“The Un-Hamlet Of Manila”: Shakespearean Intertextuality in Han Ong's The Disinherited

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Professor Glenn Clark and Professor Judith Owens for sharing their insights into Hamlet. I am thankful to my two anonymous readers for their insights and suggestions. This article was completed with University of Manitoba UM/SSHRC support, for which I am also grateful.

Notes

Lionnet counts George Lamming, Aimé Césaire, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and Dev Virahsawmy among the members of the “Tempest Club” (204).

Roger's practice of resisting his father's control by assuming the pose of the artist, and the possibility of this anti-authoritarian pose to slide into its own form of authoritarianism, calls to mind Espiritu's description of the poet José García Villa (74–101).

In Tagolog, “pitik” is a flick or snap of the fingers. The boy's name is appropriate given that Roger uses him to catch the attention of and irritate his family. I am grateful to Professor Rocío Davis for the translation. For a discussion of Pitik that contextualizes him in the sex trade in the Philippines, see Nubla.

Holderness and Loughrey argue that the lack of racial difference within Hamlet makes it a useful test case for questions of universal human values and draw attention to Wulf Sachs' 1937 psychoanalytic study Black Hamlet: The mind of an African Negro revealed by psychoanalysis. For further discussion of “global” Hamlet see Huang, especially chapters 3 and 5, Im, Khalid, Li, and Litvin. For a concise discussion of critical controversies over collapsing the divide between historical texts and “contemporary” issues, see Menon (2–4).

Anything more than a cursory review of Filipino diaspora studies is beyond the scope of this paper. For a recent overview, see San Juan Jr., “Contemporary Global Capitalism.” For diaspora and American intellectual history see Espiritu. For a discussion of diasporic queerness—an issue relevant to The Disinherited but one that falls outside the present analysis—see Manalanson IV. For a discussion of homeland return travelers, or balikbayan, see Mendoza and Rafael.

See Tromly (240–41).

Scholars are alert to the different connotations of the terms “exile” and “diaspora,” the former suggestive of individual, romantic dislocation, sometimes for aesthetic ends, and the latter referring to mass displacement driven by economic or political necessity (see Caren Kaplan 121–22; and San Juan Jr., From Exile to Diaspora 81–82). This distinction is important to The Disinherited, for Roger's voluntary and materially comfortable life in New York is best characterized as exilic.

For further discussion of the American inability to contend with its empire directly see Rowe (3–13). Scholars have addressed the cultural discourses onto which empire is displaced. Amy Kaplan's important work emphasizes the discourses of domesticity, the family, and masculinity to empire (Anarchy). For discussion of the imperialist function of education and the dissemination of American culture see Wesling and, from a sociological perspective, Go. For discussions of the implications of America's disavowal of its imperialist practices for Filipino Americans, see Issac (xv-xxii, 9–19). For other recent analyses of American imperialism, see Brody and Eperjesi (4–13).

Filipino American writers have long been preoccupied with the film Apocalypse Now. See, for example, Jessica Hagedorn's Dream Jungle. For a succinct discussion of Apocalypse Now and neocolonial commodification, see San Juan Jr. (After Postcolonialism 85–86).

In The Disinherited, excerpts from Manila's tabloids are revealing about novel's concerns, particularly about its intertexts. Later in the text, Roger's philanthropic activities are reported on with the headline, “‘Positively Shakespearean: Roger Caracera donates to Father Shakespeare de Leon's Tondo ministry'” (189).

For further illumination of the parallels between Prince Hamlet and Rizal, see the short article “Rizal: The Tagalog Hamlet” by Spanish novelist Miguel de Unamuno, who was Rizal's contemporary at the University of Madrid.

To underscore the parallels between Noli Me Tangere and The Disinherited I offer Benedict Anderson's summary of the former: The novel opens with the wealthy, handsome, and naively idealistic mestizo, Don Crisóstomo Ibarra, returning from a long educational sojourn in Europe with plans to modernize his home town and his patria … At first he is welcomed with respect and enthusiasm, but the clouds soon gather. He discovers that his father has died in prison, framed by the brutal Franciscan friar Padre Damaso … [F]riars and their various local allies scheme to abort Ibarra's … plans for establishing a modern school in his hometown. Finally [a friar], learning of a planned rebel attack on his town, frames Ibarra as its instigator and financier. The young man is imprisoned in a wave of antisubversive arrests, torture, and executions, but escapes … and ends as an outlaw. (230).

13. Ong subtly shifts attention from Prince Hamlet to his father in a curious aside. In his discussion of Father Leon de Shakespeare's attempts to read the writing of his namesake, Ong writes, He'd thought the language opaque at first … but slowly, arduously, after many rereadings, the stories had clarified … and the whole world, under Mr. Shakespeare's tutelage, had turned spiderweblike in its mesmeric symmetry, held together by threads of silken language and, at its center, by the controlling efforts of a single, voracious protagonist: Lear, Lady Macbeth, Hamlet's father (176–77; my emphasis).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lucas Tromly

Lucas Tromly is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Film, and Theatre at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. He is currently at work on a study of Asian American travel writing.