First and Third Worlds in U.S. Literature: Rethinking Carlos Bulosan - Critical Essay

Bulosan's literary and sexual libidos are inextricably intertwined. This linkage of the sexual and the literary is played out in The Cry and the Dedication in the climactic scene of Dante's death, which is symbolic both of Bulosan's detachment from a western aesthetic and from the white woman representative of "America." In comprehending this narrative of detachment, we can understand Bulosan's psychology in the context of the international relations between the U.S. and the Philippines. Analyzing Bulosan's situation in Freudian terms, the mutual disruption of pleasure in pain and pain in pleasure in the collective novelistic ego of America Is in the Heart is symptomatic of melancholia. Melancholia, as Freud argues in "Mourning and Melancholia," is distinguished from mourning in that when the mourner loses a loved object (a person or even an abstraction such as "country; liberty; an ideal, and so on" [Freud 243]), she is able finally to withdraw her libido from the no longer existent object; while the melancholic internalizes the object in her ego. Bulosan's interiorization of his "American" ideal in "the heart," for example, constitutes "the regression of the libido into narcissism" which Freud speculates works like a "painful wound" in the ego (249).(6)

Although in America Is in the Heart Bulosan charts the loss of his illusions about U.S. democracy, the "paradox of America" is resolved only through an unsatisfactory deferral of the crisis of Filipino identity to an uncertain utopian moment when the Filipino might fully assimilate into an ideal "America." Bulosan's response to this loss is typical of the melancholic. Instead of a displacement or withdrawal of the libido from "America," the "American" ideal is instead withdrawn into the ego, or the heart, representing "a regression from one type of object-choice to original narcissism" (249). Most interesting for my purposes is Freud's analysis that in melancholia "countless separate struggles are carried on over the object, in which hate and love contend with each other; the one seeks to detach the libido from the object, the other to maintain this position of the libido against assault" (256). While in America Is in the Heart, Bulosan does not detach his libido from the object, "America," but rather internalizes it in the Filipino collective ego/heart in an improbable utopian gesture symptomatic of the Popular Front's reconciliation of communism and liberalism, the narrative of The Cry and the Dedication carries out this psychotherapeutic process of detachment and decolonization.

Bulosan powerfully dramatizes this psychological struggle in The Cry and the Dedication through the character of the artist figure Dante. This contention of love and hate, for example, dominated Dante's relationship with "America." After Dante's death near the end of the novel, the character Hassim speculates, for the benefit of the white American doctor and his wife, that Dante "must have gone through a great ordeal in the United States. I don't know what to say, because he had always praised and hated the American people at the same time" (292-93). This tension in Dante's archetypal Filipino psyche is articulated most strongly just before he dies, as he tells the doctor Jack O'Brian, "My heart is divided" (290). Yet it is also at this moment of death that Dante reconciles that division: "for even now, in his semi-delirium," writes Bulosan,