and rich Jane Wyman in Cinemascope and Technicolor, playing out their love affair against an enviably “perfect picture-book American tableau.” Rio confesses her fascination for Gloria Talbott, who plays Wyman’s spoiled daughter-her “brash style” and “casual arrogance seems inherently American, modem, and enviable” (4). As the first of three subjective narrators in the novel, Rio Gonzaga is both dreamer and spectator. She dreams that someday she is “going to make movies” rather than act in them (241). Yet throughout the pages of her narrative, she assumes the attitude of the spectator, observing but not acting on her environment. Her tone remains detached, matter-of-fact; she eventually leaves the Philippines and moves to America. Rio’s descriptions move easily between the shadowy 292

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world of her family and the world of the cinema. She watches the spectacle of competing images that make up her world, the familiar actors on screen and off, and tells us what she sees. She sees her noncommittal father-adept in the politics of indeterminacy-acting according to the latest script of power, adhering to the belief that “adaptability is the simple secret of survival” (9). Freddie Gonzaga is an opportunist who “makes pronouncements but rarely lives up to them” (7), a Filipino who nevertheless “refers to himself as a ‘guest’ in his own country” (7). Rio’s father has mastered the art of dissembling; he is a political and emotional chameleon, a mestizo who admittedly feels no connection or loyalty to his Filipino nationality. Like his brother, Cristobal, Freddie knows how to adapt his image according to the needs of the moment. Thus, his postmcdern survival kit includes a belief “in paying bribes” and in “dual citizenships, dual passports, as many allegiances to as many countries as possible at any one given time” (7). Rio also sees her “Rita Hayworth mother” constantly struggling to maintain appearances. On the one hand, Dolores Logan Gonzaga is a beautiful woman with “smooth skin the color of yellow-white ivory” (82), the sign of her privileged status. On the other, she is of mixed heritage, ashamed of her darker ancestry-the daughter of an American named Whitman and a small, brown-skinned Filipina peasant who is kept out of sight when guests visit the house. Dolores Gonzaga lives for her beautification rituals, which include cold creams, moisturizers, “daily naps with masks of mashed avocado, mashed sinkamas, and a red clay from France smeared on her face” (82). She fashions herself more or less on the image of Rita Hayworth and every couple of months has her black hair tinted with auburn highlights to keep up the illusion. Even Dolores’s mysterious mauve-colored bedroom is designed so that “Whenever she looks in any of her mirrors it is always night and she is always beautiful” (84). Rio’s representation of her grandmother, however, conflicts radically with the pseudorealistic world of her parents. Her Lola Narcisa’s domain is the past; she is a literal representation of the mysterious and repressed world of Filipino tradition. In Lola Narcisa’s room, traces of an indigenous identity survive alongside colonial religious imagery. Next to the crucifix above her grandmother’s bed, Rio tells us, hangs a framed painting of the Madonna and child: “The Madonna is depicted as a native woman wearing the traditional patadyong; the infant Jesus has the brown skin of my Lola Narcisa and straight black hair” (10).In her grandmother’s room, Rio and the female servants gather to participate in a modem ritual: They listen and weep to the nightly episode of a radio soap opera. Rio cries ”unabashedly” during these cathartic visits. “It’s a delicious tradition,” she admits, “the way we weep without shame” (12). As Rio leaves the room eact: night, her Lola Narcisa remains, “[hlappy and lost in her radio reverie.” Rio’s narration takes the reader on a spectacular tour of her surroundings that focuses on the appearances and gestures of others with minimal commentary. In fact, Rio seems bound to experience life as a series of film clips: The familial, bourgeois world she describes is constantly intruded upon by flashes of cinSPRING, VOL. 43, NO. 3

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ematic images and projections. In this way, Hagedorn intentionally confuses and distracts readers, causing them to experience the conflicting imagery that informs and invades Rio’s world. This technique also suggests that Rio fluctuates between a desire to create her own story and the impulse to retreat into the alluring projections of the spectacle. In one scene, Rio sneaks off with her cousin Pucha to see A Place in the Sun, a film condemned by the Archdiocese of Manila as obscene. Although she admits that they are “bewildered by the movie, which is probably too American” for them, Rio decides that “even if I don’t understand it, I like this movie” (15). Rio translates the images she sees projected on the screen into textual imagery, conveying the magic of Elizabeth Taylor’s “breathtaking face [. . .] imploring a forbidden kiss” or “Montgomery Clift’s shoulder in giant close-up on the movie screen.” Although she cannot make sense of these images in relation to her own surroundings, she explains to the reader that the lovers in this movie “are drunk with their own beauty and love, that much I understand” (16). These free-floating images give way to her recollection of another scene in another movie: Jane Wyman bends over a comatose Rock Hudson. She tells him she loves him, she will be with him forever in the rustic cottage by the frozen lake. He finally opens his eyes. [. . . TJhepower of Jane Wyman’s love has cured Rock Hudson and pulled him from death. (16) Most significant, Rio’s representation of a representation then merges with the actual memory of her grandfather Whitman lying in bed at the American Hospital. She tries to reconcile the opposing images by envisioning “Lola Narcisa bending over my grandfather’s bed like Jane, an angel of mercy whispering so softly in his ear that none of us can make out what she is saying” (16). Rio momentarily casts Lola Narcissa in the role of saintly mediator+mpowered through her virtue to grant miracles. But Rio is unable to sustain this false representation of her grandmother, who despite a lifetime of self-abnegation modeled on radio soaps and Catholic dogma, will never achieve such status. Rio’s images become progressively more ludicrous, incongruous, and disillusioning: “He barks like a dog, grunts and sputters like an old car. My grandmother wipes the drool from the comers of his mouth while my Rita Hayworth mother, Dolores Logan Gonzaga, stands as far away from her father’s bed as possible. She seems terrified and bewildered by this image of her dying father” (16). Rio, like her mother, is confused by this contrast between the “pristine illusion” of the film and the real hospital room where “there is only our sense of foreboding, heightened by the grayness of bedsheets and medical uniforms” (17). The juxtaposition of images connoting American femininity and power (Jane Wyman as the “rich widow,” in Cinemascope) with visions of a “shriveled brown woman” solemnly awaiting her husband’s death accentuates the disparity between image and reality-and the sway of one over the other. 294

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In fact, before Rio’s own referent for the experience of dying can be actualized (represented), she forces herself to confront the painful memory and resist the intrusive power of displaced images. The moment she decides to “shut [her] eyes and the movie projector goes off in [her] head,” Rio regains control of her narrative. Instead of a death accompanied by “[slentimental music [. . .] swelling to a poignant crescendo as the closing credits roll along” (16), there is an “ancient Philco radio [. . .] hissing and humming to my Lola Narcisa, its dreadful music somehow soothing her” (17). The scene concludes with the horrifying shrieks of a dying old man-her memory of the actual event. In this way, the “truth” of the experience is realized and confronted: “His shrieks [. . .] the way his body twists and jerks epileptically on the hospital bed, is unbearable.” But more important, Rio’s text then grants her grandmother a voice that asserts, if only for an instant, Lola Narcisa’s own authority: “DON’T TOUCH HIM!” my Lola Narcisa screams in English. [. . .] Everyone stops dead in their tracks, stunned that the shriveled brown woman has so loudly and finally spoken” (17). It is interesting that both Rio and her grandmother ultimately choose to elude this “unbearable” reality and forfeit their claim to authority. Lola Narcissa’s last words ask only that her husband be allowed to sleep: “If you wake him, he dies. [. . .I Better to leave him dreaming” (17). Rio resumes the attitude of the spectator, bound to recall a mediated version of Whitman’s death. In a later scene, she chooses to remember her mother’s anesthetized description of the event: “He died in his sleep, she said. [. . .] He never woke up. It was a good thing-he didn’t suffer, she was sure of it” (57). Rio’s narrative is also interrupted by passages that encapsulate the latest episodes in the week‘s radio drama. These episodes invariably appeal to the impoverished female listeners who defer their own misery by vicariously experiencing the misfortunes of the gentle heroine. “According to my father,” Rio confides, “Love Letters appeals to the lowest common denominator” (1 1). In fact, the Gonzagas refuse to listen to Tagalog songs or attend Tagalog movies for the same reason: as traces of an indigenous culture, they are associated with what her Uncle Agustin calls the “bakya crowd.” These vestigial signs of Filipino cultural identity are classed with the inferior, the subordinate, the crude, the ingenuous, the effeminate. Accordingly, the episodes are always didactic, tragic, and predictable. “Just like our Tagalog movies,” Rio explains, “the serial is heavy with pure love, blood debts, luscious revenge, the wisdom of mothers, and the enduring sorrow of Our Blessed Virgin Barbara Villanueva,” the popular Filipina actress who stars in the show (12). This reference to the “blessed” Villanueva ironically conflates cinematic and religious influences: she is movie idol and feminine icon-both ideologically constructed figures to be worshipped and emulated. Through the spectacle of female suffering, these “didactic, tragic, and predictable” serial plots teach the rewards of suffering and endurance. They are aimed at a predominantly poor and female audience seeking their own redemption through a familiar iconography of female martyrdom. SPRING, VOL. 43, NO. 3

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In the Philippine context, these popular melodramas, like their cinematic counterparts, serve as allegories of neocolonialist, racist, or sexist oppre~sion.~ In her discussion of Marcos-era cinema and popular culture, Gina Marchetti argues that unlike their Hollywood models, popular Philippine “romances, melodramas, or ‘women’s pictures”’ are expressions of political discontent and often give a voice to a marginalized audience. The female protagonists in those representations usually serve “as symbols of oppression, sacrifice, and perpetual victimization, while also acting as sex objects that reify relations of dominance and subordination” (25). In this way, political and economic power relations are reenacted through stories that appear to be “simple chronicles of women’s miseries-ostensibly without allegorical significance” (25). What is most relevant to my discussion here, however, is Marchetti’s analysis of several contemporary Philippine films that self-consciously consider the role of the film industry and the Catholic church in sustaining the dominant ideology and the power it represents. These films tend to explore the ways that both institutions generate emotions, values, and aspirations that “perpetuate the status quo by creating dead-end dreams” (29). In Marchetti’s view, dissident Filipino film makers such as Lino Brocka recognize the power of ideology to limit and mold thought to such an extent “that oppression seems not only natural and inevitable, but desirable and ultimately fulfilling” (29). Accordingly, Rio’s intertextual narrative includes encapsulations of the weekly episodes of Love Letters. One story, for example, casts the Filipino icon of femininity, Barbara Villanueva, as a beautiful servant in the home of a wealthy landowner and his wife, “a haughty mestiza” (note the class and racial implications here). Inevitably, the young servant is seduced and impregnated by the master’s son, Mario-who is conveniently shipped off to military school. After a series of mishaps and betrayals, the “beautiful young servant is cruelly thrown out of the house on a stormy night” (12). The episode concludes with the abandoned and scorned servant girl awaiting “the birth of her child, meekly resigned to the fact that Mario refuses to see her” (13). Like others included throughout the text, this episode serves as a model for female submission and suffering. It articulates the dependent status of economically and socially disempowered women, particularly, and serves as a metaphor for other forms of class or racial exploitation. The female icon of subjugation, on the one hand, sanctifies and thus helps perpetuate the role of the victim. On the other hand, she provides the victimized and marginalized segments of the population a medium for their discontent-a referent grounded in their own historical and social conditions. In these woeful stories of seduction and betrayal, Rio sees her Lola Narcisa’s own marginalization and rejection. As she watches her “rapt grandmother” leaning close to the radio each night, “as if by doing so she can prolong her precious drama one more second” ( 1 9 , Rio understandably indulges with the other women in communal weeping and participates in a history of ritual behavior and patterns. 296

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But as the opening line of the chapter entitled “Epiphany” tells us, “[The Philippines] belongs to women who easily shed tears and men who are ashamed to weep” (105).The radio soaps, like the idealized visions presented through film and religion, can have a soporific effect-producing a kind of collective political unconscious. It is therefore not surprising that Hagedorn juxtaposes an episode of Love Letters with a scene depicting the interrogation and subsequent rape of a young woman. In the chapter entitled “The Famine of Dreams,” Hagedorn’s subtext (printed in bold face and enclosed in parentheses) consists of the “actual” events as recounted by a third-person narrator. The voices on the radio speak to the reader as the dominant text-distracting the reader from the “reality” of the event. Daisy Avila, the daughter of a liberal senator assassinated in the course of the book (a character modeled on the popular-also assassinated-Philippine leader Benigno Aquino) is detained for questioning by the sadistic General Nicasio Ledesma. As he prepares to question her, the general turns up the volume on the radio and asks Daisy in a patronizing tone whether she likes these “sentimental” radio dramas. In an ironic reference to the man he has had killed, General Ledesma tells Daisy, “Your late father and I shared a mutual respect for the remarkable culture of this country” (212). While a voice on the radio exhorts the benefits of an eyedrop that has been “a trusted friend for over twenty-five years,” a burly man enters the room and begins to question Daisy. As the announcer’s voice returns to “remind listeners about Diet TruCola and Cherry TruCola, now readily available at supermarkets and sari-sari stores everywhere” (2 1 3 , Daisy is shown photos that document, in the general’s words, the “temble, temble fate” of recalcitrant detainees. The general takes pleasure in pointing “out the young man’s mashed testicles, the close-up of his gouged-out eyes” (215). Again, the scene is interrupted by the ever-present, ever-sorrowful voice of Barbara Villanueva-playing the role of the meek and suffering Magdalena in that night’s episode of Love Letters. The chapter finally concludes with images of Daisy’s victimization-images that serve to implicate the reader in a complicitous spectatorship: As Daisy is repeatedly and brutally raped by the general’s men, the general plays the role of spectator. He refuses “to participate, preferring to stand in one comer and watch” (emphasis mine 216). Nevertheless, during the rapes he whispers in Daisy’s ear, describing the torture devices that he will use on her “after his men are through” (216). This comment on the interactive and interdependent relationship between the spectacle and the spectator,the passive observer and the perpetrator forms the basis of Hagedorn’s social and political critique of representation.The manipulation and control of image production has obvious political implications.6 In societies where political leaders are known and loved for their ability to perform-not in the sense of executing actual improvements in their function as leaders but in the sense of appearing to do s w n o real changes need ever take place. Vicente Rafael’s provocative essay, “Patronage and Pornography: Ideology and Spectatorship in the Early Marcos Years,” argues that the Marcoses and their image makers set the SPRING, VOL. 43, NO. 3

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national stage to foster a spectator society-a nation of voyeurs who “did not have to articulate their interests but only had to be alert for the appearance of something that would show and tell them what they wanted” (284). Rafael’s astute discussion demonstrates the ways in which the First Couple successfully “imaged themselves not only as the ‘Father and Mother’ of an extended Filipino family” but managed to reconstruct history “in relation to prevalent ideas about the circulation and display of power in postcolonial Philippine society” (283). These ideas, or more precisely, these “images” of power, relied exclusively on the spectacle of political form emptied of content. Lacking the means or desire to achieve the “new” and “stronger” Philippine nation that Ferdinand promised, he nevertheless projected its image-an image sustained by a spectacular display of wealth and by apparent compliance with (and approval from) American. leaders. For her part, Imelda projected a stylish composure (modeled on Western fashions and tastes) and articulated a deference to Ferdinand (“Even if he asked me, I would never dare make a decision for him,”’ ) that appealed both to traditional notions of feminine propriety and to a more “modern” view of women. Imelda’s charm was [. . .] able to instigate and feed the wish for a kind of depoliticized community-one that would make the hierarchy between leaders and followers seem thoroughly benign. Through a series of stylized gestures and a standard repertoire of love songs in the vernacular, she created an atmosphere of generalized melancholia. [. . . H]er charm compelled others to stop thinking and start looking. (289) The compelling image of a beautiful woman domesticated by male authority and power, Rafael concludes, “reduced the people to spectators. [. . .] They looked at her while he spoke to them” (290). Political gatherings thus became “an occasion to become audiences in a spectacle in which the central figure was the First Lady” (289); the crowd was invariably more interested in Imelda’s appearance than in the content of Ferdinand’s speeches. The Marcos legacy, however, did not feed solely on a locally sponsored imagemaking apparatus. Gayatri Spivak has noted that “Nowadays, instead of guns, the most effective instruments that aid in the production of the ‘Third World’ are the technologies of the media” (1987; 86). American press releases declared Imelda Marcos, for example, a woman “[c]ommitted to the finer things in life” (Karnow 371), a promoter of Filipino art and culture. Karnow points out that she “spent a fortune on a cultural center, a luxury the crippled economy could scarcely afford, and launched a film festival featuring porno movies (371). In this way, she actually endorsed the “bomba” (porno) film market in the Philippines, a market that thrives on the depiction of female humiliation and subjugation. Yet her image as patron of the arts was so widely accepted that dancer Dame Margot Fonteyn, pianist Van Cliburn, and actor George Hamilton visited her in Manila at her request (and expense). Imelda’s performances for the American media were so effective, in fact, that after a visit to the United States in 1966, the Washington 298

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Post declared her “a blessing not only to her own country, but to the world” (Karnow 371). The blessed Imelda also regarded the United States as an icon to be emulated-though her idolatry was expressed in far less sanctifying imagery: On her return to Manila, she “erupted enviously to a Manila magazine, ‘Wow! In America, when they’re rich they’re really rich”’ (Karnow 371). These examples point to the role of mass media in sustaining what Debord refers to as spectacle-”the image of the ruling class.” In the chapter, “Bananas and the Republic,” Hagedorn suggests the complicitous relationship between repressive political authority and the sale and distribution of its various disguises. The president’s wife (modeled of course on Imelda Marcos) has granted an American journalist an interview. As a passive observer and recorder of the event, the young journalist “scribbles everything she says in his notebook” (218). Referred to throughout only as “Madame” (a sobriquet rife with implications), the president’s wife wears several “masks” or personas throughout the interview. While the journalist questions her about rumors of government-sanctionedtorture and assassination, Madame skillfully assumes a variety of ideologically sanctioned “feminine” roles that serve to establish her “innocence”: beautiful martyr, compassionate servant of the people, proud wife to “the leader of an emerging and prosperous nation,” and “mother of such intelligent, unspoiled children” (220). She posits herself a woman wrongly accused of being “extravagant,”of owning thousands of imported shoes. She defends herself with visual evidence, pointing out “the worn heel” on her shoe, the wear and tear of “at least five years.” She then assumes a presumably patriotic stance, claiming to buy only locally made shoes, remarking that she is “a nationalist when it comes to fashion” (217).*For the sake of her people, Madame implies, she is willing to accept an “inferior” product (“You know our famous expression, imported? It’s always been synonymous with ‘the best’ in my country” 217). She even complains that she is “cursed” by her beauty: “They’re all jealous, okay? My beauty has been used against me [. . .] I’ve been made to suffer-I can’t help it, okay! I was born this way” (218). Madame conveniently conflates truth and fiction, adeptly drawing on cinematic and textual images as evidence to support of her actions. In an especially telling remark, she defends her innocence by comparing herself to a fictional character: “If I were corrupt, I would look like that other movie, Dorian Gray” (220). Although living in evident luxury, Madame insists that she “sacrificed everything” to serve her country. Yet she seems oblivious to the incongruity of her remarks and reveals her own penchant for artifice by confiding that her real calling was the theatre: “I could have been an actress in one of those romantic musicals” (224). Apparently missing the implications of such an admission, she remarks, “What would life be without movies? Unendurable, di ba? We Filipinos, we know how to endure, and we embrace the movies. With movies, everything is okay lung” (224). In fact, she indulges in a postmodern logic that denies the existence of any real social or political problems: “There are no real issues. Issues are conflicts made up by the opposition to further tear my country apart” (221). SPRING, VOL. 43, NO. 3

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During her spectacular and ludicrous display, the journalist finds it difficult to ignore “a whirl of images” in his mind that contradict Madame’s representation: “grainy black and white footage of sobbing women, women kneeling over open graves, graves piled high with the corpses of mutilated men and children” (222). Although the disparity between Madame’s images of national harmony and prosperity radically conflict with other representations depicting images of mass poverty, despair, and repression, the journalist opts to play by the rules of the spectacle. Sickened by the charade before him, he nevertheless reconciles himself to the idea that “[tlhere is no war in [Madame’s] mind-as there is no real threat that could possibly exist in her husband’s mind.” The journalist sees through Madame’s performance, but he becomes her accomplice, for he plans only to “construct from this [interview] an intimate profile of Madame, startling and amusing.” If, as Baudrillard put it, the “real is that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction” (54), then the journalist’s “intimate profile” will be as “real” as any other. Reality, after all, is only a series of incoherent, contradictory, and ultimately meaningless texts. Rio’s own story remains inconclusive and unsubstantiated. She tells us that she eventually emigrates with her mother to the United States, but she remains “anxious and restless, at home only in airports” (247). She will never marry. Rio says that she stops going to church, but her narrative does not comment on whether she stops going to the movies-or, on whether she ever sees anything that resembles that projected image of the “rustic cottage by the frozen lake.” There is little to indicate that Rio will be able to make sense of her dreams in the American context, to finally shed the passive role of the spectator. In a gesture of postmodern skepticism that implicates Rio in the spectacle by highlighting her role as image maker, Hagedorn follows Rio’s last entry in the text with Pucha’s conflicting version. In Pucha’s text, Rio “got it all wrong.” Pucha actually accuses Rio of mixing “things up on purpose,” of trying to prove something by changing the past. Although Pucha admits that she “may not remember all the details” of the events, she takes it upon herself to deauthorize Rio’s text. Pucha reprimands Rio and destabilizes her narrative, telling her that “this much is true, you’d better wake up and accept it: [. . .]Your Lola Narcisa is dead. [. . .]Your father isn’t poor-how can you lie about such big things?” (249). She concludes with a remark that undermines Rio’s “truthfulness” entirely and thus invalidates her view of the world. “Nothing is impossible with that crazy imagination of yours,” Pucha claims, “but if I were you prima, I’d leave well enough alone” (249). The desire to “leave well enough alone” corresponds with a desire to forget history. By undermining or deferring the “truth” of any historical or cultural knowledge claims, postmodernism guarantees what Debord refers to as “a kind of eternity of noisy insignificance”(Comments 15). Debord argues that history’s domain is the past, the remembered totality of events: “With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stones, unchecked statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning” 300

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(16). Thus, although creating a space for repressed or marginalized histories by destabilizing the epistemological bases of power, postmodern spectaclealso denies those histories any credibility. Rio’s narrative exemplifies this strategy:As it exposes the shifting and unstable foundations of all representation, her text deauthorizes itself. By implicating the narrative in a postmodern game of indeterminacy and duplicity, Hagedorn dramatizes the paradoxical nature of the postmodern stance. Hagedorn’s critique of spectacle, in Craig Owens’ description of deconstructive art practices, recognizes the “unavoidablenecessity of participating in the very activity that is being denounced precisely in order to denounce it” (235). Epifano San Juan, Jr. reads Hagedorn’s text as an oblique commentary on the impact of U.S. imperial history on the Philippines. He refers to Dogeaters as the first novel that “seeks to render in a unique postmodernist idiom a century of U.S.-Philippine encounters” (1 18). In San Juan’s view, the novel is “a cinematext of a Third World scenario that might be the Philippines or any other contemporary neocolonial milieu processed in the transnational laboratories of Los Angeles or New York” (1 18). Refemng to the archipelago as America’s once “fortuitous tabula rusu for the doctrine of market liberalism and meritocracy,” San Juan contends that “[sluspended in a metonymy of dreams [. . .] the Lacanian realm of the Imaginary, the Filipino cannot possess any identity worth writing about. [. . .] He or she becomes simply a mimicry of the White American, a mock-image born of misrecognition” (123). But as Roland Barthes has noted, “where politics begins is where imitation ceases” (154). Hagedorn’s novel is not only a parodic reenactment of invasive and pervasive mass imagery in the Third World, but also more important, an indictment against collectivizedpassivity-a political reminder that, as Debord puts it, “Those who are always watching to see what happens next will never act: such must be the spectator’s condition” (Comments 22). The text points not to the insignificance or the autonomy of the sign but to its role in the production and maintenance of power. In Hagedorn’s text world, a postmodern delight for signification serves, not to resist hegemonic social and political forces but to captivate opposition. It furnishes a context in which spectacular signs of social and economic progress routinely take the place of material challenges and, more important, those signs are actually expected to mean nothing. What remain are a series of distractions-media events, lifestyle images, reenactments, political displays, simulated revolts. Hagedorn has remarked that the colonizers were so efficient in the Philippines that she cannot honestly name what is indigenous, “except to say animism, paganism, matriarchy: what was long ago, before the Spaniards with their imperialist Christianity, and before the Americans with their [. . . [insidious media” (Conference 147). In the brief entry that concludes her text, Hagedorn’s critique of signifying systems culminates in a feminist prayer that is both sacred and profane, a blessing and a curse. As its title suggests, the “Kundiman” chapter appeals to the power and spirit of woman9 Conjuring up sacred images of woman as a figure of redemption and hope, Hagedorn usurps and exploits these dominant SPRING, VOL. 43, NO. 3

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metaphors of Christian iconography to defame the name of the Father and impugn the rule of the patriarchy. These sacred images traditionally mediate female subjugation, but they also hold the promise of her empowerment. In Christian imagery, figurative representations of women glorify the virtue of passive suffering.’O In the symbolic order of the patriarchy, sacred images of woman articulate a narrative of sanctified oppression. Historical evidence suggests, however, that in the early phases of religious worship the female force was recognized as awesome, powerful, transcendent.” With the institutionalization of patriarchy, that imagery was necessarily constrained and reconfigured. Like her novel, Hagedorn’s prayer is an oblique expression of conflicting impulses. It is an ironic condemnation that asks the “mother of revenge” to “forgive us our sins but not theirs” (251) and that juxtaposes images of despair, terror, and violence with visions of forgiveness, love, and redemption. On the one hand, Hagedorn revises Christian imagery so that the Garden becomes a female dominion, a realm blessed with “the fruits of [her] womb: guavas, mangos, santol, mangosteen, durian” (251). Images of death and destruction suggest the legacy of a militaristic patriarchal system: “Spilled blood of innocents, dead by the bullet, the dagger, the arrow; dead by the slingshot of polished stones, dead by grenades, hunger and thirst [. . .] spilled blood of ignited flesh, exploded flesh; spilled blood of forbidden knowledge [. . .]” (251). The female icon of “perennial sorrow” has eyes that “are veiled and clouded by tears, veiled but never blinded,” and her garden is infested with serpents. At the same time, the prayer is a confession of guilt and complicity, a collective appeal for the Mother to “bless us [. . .] for we have sinned.” Religious spectacles historically provided the means to govern, pacify, or captivate a coIonized people. In the contemporary moment, ideological production is inextricably linked to image production, and spectacle remains a primary mechanism through which state powers project the appearance of consensual rule. Reconfigured as spectators, colonized subjects consent to another’s vision of reality. In the Third World, decolonizing projects imagine viable alternatives and social action grounded in their own historical-economic realities. But as Hagedorn’s text suggests, the spectators must not only dream but must act on their histories. Immobilized and silenced, they watch and wait to be represented and spoken for. Hagedorn’s novel reenacts the cost of such a position in a Third World context, where real oppression and real terror so often provide raw material for the business of spectacular production.

FLORIDA GULFCOASTUNIVERSITY NOTES 1 . Jessica Hagedom Conference presentation reprinted in CrificafFictions 148. Hereinafter cited as “Conference:’ 2. Hagedorn has noted that she “did not want to use a glossary” (Conference 148). Nevertheless,

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one reviewer complained that “it’s a pity Ms. Hagedorn’s editor did not insist” that she edit more of the “non-English expressions that pepper [her] pages.” To this reviewer, the “exoticisms become tiresome, more a nervous tic than a desire to make connection across the gulf of culture.” See Blanche d’Alpuget, “Philippine Dream Fest.” New York Times Book Review 25 March 1990: 1. 3. Although Karnow does much to deconstruct various grand narratives used to defend U.S. imperial objectives in the Philippines. Peter Tarr criticizes Kamow’s tendency to justify or idealize some of these without hesitation. See “Learning to Love Imperialism,” The Nation 5 June 1989: 779-84. 4. Hagedorn’s comments on the degraded status of indigenous languages in the Philippines are worth noting here: “We learned our native language, Tagalog, as if it were a foreign language. It was also the language used to address servants. English was the preferred language-expert, mock-English which everyone spoke mixed with Spanish slang. No one in my day ever thought to question why a so-called independent nation so close to China and Vietnam chose to conduct most of its schools, white-collar businesses, and even media in English” (In Conference, 147-48). 5. For a discussion of the family as allegorical symbol for the nation in contemporary Philippine films, see Robert Silberman, “Was Tolstoy Right? Family Life and the Philippine Cinema.” East-West Film Journal. 4.1 (1989): 69-78. 6. See Michael Rogin for an example of this relationship in the context of US. politics. 7. Imelda Marcos quoted in Polotan 56. 8. Stanley Karnow points out that after her escape from Manila in 1986, Imelda’s three thousand pairs of shoes were found to be “mostly French and Italian” (373). Nevertheless. she later insisted to Kamow “that she had accumulated them to promote the Philippine shoe industry on her trips abroad” (373). 9.A kundiman is a love aria. However, the word itself is etymologically linked to “cunt,” which is derived from the Oriental Great Goddess Cunti, or Kunda. In ancient writings the word “was synonymous with ‘woman,’ though not in the insulting modern sense” (197). Medieval clergymen deemed all pagan female-genital shrines obscene, so the word, like woman herself, assumed a degraded status. See Barbara Walker’s Woman s Encyclopedia ofMyths and Secrets. 10. For an important review of the historical and etymological connection between image and ideology see David Downing and Susan Bazargan’s introduction to Inlage and Ideology. 11. See Lerner (particularly chapter 7, “The Goddesses”) for an informative account of this transformation.

WORKS CITED Barthes, Roland. Rohnd Barthes by Roland Barthes. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill, 1977. Baudrillard, Jean. Siniulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Debord, Guy. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Malcolm Imrie. New York: Verso, 1990. . Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black, 1983. Downing, David, and Susan Bazargan, eds. Image and Ideology. Albany: State U of New York P, ~1991. Hagedorn, Jessica. Conference Presentation. Ed. Mariani, Philomena. Critical Fictions: The Politics of Inlaginutive Writing. Seattle: Bay P, 1991. 146-50. . Dogeaters. New York: Penguin, 1990. Kamow, Stanley. In Our Inurge: America’s Empire in the Philippines. London: Century P, 1990. Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. Mallat, Jean. The Philippines. Manila, Philippines: National Historical Institute, 1983. Marchetti. Gina. “Four Hundred Years in a Convent, Fifty in Hollywood: Sexual Identity and Dissent in Contemporary Philippine Cinema.” East-West Film Journal 2.2 (June 1988): 2 4 4 8 . Minh-ha, Trinh T. Wonlan, Native, Other: Writing. Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. Owens, Craig. “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism.” Ed. Brian Wallis. Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Boston: Godine, 1984. Polan, Dana. “‘Above All Else to Make You See’: Cinema and the Ideology of Spectacle.” Postmodernisni and Politics. Ed. Jonathan Arac. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Polotan, Kerima. Imelda Romualdez Marcos. New York and Cleveland: World P, 1969. Rafael, Vicente L. “Patronage and Pornography: Ideology and Spectatorship in the Early Marcos

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Years.” Cunipurative Studies in Society and History 32 (April 1990). Rogin, Michael Paul. “‘Make My Day!’ Spectacle as Amnesia in Imperial Politics.” Representations 29 (Winter 1990): 99-123. San Juan, Epifano. Jr. “Mapping the Boundaries: The Filipino Writer in the U.S.A.” Journal of Ethnic Studies 19:1 (1991): 117-30. Spivak, Gayatri. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1987.

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