Unreading the Novel, or Experiencing Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War as Mythopoeia

• Main Author: Ojano, Katherine D.
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: aesthetics; historical fiction; modernism; myth; opacity; postcolonial fiction
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss27/11; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/2096/viewcontent/_5BKKv00n27_2016_5D_204.1_Monograph_Ojano.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

The Filipino novel which arose in the 19th century is understood to have consolidated the nationalistic spirit that fueled the anti-colonial revolution against Spain. Contemporary writing drew from the radical lessons of the past as a tradition of resistance writing intensified and grew. Yet as Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War (1988) shows, the novel, despite or alongside its politics, also brings to the fore formal and substantial problems of excess and incoherence. This paper explores the instances of the mythical that bring about these points of incomprehensibility, even scattered, perhaps, absolute subversions of the genre and the nationalist cause in which it partakes. Becoming mythopoeia, the novel turns into a postcolonial mode of storytelling and (re)living myth that puts in peril (as it assures) its form, its cause, and even its readership. With theories of narrative and history by Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Nietzsche, more recent contributions to postcolonial studies by Filipino scholars, and insight into myth in modern fiction by Michael Bell, close reading of aspects of State of War will calibrate the mythical for meanings alternative to reductive or dismissive tendencies in critical theory.