Chris Vials Realism for the Masses; Aesthet

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.His account of a homologous system of class oppression in both the Philippines and the U.S.allows the reader to connect systems of power across national borders.Thus even though Bulosan never lived longed enough to return to thecountry of his youth, the “America” he constructed in his autobiography didnot foreclose affiliations elsewhere; viewed within the context of his unending dedication to the Philippines, “America” appears as less of a bounded entity and more as a self-conscious fiction allowing Bulosan to address one front within a global network of power.America Is in the Philippines? Bulosan and theVirtuous Yeomen of Northern LuzonViet Thanh Nguyen noted that in America, Bulosan withheld a critique of American imperialism from his account of poverty in the Philippines.Partlybecause of this, Nguyen adds, his criticisms “were muted, distorted, or marginalized” by his readers (81, 85).It is very true that Bulosan’s 1946 narrative did not go nearly as far as Cry and the Dedication in its exploration of the hierarchical relationship between the Philippines and the U.S., and that his criticisms were in many ways “distorted” by his white audience.Surprisingly, however, the contemporary reviews of America illustrate that mainstream liberal American readers did in fact register a critique of empire in the book, a fact that has not been explored in the scholarship on Bulosan to date.A commentator from the New Republic observed, “What [Bulosan] tells of those early years [in Luzon] will be a shock to any number of people who have always imagined a land of little, happy brown brothers being helped toward independence by handsome Americans like Paul McNutt and Douglas MacArthur” (Gissen 421).William Lynch ofthe Saturday Review of Literature expressed a similar sentiment, but did so in a way that revealed how Bulosan managed to enable such a critique: “To most ofus the Philippines means only Manila, legends of the Spanish American War,the promise of independence, and the feeling that there must be good roadsand schools since American occupancy always means good roads and schools.Bulosan’s Philippines knew few of these benefits.It did know a people whosecapacity for work and whose ambition for their children bestow on them theheroic qualities of Pearl Buck’s peasants” (7).On one level these responses to140Carlos Bulosan, H.T.Tsiang, and U.S.Literary Marketthe novel show how the putatively “sympathetic” representations of East Asians by Buck, Snow, and Dmytryk had in no way prepared American readers for thebasic realities of American imperialism in the Pacific.Thus the mere revela-tion of discord in the Philippines by Bulosan would come as a “shock” that was subversive in itself.But the last passage also highlights the terms of that shock.I have already noted that Bulosan depicts Filipinos as ideal candidates for U.S.citizenship.But as illustrated by the comparison to “Pearl Buck’s peasants,” Bulosan similarly enabled U.S.readers to see the inadequacies of their foreign policy by showing Filipinos across the Pacific as hardworking and ambitious, and thus equally fit for self-government.Since Pearl Buck’s realism formed the template for“serious” American readings of much of Asia, America worked its subversive effect by its recognizable redeployment of that realism, employing some of its motifs in a way that underscored the silences they enacted.After reading America, a writer for the Catholic journal Commonweal simply noted of the Philippines that “the people are good” (Monaghan 149).As such, they could also be wronged.An important way in which Bulosan tries to unite both sides of his politi-cal project—Filipino national liberation and Asian American inclusion—isthrough his representation of the people of Northern Luzon in the first section of America.An examination of this first section—the section to which contemporary reviewers were overwhelmingly drawn—reveals that the Philippinesare able to rejuvenate American institutions precisely because its pre-modern“folk,” as represented by Bulosan, contain the seeds of that modernity.In America, the “folk” of the Philippines are not represented in their ludic incarnation (i.e., in terms of the undisciplined, pre-industrial figures of the minstrel or of some folklore studies), but in the virtuous, proto-modern terms of the American agrarian and republican ideal.23 In this representational choice and in the overall aesthetic structure of his America, Bulosan uses a form akin to the most popular realisms of his era.24 He expressed his preference for realism in America itself, writing that the Russian writer Maxim Gorki attracted him more than any other writer.He reiterated this appeal in a 1949 letter, in which he stated a desire to write a fifteen-hundred-page novel of Filipino history combining the bestqualities of Tolstoy and Gorki in particular ( America 246, “Letters” 180) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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