I’m interested in the emotional trajectory the narrative takes – always away from the characters. Zamora is introduced in the beginning, then drops out until his corpse reminds us he inhabited the story; Lina addresses us directly in a standoff-ish but affecting way, then becomes a ghostly companion to another dissolving character, Vincent Moody. Each enters the story at perhaps their most intense emotional moment, receding from there. Rather than building characters and scenes into a grand emotional pinnacle, the narrative diverges, breaking down around a series of disappearances. This lack of a payoff is exemplified by the fizzle of the tiger on the movie set: “‘Aw, phooey,’ Jesse Pierce said. ‘That was lame’” (270). The implicit promise of lurid action is not just deferred but is structurally impossible in Hagedorn’s narrative, and this seems to be one thoroughgoing aspect of the postmodern text. Indeed, there’s almost a distraction of desire, as if no one can see things through. The metaphor here is the film itself, which takes forever to shoot, gets written and rewritten by director and cast alike, and results in miles of footage without anyone knowing how it fits together into a meaningful whole. Perhaps this lack of a coherent trajectory is inevitable in a postcolonial tale that gets senselessly hijacked – like the Philippines itself: on a course diverted first by the Spanish and then the Americans, all the while constructing images of its own pre-colonial history in the Taobo. And, if we accept Kwame Anthony Appiah’s split between postmodernism and (post-)postcolonialism along some aesthetic/political divide, then Dream Jungle is clearly an example of the former, for the novel sacrifices (political) solidity in favor of (aesthetic) dissolution. But then we’re caught in the same old double bind we always are when discussing the politics of a work of art: Does it subvert or merely reflect what it presents as the status quo? For Appiah, the sculpture Man with a Bicycle is politically salvageable because it refuses to ‘Otherize’ – or commodify – what it represents. It moves beyond delegitimization and makes “an appeal to an ethical universe” (353). But I’m not convinced that Dream Jungle makes the same move. Instead, it seems to wallow in its representation – not of the commodified Other – but of the hopeless case, the pitied object, the world-weary chronicler, the imaginary past, the speaking corpse.