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A Dominican Alonso Quijano: The Ingenious Knight Oscar Wao

2014; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Volume: 172; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hsf.2014.0061

2165-6185

Cherie Meacham,

Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez

A Dominican Alonso Quijano:The Ingenious Knight Oscar Wao Cherie Meacham To want to be different from the way one is is the human aspiration par excellence. Mario Vargas Llosa After four hundred years of inspiring unorthodox behavior in real and fictive characters, on scales both great and small, the spirit of Cervantes' immortal tilter of windmills has again emerged. This time his heroic model of chimerical nonconformity reappears in the fluid space of Junot Díaz's novel, which spans the ghettos of New Jersey, the campus of Rutgers University, and the shores of the Dominican Republic. Quixote's protective armor is present in Oscar's colossal layer of flesh, the quest once inspired by novels of chivalry is now a product of science fiction, fantasy, comic book superheroes, and video games. Sancho Panza is replaced with the street smart college roommate, Yunior, who also provides the novel's major narrative voice. The companion animal is no longer a broken down horse, but a magical mongoose. Oscar and Alonso both seek to transform their tawdry realities with a noble quest for the perfect love; Quixote's Dulcinea/peasant girl is transformed into Ybón, Oscar's princesa/puta. Like Cervantes, Junot Díaz weaves a dizzying display of intertextuality into a meta-narrative of troubled times. Does the death of this dreamer of uncompromising ethics portend the decline of a global empire as in Cervantes' masterpiece? Does the failure of a system unable to resolve the complexities of its component parts serve to highlight hope for humanity in the noble spirit of a prophetic pariah, or prefigure a scenario of doom? These are the structuring concerns of an exploration of the parallels and contrasts found between these two masterpieces, so alike in some ways, so different in others. Northrup Frye's seminal study, Anatomy of Criticism, provides a useful framework for the dualities that form the literary worlds of Don Quixote and Oscar Wao. The operating paradigm for both characters is the hero of romance "for whom the [End Page 67] ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are natural to him …" (33). Such an elevated standard inspires each character who begins the quest in low-mimetic mode, "superior neither to other men nor to his environment," but ends by achieving the feats of the high mimetic hero, who has "authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours" (34). Thus the ironic juxtaposition of comic parody and tragic suffering in both novels causes the reader's response to evolve from mocking ridicule into admiration. Each hero learns superior wisdom from his (mis)adventures to transcend an initial isolated status as lunatic, or even worse in Oscar's contemporary scene, as nerd. Such a transformation helps to explain the enduring appeal of the Quixote and the immediate critical acclaim for Oscar Wao, confirming the observation of Mario Vargas Llosa in the much quoted article, "Is Fiction the Art of Lying?," that in the gaps between real life and human desire, "novels provide humans with lives they're unresigned to not having" (1). What are the defining and confining realities that frame the comedic turned heroic quests of both Alonso and Oscar? Manuel Durán observes the changing scenario that Cervantes experienced in Spain between the first and second half of the sixteenth centuries. The "apex of glory and influence" that existed under Charles the V, "defender of faith and unity in Europe" and convinced of his "role and special destiny," eroded into the progressive poverty, inflation and stagnation, and increased national debt of the reign of Phillip II (13). Cervantes, like his literary personage, spent the latter years of his life struggling against poverty and neglect. Durán observes that the novel is directed to the middle class of "limited horizons and an uncertain role," poor hidalgos who had little to do but read books in which they found "a wider horizon, an escape hatch from a dungeon" (132). With reference to the nostalgic world of high ideals and heroic adventure of the novels of chivalry, Alonso Quijano struggles to escape this "social cruelty," the "excessive use of authority...