Our own voices

(First of 2 parts)

Interviewed recently for a TV yearender on the arts, I opined that as far as literature goes, the most important Filipino title that came out this year would have to be Jessica Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle.

I said this not because I felt I owed it to dear friend Jessica, whom I may have given short shrift last month during her brief visit for a world’s theater women confab at the CCP. I couldn’t find the time to join her at that gathering, so that we only managed to resume eye contact – after several years of subsisting on occasional electronic beso-beso – at the local launch of her latest novel at National Book Store. But then she had to speak to the crowd and sign copies.

I thought we could go out after, perhaps cross over from Edsa Shangri-La the mall to its namesake the hotel, where we could enjoy cigars and single malt whisky at Churchill’s. But a younger and infinitely more attractive man beat me to the invite.

Actor Joel Torre, who had spent some time in New York for theater work (he appeared in the stage version of Hagedorn’s first novel Dogeaters) and a major role in Lav Diaz’s epic Batang West Side, wanted us all – including Jessica’s fellow playwrights and groupies – to motor over to his Manukan Grille past Santolan. I said I’d join them, but had to go to a wake first. Well, Finnegan’s Irish luck, coupled with Manila traffic, didn’t allow it that evening. The next day our most celebrated living writer flew back to NYC.

But that’s okay; I’m sure she understands, the way she manifests, on the printed page, compleat understanding of her well-etched, adroitly wrought characters in Dream Jungle.

Oh, we had read about how the much-awaited novel — coming several years after her second, Gangster of Love – had employed, as imaginative narrative catalysts, a couple of unrelated events that occurred in her homeland in the ’70s. These were the Tasaday "discovery" and the filming of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.

Local litterateurs might instinctively blanch at the idea. What, marry Manda Elizalde and Francis Ford Coppola? Why, the gumption of writing from a distance, indeed – as an ad-vantaged Fil-Am, relying on tidbits and morsels of the homeland’s memory to shore up literary imagination. Yes, we can’t help but be proprietary and defensive about rich "material." Except that we hardly use it as overweaning bounty ourselves. So it’s fair game, right?

Jessica Hagedorn pulls it off, and how. Dream Jungle is masterfully written, in chapter snippets that startle with structural leaps, virtual jigsaw pieces weaving themselves neatly together to resolve the lush narrative puzzle.

The Stone Age tribe, or what’s claimed to be one, is renamed Taobo, while the Hollywood shoot is conducted in Mindanao, close to where the anthropological dream "discovery" had occurred six years earlier. The wealthy mestizo who purports to make the discovery has been named Zamora Lopez de Legazpi – in a triple homage to colonial history with a private joke thrown in (or so I surmise, since that first name may acknowledge friendship with a younger poet-writer, R. Zamora Linmark, who a couple of years back accompanied Jessica here for her final research foray).

A score of other characters are dizzyingly introduced, but surprisingly, they are fleshed out and stay in the mind. The writerly ploy that succeeds in converting them into memorable characters is the inspired montage of POVs. Read: points of view.

This is ultimately what fascinates me about Dream Jungle, how it can serve exceedingly well as a manual for aspiring fiction writers, on how to skip or even leapfrog from one POV to another, and yet another, while keeping purposeful track of the surging waves of sometimes parallel, sometimes intersecting story lines.

A careful plotting of the structural foundation, vis-à-vis POV manipulation, reveals a non-linear pattern, just like digital film editing. And a variety of divertissements is just as effectively employed.

The book starts with an excerpt from Antonio Pigafetta’s chronicle of the "discovery" of the Philippines, in his Primo Viaggo Intorno Al Mundo, or "an account of Magellan’s expedition." Other excerpts are thrown in as counterpointing or breather chapters; the choice that informs their seeming intrusion is ever judicious.

The group of characters for "Part One: Discovery and Conquest," which takes place in 1971, includes Zamora’s Teutonic wife Ilse, their daughter Dulce, the driver-bodyguard Sonny, the housemaids Sputnik, Candelaria and Celia (the last is really a yaya, whom Zamora deflowered when she was 17). Candelaria brings in her own daughter from Mindanao, a ship disaster survivor at 11. This is Rizalina or Lina, who resurfaces in Part 2 as an Ermita bargirl named Jinx. Her character is as primary as Zamora’s. The sexual tension between them – the deprived and the depraved – is left unresolved; she goes on to bear a child at 15, and becomes the S.O. of another central character.

Also sketched in Part 1 are the Taobo, led off by the young boy named Bodabil, who is obviously patterned after the Tasaday boy made famous in National Geographic and other magazines as the tree-swinging Jungle Boy who’s an accommodating performer. There are also Kenneth Forbes, a Yale buddy of Zamora’s turned Asia-hand photographer, and Dr. Amado Cabrera, an anthropologist whose own journal entries and paper serve as unique chapters.

In Part I, the POV per chapter shifts from Pigafetta to the omniscient view, then to Lina’s, then Zamora’s, back to the 3rd-person, to that of Fritz Magbantay (nephew of the President, who by the by has a cameo appearance at the Palace during the martial-law regime), back to Lina’s, Zamora’s, Lina’s, ominiscient, Forbes’, and so forth, with Pigafetta excerpts and Dr. Cabrera’s field report thrown in, and ending with Zamora’s.

The welter of I’s as the central eye and intelligence could confuse the unwary reader, or raise an eyebrow among finicky critics who might decry the hopscotch perspectives as simply a way out through easy, occasionally stream-of-consciousness writing. But I believe it works, given the patchwork nature of having to render such a rich panoply of mise-en-scenes. It isn’t until the end of the book that a legitimate question can be asked over the apparent disappearance of certain characters who merely served as sketches (a French actress, an American pilot…), albeit at least one, Fritz, was given a POV voice. .

"Part 2: Napalm Sunset, 1977" assembles another cast, led off by Hollywood actor Vincent Moody, the writer-producer-director and his wife (again, patterned after the Coppolas; she does a documentary of the filming), the central lead who gets replaced (Harvey Keitel, by Martin Sheen, remember?), the Italian cinematographer, the Marlon Brando demigod (here named Sebastian Claiborne), and various other types, including a local Mayor who likes to ravish young girls, but not before subjecting them to a retelling of historical episodes such as the Balangiga massacre.

Another primary character emerges, in a US-based Filipina journalist named Paz Marlowe (in Coppola’s film a lead character is named Marlowe), who goes around with a gay mestizo direk named Pepito Ponce de Leon. Paz is given her share of POV chapters. In fact only Moody’s, Lina’s and hers are interspersed with the now more frequent omniscient point of view.

Zamora reappears in "Part 3: Requiem for a Prodigal Son, 1997," in a grand way, and the concluding chapter using his POV is no less than a signal tour de force. With supreme irony does he render closure: "The girls are having fun. And not once does my name come up. Not once."

The episodic treatment validates form following function. Hagedorn’s prose is by turns terse, witty, poetic, edgy. She invests her characters with insights and observations that assure an intimacy with her vast, intense, cyclopedic arena.

As an American character laments (a la Claire Danes): "’The roaches, the lizards, the bats, the heat, the rain’ – he gave Lina a nod of acknowledgment – ‘the unforgettable women, the grinding poverty. I know this place like I know my own heart.’"

Elsewhere, Zamora preens like his own version of Coppola-Brando:

"The publicity, the absurd headlines in Manila that screamed EX-PLAYBOY SAVES OUR CAVEMEN! Ilse was horrified. But I loved it. Journalists clamored for interviews. It all happened fast, much too fast. I agreed to be interviewed by everyone. Such fun."

And following is an example of how the author utilizes her knowledge of, and oneness with, Pinoyhood, as a paean to the multilingual punning that can only characterize, er, typify us:

"The bitch queens of the world – Miss Bolivia Newton-John, Miss Coastal Rica, Miss Arriba Aruba, Miss Nicaraguagua, Miss Natahiti, Miss Sri Langka, Miss Walang Malaysia, Miss Japantasya, Miss Puerto Ricopuno, Miss Grease, Miss Roast Turkey, and Miss Hungry – the baklas, chismosas, poison-tongued brujas, and devilish doñas of Manila pack the pews of the Holy Cross Mortuary Chapel on a humid Saturday night."

I mentioned earlier that sight unseen, I posited that Hagedorn’s book would have to be the landmark Filipino literary title for 2003. That remark was premised simply on the fact that its author keeps us on the world map of contemporary literature.

Indeed, she has done it again with Dream Jungle. And we ought to thank her for her sense of delight in our collective unconscious and serendipitous, synchronistic narratives as material – like her own writing rich and evocative, startling and grotesque, picaresque and comic, ultimately haunting.

(To be continued)