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Nicola M.

Sebastian
LIT199
Conference Paper Final Draft
3 March 08
The Fruits of Laughter: The Carnival World of Humour and Hybridity
in Yusons Great Philippine Jungle Energy Caf

Introduction
All that [has] passed before and [will] come to pass after [is] nothing else but open
mysteries.
- Great Philippine Jungle Energy Caf by Alfred A. Yuson (p. 20)
In a line, Yuson catches two birds with one stone, speaking aptly not only of the current
state in the global community, but also of the modern-day Philippine condition. On a universal
scale, knowledge has been broken down into computer bytes, transmitted and replicated faster
than the speed of thought; advancements in technology have blurred the boundaries in an evershrinking world. What we have now is what Frederic Jameson describes as a culture of
fragmentary sensations, disposable simulacra (images), and superficiality (quoted in Abad and
Hidalgo, 353).
Locally in the Philippines, the burden of a long history of colonialism creates a special
post-colonial crisis of identity (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, Empire Writes Back 47). In fact,
even the label of the Philippines as a postcolonial nation is problematic, with the Philippine
colonial experience being overlooked in postcolonial studies. Illuminating this apparent
invisibility is that despite a century of cultural exchange and colonial relations with the United
States, despite the most persistent influence on our culture today coming from our American
colonial (and neocolonial) experience centuries under Spanish rule aside the Philippines is

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virtually obscured in American studies and in American educational institutions (Isaac 3).
Many even claim this period could hardly be considered part of imperial history, that the
Philippines was more of a dependency rather than a true-blue colony (Lopez 8).
In a world of post-icity, whether postmodernism or postcolonialism, truth and
meaning, traditionally taken for granted, are now met with apprehension and criticism amid
the random swirl of empty signals (quoted in Abad and Hidalgo, 353). Knowledge, language,
history, and nation become enclosed in quotation marks. Discourse has now replaced the notion
of reality. Within the Philippines, the modern context of globalization threatens an already
problematic nation, producing a Filipino identity that is as ambiguous as personality in
hyperspace. With the historical process initiated by European [or Western] imperial
aggression still playing out globally (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, Empire Writes Back 48),
postcolonial nations like the Philippines are still engaging with their colonial burdens.
Postcolonial discourse, in the testimony of Third World countries, interrupts the concept of
hegemonic normality to bear witness to the unequal and uneven forces of cultural
representation involved in the contest for political and social authority within the world order
(Bhabha, Postcolonial Criticism 105).
Out of this current, dizzying state of affairs, Alfred A. Yusons novel, Great Philippine
Jungle Energy Caf, is born. It was published in 1988, in the aftermath of a fallen dictatorship
and more than a decade of martial law. This first attempt won the promising, young poet the
Palanca Grand Prize for the Novel, and his other literary achievements, including several
collections of poetry, essays, and his second novel, Voyeurs and Savages, have earned him
much recognition in the form of fellowships and literary awards.1 Two major moments play out
1

Alfred Yuson. Panatikan.com.ph: Your Portal to Philippine Literature. 2005. Institute


of Creative Writing, UP Diliman. 27 Sept 2007
<http://www.panitikan.com.ph/authors/y/aayuson.htm>.

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simultaneously within Jungle Energy Cafes narrative: the revolutionary period of 1886-1898,
in which the Filipinos rallied as a people for the first time against their longtime colonisers, the
Spanish, and another turn of the century, 1968-1984, which witnessed the rise of a dictator, not
unlike the nations previous colonial masters, and his downfall by one of the most spectacular
feats of people power the EDSA Revolution.
Jungle Energy Cafe is really a story within a story: it follows the life of Leon Kilat,
whose real name is Pantaleon Villegas, a historical 19th century hero of the Cebuano
Revolution, as it is told by one Robert Aguinaldo, a 20th century writer living in the martial law
period and a fictional character of the novel, whose story is also narrated. Leon Kilat, despite
being historically real, is essentially fictional. Originating from the sleepy, seaside town of
Bacong, Negros Oriental, Leon escapes to the mountains with his brother-in-law Melecio after
a run-in with the authorities involving a wooden paddle and a Guardia Civils bottom. There
his propensity for mischief is multiplied when he receives the fabled bananas charm, and
arrives in his town in a blaze of banana-charmed glory.
Now endowed with the powers and secrets of the bananas charm, Leon proceeds on to
a series of adventures and misadventures from meeting Buhawi, another historical figure
taken to mythological proportions who gives him the name Leon Kilat, or Lightning, and the
rest of his band of followers, to sailing to Cebu on a magical handkerchief named Luzviminda
and joining a circus that turns out to be the front for a secret revolutionary movement, the
KKK.
Along the way he lands in one predicament after another, each one more sensational,
and hilarious, than the last. He is chased onto the street by a baker turned kung-fu master after
a most inopportune incident with a larger-than-life erection, leads a battle against Spanish
troops in Cavite, watches the execution of Jose Rizal from afar, leaps in time to meet his

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biographer and join a rally against the regime of a Dictator, and is finally betrayed by the
perilous beauty of a scheming mestiza named Pilar. Meanwhile, Robert Aguinaldos story is
told in the pauses of Leons fantastical journey, as Robert researches and writes the very story
of Leon Kilat that is unfolding, as well as participates in the socio-political stirrings of his time.
Resurrecting from his first death (198), Leon travels through a jungle and finds
himself at the Great Philippine Jungle Energy Caf, where heroes, poets, and many of
historys illustrious and notorious figures, new and old, local and international, are gathered in
rowdy celebration. There he reunites with Buhawi, his other friends, and former lovers, and
they all have a grand time drinking, talking, and reliving history, sipping away at chitchat
anddabbling at other lives (98).
Like other postcolonial texts, Jungle Energy Caf seeks to redefine the consciousness
of peoples whose identities have been fragmented, whose cultures have been deracinated by
physical and epistemic violence of colonialist systems of knowledge (Legasto 6). The novel
combines fact with fiction, weaving together events from our nations history including
the Cebuano Revolution that took place at the end of the 18th century with native myths and
folklore such as the legendary powers of faith healers. But unlike other novels that may focus
on the violence of colonial domination, exposing the subjugation of the Filipino people first by
the Spanish, then the Americans, and finally the Japanese, Jungle Energy Caf betrays no anger
the novel does not rage against injustice or passionately cry out for nationhood.
Instead, it is playful, almost ridiculous. Though it narrates the same Philippine history
and cultural heritage, it does so with a distinctly irreverent tone, evidenced from the start by its
confusing, long-winded title. Within the novels pages, filled with scenes of colonial conflict
and the tyrannical abuse of democracy, emerges Leon Kilat, the laughing antithesis of a hero.
From the midst of a postcolonial Philippine world fraught with physical and epistemic

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violence, rises a novel that, through its hero, dares to laugh in the face of such oppression and
suffering.
Yusons refusal to treat such matters with any amount of seriousness has drawn some
negative criticism, such as from Maria Teresa Martinez-Sicat who argues in her essay, The
Impotent Charm of Alfred A. Yusons Great Philippine Jungle Energy Caf, that the novel is
not only an ahistorical but also an antihistorical text (110), trivialising national history and
turning our heroes into fools. From her perspective the novel fails to shape a collective
identity and contribute to the building of a Philippine nation (118). This disapproval has met
laughter and its various forms throughout history. Laughter was viewed negatively by Plato
and Aristotle, who saw it as a kind of scorn, as a nasty expression of perceived superiority
(Morreall 3). This tainted reputation has stayed with laughter since, with scant attention being
paid to a theory of laughter.
However, perhaps this playfulness should not be so readily dismissed. Despite laughter
being overlooked in critical thought, Mikhail Bakhtin was one literary theorist who took
laughter seriously, even arguing that laughter has subversive powers. Bakhtin develops this
principle of laughter through his conception of the carnival, a medieval folk tradition that was
for him a spectacular feast of inversion and parody of high culture (Lachmann 62). Within
the carnival, laughter is seen to [deal] with the very process of change, with crisis itself,
propelled [towards] a shift in authorities and truths, a shift of world orders (Bakhtin,
Dostoevskys Poetics 127).
From this perspective, the robust laughter that echoes throughout Jungle Energy Caf
could betray a message more significant than Leon Kilats extreme delight with life itself.
Perhaps then there is more to the chaotic world of Jungle Energy Caf. Underlying its

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seemingly senseless surface are depths of meaning waiting to be explored, if one has the means
to comprehend its irrational, unfathomable language.
And so, what of the laughter of Jungle Energy Cafs incorrigible hero, Leon Kilat, that
resounds in our hearts long after we have put down the book? Examining how laughter
functions within the novel and the greater context of the Philippine postcolonial condition, this
paper follows the movement of laughter as it develops within the novel:
1. Laughter is produced within Jungle Energy Caf through the mock-epic effect and
the grotesque.
2. This laughter, through its means of production, creates a carnival world.
3. The novels carnival world expresses heteroglossia.
4. As heteroglot, the novel manifests hybridity.
5. Thus, laughter ultimately portrays the Third Space, creating a place for
postcolonial dialogue and its formation of an identity.
From its study of laughter in the novel, this paper produces several findings of laughter and its
actualisation in certain movements:
1. Laughter allows the fulfilment of the forbidden, releasing suppressed discourse
from the margins.
2. In doing so, laughter destabilises dominant socio-ideological hierarchical
structures, realising its potential subversive power.
3. Laughter offers renewal beyond anarchy in two forms: the realisation and
appreciation of heteroglossia and hybridity, and the postcolonial response found
in hybridity, which promises in the Third Space the creation of something
altogether new.

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4. Laughter hints of something still beyond, offering a third movement of renewal in
its visions of utopia.
As this paper will reveal, this particular work by Alfred Yuson fulfils its promise of
illuminating the Filipino, and thus postcolonial, struggle to find meaning amidst the random
swirl of empty signals and chaos of fragmented identity and conflicting cultures. The novels
production of hybridity, as conceptualised by Homi K. Bhabha, is central in capturing the
Filipino postcolonial condition and its formulation of a response. In short, this paper seeks to
explore the comic energy of Yusons Great Philippine Jungle Energy Cafe, as it constructs a
carnivalesque world that expresses not only heteroglossia but hybridity in its production of a
Filipino postcolonial response.

Its a Party: Laughing Up a Carnival


Why not indeed? Why not Nixon? Hee-haw! (39). This is the quintessential Leon, joyful
and rowdy, completely incorrigible. What is espoused best in Leon Kilat permeates the fabric
of the novel itself; in fact this peculiarly comic energy, this laughter, is the animating spirit of
Jungle Energy Caf. The ridiculous title does not disappoint with a story even more absurd:
there are farting contests, magically powerful moles, bashful snakes, and time travel. The
supposed main character is nothing like a hero, with Leon Kilat gaining his powers by
accident, when the mythical banana charm falls into his open, laughing mouth, and landing in
one ludicrous predicament after another.
Though this may all be made convincing (and less humourous) through a realistic
narrative, Jungle Energy Caf refuses to do so. The novel establishes itself as metafiction,
drawing attention to itself as a work of the imagination through its story-within-a-story
structure. Leons fictionality, at least within the novel, is accentuated by this parallel plot, as

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the main timeline, which is centered to a certain extent on Leon Kilat, is continuously
interrupted with passages narrating various moments of Robert Aguinaldos life as he
researches and writes Leons story in the present (at least the present of the novel at
publication). In one instance, Leons biographer even draws himself into Leons narrative,
addressing the reader directly with the words, I, Robert Aguinaldo, am telling you, anyway
(185). Going further than this, many of the characters are actually aware that they are elements
of fiction. At the start of the novel Leons sister, Silvestra, wakes him up with the threat that
they wont film [his] life for [him] (1), making it hard for the reader to take the novel
seriously even from the start.
Even Philippine history is not pardoned from the novels comic attention. The KKK
becomes a circus act in the most literal sense, and a passionate rally against martial law
culminates in the Dictators signing a decree declaring the urgent national-need for an allnight rock concert (181). Such a cavalier treatment of history and its heroes Leon Kilat is
after all an actual historical figure is what exposes Jungle Energy Caf to the criticism of
Maria Teresa Martinez-Sicat. But the likes of Ruth Jordana Luna Pison and her essay, Great
Philippine Jungle Energy Caf by Alfred Yuson; Non-linear History, run counter to this
opinion. Pison appreciates the value of the novels offbeat approach to history, which
challenges such a concepts authority and exposes its constructedness (89-90). More
importantly, Pison takes note of the novels subversive powers, arguing that it allows for the
production and dissemination of alternative/oppositional stories (90), especially through the
use of parodyirony and humour (144).
However, the laughter that abounds in Jungle Energy Caf is distinct. It is not laughter
in its everyday form; it ridicules and mocks, inverting what is accepted and celebrating what is
absurd. The special form of laughter within this novel, its irreverent comic energy, is harnessed

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by Mikhail Bakhtin in his theory of the carnival; the novels laughter is carnivalesque laughter.
The carnival had its heyday in the medieval times and the Renaissance; as much as three
months a year would be devoted to such festivals in some cities (Clark and Holquist 300). The
festive occasion of folk culture caught the imagination of Bakhtin, who sees the carnival as a
boundless world of humourous forms and manifestations opposed [to] the official and serious
tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture (Bakhtin, Rabelais quoted in Clark and
Holquist 299-300).
Ordinary human life, along with the literary works that reflect its realities, is ruled by
certain hierarchies that structure society and create inequality through various forms of terror,
reverence, piety and etiquette (Bakhtin, Dostoevskys Poetics 123). More than just sociopolitical fixity, the dominant culture during the Middle Ages was deeply connected with the
Church, consequently [involving] a vertical world of absolute values (Bakhtin, Rabelais
quoted in Clark and Holquist 308). Bakhtin views the opposition of official systems and
unofficial margins as equated to a hierarchy of high and low culture, differentiating the
two binaries through their attitude toward laughter, in turn creating another facet of the binary
system as serious-humourous (Clark and Holquist 299).
During the Medieval Age, laughter was a relatively liberated form of expression, a form
in which much was permittedthat was impermissible in serious form (Bakhtin,
Dostoevskys Poetics 127) since it was all in jest anyway. In this way, carnival, as the world
laughter builds for itself (Bakhtin, Rabelais quoted in Clark and Holquist 308), suspends such
official systems, with its laws and restrictions, in favour of senseless revelry (at least from
the official standpoint), anarchy, unofficial folk culture, and the grotesque. As a spectacular
feast of inversion and parody of high culture (Lachmann 62), the carnival propagates a sense
of the world as joyful relativity (Bakhtin, Dostoevskys Poetics 124).

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In celebrating upheaval and ambiguity through inverting fixed and closed structures, in
representing in its images both death and life equally, the carnival is presented as a pathos of
shifts and changes (Bakhtin, Dosteovskys Poetics 124). Shift-and-renewal and openness
become the norm, in place of official fixity. Ruled by laughter and free from categories like
absolute and unchangeable (Clark and Holquist 301), the carnival is life turned inside
out; it is the reverse side of the world (Bakhtin, Dostoevskys Poetics 122).
The laughter produced in Jungle Energy Caf creates a carnival world within the novel.
As we shall see, the novel adopts the logic of the carnival, with its set of categories that
Bakhtin discusses in The Problem of Dostoevskys Poetics, namely: free and familiar contact
among people, eccentricity, carnivalistic misalliances, and finallyprofanation (Bakhtin
123). Though he outlines these four carnivalesque categories, they are not abstract thoughts
on the values of the carnival, but are, rather, experienced and played out in the form of life
itself (Bakhtin 123), in this case in the life of the novel. This dynamic vitality implies that the
categories are not static or independent of each other; they shift, interact, and overlap one
another.
The first category comes from the historic carnival, a public affair that was celebrated
in the town square, which has become the symbol of communal performance (Bakhtin 128).
With the suspension of distance between people, as all gather in the carnival square, there is
free and familiar contact among people (Bakhtin 123) embodied in the novels caf-ending.
The multitude of characters gathered in the caf are not organised by profession, class, or even
race: military men go arm-in-arm with national artists; bandits and the learned elite mingle
without a second thought; Filipino journalists chitchat with old Hollywood stars. As in the
carnival square, all are equally privileged and equally intimate, and so enter into free and
familiar contact.

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The carnival knows neither stage nor footlights (Bakhtin 128), lacking the
conventional division into performers and spectators (Bakhtin 122); this is espoused in the
novels metafictional element with its direct addressing of the reader and its inclusion of the
author as a character. And so, the carnival belongs to the whole people, it is universal,
everyone must participate in its familiar contact (Bakhtin 128), just the reader, author, and
characters are all involved in the story of Jungle Energy Caf.
As individuals mingle as equals in the carnival square, it affects a change in a persons
relationship to others, freeing their behaviour and discourse from the influence of social
hierarchy. Thus the second category of the carnival: eccentricity[that] permitsthe latent
sides of human nature to reveal and express themselves (Bakhtin 123). Eccentricity and
inappropriateness are observable in the characters of the novel who, as comic figures, have a
certain freedom of movement. Everything seems to be permitted that would not be acceptable
in a serious work of literature, allowing a fantastical plot with fantastical characters.
Leon Kilat, the supposed hero, is completely unpredictable, possessing a certain
wildness to his character that brings him to act in ridiculous and sometimes outrageous ways.
In one instance, when Buhawis band of followers attack him and his friends, he pecks at them
with a birds beak (38); in another he joins a revolution for good sport while caring nothing
for The Cause itself (144). Leon is also a highly sexual being, and is obviously quite
comfortable about it when he masturbates in front of the church in his hometown of Bacong,
Negros Oriental, and, while laughing, he comes (3). Leon, with his inability to take anything
seriously for long, is thus the personification of the carnivalesque spirit. Like Leon, the
carnival makes authority stand on its head, all for a laugh.
Through the familiarising power of the carnival are formed carnivalistic
msalliances, the third carnivalistic category (Bakhtin 123). This involves the opening of all

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formerly enclosed, detached things into familiar relation with one another (Bakhtin 123). Such
interaction produces carnivalistic contacts and combinations, bringing together and wedding
normally opposed binaries such as high and low, official and folk (Bakhtin 123). Such
carnivalesque combination is first felt in the presence of myth and folklore in the text. Silvestra
is a seer, foreseeing the errant shot that shatters Melecios knee, burdening her with a soon-tobe crippled husband (27). When she is made a prisoner of her own home by the Guardia Civil,
who are looking for her husband and brother, her old friend the tortoise brings her food and
news of the goings-on in the world, alerting her to Leons approaching departure for Cebu
(106). The sight of merry mermenwaving wildly at him fails to lift Leon Kilats spirits as
the Circus sets sail for Manila (162). By weaving in magic and mysticism, Jungle Energy Caf
introduces precolonial culture into the narrative.
Folkloric discourse, founded on superstition and fantasy, and long forgotten in modern
society, is merged with the dominant mode of realism in the West (Faris 1), which is built
upon a belief in logic and empiricism (Faris 7). Furthermore, Jungle Energy Caf combines
myth with history. Leon Kilat uses his mythical powers to fight for freedom, first from Spanish
colonial masters then the Martial Law regime of a dictator. The heaven-like caf at the end of
the novel features both literary and historical figures. In this blending of the fantastic and
realism, of myth and history, a magical realist narrative is created that merges ancient or
traditionaland modern worlds (Faris 21).
Finally, in combining the official with the folk, there naturally occurs a profanation
that debases and brings down to earth what was formerly aloft, which is the fourth category of
the carnival sense of the world (Bakhtin 123). This category covers the carnivals characteristic
parodies, obscenities involving the grotesque, blasphemies, and more (Bakhtin 123).

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Profanation is the language of the carnival, allowing it to build its world of anarchy and
plurality in the inversion of official systems.
Parody establishes within the novel an entire system of crooked mirrors, elongating,
diminishing, distorting (Bakhtin, Dostoevskys Poetics 127). A prominent parody of the novel,
which pumps out much of Jungle Energy Cafs comic energy, is the creation of a mockepic, which parodies the traditional epic and its conventions. Though the mock-epic is not an
actual carnivalesque form, it is employed by the carnival, much like the novels metafictional
and magical realist elements, to advance its values. The epic was the highest point of
precolonial literature and followed certain conventions: it recounted the deeds and adventures
of a tribal hero, it was orally transmitted by the tribes singer or chanter, and it was centered
on supernatural events and heroic deeds, bearing a strong element of magic and the
supernatural (Eugenio xi). The epic hero often had supernatural powers and was aided by
creatures and items of magic (Eugenio xvii), such as the silk handkerchief, Luzviminda, that
Buhawi passes onto Leon when Leon finally departs the mountain camp. In fact Leons riding
of a magical kerchief, or monsala, is characteristic of the Suban-on epic heroes (Eugenio xxii).
However, the novel treats these conventions in an irregular, and therefore comic,
manner. As mentioned previously, the works hero, Leon Kilat, is far from stereotypical. He is
in fact an anti-hero, having done nothing to deserve his powers other than tagging along in
Melecios search for the fabled banana charm, after mischievously beating the bottom of a
guardia civil and retreating into the mountains to join his fugitive brother-in-law.
The conventional hero-archetype is a great warrior, strong, brave, and possessed of a
restless, adventurous spirit (Eugenio xvii). Leon is an embodiment of these traits, but lacks the
social responsibility that motivates the traditional hero in his many adventures, often
undertaken in the service of his family, his country, his people, and of others who seek his

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help (Eugenio xiv). If social duty is not his reason, the conventional hero embarks on
adventures in search of love or to prove his worth through heroic deeds (Eugenio xiv).
Leon is impulsive and carefree, evidenced in the way the hero uses his powers with
the spirit of abandon (37). He indulges in various sexual escapades, a couple of which are illtimed and even disastrous: his marrying of Teresa, the blind mistress of his boss, Yu Cheng
Co, gets him in a fine mess with the chinaman, and he allows himself to be enticed into the
room of the beautiful mestiza, Pilar, fully aware that it is a trap, that the room holds his doom
and aborted future (193) for now, at least. He also lacks the impressive physical
appearance of a traditional epic hero (Eugenio xviii), his masculine glory diminished by his
laughably small sex organ, which he likes to call his pearl (42).
Despite his faults, Leon is a pure and sincere character, who at times finds himself in
unfortunate predicaments, some of which, like the unwelcome erection he gets from Teresas
tailored pants that ruins his stay with the kind Chinese baker, are beyond his control. The
outlandish and hilarious situations Leon finds himself in make him a ridiculous take on the
archetypal epic hero, and the victim, or main lead, of a truly comic story.
The language itself is a distorted mirror of the distinct, lofty style of epic narrative that
employs repetitions, grand speeches, and the outrageous exaggeration of the heros deeds
(Eugenio xxiii). Buhawi is described as, he of the mighty stride and the authoritative report
(81), playing with the epic convention of the epithet, which labels the heroes by outfitting them
with a grand description (Eugenio xxvi), while referring to his impressive flatulence with
perfect deadpan. The cook of Buhawis mountain camp, Laureano, prepares a feast for the
rebels, singing a recipe fit for an epic passage. An excerpt best illustrates the repetitions,
rhythm, and dramatic style Laureano uses in mimicry of epic narrative:

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And so, sang Laureano. We start with the rice bran. A cheap feed it is for pigs,
chickens, horses, yes, so what better way to energise puny humans than with polished
rice leavings
And so. A first course. Rice bran flour with sweet potato croquettes. And so. We
soak some glutinous rice in water and then grind them between two flat stones. We sift
the rice bran flour and add it to the freshly ground glutinous variety of rice. We allow
the flour-water mixture to stand. And so
And so. Ahh, the second equally appropriate course, perfectly ironic for
crossing boloes with those stinking eagle-nosed Iberians. Ahh yess. Hot tamales
We add the sugar, and mercies, look, Pintada, look Fidelito, I still have paprika,
remember the raid we pulled off in Zamboangita, where that crescent-nosed Castilian
begged me to spare his spices, ahh yes, what an afternoon, and now the cinnamon is
gone and the cloves are gone and the cumin is gone but the paprika I still have, oh,
mercies, and so
And so. We have a feast for the day, yes we do, mercies, ahh. Tomorrow, the
turd-nosed Spaniards should beware when we clash with them, for we should be as
mighty as sated gourmands with our repast day. Yes, we may all say that camp was
never like this. Ahh, And so. (76-79)
Epic rhetoric is also echoed in other dialogues of the novel, such as when Leon meets
his sister Bestra after having received the banana charm. There is a meeting of like minds, as
both are now gifted with magical foresight, and their conversation seems taken directly from
the high-flown speech of epics:
How is it, Leon, that the weak speak more than the strong?
It is like the littlest bird, who chirps for more than its fair share of space.
Hovering over much more of place, the hawk remains silent.
Shall you talk this way forever, now that youve swallowed the bananas
charm?
No, my dear sister Bestra, no way. My speech shall curve here and there the
way the banana shapes its day.
Yes, we both speak like the tortoise. Remember, Leon?
I remember, yes. Yours was the power.
But I am woman. I need it not for show.
But I am young.
And have to explain away your laughter
Yes, before it melts into yawn (25-27)

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In Chapter Fourteen, the narrative turns into a script, and Tuadla and Tanya, two
performers of the circus/revolutionary organisation that Leon has joined, narrate Leons
adventures as he battles the Spanish troops in Cavite, watches the execution of the Katipunans
hero, Jose Rizal, and leaps in time to participate in the rallies of martial-law Philippines. Such
narration of Leons story by characters that are in the story themselves is an ode to the oral
tradition of precolonial literature, when the epics were orated or sung to the tribe by a member
of the select group of singers and chanters (Eugenio xi). Thus, in playing with the
conventions of the epic within the narrative, Jungle Energy Caf produces laughter through the
effect of a mock-epic.
Beyond the mock-epic, parody is found throughout the novel, as it mocks not only the
pure genre of the epic through its mimicry of epic conventions, but also the sacred, with its
rituals and language (Bakhtin, Dostoevskys Poetics 127). In Chapter Six, Buhawi leads his
followers in an amusing, mock-religious chant, mixing Latin with the Spanish and Filipino
vernaculars in a nonsensical litany:
Sacra ng draco.
Sacra ng draco.
Torre de illuminati.
Torre de illuminati.
Vox pace.
Vox pace.
Verde yo te quiero verde.
Verde yo te quiero verde.
Hostia magica.
Hostia magica.
Salse verde.
Salse verde.
Anak bulan.
Anak bulan.
Pokinina.
Pokinina.
Quid pro quo.
Quid pro quo. (74-75)

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Another parodic profanation occurs in the caf at the novels end, aptly used as the
novels title since it is also the novels ultimate expression of Bakhtins carnival. The caf,
alluded to constantly within the narrative by a select group of characters including Leon Kilat,
Buhawi, and Silvestra, is the place where all the great figures of the past, present, and future
will gather to tell stories and savour scandals over cups of Irish coffee (20). Characters
from the novel will be reunited in the caf, now rubbing elbows with personalities ranging
from Filipino poets and heroes like Nick Joaquin and Jose Rizal, to local celebrities such as
Gloria Diaz, to international pop symbols like Muhammed Ali, John Lennon, and James Dean.
The caf itself is an inversion, a parody of heaven. Leon awakens from death and
journeys to the caf, the final act of resurrection (198). Whereas the traditional Christian
heaven is filled with angelic voices singing solemn hymns to God, the novels paradise is
decidedly comic and indulgent, where Leon and those of [his] stripe shall meet again, and
again, and again, over many cups of brewed native coffee, some booze, and assorted
fingerfood (88-89). There is raucous and excessive revelry, along with an abundance of Red
Horse, a potent Filipino beer, as they [drink] & [make] merry together telling old stories &
new stories (201). The caf passage is the ultimate parodic profanation, debasing logic and
order in complete, joyous anarchy. The carnival, cheerful chaos, finds its kingdom in the caf
as everything seems to be happening at once and characters speak, act, and interact in a jumble
of energy:
cmon dont be so stiff and shy isnt it a shame John & Yoko couldnt make it tonight
sayang their reservation but they sent word theyll try again Monday oh look there why
if it isnt Billy the Kid arm in arm with Flash Elorde my what an evening what a party
what a caf yes what a jungle caf thought Leon peremptorily before polemical lines
cut through & thrust themselves upon his giddying consciousness what with the two
bottles of Red Horse so far & now branching up into Glenfiddich he heard: Its a
constitutional right, goddamnit, not an absolute right, never was, this peaceable
assembly business (203)

Sebastian 18
Translating into a social dynamic, this anarchy includes the caf in the first
carnivalesque category, free and familiar contact. There is a loss of hierarchy as all those
gathered, celebrities and scholars, artists and rebels, interact as equals. Leon and Buhawi are
folk-heroes, their legend-ary powers and enjoyment of the more-vulgar, bodily activities
labelling them as grotesque, separating them from the learned elite, with their belief in science
and logic. And yet they are included and even welcomed in the caf at worlds end. And true
to the carnival, the caf refuses closure, maintaining a sense of open-endedness just as the
carnival sense of the worldknows no period, and is, in fact, hostile to any sort of conclusive
conclusion: all endings are merely new beginnings (Bakhtin, Dostoevskys Poetics 165).
The grotesque, found in the caf itself as well as throughout the novel, is another form
of the fourth carnivalesque category, profanation. The grotesque, a key aspect of Bakhtins
carnival, is a form of low culture that is obsessed with the body, especially its lower
stratum, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs (Bakhtin, Rabelais quoted in Vice
155). The body portrayed in the grotesque is in a constant state of movement and change,
emphasised through body realities such as eating, drinking, sex, evacuation, birth, and death
(Clark and Holquist 303). In its vulgar expression of acts frowned upon by high culture, the
grotesque allows the release of such distasteful energies in laughter and inverts social norms.
Thus, laughter, in its generation through the grotesque, degrades and materialises,
bringing culture down to earth (Bakhtin, Rabelais quoted in Vice 155), while unabashedly
displaying and celebrating the body and earthly life (Clark and Holquist 311). Furthermore,
because it celebrates the bodily processes, the changes of the bodily state, the grotesque body
is flesh as the site of becoming (Clark and Holquist 303), making the grotesque fundamental
in producing the carnivals pathos of change (Bakhtin, Dostoevskys Poetics 132).

Sebastian 19
Reading Jungle Energy Caf exposes one to numerous occasions of grotesque realism.
Along with Leon, the mountain camp and its members are the essence of the grotesque.
Buhawi [breaks] glorious wind in celebration after his team wins the camps game of
patintero (72) and, in another instance, urinates on Leon for no known reason, with words that
play on one of Hollywoods most famous lines, heres pissing at you, kid. A whole chapter is
devoted to the first sexual experience of Leon with Pintada, a sexually-liberated woman herself
who cheerfully satisfies the libidinal needs of Buhawis men; and great relish is given to the
description of Laureanos grand feast. The manner of Buhawis apparent death is a perfect
example of grotesque humour: he is shot through the rectum (97).
The grotesque also adds to the collective spirit of the carnival; it thus contributes, as the
caf does, to the carnivals free and familiar contact, linking the last category of profanation
to the carnivals first category. The body, which is focused on to comic extremes within the
novel, is not merely a private entity to be enjoyed by the individual (or two); it is a collective
body, shared in by all (Bakhtin, Dostoevskys Poetics 311), as communal as Pintadas love.
All human beings are united by their embodiment, and the body, their bodies, can serve to
gather and unify through this shared experience. Thus in its laughter, which celebrates the
grotesque, the carnival holds the free intermingling of bodies, the unabashed display of
bodily functionsand the free interplay between the body and the outside world as
fundamental (Bakhtin, Dostoevskys Poetics 311).
In the carnival, the individual comes to feel like an indissoluble part of the collectivity,
a member of the peoples mass body (Bakhtin, Rabelais as quoted in Clark and Holquist 302).
The grotesque enters the caf through its never-ending supply of food and beverage, and its
party-like atmosphere, which hark to the carnival feast where the sharing of food, a highly
communal act, is a crucial aspect (Clark and Holquist 302). The [bringing of] people together

Sebastian 20
in a communality has been argued to be the common movement of all features of the carnival
(Clark and Holquist 302), inspiring openness and relativity.

Not So Silly After All: The Subversion and Renewal of Carnivalesque Laughter
Clearly, the carnival is a world of its own, with its own logic and language. This
carnival world is outlined, as much as the carnival can be structured, in the carnivalesque
categories. The first category establishes a fundamental aspect of the carnival: the free and
familiar contact among people that, in removing distance between people (Bakhtin,
Dostoevskys Poetics 123), allows the initial meeting of opposed worlds and the levelling of
hierarchies, and subsequently leads to the liberation of the folk. The second category of
eccentricity is a direct result of this familiar contact, liberating the suppressed aspects of human
nature and culture, be it the grotesque body or the sense of the ridiculous. Carnivalistic
msalliances, the third category, also proceeds from this familiarity, which allows the carnival
to bring together opposed worlds, whether through magical realism, or, as discussed in the
fourth category, parody.
The fourth category, profanation, is directly manifested in the novel through parody and
the grotesque. Profanation is the language of the carnival, fully articulating the carnivalesque
ideals of familiarity, openness, and relativity in its concrete forms that invert the high and
thus liberate the low. Through its forms, the carnival [has] the effect of plunging certainty
into ambivalence and uncertainty, as a result of [its] emphasis on contradictions and the
relativity of allsystems. (Clark and Holquist 304). Thus, through the carnival, the folk
are exposed to the gay and free laughing aspect of the world, with its unfinished and open
character, with the joy of change and renewal (Clark and Holquist 301).

Sebastian 21
The joyful insurrection that occurs in the novels carnival world contains great potential
for a postcolonial engagement with the text, as it displays a true power of subversion. This
subversion is a challenging of authority itself, as it appears in several forms within the novel.
Subversion is enacted in the carnivals liberating force. Carnivaleque laughter is [indissolubly
and essentially related] to freedom (Clark and Holquist 308), and this liberating force serves
to subvert as well. Within the individual and society, carnivalesque laughter affects a concrete
change: it liberates the folk from the oppression of gloomy categories into the joy of
change and renewal (Clark and Holquist 301). Thus laughter, generated by folk humour, is a
freedom from and victory over fear (Clark and Holquist 301), used by dominant structures to
maintain control. In this aspect, carnivalesque laughter allows the fulfilment of the
forbidden, releasing suppressed discourse from the margins, which in turn subverts the
authority of the norm.
Lily-Rose Tope further develops this liberating aspect of Jungle Energy Caf, focusing
on the narrative of the millenarian the language of the uneducated, revolutionary masses
that incorporated religion and magic (128). For Tope, the novel initiates the process of
liberating the subjugated discourses by narrating from below, using the perspective of
millenarian-turned-revolutionary Leon Kilat (129). Thus the novel creates an alternative
space and narrative (133-134), subverting existing systems by making room for postcolonial
dialogue.
The weaving of a magical, fictional tale out of myth and historical moments and
figures serves to undermine the concept of history itself, and brings back the long-forgotten
and dismissed tradition of folklore, achieving a renewal of precolonial literature. Pison
elaborates further on the dichotomy between history and fiction (Pison 88), arguing that
Jungle Energy Caf challenges the accepted authority of history as a novel where fiction

Sebastian 22
blends with fact (Pison 88). What is produced is the effect of history as the novel and the
novel as history (Pison 88), exposing history as yet another construction (Pison 90), as much a
text as stories are.
Furthermore, anarchy also reigns as realism, the foundation of Western culture and
literature, is thrown into the air in a mad burst of laughter. The novels aspect of magical
realism, with its fantastical (and illogical) plot and non-linear time, has a part to play in this.
Realism, ruled by the western ideals of reason and objectivity, is just one other reductive and
hegemonic system that favours the rational over the sensual; through the combination of
magical realism and the postmodernist strategy of metafiction, a shadow of unsettling doubts
is cast upon its altar (Faris 17).
But this subversion does not mean that such systems are removed, rather, they are made
to co-exist equally with the low cultures they spurned, as the carnival brings together, unifies,
weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the
insignificant, the wise with the stupid (Bakhtin, Dostoevskys Poetics, 123). It is the officiality
of such systems that is denied as dogma, hegemony, and authority are dispersed through
ridicule and laughter (Lachmann 70).
Beyond the dispersal of dogma, hegemony, and authority through laughter that
parodies and levels hierachical systems, Bakhtins formulations go a step further to conceive of
carnivalesque renewal amidst the destruction. In carnivalesque laughter, Bakhtin sees an
embracing of change itself, be it destruction or renewal. Bakhtin explains his concept:
Carnivalistic laughter likewise is directed toward something higher toward a shift of
authorities and truths, a shift of world orders. Laughter embraces both poles of change,
it deals with the very process of change, with crisis itself. Combined in the act of
carnival laughter are death and rebirth, negation (a smirk) and affirmation (rejoicing
laughter). This is profoundly universal laughter, a laughter that contains a whole
outlook on the world. (Dostoevskys Poetics, 127)

Sebastian 23
Carnivalesque laughter is by nature deeply ambivalent, linked to crisis itself,
[keeping] alive a sense of variety and change (Clark and Holquist 301). In this there is
revelation in laughter; it proclaims a second truth to the world (Lachmann 65). This is the
truth of the relativity of the truth, the truth of crisis and change, the truth of ambivalence
(italics mine; Lachmann 66). Since both life and death are aspects of reality, equal partners in
existence, the only thing that is fixed is change itself; change is the only truth that needs to
be embraced. Celebrating relativity and proclaiming this truth of ambivalence within the chaos
of the carnival furthers the breakdown of binarism and the pluralising of discourse. And since it
accepts both poles of change, laughter becomes a universal concept, an all-embracing worldview. Laughter, through the carnival, absolutises nothing, but rather proclaims the joyful
relativity of everything (Bakhtin, Dostoevskys Poetics, 125).
Such joyful relativity is then the truth found within the carnival; this is true
knowledge, beyond any singular statement that is bound to be narrow and one-sided (Bakhtin,
Dostoevskys Poetics, 132). Those gathered at the caf are privileged with this knowledge.
When Leon acquires the banana charm, the book of history, its chapters reaching backwards
and forwards into time, opens its pages to him; he suddenly [knows]that all that had passed
before and would come to pass after were nothing else but open mysteries (20). The secret
known by those who live in the carnival world of Jungle Energy Cafe is a pluralism that seeks
no fixed meaning and permits a myriad of differing perspectives (Lachmann 62). Carnival
humour offers no last word (Clark and Holquist 317), establishing an open-endedness seen in
Leons laughter, which rings out from beyond the grave, refusing to end with his bodily death.
In its powers of subversion and renewal, the carnival world of Jungle Energy Caf is
seen to be more than mere holiday play and senseless merrymaking: it is a special form of
life that is able to revel in the worlds variety, to celebrate its openness and its ever-renewed

Sebastian 24
capacity to surprise (Clark and Holquist 300-301). The novels carnivalesque laughter
supplies direction to what would otherwise be a comic but superficial text.

As the Holiday Ends, Things Return to Normal: The Historical Limits of the Carnival
As a carnivalesque world, Jungle Energy Caf goes beyond a literary feat of mere wit
and style. Leons laughter, now the laughter of the carnival, challenges and dissolves the
concept of authority. The reverence with which certain concepts and systems are treated
becomes the stuff of ridicule in the novel, as joyous anarchy rules its pages (Lachmann 62).
But the carnival in its historical occurrence, despite being a regular event in a towns calendar,
was just that an event, limited to the yearly cycle of feast days and holidays as decreed by
those official institutions the carnival displaces. A celebration of the extraordinary, of life
drawn out of the ordinary, implies a subsequent return to the ordinary. The carnival did not, and
could not, destroy socio-cultural hierarchies; it was only a temporary immersion of official
culture in folk culture (italics mine; Lachmann 71), after which the dominant system of
authority would take the crown back from the fool and resume its reign, at best renewed by the
towns carnivalesque moment. Despite Bakhtins projection of the carnival into a world-view, a
potential state of existence, its historic reality limits its revolutionary reach, keeping it within
the past as a medieval relic that has lost its former significance as both an event and a
concept (Clark and Holquist 300).
Sisa is Leons friend from the lazy, innocent days in the small town of Bacong before
he is empowered by the banana charm. Silent, perhaps even dumb, her face is infinitely
placid; she would observe Leons foolish antics and stare out to sea with a calm that came
close to idiocy (5). Sisas silence is broken when Leon returns with the banana charm in his
mouth, raging through his hometown like lightning. His robust laughter frees something within

Sebastian 25
her. Perhaps this suggests that laughter is powerful enough to affect change more concrete than
a passing festivity, that it can bring the values of the carnival beyond its finite bounds into the
realm of the postcolonial situation.

Narrating the Philippine Postcolonial


No matter how surreal Jungle Energy Caf may be, the setting of its story is still the
Philippines, a very real geographical and cultural entity. Beyond establishing the postcolonial
condition of this island nation by proving its extensive colonial history, the novel itself captures
instances of the colonial struggle for independence and the postcolonial desire for identity.
Like the postcolonial country it reflects, the novel is a mix of Spanish, Filipino, and American
influences, displaying a host of multicultural references drawn from the Philippines long
history of contact with foreign peoples. A perfect image of this intercultural contact is the
parallel drawn in the novel between the Filipino tikbalang and the centaur of Greek antiquity,
done with a comic twist as it turns out to be a friendly, cigar-smoking creature whom they
fondly named Nicodemus (90).
Jungle Energy Caf not only reflects the fusion of culture that is the Philippines, it also
illuminates the nations struggles born of its colonial past and postcolonial present. The conflict
between the Spanish masters and their Filipino subjects is the backdrop for the rollicking
adventures of Leon and company: Leon whips the bottom of one of the feared Guardia Civil,
he befriends Buhawi, a folk-hero who threatens the authority of the Spaniards, engages in
battle with a contingent of Guardia Civil out to capture Buhawis rebel group, and finally he
joins the KKK and its fight for Philippine independence.
Beyond the physical battle for land and nationhood, the clash of culture manifests itself
in the attitudes of both sides towards the other. Laureano, with his almost-mythical culinary

Sebastian 26
talent, constantly refers to the Spaniards as hawk-nosed, crescent-nosed, ladle-nosed, kalawnosed, turd-nosed, among other imaginative descriptions (76-79); likewise the natives are
labelled by the colonisers according to their noses, which are mostly short and squat, some
even downright squashed rather unevenly across [their] flat brown faces (82). Whether
native or Spaniard, each group views the other as Other. However, since it is the Spaniards
who have power, it is the Filipino who becomes the true, marginalised Other, as subjects
under colonial dominion, forced to obey and accept their position, both mentally and socially,
in the colony.
A passage describing the mountain where Buhawi and his band of followers dwell is
particularly revealing. The mountain is named Cuernos de Negros, Horns of the Devil by the
Spanish, who find humour in the parallel drawn between the name of the mountain and the
island in which it was found Negros, so called for its dark-skinned aborigines (33). This
demonising and exotifying of the Filipino natives continues on in the passage, when Pedro
Saavedra, a Spanish surveyor and heir, takes in the islands panoramic view with a long
sweeping look (33). He reflects:
There is too much dark beneath this countrys serene surfaceSuch belief in the
warmth of blood, even us Castilians would be knitting our brows to comprehend. Such
childrenAnd still they have much to learn. And they laugh so and sob so about their
childrens tales, their healers, sirens, naiads, vampires, talismans, elementals, shamans,
priestesses, their sorcery! (34-35)
One can feel in these words the binary system that [establishes] a relation of dominance, and
represents a violent hierarchy on which imperialism is based and which it actively
perpetuates (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Post-colonial Studies 24). The binaries of
coloniser-colonised, white-black, presence-absence, and civilised-primitive, among others
(Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Post-colonial Studies 24), asserts the supremacy of civilised
European societies and allows the exploitation and civilisation of primitive peoples by

Sebastian 27
their supposed superiors, acts that are justified and encouraged by imperial ideology. Pedro
Saavedra, assured in his countrys cultural and racial superiority, can look down on a people,
too dark and therefore completely Other to his own, branding them as sensual, superstitious,
irrational, and as immature as children.
The carnival, when applied to the postcolonial situation as is done in Jungle Energy
Cafe, responds to this imperial system. As we have seen, the carnival overlaps opposing realms
and inverts conventional structures, dissolving them in laughter. In this same manner, the
novels carnivalesque world subverts yet another binary system, that of colonial discourse,
challenging the authority of the coloniser, and, along with it, the associated (and therefore
privileged) notions of realism, white, civilisation, logic, history, and truth. There occurs a
breakdown of the official hegemonic systems of power still in place long after our colonisers
have left the country, as the folk, the marginal, and the subjugated are freed from their
colonial fetters and celebrated in, as Lachmann puts it, a spectacular feast of inversion and
parody (62). The colonial binarism of privileged-marginal is blurred as life [is] turned inside
out (Bakhtin, Dostoevskys Poetics 122), and, as witnessed in the caf at the novels end,
laughter allows equality and anarchy reign. In this chaos of suspended structure, the carnival
world asks, what is really real? What is meaning and who dictates it?

Whats In a Word: Laughters Liberation of Heteroglossia


The muteness of Sisa, a powerfully symbolic image, is now seen to be a manifestation
of the suppression of the colonised peoples voice and culture. Whether it is self-imposed or a
natural defect, her silence speaks of the yoke of colonial domination. But when Leon returns to
Bacong, whipping the Guardia Civil into fearful retreat, Sisa, together with the heavy clouds
above, breaks her silence: a rumble of thunder [rents] the air as Sisa smiles and begins to

Sebastian 28
laugh (30). The rain now [falling] in torrents, Leon [laughs] a covenant with SisaAgua de
Mayo! (30). Sisas laughter, along with the dramatic effect of the first rains of the season,
seems to speak of a renewal that transcends the bounds of the carnival.
Through the carnival, Sisa is freed from her silence and given back her voice, just as
folk culture is released from the margins by carnivalesque laughter. But even beyond this, there
is something powerful in the very sound of her voice, in her own laughter that is released by
the carnival. Her regaining of the fundamental ability to speak seems to suggest the carnivals
liberation of something that is beyond it, as if pointing to a truth or reality as everyday as the
act of laughing. What is contained in Sisas voice, in her utterance, is what the carnival
ultimately points to the heteroglossia of language itself.
The carnival may be a temporary realm, doomed to end as the officially-allotted feast
days come to a close and everything returns to normal, but it expresses and celebrates
something that is fundamental: what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia. In heteroglossia, laughter is
expanded beyond its expression in the carnival moment into real-life, bringing with it its
carnivalesque truths. Heteroglossia, as discussed by Bakhtin in his essay Discourse in the
Novel, refers to the social diversity of speech types (Bakhtin 263). Traditionally, language
was perceived to be unitary and singular. and was thought to have a simple unmediated
relation to the speaker (Bakhtin 269). But according to Bakhtin, language is ideologically
saturated; it reflects a world view (Bakhtin 271). He conceives of centripetal forces that
strive for socio-political and cultural centralisation (Bakhtin 271), in other words,
monoglossia the creation of a unified, central world-view (Bakhtin 270). If ideology is
essentially connected to language, these centripetal forces naturally produce and express
themselves in a singular language (Bakhtin 270), a firm, stable linguistic nucleus of an
officially recognised literary language (Bakhtin 271).

Sebastian 29
However, the need to create a singular language implies that such a formation is not
natural; it implies that language is not naturally unified or stable, and furthermore, that there
are forces opposing those that seek a fixed center. In truth, language is heteroglot, stratified and
differentiated into linguistic dialects, and socio-ideological languages such as languages of
social groups, professional and generic languages, languages of generations, and so
forth (Bakhtin 271-272). This heteroglossia applies centrifugal forces on language, and so
in any utterance, in any act of speech occurs the meeting and contradiction-ridden, tensionfilled unity of two embattled tendencies languages centripetal and centrifugal forces
(Bakhtin 272). What traditional linguistics and unitary language denies is this heteroglossia;
they are blind to the world as made up of a roiling mass of languages (Holquist, Dialogism
69).
The carnival, along with other low genres, not only expresses this heteroglossia
(which should in theory be present in any instance of everyday speech), it dialogises
heteroglossia (Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel 273), meaning it deliberately allows the
multitude of diverse languages to interact, relate, and compete with each other. Whereas
dominant, official culture is deaf to dialogue, in the carnival the heteroglossia of the clown
[sounds] forth, ridiculing all languages and dialectswhere all languages were masks and
where no language could claim to be an authentic, incontestable face (Bakhtin, Discourse in
the Novel 273). The carnival therefore reveals the hierarchical, unequal nature of language
and the society in which it belongs in which the official language is privileged and the
other varied multitudes are subordinated. In the carnival, faced with the laughter it produces,
the official literary language becomes just another of the heteroglot languages.
Heteroglossia likewise manifests itself in the written word, in literary texts, especially
the novel. In fact, Bakhtin perceives the gradual carnivalisation of literature in the development

Sebastian 30
of novelistic prose, with its quality of dialogism (Bakhtin, Dostoevskys Poetics 124). In his
essay Discourse in the Novel Bakhtin goes against the assumption that the artistic work as a
wholeis a self-sufficient and closed authorial monologue (Bakhtin 274). Rather, he argues
that the novel engages in a dialogue of languages (Bakhtin 294), that is incarnated in the
speech and dialogue of the characters (Bakhtin 326). In fact, dialogisation and the novels
dispersion into the rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia is the distinguishing feature
of novelistic discourse (Bakhtin 263).
However, heteroglossia, upon entering the text, is no longer in its everyday form, the
novel artistically reworks heteroglossia into a structured stylistic system that expresses the
differentiated socio-ideological position of the author amid the heteroglossia of his epoch
(Bakhtin 300). In the polyphonic or multi-voiced novel (Clark and Holquist 240), dialogism
occurs between the heteroglot languages, as it is concretised and individually accented in the
utterance (Bakhtin 272). Each utterance of the novels characters contains this dialogism,
which, because of languages inherent inequality, is a combative struggle not between the wills
or opinions of the characters, but between and among socio-linguistic points of view
(Bakhtin 273).

Speaking in Tongues: The Dialogue of Many Voices in Jungle Energy Cafe


As a novel, and a carnivalesque one at that, Jungle Energy Caf exhibits literary
heteroglossia twice over. Since the carnival is dialogised heteroglossia, parodic in tone,
consciously opposed and aimed sharply and polemically against the official languages of its
given time (Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel 273), all instances of the carnival that have been
discussed previously naturally manifest this heteroglossia in a most robust (and obvious) way.
Jungle Energy Cafe, as dialogised, and therefore accentuated, heteroglossia is a vast and

Sebastian 31
confusing bricolage of differing elements, linguistic styles, and narrative forms, from popular
nonsense rhymes like Si! Si! Para buto ng sili! shouted by Seor B&B into a telephone
(170), to jokes and both western and Filipino poetry. The metafictional drawing of the narratorauthor, Robert Aguinaldo, into the novel as a character himself, quite deliberately shakes the
inherent authority of the author (though, of course, Robert is merely a representation of the
author, not the actual author of Jungle Energy Caf). The multilayered nature of the text is
further enhanced by the Endnotes section at the end of the novel, which not only parodies the
language of academic papers, but explicitly attributes phrases and passages in the text to
external references, outlining the vast web of linguistic and socio-historical forces.
Studying the tense interactions between and within the different forms of language
opens our eyes to the innumerable levels of dialogue existing within the novel. Magical
realisms closeness and near-merging of two realms, two worlds, (Faris 21) engages the
socio-ideological languages of the myth-fantastic and the historic-real in dialogue with one
another. The fantastic, the language of precolonial epics, colours the immortalised historical
moment of Jose Rizals execution, as Leon uses his magic kerchief to enhance his hearing. Jose
Rizals heart was steady, and Leon caught last words of the good doctor as he wrenched his
face for a last glimpse of east: All that this land fathered, that is all (177). Adding yet
another layer of meaning and reference to this passage, these words then turn out to be lines
from Cirilo F. Bautistas epic poem, Telex Moon, as mentioned in the novels Endnotes
(220-221).
This initial confrontation ignites into a full-blown battle as the fantastical narrative that
features folklore heroes like Leon and Buhawi is countered with historical reality, as Robert
Aguinaldo researches on their lives and legacies. Leon Kilat is a figure out of the pages of
history itself, but is endowed with extraordinary abilities characteristic of the precolonial epic.

Sebastian 32
Though Buhawi, or King Kanoy, is believed by his followers to perform feats of supernatural
strength, healing, and other such miracles, Robert highlights passages from a research paper
that discusses Buhawi in an objective manner, viewing him as an example of leyenda
negra (53), material for the ethnohistory of legend making (46). Excerpts from the paper
become part of the narrative, and its academic language portrays not a Living God (48), but
merely Ponciano Elopre, a charismatic but human leader who attracted a cult following with
his fantastical predictions about the end of the world.
As a carnivalesque world, Jungle Energy Caf relies heavily on parodic discourse,
which disrupts the object of its attention with mockery and inversion. The novel mocks not
only the language and conventions of traditional epics, it is also aimed sharply and
polemically at other official languages (Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel 273), such as
religion, and, as we have seen, history, which turns into just another voice in the multitude. It
also mocks nationalist discourse, as seen in the conflict of regionalist and nationalist voices as
revolutionaries, led by Leon, call for every Filipino, er, Cebuano, to join in and fight for the
Filipino, er, Cebuano and final liberation (186). Such discourse is further explored for
complexities in Leons confusion over what The Cause really is, and the comic way in which
he learns about the circus secret revolutionary calling:
Revilla swilled the sweet coco wine in his glass and dramatically fixed Leon in
the eye. The Cause, he emphasised drunkenly. Sshpeak of it in capitalssh when you
sshpeak of it, Leon.
And what is The Cause? asked Leon carefully. What strange animal is it,
Revilla?
Bah! harrumphed Revilla stoutly. I sshavor not your jesshting tone, my
friend. Either you are for the causshe of freedom, or you are for the cursshe of
tyranny.
The Cause, repeated Revilla somberly, issh what we consshecrate our livessh
too, what guidessh all or effortsshe, what sshpurssh ussh on from sshacrifice to
sshacrifice. Nothing else but The Cause.
Oh, sshut up, Revilla, letssh go to sshleep, said Leon. (141-142)

Sebastian 33
A topic usually treated with the most deference, especially in a postcolonial country such as the
Philippines, become the slurred ramblings of a drunken circus performer, who throws about the
words of a Philippine national hero, Ninoy Aquino either you are for the cause of freedom,
or you are for the curse of tyranny (217). The mockery is fully driven home when Leon
mimics Revillas inebriated speech and tells the man to go to sshleep, having one last laugh
at the expense of the causshe of freedom.
Parodic discourse, as seen here, is a form of double-voiced discourse, or
heteroglossia as anothers speech in anothers language (Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel
324). It is a specialised form that heteroglossia assumes when it is incorporated into the novel
(Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel 324). In double-voiced discourse, each utterance is
weighted with two voices, two meanings, and two expressions, expressing both the direct
intention of the character and the authors intentions as refracted in the characters voice
(Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel 324). Here the authors parodying of nationalist rhetoric
resounds through Revillas sincere attempt to express his passionate beliefs: his drunken state
only lowers The Cause he holds so highly. Meanwhile, the authors refracted intention is
voiced outright in Leons ridicule and mimicry of Revilla.
Another instance of double-voiced discourse is when Leon is embarrassed to wear his
new pants in front of Yu Cheng Co and Teresa, who are hurt and insulted by his apparent
rudeness. What Teresa and Co do not know is that the pants Teresa sewed for him give him a
pleasant new bulge in his pants (125), which ultimately grows until it [punctures] a hole
through the shops very roof (132). Before that happens, however, the internal speech of both
the shamefaced Leon and the affronted Yu Cheng Co contain words with double entendres.
Leon struggles to find a way to make his hosts understand and empathise with the size of [his]
dreary problem (italics mine; 128); the Chinese baker fumes at the audacity of his Indio guest,

Sebastian 34
who must have felt a rise in self-importance from getting a new pair of pants (italics mine;
129). The authors intention the use of pun to enhance the humourous situation is most
obvious in the thoughts of Co, who at that moment is unaware of Leons quandary, and thus
uses the pun unintentionally.
The past and the present are intertwined in a dialogue between the languages of
generations, not only in the parallel stories of Leon and Robert Aguinaldo, but in the narrative
which, though set for the most part at the turn of the 19th century, is interspersed with modern
culture. Leon and Bestra speak of Hollywood in the opening lines, and 20th century slang is
used by 19th century characters, such as Leons exuberant JacuzziIs the life, man! upon
finding a way to turn a gurgling stream into a hydro-powered back massage (103). Leon even
references the transformational magic cry of the superhero of a popular radio series, Kapitan
Kidlat (217), when he cries out Kilat ngayon! (136), translating the word lightning from
the Tagalog kidlat into the Cebuano kilat. Another instance is when Pajarillo, an agent for
Singer sewing machines, explains to Leon that every Jesusa, Maria and Josefa who could
cavil for small change from every Jesus, Mario and Jose could purchase one of the
newfangled machines (117), drawing from the American expression, Jesus, Mary and
Joseph.
Modern slang is not the only speech variety found in the novel. The novel employs
various linguistic dialects, incorporating Filipino, Spanish, and even Latin into the
predominantly English text. Literary language is also brought into play, as, in the passage
leading up to Leons first sexual encounter, Pintada speaks to her would-be lover in the
language of literary criticism: Your meter is varied, your rhythm sprung (41). Leon then
interrupts her by suggesting they get down to the present business of lovemaking. Even the
languages of social groups are brought into the dialogue, such as the speech type of a

Sebastian 35
particular, highly visible social group, the Filipino-Chinese population. When the Chinese of
Colon Street come to the circus (138), they marvel at Leon and Tanyas star act, shouting,
Mu kah mu pah mah mu teh (139), which captures the accented Filipino of the FilipinoChinese.
Dialogism occurs within the speech of a character as well as between characters. Leons
speech, as the laughing hero of this carnival world, is particularly plural. As Leon tells his
sister, his speech shall curve here and there the way the banana shapes its day (26),
accentuating heteroglossia by refusing to even attempt a singular language. At one point in the
novel, Leon finds himself in a dilemma on account of the new pants Teresa has sewn for him:
either he shows his hosts how the new pants look on him, and Co is insulted by [his] privates
inordinate response (127), or he keeps hiding in his room, which also offends them. Without a
clue as to what to do, he rants about the unfair position he is in:
Jesus, what a bind!these goddamn pants (without mountains, even!) that cast me
under the spell of satyriasis, how embarrassing, a fucking no-win situation it is, damned
if I do and damned if I dontwhat a fucking dilemma! A karate chop for a Gordion
knot, for want of a nail and my kingdom for a horse, but this is hell!...It feels like very
glecch!...How now, brown cow?! How, how, the carabao?! How the gentle exit from
this mess? How the pull away from this Chinese shop, where the push of kin is there, so
palpably visibly there, here and there?! Wow, Cubao, pero but how?! (127-128)
His thoughts are a confusion of literary language, clichs, foul cursing, rhetoric, lyricism, and
modern-day speech. He even pluralises the common expression, how now, brown cow? by
drawing a parallel in the Filipino-English rhyme, how, how, the carabao?
Within the words of another character, the homily Buhawi delivers as he and Leon
say goodbye, we find a perfect cross-section of the heteroglossia in Jungle Energy Caf,
offering a sample of this polyphony and the various forms through which it makes itself
present. His lengthy farewell speech is an assemblage of various historic and literary
references, and linguistic styles. He invokes Western mythological figures such as Hades and

Sebastian 36
Thor (94), and pays tribute to Jose Rizal, the illustrious ilustrado and his timeless Noli Me
Tangere (92). The past and the future can be heard in the present of Buhawis words, as King
Kanoy draws from the memories of their time together Remember me, remember usHow
Pintada caressed your innermost recessesRemember Laureano of the gallant repast
Remember the marvels of burping and farting (89-91) and also points to the future with
the promise: we shall encounter each other again when we survive the deaths of our physical
bodies, I in all appearance shot through the rectumyou stabbed seven times through the
navel (97). He almost seems to enter the future when he describes the caf that awaits them,
saying, Hey, Leon, are you enjoying yourself? Man, you must! This doesnt happen everyday!
Such a party! (98).
Buhawi harks to certain poets, Western and Filipino, from the past and the present, to
create an intertextual pastiche. At one point he tells Leon to remember Nolledo and Villa, the
comely contumely of their celestial commaed clauses (96), and, going further than merely
mentioning their names, enables their voices and commaed clauses to enter the narrative
with the line, And, when, Quevedo, fell, on, Gods, bright, centipede (96). Pastiche
actually occurs in numerous parts of the novel besides Buhawis homily, such as when Pintada
describes her lovemaking with Leon as a doveglion fuck (43), doveglion being the
celebrated non-de-plume of the premier Filipino expatriate poet, Jose Garcia Villa, as a
contraction of dove, eagle, and lion (210-211). In another instance the words of Julius Ruiz
are seen by Leon as he looks eighty years into the future to see handwriting on a wall in
Ermita: You were the broken wings of an angel, strange cargo for the boat that pulled off at
eight, evening. And you drank the sound of the siren (162).
Buhawis words are often mysterious and sage-like, invoking the wisdom of fortune
cookies and arcane knowledges like the powers of hexagrams and the spiritual encounters of

Sebastian 37
one Dr. John Dee (93-94). But he also breaks into modern-day speech, such as when he
bequeaths his magical kerchief Luzviminda to Leon with the not-quite solemn words: Take it.
Shake it but dont break it. Cross the seas with it. Award Teresa her sight with it. Take applause
and wave with it, for it is silken, and a kerchief, with powers to boot (99). His heteroglot
language even distorts history, with the prediction that Bernardo Carpio, another Philippine
hero, is to reappear a century hence in the form of a professional basketball player fated to
burn the hoops for 27 points one night against his former team of mighty Crispa in his new
capacity as a power forward for a Chinese magnates team (95-96).
Thus Buhawi, in his words and actions, lives the gospel he directly and indirectly
preaches: subversion through dialogised heteroglossia. In his own homily there is, as he puts it,
subversion of a very high [order, there] is multiplicity of tones, characters, courses of
structured if divergent flow (73).
Dialogism need not be verbalised speech or inner monologue; it does not have to come
from characters themselves, which is but one of the forms heteroglossia assumes within the
novel (Bakhtin Discourse in the Novel 335). Potential dialogue is embedded in yet another
form of double-voiced discourse: the discourse of a whole incorporated genre (Bakhtin,
Discourse in the Novel 324), which is the inclusion of other literary and non-literary
forms or genres within the narrative. As a work of bricolage, Jungle Energy Caf weaves
different materials together, from endnotes and socio-historical volumes, such as the book by
Resil Mojares that Robert Aguinaldo studies as he writes Leons story, to a map of Negros
Island and a diagram of the Filipino game, patintero.
As Leon returns to Cebu after his trip to Manila and subsequent time travel to the 20th
century, several excerpts appear at the start of Chapter Fifteen. One is yet another excerpt from
Resil Mojares book, Casa Gorordo in Cebu: Urban Residence in a Philippine Province 1860-

Sebastian 38
1920, this one detailing life in Cebu upon entering the 20th century, when cinema, dance-halls,
and Coca-Cola arrived in the province (182-183). The next three are found under the subtitle,
World Predictions 1983, and are all somehow related to Uranus:
June to July 10 Lunation
This is an active month on the international scene, with many changes and
upsets in the countries where Lunation conjoins natal Uranus the Philippines, little
Liechtenstein, and the islands of Reunion, Martinique and Guadeloupe In the
Philippines, there is likely to be unrest over the repressive government that has been in
power there for some time.
LLEWELLYN CALENDAR 1983
In 1979 Uranus was in the Mid-Heavens of Iran when the Ayatollah
Khoumeini came into power. Uranus is the power of rebellion, and everytime it reached
the 10th house of a countrys chart it indicated an uprising or a revolution. The planet
instils a sense of self-independence, or the need to assert ones individuality. Uranus is
the planet of the masses. It signifies the coming together of people from all walks of
life, races and creeds, as well as their merging into a common experience
- Notes by Concepcion Misa
Whats the similarity between the USS Enterprise of Star Trek and a roll of
toilet paper?
They both go to Uranus and wipe out Klingons.
- Joke picked up by Mitchum Tikboy,
as told to Robert Aguinaldo
(183-184)
In these excerpts of a calendar, the notes of one Concepcion Misa, and a joke told to Robert
Aguinaldo by his son, Uranus is taken as a word with stratified meaning, not merely the name
of the seventh planet from the Sun. It becomes the object of study for astrology and divination,
drawing into discourse the mythological origin of the name: Uranus is one of the Titans in
Greek mythology, who was ruler of the heavens until he was unseated by his son, Cronus. In
the last excerpt, all original meaning is lost as the word is fragmented and manipulated into
something more obscene your-anus. And so the three excerpts relate and interact with one
another in dialogism, in the relation and struggle of words with one another.

Sebastian 39
There is a second movement beyond these excerpts, as these passages affect the actual
narrative of Leons story. Leon muses on his future as he approaches Cebu, knowing that he
would die in a matter of months (185); here Robert Aguinaldos voice enters the narrative and
addresses the reader directly, informing him/her of Leons death to come, and breaking the
assumption that novels have only passive listeners beyond its boundaries (Bakhtin 274).
Whats more, Leons thoughts take on the shape of the previous excerpts, as if Roberts perusal
of them affected Leons mind directly, which it did, since Robert is Leons creator (to a
certain extent). Leon knows that he will
never experience the magic of film at the Teatro Junquera Tennis matches would
remain unknown to our hero. He would never get a lady partner for the price of twenty
centavos a dance, let alone waltz or two-step to the latest American music. He would
never taste Coca-Cola made with artesian water.
He would never hear of Guadeloupe or Martnique, see the Ayatollah Khoumeini
or Star Trek on tv. He would never listen to one Dr. Uy perorate on the significant
parallels between the periods of Aguinaldo and Macoy under the influence of Uranus
and its six-year cycle. He would never (185)
All his nevers are attached to phrases in the previous excerpts, resulting in a heteroglot
layering within the text of external sources, Roberts citation of them, and Leons use of
them to express himself.
In the comic novel, which Jungle Energy Caf is essentially, Bakhtin believes that
heteroglossia is incorporated in a particular way (Discourse in the Novel 311). What
predominates in the [comic] novel are various forms and degrees of parodic stylisation of
incorporated languages that dismisses any straightforward and unmediated seriousness
(Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel 312). Thus, the carnivalesque laughter within the novel
exposes heteroglossia, by making it literary, in order to subvert official languages and thus
breakdown dominant socio-ideological structures, along with their binaries, in a rowdy
celebration of openness and variety.

Sebastian 40

The Voice of the Other in Polyphony: Heteroglossias Fundamental Plurality


Thus Jungle Energy Caf dialogises and makes prominent the heteroglossia of
language, allowing the reader to realise the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions
between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socioideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles, and so forth (Bakhtin,
Discourse in the Novel 291). These languages do not exclude one another, but rather
intersect with each other in many different ways (Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel 291).
Thus heteroglossia is not neutral or nonproductive; it is a plurality of relations, not just a
cacophony of different voices (Holquist, Dialogism 89). The myriad of voices and languages
interact dialogically, affecting one another as they construct meaning amidst context.
In its polyphony that allows for various equally privileged [consciousnesses] (Clark
and Holquist 244), there is an openness of relations, an openness in the self/other relations
(Clark and Holquist 243). For Bakhtin, the gap between the two different centers of the I and
the other is the space where dialogue is pursued at its deepest level (Clark and Holquist
242). This characteristic of Bakhtins theory, its consciousness of the other (Clark and
Holquist 241), draws it into the dark, unchartered waters of postcolonialism. Drawing Bakhtin
into postcolonial dialogue is appropriate furthermore because Bakhtins topic of study,
language, is used as a means of oppression in imperial systems (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin,
Empire Writes Back 52). And so, the in-between space, the sense of margins, in Bakhtins
formulations of heteroglossia can be brought into the present postcolonial day, particularly
through the writings of a postcolonial theorist who takes special interest in the realm of the inbetween, Homi K. Bhabha.

Sebastian 41
Hybridity: Culture on The Edge
In Bhabhas discussion of the modern nation, he conceives of meaning as being
continually constructed in cultural liminality (DissemiNation 619). Truth, rather than a
stable, homogenous system that builds the political unity of the nation in its [turning] the
People into One (DissemiNation 620), is markedby the ambivalence of the process of
emergence [of meaning] itself, involving a negotiation (rather than a negation) of
oppositional and antagonistic elements (Bhabha, Commitment to Theory 2382-2383). Such
a view implies Bhabhas attempt to dissolve the binary system from which cultural authority
is derived, that essential and simplistic opposition between the Self and the Other, based on
which nationalist discourse situates its own nation-self against the extrinsic Other nations
(Bhabha, DissemiNation 619). Thus, Bhabha defines culture itself, saying that cultures are
never unitary in themselves, nor simply dualistic in the relation of Self to Other
(Commitment to Theory 2395).
Going beyond this totalisation of culture, Bhabha turns to a Third Space of
Enunciation (Commitment to Theory 2396), where meaning is found in cultural
difference, the intersection and jarring of meanings and values generated in-between the
variety and diversity associated with cultural plentitude (italics mine; DissemiNation 633).
Marked by such cultural difference and the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples,
antagonistic authorities, and tense cultural locations (DissemiNation 619), this Third Space,
or in-between space (Commitment to Theory 2397), mediates between the I and the You
(Commitment to Theory 2395). Since meaning is constructed only in this mediation or
interpretation, in the in-between space itself (and not in the things in themselves), the Third
Space makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent processensuring that the

Sebastian 42
meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity (Commitment to Theory
2396).
Furthermore, the Third Space is characterised by hybridity in its production of new
forms of meaning (DissemiNation 634), new in that they are neither the one nor the other
(Commitment to Theory 2385). Hybridity, a feature inherent to culture itself, strengthens the
ambivalence and openness of meaning; by resisting totalisation becoming one or the other
hybridity allows meaning to retain its infinite depth of possibility (DissemiNation 635; 633),
thus permitting contradictions, ambiguities, and pluralities to co-exist. This hybridity of
culture, its expression of the arbitrary sign that remains open to translation
(DissemiNation 635), recalls the unfathomable depths of language in Bakhtins writings.
Bhabhas hybridity is brought into dialogue with Bakhtins heteroglossia in the
instance of iteration (DissemiNation 635): what is for Bakhtin the utterance of language is
the sign for Bhabha. As Bakhtins utterance is the site of a struggle between socioideological perspectives, between the centripetal and the centrifugal forces, in a similar
movement, Bhabha views the sign as arbitrary, as the hybrid [site] of meaning that is
different and differential in its repetitionin each specific social practice each
utterance of the sign, allows for new translations, because each instance is unique, shaped by
innumerable social contexts and forces.
In this juxtaposition, the heteroglossia of language is extended to become the nature of
culture itself, both theories stress an ambivalence that does not allow the establishment of
discursive authority (DissemiNation 634). However, this leaking of heteroglossia into
territories beyond language is not an interpretation or adaptation of Bakhtins formulations, it is
directly accounted for by Bakhtin. Bakhtins heteroglossia exists beyond language, present in
all levels of exchange, albeit through completely different means, thereby proclaiming

Sebastian 43
existence itself as a vast web of interconnectionsall of which are linked as participants in an
event so immense no single one of us can ever know it (Holquist 41). In the events of the
production of culture and in interpersonal dialogue alike, there is a constant, ceaseless
creation and exchange of meaning (Holquist 41). Both Bakhtin and Bhabha stress, in their own
individual contexts, a fundamental plurality: the one as many rather than the many as one
(Commitment to Theory 2382; DissemiNation 626).

Another Other: The Postcolonial Third Space


Bhabha applies his formulation of culture to the postcolonial situation. Colonial
discourse is founded on an articulation of difference (The Other Question 38), using a
system of representation, a regime of truth (The Other Question 41), that positions the
coloniser as Self and the colonised as Other. This constructs the colonised Other into a
stereotype, a fixed form of difference (The Other Question 47). This fixity is an
apparatus of power that colonial discourse uses to establish a racial hierarchy that construes
the colonised as a population of degenerate types, and with that produces its own cultural
authority and the right to conquer and colonise (The Other Question 41).
This function of colonial discourse, its production of knowledges of coloniser and
colonised which are stereotypical but antithetically evaluated (The Other Question 41), has
been outlined by other postcolonial thinkers. But according to Bhabha, previous attempts to
liberate the inherent marginalised Other, such as that of Edward Said, always failed because,
though they celebrated and uplifted the Other, their arguments stayed within the framework of
binarism (The Other Question 42), ultimately leaving the Other as still an-Other. In this
model, the Other is forever the exegetical horizon of difference, never the active agent of
articulation. The Other is cited, quoted, framed, illuminated, encased in the shot/reverse-shot

Sebastian 44
strategy of a serial enlightenmentThe Other loses its power to signify, to negate, to initiate its
historic desire to establish its own institutional and oppositional discourse (Commitment to
Theory 2391). In other words, such positions were self-defeating; the Other could never come
into itself completely and creatively.
Bhabha transcends this imperial binarism through the Third Space. In the postcolonial
context, the Third Space now mediates between the I of the coloniser and the You of the
colonised, which is, as we have seen, an ambivalent process that privileges neither the one or
the other. The space in-between the realms of the coloniser and the colonised is host to an
overlapping and exchange between the two binaries that is neither clear-cut or one-sided,
challenging the simplistic opposition of coloniser to colonised. Thus the colonial relationship,
and the Otherness of the colonised subject in colonial discourse, is characterised by
productive ambivalencethat otherness which is at once an object of desire and derision [to
the coloniser] (Bhabha, Other Question 38). The fixity of the coloniser-colonised binary,
and with it the authority of the coloniser, is destabilised by complexity, ambivalence, and
contradiction (Other Question 40), inherent features of all cultures, but perhaps more
prominent in a culture racially and ideologically fragmented by imperialism.
This specifically postcolonial hybridity makes the colonial subject problematic to the
colonisers authority, half acquiescent, half oppositional, always untrustworthy she is
unresolvable and thus threatening in her cultural difference or hybridity (Commitment to
Theory 2393). Thus, instead of a simple and unending back and forth between opposing
binaries, Bhabha proposes a third movement beyond binary representation, into a place that
makes space for the postcolonial through new hybrid forms that are neither the one nor the
other (Commitment to Theory 2385).

Sebastian 45
Laughter that Hybridises in Jungle Energy Cafe
In exploring the depths of heteroglossia in its carnivalesque form within Jungle Energy
Caf, hybridity, unknown until this point, has been discovered in the process. The previous
discussions of the text can now be illuminated in a hybrid light; in fact, looking back makes
one realise that the entire novel is a hybrid. It may be of interest to note that Bakhtin himself
applies the term hybrid in his own theory, in his case to refer to how an utterance of a single
speaker can contain two utterances, two languages, and thus two belief systems (Bakhtin,
Discourse in the Novel 304).
The characters themselves refuse to be fixed, with Leon breaking away from stereotype
which is, if we recall, an apparatus of colonial power by being completely unpredictable:
he plays a hero, a fool, a sage, a poet, and even a modern-day bachelor as one would change
clothes. Buhawi is another one who defies definition, proven in a dictionary entry in the text
entitled Buhawi Ludens, which attempts to capture his nature and ends up describing him in
multiple, plural ways. Add to that the mock-epic effect, the magical realist merging of the real
with the fantastic, and the heteroglot use of varying languages and genres, and what is results is
a carnivalesque polyphony that is in fact a rich chorus of hybridity, a song of ambivalent
difference that borders on chaos.
From a postcolonial perspective, the hybridity in the novel, at this point inextricably
bound with the carnival and heteroglossia, generates laughter that disrupts and levels through
its celebration of the in-between. Simultaneously, this carnivalesque laughter liberates
hybridity, as it does heteroglossia, by recognising and announcing within the novel these
inherent qualities of culture and existence. Carnivalesque laughter is thus a laughter that
hybridises. To interpret Bakhtins own words, it could be said that hybridity, particularly in the
postcolonial context, is the heteroglossia of [our] epoch (Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel

Sebastian 46
300). The concept of hybridity gives Bakhtins heteroglossia a political angle, bringing it
within the present day and age, honing it into a tool that can shape a place for the Philippine
postcolonial condition.

A Second Step Forward: Hybriditys Postcolonial Response in Laughter


However, this laughter does not transcend cultural and colonial structures merely by
draining them of their power. To end here would leave the postcolonial with nothing to move
forward with except the broken remains of a system. Carnivalesque laughter is not nihilistic;
there is creativity, a response inherent in its cheerful chorus. The carnival itself resists closure:
there is no last word (Clark and Holquist 317), just as Leons death and resurrection are not
quite final as they are only the first (198), and the novel ends in a run-on sentence that isnt
brought to a stop with a punctuation mark, leaving the last word, party, to hang in the air
indefinitely (209).
Bhabhas concept of hybridity enables laughter a second step forward, offering a
creative response for the postcolonial in the Third Spaces generating of new forms of
meaning (DissemiNation 634). Produced in the jarring of meanings and values
(DissemiNation 633), between the world of the coloniser and that of the colonised, these
forms are hybrid in essence they are neither the one nor the other. Hybrid forms can thus
step out of the futile back and forth between the coloniser and colonised, and move forward
into something new.
Just as all meaning is constructed from cultural difference, meaning for the postcolonial
is also produced in the Third Space between the opposition of coloniser-colonised. This
meaning, characterised by hybridity, can be claimed fully by the postcolonial as all her own,
as her unique experience of reality. Hybridity captures the position of the postcolonial as

Sebastian 47
poised between two realities, not pure Filipino in the precolonial sense, but not an exact copy
of the colonising culture either. If the carnival reigns in upheaval and anarchy, it is only one
part in a greater dance, setting the stage for the unfolding of the truly new. Taking existing
hierarchies and conventions and transforming them anew, hybriditys creative aspect births a
new world, a new mode of representation, that acknowledges its origins and yet is wholly
unique and independent from the system it emerges from. This is a world, a Third Space
created by the laughter in Jungle Energy Caf, expanded beyond its historical setting to bring
the carnivalesque moment to the present situation. It is a world embodying the beginnings of a
postcolonial identity that remembers the past yet looks forward into the future.

A Laughing Alternative to Hierarchy


This notion of carnivalesque hybridity and its development within the novel has
implications on the greater context, illuminating certain qualities of the nature of postcolonial
culture. Understanding and appreciating Bhabhas Third Space allows one to see the futility of
attempting a pure Filipino culture. Bhabha goes against such nationalist discourse in his
writings, arguing that hierarchical claims to the inherent originality of purity of cultures are
untenable (Bhabha, Commitment to Theory 2396). The ambivalent negotiation of meaning
within the margins of culture disowns the authority of any ideology, be it the colonisers or that
of the colonised. This is witnessed in the novel itself, with the ambiguity surrounding The
Cause, the reducing of it into the confused quotes and misquotes of a group of circus
performers, as Seor B&B and the others of the CCC try to explain to Leon what the KKK is
really about (154-157), and his own nonsensical interpretation of The Movement as a circus act
bursting into one large brilliant flame (157). There is a distinct lack of a nationalistic
manifesto within Jungle Energy Cafe, especially in the novels so-called hero, Leon.

Sebastian 48
The movement of those who wish to see a reinstatement of the precolonial world,
believing that this is what is truly Filipino, because this period was supposedly untouched by
foreign influence, is sincere but misguided. This is what Bhabha would describe as the radical
rhetoric of the separation of totalised cultures safe in the Utopianism of a mythic memory of
a unique collective identity (Bhabha, Commitment to Theory 2393). A country can never be
rid of its colonial past, as if it were a purely external, physical condition that was removed
upon the establishment of independence.
All that has happened makes us who we are. Our colonial past is as much part of our
history and identity as our ethnic heritage, as is our fascination with all things American and
the phenomenon of Taglish. And, though postcolonial nations are technically pastcolonialism, postcolonialism studies the effects of the imperial process from the moment of
colonisation to the present day (italics mine; Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Empire Writes
Back 47-48). Though nationalist discourse is crucial in such countries to decenter the colonial
system, it cannot be made into a center itself. Because to hold our precolonial culture as the
ideal would be a mere reversal of the colonial hierarchy; doing so would not initiate the
creation of a totally new, postcolonial world, it would instead be a poor copy of the very
system it resists. A new tyrant would take the place of the old.
Against this trend, carnivalesque laughter offers an alternative. Carrying with it the
values of the carnival, laughter prescribes a perspective that absolutises nothing, but rather
proclaims the joyful relativity of everything (Bakhtin, Dostoevskys Poetics, 125). The
renaissance form of the carnival may have faded into history, but its laughter, with its
dialogised heteroglossia, finds a current form in hybridity. Instead of difference that hardens
into a fixed hierarchical structure of Self-Other, justifying oppression and propagating a
regime of truth, hybridity offers the difference of the same (Bhabha, Commitment to

Sebastian 49
Theory 2382), welcoming the pluralities and contradictions of the Other within culture itself
by negotiation rather than negation (Bhabha, Commitment to Theory 2385), by articulating
the otherness of the people-as-one (Bhabha, DissemiNation 621). This ambivalence is
what makes hybridity a form of carnivalesque laughter, which is not oriented towards the
definition, the one truth (Lachmann 70). And it is this relativity that the postcolonial offers to
the world, which is both a challenge and a revelation gained from her own [history] of
marginality (Bhabha, DissemiNation 622).
And so, there is a response to be found in the irrepressible laughter of Leon Kilat,
which transcends the pages of the novel and the historical limits of the carnival, to echo within
our own hearts, striking a chord of dissent, upheaval of renewal.

Conclusion: Visions of Utopia and The Last Laugh (Not)


Bakhtins theory of laughter envisions and builds a world of its own, a carnival world
that is one great communal performance (Bakhtin, Dostoevskys Poetics 160), ruled by the
joy of change and renewal, even by cultural hybridity when carnivalesque laughter is brought
into the postcolonial present. It is a world ruled by its own logic, characterised by
incompleteness, becoming, and ambiguity (Clark and Holquist 310); in the carnival,
opposites come together, look at one another, are reflected in one another, known and
understand one another (Bakhtin, Dostoevskys Poetics 176). In its celebration of the body in
all its functions and its embracing of both poles of change, birth and death, carnivalesque
laughter is universal, [containing] a whole outlook on the world (Bakhtin, Dostoevskys
Poetics 127), calling all humankind to participate in its joyous revelation, in its pathos of
shifts and changes, of death and renewal (Bakhtin, Dostoevskys Poetics 124).

Sebastian 50
In this aspect, laughter envisions a superior world order (Clark and Holquist 310),
leading the carnival to acquire the trappings of utopia. Bakhtin himself asserts that
carnivalesque laughter is directed toward something highera shift of world orders
(Dostoevskys Poetics 127), anticipating a utopian world in which anti-hierarchism, relativity
of values, questioning of authority, openness, joyous anarchy, and the ridiculing of all dogmas
hold sway, a world in which syncretism and a myriad of differing perspectives are permitted
(Lachmann 62).
This vision of utopia is contained in Bakhtins myth of ambivalence, which proclaims
the second birth of the world out of the spirit of laughter (Lachmann 66). The carnival treats
birth and death equally in its humour, without the one-sided seriousness of official culture. In
this manner, the act of laughter reduces the absoluteness of death which is employed by
official institutions to exert control through ridiculing death and finiteness (Lachmann 66).
The myth of ambivalence therefore denies the end by sublimating death in and through
laughter (Lachmann 66), just as Leon rises from his first death and joins the eternal party at
the Great Philippine Jungle Energy Caf (198). Folk laughter does not vanquish the actual
reality of death, but it dispels the fear of an end, referring to both cosmic fear, which fears
the end of humanity, and individual death (Lachmann 73). This fear, whether cosmic or
individual, is used by official structures to exert authority and extend their reign (Lachmann
71), and, in dissolving this fear, laughter promises freedom, liberating the people from the
oppressive authority of such structures.
The utopian element of Bakhtins theory may be criticised by some as idealistic;
however, it offers some semblance of a conclusion to a discussion that by nature has no
endings, merely new beginnings (Bakhtin, Dostoevskys Poetics 125). Though Bakhtins
utopia, where all boundaries and hierarchies dissolve in laughter and all of humanity,

Sebastian 51
regardless of class, colour, or creed, becomes united in communal performance, may only be
realised in idyll speculation, its values can be taken to heart. And as we have seen in the
writings of postcolonial thinkers such as Homi K. Bhabha, who does not even deliberately
advocate the carnival or its laughter, the movement towards such a utopia may have already
begun, whether or not it will ever be really achieved.
In a world becoming smaller by the day with the help of technology, people are
enabled, and forced, to interact and mix in what is now a global community. It is a community
filled with great cultural diversity, and, as an inevitable consequence, cultural conflict,
witnessed in Americas War on Terror. In such a world, where boundaries and distance mean
little, the perspective of folk laughter becomes increasingly indispensable. Going beyond the
fixities of language, culture, race, and even nation, laughter, through the carnival and hybridity,
calls for an almost existential tolerance, a fundamental appreciation of difference, which is the
essence of our humanity. Carnivalesque laughter proposes ambivalence instead of dualism,
relativity instead of absolutes.
Looking at the world from the perspective of the carnival, its present condition of the
random swirl of empty signals need not be a source of despair; perhaps it is a sign of better
things to come. Instead of seeing nihilism in postmodernity, mourning the loss of truth, we can
realise the value of bringing down such hegemonies, and welcome the meanings to come in the
wake of their oppression. And, if Jungle Energy Caf captures the Philippine postcolonial
condition and produces a carnival hero in Leon Kilat, perhaps the Filipino, who dares to laugh
instead of hanging her head in despair, who, like Leon, does not seem to take life too seriously,
promises hope for the world in her postcolonial experience and identity. If so, then the Filipino
is the true heroine of the postmodern world, leading the way through laughter into a future of
joyful relativity.

Sebastian 52
As this conclusions title suggests, no concept or idea in this discussion, be it officiality
or the carnival, has the last laugh. Laughters reach is so vast that it possesses countless layers,
and equally numerous functions. It is a form that defies any conclusive conclusions (Bakhtin,
Dostoevskys Poetics 125): though it proclaims an existential tolerance, it retains its powers of
subversion, held at ready to de-crown any tyrant, whether privileged or marginal, who dares to
ascend the throne and abuse its power. The constraints of this paper limit its discussion of the
full extent of laughter, leaving much of its dark, mysterious waters unexplored. Thus, laughter,
which still lacks a formal theory in literature, is brimming with potential for future
investigation. Further studies could follow laughters trail, studying its multiple and varied
forms and functions at greater depth. For example, such studies could develop the subversive
and renewal functions of laughter, examining its psychological and social effects. This paper
invites further contribution to the endeavour of outlining the history and theory of laughter,
which will ultimately achieve a long-overdue portrait of laughter and its place in the human
condition.

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