History as Rumor: The Political Fantasy of the Negrense Elite in Vicente Groyon's "The Sky Over Dimas"

Mayel P. Martin

doi:http://doi.org/

Abstract

This ideological critique reads Vicente Groyon’s The Sky Over Dimas in its appropriation of historiographic metafiction. The paper argues that its two borrowed modes, historiography and metafiction, function as a symbolic act following Fredric Jameson’s Marxist interpretive ground of the political. In The Sky Over Dimas, historiographic metafiction is a symbolic act that articulates the political unconscious/fantasy of the landed elite while repressing their role in the perpetuation of the feudal system of sugar in Negros. This provisionalizing or bracketing of history in the novel, unlike other historiographic metafictional texts like Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café, State of War and Empire of Memory, does not foreground any “alternative histories” of the marginal or the ex-centric. Instead, the novel withholds narrative (and historical) truth, reduces most of its narrative circumstances to gossip and speculation to humanize its protagonists—the hacendero class in Negros. It is this displacement or deviation from the emergent form of historiographic metafiction, its generic series, which engenders a diachronic differential reading that allows the novel to be construed as a symbolic act—an ideological reply or imagined solution to an actual social dilemma.

Keywords

historical novel, historiographic metafiction, Negros, political unconscious, postmodernism

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Kritika Kultura
Department of English
School of Humanities
Ateneo de Manila University

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Jan Baetens
Professor
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Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven (Belgium)

Joel David
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Inha University (South Korea)

Michael Denning
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Department of English
Yale University (US)

Faruk
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Universitas Gadjah Mada (Indonesia)

Regenia Gagnier
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University of Exeter (UK)

Leela Gandhi
John Hawkes Professor of the Humanities and English
Brown University (US)

Inderpal Grewal
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Professor of South Asian Studies, Ethnicity, Race and Migration Studies
Yale University (US)

Peter Horn
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University of Cape Town (South Africa)
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University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa)

Anette Horn
Professor of German Studies
University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa)

David Lloyd
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University of California, Riverside (US)

Bienvenido Lumbera
National Artist for Literature
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University of the Philippines

Rajeev S. Patke
Director of the Division of Humanities
Professor of Humanities
Yale NUS College (Singapore)

Vicente L. Rafael
Giovanni and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor of History
University of Washington (US)

Vaidehi Ramanathan
Department of Linguistics
University of California, Davis (US)

Temario Rivera
Professorial Lecturer
Department of Political Science
University of the Philippines

E. San Juan, Jr.
Philippines Studies Center (US)

Neferti X.M. Tadiar
Professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies
Barnard College (US)
Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race
Columbia University (US)

Antony Tatlow
Honorary Professor of Drama
Trinity College Dublin (Ireland)

History as Rumor: The Political Fantasy of the Negrense Elite in Vicente Groyon's "The Sky Over Dimas"

Mayel P. Martin: Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines

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