THE FOREST AS SIGHT, THE FOREST AS NARRATION Alvin Yapan’s Sandali ng mga Mata
Abstract
Fredric Jameson argues that the passage from monopoly to late capitalism or globalization has resulted in a “bewildering new world space” marked by a “weakening of historicity,” if not the outright “suppression of history.” As a result, this dizzying, dehistoricized totality has become unrepresentable. If this foreclosure is premised on the capture of social life by the “interpenetration of government and big business” under late capitalism, this paper argues that the forest, as a historically and narratively illegible space, may offer an escape. Drawing on a Marxist tradition of ecocriticism, in particular Robert Spencer’s work on “forest literature,” and notions of haunting and spectrality, this paper investigates how the forest in Alvin Yapan’s Sandali ng mga Mata can “illuminate capitalism’s world-destroying power” and see through the simultaneous transparencies, opacities, and distortions of late capitalism. In the context of the country’s deepening entanglement with globalization and profound vulnerabilities to the climate emergency, the idea of the forest as a way of seeing hopefully contributes to such an urgent political task.
