José David Saldívar’s Junot Díaz: On the Half-Life of Love instigates in the reader a Pierre Menard effect. One wishes it were possible to better his book by copying it out word-for-word and thus adding to its magnificent contribution to studies of Díaz.Footnote 1 It is true that Jorge Luis Borges’s character sought to do this with Cervantes’ Don Quixote, implying that the generativity of the fictional world always legitimizes a form of (re)creation. But there is something special to be said for the careful and insightful work that Saldívar has done in his book to open even further avenues for thinking about Díaz’s work. For the meticulous process that he deploys to account for how Díaz’s New Yorker short story “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” was alchemized into the novel of the same name some 11 years later suggests that his critical engagement with both story and novel and the process of their writing by the author is an invitation to continue the work of transformation and transposition into different critical and artistic forms. This is in fact a theme that Saldívar traces out variously in Díaz’s development as a writer thus far, from his days as a student in the MFA program at Cornell, through the publication of Drown, and on to the masterpiece that is Oscar Wao. I have often wondered, for example, how long it will take for the novel to be converted into a movie or a Broadway musical. There are ample grounds for such an expectation for both options.
At a point in his book, Saldívar invokes Gérard Genette’s concept of the paratext to explain the apparatus by which Díaz incorporates both frames and internal mechanisms into his novel for extending the many possible meanings of Oscar Wao. Footnote 2 While his discussion of the epigraph to the novel from the first volume of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four helps to expand the reach of this paratext beyond the comic science fiction universe, what he then says about the novel’s 33 paratextual footnotes also shows how Oscar Wao is embedded in a particular view of New World history or, as we are told in the novel, the “Great American Doom”. But on his further discussion of the salience of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to Oscar Wao, we come to the sudden realization that the paratextual apparatus may also be hinting at a wider incorporation of other literary perspectival fragments, in other words, that in Oscar Wao the paratext also folds into itself a whole range of intertexts, as if to align the geographical reach of the novel beyond just a spatial logic to that of the literary historical logic of the entire tradition of literature, Western and otherwise. It is for that on first reading the novel one has the vague and uncanny sense of belated recognition. This is because Oscar Wao is not just about some minor characters from the Dominican Republic who have been exiled and marooned in New Jersey but that their is the condition of many other characters that litter all of literary history. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is both a great American novel in the terms put forward by Lawrence Buell in The Dream of the Great American Novel (2016) and an extraordinary work of weltliteratur par excellence.Footnote 3
It is the tragic intertext of the novel that is of concern to me in these remarks. The narrative of Oscar Wao is a family saga strung across different generations of the Cabral Leons as well as across different geographical locations: Oscar, Lola, Belicia, La Inca, and Abelard are the key dramatis personae, and the main events of the novel shuttle between the Dominican Republic and New Jersey. There are two connections between the family saga and the two geographical locations: the Dominican Republic is generally the source of all the characters’ nightmares (note: not dreams), and New Jersey is the source of all their confusion as immigrants. The immigrant confusion is laid out primarily in the form of teenage and young adult angst about being a true Dominicano/a that is repeatedly asserted in the anxious idioms of the constitution of masculinity and femininity and in relation to romantic self-fashioning. The anchors of these processes in the novel are Oscar himself and his sister Lola, with Yunior the narrator exemplifying for his part an extreme form of hyper-masculinity in speech, actions, and sexual behavior.
Thinking directly of the tragic intertext to the novel, however, one is bound to ask what, then, is fukú? Is it the shorthand for some form of tragic determinism, magical curse, or pure bad luck? The reference to Aeschylus’s House of Atreus and The Oresteia in the sections on Abelard (Oscar Wao, 152) do import a fundamental tragic framework of fate and determinism, and yet this is also countered by multiple other locations of fukú and a sense of undecidability about what it really is or might be. The fukú americanus is attributed on the first page of the novel to ‘the Admiral’ because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite “discovering” the New World, the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing (dique) divine voices” (Oscar Wao, 2). The reference here is it to Christopher Columbus and his controversial “discovery” of Santo Domingo and by extension the New World. But the fukú inherent to this discovery in 1492 is not given specific plot enactment within the novel (in terms of either the plot engine or the plot direction of specific events) and remains only a tantalizing suggestion about the distant origins of the almost unending crisis of the Dominican Republic. In the novel, it is Trujillo, long-term tyrant of the country, that is the fukú’s primary articulation. For it is Trujillo who instrumentalizes the reign of terror amply illustrated in Oscar Wao that leads not only to the destruction of the Cabral Leon family starting with the cruel death of Abelard in the 1940s but also ultimately to the forced migration of Belicia in the 1960s and thus to the diasporization of the Cabral Leons to Paterson New Jersey, with all that it entails for them. Finally, the principle of fukú is represented by Yunior, one of the three narrators of the novel (along with Lola and Oscar) as a major source of inherent instability between cause and effect, as we see in his speculation on whether Abelard’s fate was sealed because he said something negative about Trujillo, or because he refused to surrender his beautiful daughter and wife to his sexual rapaciousness, or whether it was due to his having written an ethnographic study of the tyrant’s dependence on magic (Oscar Wao, 245–46). What was Abelard’s culpability, Yunior asks:
There would always be speculation. At the most basic level, did he say it, did he not? (Which is another way of asking: Did he have a hand in his own destruction?) Even the family was divided. La Inca adamant that it had all been a setup, orchestrated by Abelard’s enemies to strip the family of their wealth, their properties, and their businesses. Others were not so sure. He probably had said something that night at the club, and unfortunately for him he’d been overheard by the Jefe’s agents. No elaborate plot, just drunken stupidity. As for the carnage that followed: que sé yo—just a lot of bad luck.
Most of the folks you speak to prefer the story with a supernatural twist. They believe that not only did Trujillo want Abelard’s daughter, but when he could not snatch her, out of spite he put a fukú on the family’s ass. Which is why all the terrible shit that happened happened.
So which was it? you ask. An accident, a conspiracy, or a fukú? The only answer I can give you is the least satisfying: you’ll have to decide for yourself. What is certain is that nothing’s certain…. The remaining Cabrals ain’t much help either; on all matters related to Abelard’s imprisonment and to the subsequent destruction of the clan there is within the family a silence that stands monument to the generations that sphinxes all attempts at narrative reconstruction. A whisper here and there but nothing more (Oscar Wao, 242–43).
And so, is fukú simply a cynical conspiracy, a curse placed on the family by Trujillo (instrumentalized of course through great violence and torture), or is it the work of an implacable fate, as hinted at in the throwaway verb “sphinxes” which then imports into the novel the principle of undecidability from Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex? In Sophocles’s play, the source of the protagonist’s tragedy is extremely difficult to establish without the constant anticipation of alternative explanations, much like what Yunior wants to suggest for Abelard and his clan. The main point here seems to be that there is no clear fit between causality and consequence as it might relate to the fukú. Everything seems to be contingent upon a variety of factors, some profound, but others seemingly quite banal and elusive in their immediate significance. Their significance comes to be known much later, after the tragic consequences have taken place. Some events have multiple causalities that just confound our capacity for ordering them and connecting them to effects. However, the fact that the reversals of fortune have been generated from multiple causes does not mean that their tragic effects are any less damaging or indeed intriguing. They elicit interpretation while simultaneously confounding the capacity for interpretation. There are thus in the novel persistent forms of incommensurablity between tragic effect and the (multiple) causes that might be taken to have produced it. For the Cabral Leons, the real tragedy is not that of simply laboring under a fukú but the fact of being human in an unideal and violent world, and thus, in the words of Donne’s “Death be not proud,” of being “slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men.”
I. Aristotle versus Díaz
To derive a model of tragedy exclusively from the intertext provided by The Oresteia for Oscar Wao would, however, be to substantially distort not just that intertextual reference but also the very idea of tragedy as it unfolds within the novel. For Junot Díaz’s model of tragedy is simultaneously more complicated and yet more simple than what we find in Aeschylus. Even though in the Poetics Aristotle sets the keywords by which many commentators have come to understand tragedy as a form and not simply as a content, it is also he who lends us the means by which to expand the concept from the strictly classical mode developed for the representation of the action choices of queens, kings, and grand personages and into more lay terms involving ordinary people. As I have argued elsewhere, this extension is to be gleaned from interleafing the Poetics with the Nicomachean Ethics. Footnote 4 Like all philosophical works on ethics, Aristotle’s primary concern in the Ethics is with explaining how to live the good life and not simply about how to discern between good and evil. For in many ways the ethical effects of reversals of fortune and their implications for a definition of tragedy depend on both the art of tragic representation and the ways in which a tragic representation reflects the consequences of impediments to the good life, whether these ultimately derive from catastrophe or not. If in the Poetics Aristotle focuses specifically on tragic plot in outlining for us its main elements and emotional effects, it is in Nicomachean Ethics that he elaborates upon the nature of the good life, which in his view derives from settled orientation, the exercise of virtue and ethical choice, and of equal importance, the availability of external or worldly goods.
As Aristotle puts it in the Ethics, “it seems clear that happiness needs the addition of external goods, as we have said; for it is difficult if not impossible to do fine deeds without any resources.”Footnote 5 The resources Aristotle has in view here are of a material character but will also later be shown by him to encompass the much broader ambit of emotional supports. Martha Nussbaum has glossed the category of worldly goods as implying the “interactions of philia, either familial or friendly” and good health, as well as the benefits of citizenship and communal belonging.Footnote 6 For Aristotle, ethical choice is an aspect of eudaimonia, variously translated from the Greek as indwelling virtue, happiness, and also as flourishing.Footnote 7 My emphasis is predominantly on flourishing, since this seems to me to mark the most important aspects of the coming-to-fruition of one’s aspirations and by implication their modes of self-fashioning. The point to be noted, following Aristotle and Nussbaum, is that if you were to wake up one fine afternoon and find that all your guarantors of philia in the shape of family and friends were to somehow have been destroyed in a natural or man-made disaster, that you would not only suffer a great deal of emotional pain and anguish, but that your very capacity to undertake salient ethical actions would itself be impaired. You would suffer a significant atrophying of the self, and thus of the capacity for flourishing. It is suffering (and not just misery) that marks tragedy for the ordinary person, and this cannot be limited simply to catastrophe, even though in literary representation this has often been the case.
It is this expanded view of flourishing or eudaimonia that I think Díaz illustrates so cogently in his novel. When the teenage Belicia falls in love with The Gangster, she acquires a new sense of self-fulfillment and thus of flourishing. The ultimate outcome of getting entangled with The Gangster, who unbeknownst to her is married to Trujillo’s sister La Fea, is that she is taken into the cane fields outside the city and severely beaten up by some of La Fea’s goons (the Elvises, they are called, because of their peculiar “pompadours like the backs of beetles,” Oscar Wao, 159). This is while Belicia is pregnant. Her forlorn romantic hope that her boyfriend would come and rescue her from La Inca’s house after the beating is quickly dissipated when the goons who first sought to teach her a dire lesson in the cane fields return to try and finish the job they had started. In the end, La Inca has to bundle her off reluctantly to Nueva York to begin her life of diasporic exile away from the violent terrors of Santo Domingo. In the diaspora, it is not insignificant, first, that Belicia contracts breast cancer, something that implies the painful defacement of her primary source of feminine beauty in the eyes of men and indeed of herself, and second, that she is reduced to having to do three jobs just to look after her two children, Oscar and Lola. Not only does the condition of diasporic exile represent a reversal of fortune and a lot of suffering for her, but it also instils in her a certain brutal cynicism that she takes out on her daughter. These in effect represent an atrophying of her capacity for ethical sensitivity.
And yet at the same time, we must acknowledge that all of Belicia’s life has been marked by the onslaught of violence on the integrity of her body from a young age. She is the last daughter of Abelard, on whose death she is shunted indifferently between different members of the family until she ends up enslaved with a brutal branch of the family at the age of 9. The conditions of her enslavement are brutal, but much worse are the forms of punishment that are inflicted upon her on the signs of even the most minor infractions. In one of these, her back is badly burnt with fire and thus marked for life, which is directly reminiscent of the chockocherry tree on Sethe’s back, the work of the lash in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. We may then say that Belicia’s capacity for making ethically salient choices or indeed of ethical sensitivity (such as say in the way she relates to her daughter) is impeded by the loss of worldly goods of philia before and after the interregnum of her happy stay with La Inca, Abelard’s cousin, from the age of 9 to 16, such that the atrophying of her capacity for ethical choice and sensitivity are the direct measure of such impediments. She is thus a fully tragic character.
In Abelard, however, we see the concentration of many features of tragedy that allow him to symbolically encompass both the classical Aristotelian definition and the more extended one we are elaborating here for Oscar Wao. When Aristotle notes in the Poetics that the plot of a tragedy must have a beginning, a middle, and an end, he is not simply calling for the mechanical temporal sequencing of the tragic action but rather for the establishment of the terms of what Nussbaum glosses as causal plausibility. As she notes, whether with respect to literary tragedy or real life, for the victim of suffering to elicit sympathetic identification from the witness to their suffering it has to be shown, first, that they were not culpable for the catastrophe that befalls them; second, that even if they were somewhat culpable the scale of the catastrophe vastly outstrips their culpability; and third, that the catastrophe has undermined the sufferer’s capacity to make ethically informed judgments. It is these three elements that collectively define causal plausibility for the audience or reader and also in the eyes of the one who bears witness to the tragic protagonist’s suffering. And it is this that triggers sympathy for the sufferer and perhaps an active response to their suffering.Footnote 8 And yet in the literary representation of suffering causal plausibility entails a number of other elements, not all of which necessarily comply with Aristotle’s notion of the ideal plot. At issue are the elements of circumstance and contingency, and sometimes even of the contrast between the human domain and that of the natural world, as we find for Clara in the earthquake sections of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits or for Ammu and Velutha in the monsoon sections of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Furthermore, circumstance and contingency may also be coupled to hamartia in Aristotle’s terminology to trigger the tragic reversal of fortunes. At any rate, as we have already seen from Yunior’s speculation on the causes of Abelard’s tragedy, the fact that we cannot establish his culpability for what befalls him does not make him any less sympathetic.
Hamartia’s commonplace translation as “tragic flaw” may be traced back to A.C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy,Footnote 9 where each of the main tragic protagonists in Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear is burdened with a flaw of some sort. (One might also add Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus to Bradley’s list for good measure.) But Bradley’s account places too great an emphasis on the tragic flaw as the sign of an ethical deficit. Thus, it is Macbeth’s overweening ambition that makes him go down the path of murder, Othello’s extreme jealousy that leads him to strangle Desdemona, and Hamlet’s debilitating prevarication that prevents him from avenging his father’s assassination in a timely manner. Aristotelian hamartia simply means an “error of judgment,” which in fact is inherently an error of the interpretation of facts as they are presented to the tragic protagonist. These errors of judgment may indeed derive from certain character dispositions, but it is not the dispositions in themselves that trigger the tragedy but the relationship between dispositions and contingency that lead to the reversals of fortune. And so it is perfectly true that Hamlet is given to delay when incited by his father’s ghost to execute his role as avenger. But what is even more true is that he seems to be frequently diverted by aesthetic considerations. When the Player King arrives at Elsinore and delivers the “Pyrrus, Priam and Hecuba” speech on Hamlet’s instigation, Hamlet is deeply moved by it (“What is Hecuba to him, and he to her/ That he should weep for her?”). But the direct effect of this is that he himself decides to pen a play of his own—the Mousetrap—to capture the conscience of King Claudius. All goes well at the performance, and it is evident that on seeing the play that Claudius is deeply afflicted by what can only be assumed to be guilt. He suddenly asks for lights before the play ends and sweeps out of the show in great agitation. Shortly after, Hamlet is sent for by his mother and on the way to her chamber happens to chance upon Claudius at prayer. Hamlet is not to know what we the audience are privy to, and that is that Claudius’s prayer sinks to earth because of his guilt. And so, the young prince is only confronted by what appears to be an aesthetic tableau of a man at prayer. This then incites his own religious interpretation of the tableau, with the conclusion that he must not kill the upstart king at prayer; otherwise, it might lead to his soul going straight to heaven. The point I want to make here is that Hamlet seems to be arrested by the aesthetic domain at these and other points in the play to the degree that he is restrained from acting because of the insistent demand posed by the aesthetic domain for interpretation. This is fundamentally part of his hamartia or error of judgment to my mind.
For his part, Abelard is a doctor described as intelligent, highly cultured, cosmopolitan, and a loving and over-protective husband and father, thus establishing all the grounds of a sustaining philia in Aristotle’s terms. But he is also defined by important middle-class material descriptors such as a surfeit of books and the requisite leisure to read them, a highly sophisticated education that makes him not just a reader but also a writer, and even with some specific food preferences. Abelard’s key defect, however, is a certain see-no-evil complacency brought on precisely by his material class interests. And it is these that prevent him from making any radical decisions, even one as simple as leaving for Cuba (the revolutionary Cuba!) with his family on the advice of his mistress Lydia. To his best friend and neighbor Marcus, who finally betrays him to the authorities, he waxes indignantly for sometimes up to an hour “about the injustice, about the hopelessness of it all” (an amazing amount of circumlocution because he never once directly named who it was he was complaining about). He alternated between impotent rage and pathetic self-pity (Oscar Wao, 229). There is a large hint of Hamlet in this fundamental incapacity to act in his own and his family’s self-interest, but I would argue that his failure is tied to a fundamental sense of security bred from his material class position. His error of judgment is in assuming that anything might remain sacrosanct for Trujillo, including any of the markers and guarantors of the civility of class and of tradition. All the evidence before Abelard’s arrest pointed to the opposite, and yet he persisted in acting as if the protocols of respect for the age-old traditions would remain intact. His is partly a tragedy of sly civilities and manners reminiscent of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, and partly the saga of a particular geographical location (the Dominican Republic) that echoes the tragic sagas of the South made famous in William Faulkner’s work. To trace the intertexts of Oscar Wao would require a true grasp of all of the American literary tradition as well as of the World Literature of which America is but an island among many. And Saldívar’s Junot Díaz: On the Half-Life of Love points us in the many rich directions that we are invited to take.
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