Most of the time, my first reaction when I read these books is to look at the formal constructs the authors use to frame their stories. As a writer, that’s how I’ve been trained, and those types of critiques tend to come more easily to me than many of the things we end up discussing in class as lynchpin elements of a text. So I apologize if this isn’t necessarily on topic, but as I read through Dream Jungle I was continually impressed with how Jessica Hagedorn handled the varying intertextual constructs within the book.
Many times, these types of fictional elements (excerpts from Pigafetta’s journey’s with Magellan, interview transcripts of discussions, a courier-fonted excerpts of Pilar’s memoir, footnoted excerpts, etc.) can have a counteractive quality that disrupts the reader more then enriches the text, and that didn’t happen here. Though the content bears almost no resemblance, I kept seeing the same authorial instincts to use these constructs as Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich used in Crown of Columbus, where intertextual references play a large part in establishing a fictional "history", but establish also a depth the to story instead of highlighting surface aspects. I keep thinking of why these elements worked so well, and I think it may be the double-culture revelry that the books share. Dream Jungle does deal directly with American pop culture, but not exclusively, which adds a certain cultural weight to the "bells and whistles." In Dream Jungle, somehow they work to achieve a distinct "history" to the fictional elements to the text that worked along with historical characterizations of place, such as the characterization of the Philippines throughout. Books built around intertextual meta-elements that deal solely in discussing American pop culture (anything by David Foster Wallace, really) tend to have the hurdle of reader alienation to deal with, and I think it may have to deal with the nature of our pop culture’s inability in many instances to look past its own influence (which Wallace once wrote an essay about, ironically), which can cause self-reflexive aggravation in readers when authors revel in it. Hagedorn in her books finds a way to dodge that trap by pitting American pop culture against a staid history, and I think that may be what I responded to most here.