Postmodernism — remember that? Textual gamesmanship, flagrant assertions of the instability of narrative, mix-and-match structures, high and low registers, death of the author, etc. The whole mind-bending, maddening bit. It was perhaps inevitable that as a mainstream literary movement, postmodernism would run out of steam after having about two good post-Watergate decades; Infinite Jest is a target for online mockery because it’s a symbol for smart-dude posturing, but also because it represents the exhaustion that comes with looking for sincerity through layers of wordplay and irony. Domestic terrorism, a couple of endless wars, reckonings on racism and fascism, a disintegrating climate, and all the rest have had a way of making those PoMo gambits sound schoolyard-ish.
Come back, you can imagine Gina Apostol saying with The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata — you forgot what you’re missing. There was some heft and seriousness to the PoMo project all along. The second novel by Apostol — who grew up in the Philippines and now lives in the United States — won her home country’s national book award upon its publication in 2009, but is only now getting released. Presumably its deep dive into the particulars of the Philippine revolution against Spain in 1896, as well its stockpile of PoMo footnotes, led publishers to assume its appeal was strictly regional. But the success of Apostol’s U.S. debut, 2012’s The Gun Dealers’ Daughter, and her 2017 novel, Insurrecto, has moved the needle, and rightly so. Steeped as Mata is in history, its chief argument is that a nation is a story that people tell each other about themselves, and that’s as relevant as any other fiction.
Introducing this new, American edition, Apostol writes that “this book was planned as a puzzle: traps for the reader, dead-end jokes, textual games, unexplained sleights of the tongue.” (John Barth blurbed it.) “But at the same time, I wished to be true to the past I was plundering.” But truth is multiform: Insurrecto turns on a filmmaker’s efforts to make a movie out of a massacre of Filipino revolutionaries by Americans in 1901, and how her version clangs against the experiences of her parents and that of the translator who is challenging her. Across the novel, identities fracture and chapter numbers jumble, Hopscotch-like.
Mata is an epic version of Insurrecto’s gambit. Its core document is a memoir of the revolution against Spanish colonizers written by Mata, a man nearing blindness, but not before he could read Jose Rizal’s pivotal 1887 novel, Noli Me Tángere, which played a key role in inspiring the revolt against Spain. Mata’s document itself is a jumble — juvenalia, letters from family, travel chronicles, dossiers of revolutionaries, codes, notes on meetings with Rizal, and memoir written while held prisoner by American forces. It is also, explains translator Mimi C. Magsalin (also a character in Insurrecto), written in Spanish and a variety of Filipino dialects. The document’s meaning, provenance, and integrity are often uncertain.
Where there are gaps and confusion, two women swoop into the footnotes with Magsalin. Estrella Espejo is a Filipino history scholar who thrills to engage in the story of her homeland’s noble revolution. (“All that love stuff: boring,” she writes when Mata is past adolescence and the narrative finally moves into the early days of the revolution.) Diwata Drake is an academic psychologist who seems helpless to overapply her expertise to Mata. (“This story is an abject tale of growing heterosexual, normative desire: the boy socialized into his world’s hierarchies.”) Magsalin is pincered between the two, absorbing criticism from both women over her interpretive decisions. (“Oh, alligator of Analysis: shut up,” Magsalin snaps at Drake in one footnote. “Let Reymundo speak!”)
Magsalin is Filipino for “translate”; espejo is Spanish for mirror; Diwata is the name of a fertility goddess in Filipino mythology. They are themselves, but representatives of other roles. Which speaks to an old problem with postmodern fiction — characters were often so busy being symbols they had a hard time becoming human. But the novel pivots on that phrase “Let Reymundo speak,” which is uttered often in the story. For all of their aggressive flinging of scholarly bona fides, each is searching for the human in Mata, and by extension Rizal, and by further extension the Philippines’ national character.
“In my view, two things shape the Filipino: puns and Jose Rizal,” Apostol writes in her introduction. Noli Me Tángere is required reading in the Philippines, but as she points out, it’s a story that sifted through multiple languages — its original Spanish and the Tagalog and English versions that are more commonly read today. The national identity is a host of identities; as somebody who knows the country largely through first-generation immigrant literary figures like Lysley Tenorio and Ana Castillo, I’m certain I’ve missed most of the jokes and puns, even though Espejo’s footnotes are there largely to call attention to them.
But without diminishing what’s particular to the Filipino experience in the novel — the makeup of the Katipunan revolutionaries, the nation’s uneasy relationship to the Catholic Church — the prevailing mood of social fragmentation and squabbling over a national identity is eminently portable. The latter pages of the novel turn on Mata’s description of a purloined document that upends the scholars’ past understanding of Rizal’s (and hence their country’s) history. In a faux afterword to the novel, Drake writes, a bit pretentiously but not inaccurately, “The list of textual deceptions [in Mata’s memoir] underlines without a doubt the eternal trauma of the Philippines: like everyone else, it is a contingent being, born of words.” So, too, it’s easy to see the same crisis in America — or any other nation — in terms of what makes a country itself when so many people disagree on what it means.
And beyond the questions of national identity the novel raises, Mata is simply funny — richly satirical of psychology and history, and of the PoMo gestures that it embraces. Mata himself may be lost in the squabbling, but the squabbling is part of the point. As Magsalin writes at one point, exasperated, “Of course I make mistakes. All translators are confronted by territories for which they have no signposts, no cartographic schemes.” Apostol sympathizes with her translator character the most, it seems; both are determined to summarize the character of a nation, and then unravel it.
[Published by Soho Press on January 12, 2021, 360 pp., $27 hardcover]