I mean this in the nicest possible way: this book is an inside joke.  It is sooo funny, yet so scathing at the same time. Comic and tragic. Honest and ironic. Absolutely delirious. That’s postmodernism, baby.

I had to message my lit teacher for readings on this one because I felt like its entertainment value (which is SO MUCH) kinda (in my experience) overshadowed its relevance as a really good critique on capitalism. I was really looking more for analyses of Rio’s position as primary focalizer, but instead I found a much better paper (by a certain LA Wright in the Asian American Literature Journal) (https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1105&context=aaldp) on two seemingly minor characters that turn out to be the key to unlocking Hagedorn’s satirical style.

Strap in, kids, I’m about to talk about Marx now. Also Genette. Because I’m insufferable and a smartass. I hope that is not news to you and if it is I’m Sorry.

TLDR but deffo read that paper I linked — so “time” in Marxist theory is what we laborers are selling to capitalists in exchange for a wage, and what capitalists are trying to exploit for maximum profit or surplus profit. “Time” in narrative theory (Genette) pertains to two of three things: (1) how many literal pages the author writes about any character or scene or plot point, and (2) how often you repeat narrative elements within the whole story. STAY WITH ME. Both Marxist and Narrative meanings are indications of value — i.e. how much is your labor time worth?, and how valuable are you to the narrative?

In This Society, the former decides the latter, and Hagedorn shows us as much. Poor people seemingly have less value than rich people in this book. In this kind of society, we’re all losers, except for the most profit-hungry i.e. the local elites (the Alacrans, the General, the President) and the foreigners that they enable and who enables them (those Hollywood producers, descendants of Spanish colonizers). Even the middle class (Lolita Luna, Andres, Pucha, Daisy) who think they’re spared by association are not. Instead, they live in a constant state of insecurity and anxiety.

But with the amount of pages that Hagedorn spends on depicting the lives of everyday workers like Romeo and Trinidad (each other’s foil in how they think about labor) — deliberately breaking the momentum of Rio’s and other middle class and upper class characters’ narration too — and by showing how higher classes repeatedly interpret the workers’ plight in extremely contradictory and hypocritical ways, the author’s argument emerges: rich people are so full of shit. And we let these people — their arbitrary rules — dictate how much value we have in society???

I thought Dogeaters was just about Martial Law — a realist take, a satirical one, but just a retelling of a historical period that with the return to power of the Marcoses have become so disputed. It is much more sophisticated than that.

It shows you the engine that set Marcos’s dystopian society in motion in the first place… I wonder how many times SPORTEX was mentioned in the book, and TruCola, and Intercoco. When Daisy is being assaulted by soldiers, we intercut to ads for EyeMo and TruCola... What makes Hagedorn’s world so absurd? It’s not even the magical realism. It’s much more surreal than that. It’s just capitalist realism. It is a world where nobody can imagine a way out of the status quo that exploits them, and those who dare to are vilified, captured, imprisoned, forced into exile, or gunned down. You know, like the world we are living in now.

If you’re not getting it by now, I can’t help you.