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Textual Territory and Narrative Power in Junot Díaz’s Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

2011; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

1920-1222

Richard F. Patteson,

Caribbean and African Literature and Culture

I. In numerous discussions of Brief Wondrous Lift of Oscar Wao conducted during interviews and public appearances, Diaz has repeatedly suggested and even stated outright that readers should consider relationship between authority exercised in world at large and that of story's narrator. Isn't storytelling, he asks, the desire put everything about world in your power? (Diaz, Junot Diaz Redefines Macho). Although he claims his intention is draw attention the dangers of single (Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: Questions for Diaz), Diaz, following practice of many writers who discuss their books publicly, continues exemplify that voice by attempting shape how is read. He insists that Yunior's telling of this story and his unspoken motivations for it are at heart of novel (Diaz, Junot Diaz Redefines Macho), but it might also be said that interviews, and Din's unspoken motivations for them, are equally central. An author's compulsion control does not necessarily end with publication. Like his narrator Yunior (and perhaps like narrators), Diaz is torn between competing needs challenge authority and exercise it. Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao attempts acknowledge and incorporate this internal struggle; it incorporates struggle's most paradoxical feature, notion that act of telling is itself an exercise of power, into deepest design of novel. Even before he begins tell Oscar's story, Yunior frames it in way that both reflects his own ambivalence toward authority and places it in an historical, and quasi-mythic, context. book's first epigraph, Of what import are brief, nameless lives ... Galactus? is spoken by one of uber-villains of science fiction comic book world. Not incidentally, Galactus addresses Uatu Watcher and sometime Teller, whose mission is stand guard over Earth without interfering. Uatu occasionally does intervene, however, most notably protect Earth from godlike Galactus. Yunior, who has watched over Oscar intermittently and perhaps intervened too seldom, finds it useful identify with Uatu: It's almost done. Almost over. Only some final things show you before your Watcher fulfills his cosmic duty and retires at last Blue Area of Moon (Diaz, Oscar Wao 329). Moreover, book's title, chosen by Yunior himself (285), is clear refutation of Galactus' words. In second epigraph, an excerpt from Derek Walcott's poem The Schooner Flight narrator, Shabine, man with a sound colonial education (350), talks back history and, as Yunior tries do, tyrannies imposed by colonialism. Understanding that all them bastards have left us is words (Walcott 350), Shabine makes most of situation and uses language construct an identity and textual space for himself that is his own nation. For Yunior, however, effort is complicated by his own narrative's genesis within totalitarian history written by Dominican Galactus, Rafael Trujillo. Diaz knows well that dictators in real world can be highly accomplished storytellers. In Mario Vargas Llosa's Feast of Goat, breaking point for one of Trujillo's assassins occurs when dictator attacks Church, turning himself into one of Satan's most effective allies (187), dark god who, like Satan, usurps prerogatives of Almighty. tyrant not only terrorized, imprisoned, and murdered countless Dominicans, but also subverted and erased their sense of identity, attempting to take away stories [they] told about themselves (Patteson 233) and thus strip them of cognitive and physical control of their lives. This erasure, most fundamental of his crimes, had its origin in his power reformulate whole narrative of Dominican Republic with himself as both author and superhero--Father of New Fatherland. …