Haunting Philippine Literature: Gothic Traces in Philippine Komiks and Graphic Novels

Lead Researcher(s): Marie Rose B. Arong
Status: Published

Introduction: The gothic in Philippine literature is rarely, if at all, critically examined. Part of this absence has to do with the inherent difficulty of defining the gothic and locating it in the Philippines. Gothic, for the most part, would seem to be an entirely Western form. Indeed, if we consider that the gothic imaginary arose in the late eighteenth-century British society due to a wave of anti-Catholicism (Hoeveler 2012, 5), it may seem uncanny to be writing about the gothic in the Philippines, which continues to be a very Catholic country (latest figures show about 80% of Filipinos are nominally Catholic). The Philippines, like most Asian countries, still primarily associates the term gothic with architecture (Ancuta 2012, 209). However, a review of various Philippine fiction anthologies reveals a different story altogether. Included in these anthologies are various
manifestations of the gothic in Philippine literature, almost two decades after Nick Joaquin started writing his own version of gothic stories in the 1940s including “May Day Eve,” “Summer Solstice,” and “Guardia de Honor.” In the two-volume anthology of Philippine short fiction in English (stories originally published from 1956 to 1972), the editor, Gemino Abad, includes several short stories that adopt the tropical gothic: Joaquin’s “Doña Jerónima,” Wilfredo Nolledo’s “Cadena de Amor,” Alfred Yuson’s “The Hill of Samuel” and Resil Mojares’s “Beast in the Fields.” In his introduction, Abad (2008, xxv–xxvi) situates these stories under the “nonrealist” category or “stories of the marvelous and the supernatural.” He describes these stories as “the gothic tale, which recounts supernatural beings, such as fairies and ghosts, or humans with supernatural power” (Abad 2008, xxv).