“Magic Realism” in Oscar Wao: A Merging of the Esoteric and Exoteric
Chris Bakka
In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Dominican-American author Junot Díaz offers a pointed critique of the Eurocentric view of the Latino storytelling tradition of “magic realism”—a term that, in itself, ultimately proves to be problematic, as it attempts to use Western concepts to convey what it perceives to be distinctively non-Western ideas. Because Díaz and his book straddle these two seemingly diametric planes—one of Western thought, of postmodernism, and another of native mind—Oscar Wao effectively satirizes itself, lampooning magic realism as it is commonly defined by critics (and by extension, practiced by writers). At the same time, Díaz embraces his own kind of magic realism as he struggles to explain the Dominican diaspora, ultimately settling on science fiction and fantasy as a prism through which Dominican history can be viewed.
Before addressing Díaz’s devices for doing so, however, we must examine magic realism both as a term and as a tradition. Only then can we appreciate the sweeping breadth and fine complexity of Oscar Wao’s critique. Díaz takes issue with the collective critical tendency to blithely separate the elements of fantasy and reality in magical realist fiction, assigning the logic and “realism” to Western influence and reducing the Latin-American influence to mere myth. As Clark Zlotchew, a prominent literary critic and professor of Spanish language and literature, notes in his book, Varieties of Magic Realism, this critical tendency is destructive:
A great many critics believe, as we have seen, that magic realism is the result of the blend of European logical-scientific rationality and the autochthonous New World’s primitive, mythical, magical and superstitious irrationality. Furthermore, they believe that the Latin American writers who are considered magic realists reflect this duality in their writings. (16)
As Zlotchew observes, this black-and-white approach to understanding the largely grey area of Latin-American writing and the European “influences” therein cannot be successfully applied without compromising the non-linear nature of the text. To attempt to understand New World literature from a strictly Old World perspective is an exercise akin to translating a foreign text into English and treating the English text as an authority—not recognizing that in the act of translation there is great loss; that concepts expressed from a different vantage point cannot be fully understood without an understanding of their origin. The conversion of the literal New World writing into a Eurocentric trope provides the illusion of understanding; the irony, however, lies in the fact that in the quest for empirical truth, the truth becomes distorted and inaccessible. Zlotchew expands his position on the authority attached to the Eurocentric view at the expense of the ethnocentric:
Part of the evidence that the magic realists and the critics who define magic realism from the ethnocentric point of view write from without rather than within the mentality supposedly reflect in magic realism, is their assigning all the logic, science and rationality to the European influence, while reserving the myth, superstition and irrationality for the indigenous factors. This, ironically, is in itself a Eurocentric viewpoint. (19-20)
It is this postmodern trend, to carve magic realist literature in two, to pit the esoteric against the exoteric, that destroys the story as an organism. Zlotchew goes on to repudiate this practice, denouncing it as naïve and disparaging:
The European tradition of logical thought and scientific inquiry, after all, subsists in conjunction with Pagan mythologies and the Christian religion, belief patterns based, not on logic or scientific observation, but on faith, which is the belief in what cannot be seen or weighed or measured. The Second Coming of Christ is no more logical or scientific than the Aztecs’ belief in the return of the god Quetzalcóatl; both are matters of faith. Certainly, indigenous American superstition—e.g. nahualism among the Guatemalan Indians—is no more irrational than the European belief in ghosts, vampires, werewolves, witches or leprechauns. (20)
Placed into perspective, we see the Eurocentric critical tendency is steeped in hypocrisy. As Westerners, we tend to count our own beliefs as reliable, and therefore “real,” because they come from a place of comfort, of closeness. We reduce indigenous beliefs, in the name of “logic,” to mere fantasy. Who is to say, however, that Christianity is the ultimate authority; that Christ is the alpha and omega he is posited to be? How are we to accept that the largely speculative realm of science—the vastness of the universe, the more-than-microscopic sub-reality of the atom and quark—is any more “real” than the gods and spirits of the Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas? Why are the practices of one culture “superstitious” and “magical” where those of another are “real”? Why must we be asked to suspend our disbelief in some cases, while in other cases we accept equally outlandish experiences as bald truth?
What is significant about Eurocentric rationalism is not its arrogance, however, as much as its insistence on the difference between imagination and reason. In his novel, Díaz simultaneously dismantles this dichotomy and criticizes the Eurocentric tendency of dichotomization. He does so by blurring the lines between magic and realism, between fiction and truth, between story and history. Díaz refuses to accept magic realism as critics define it; indeed, he mocks their definition and the embrace of that definition by his contemporaries. What Díaz seeks to achieve in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a marriage between what is magical and what is real. He conflates magical realist fantasy, the Western magic of science fiction, and the empirical “truth” of Dominican history into a novel that takes a firm stance against the postmodern contention that stories dissolve and words mean nothing. He does so by blending the Western, postmodern experience—the allowance and presentation of footnotes, the careful dissection of text—with a concentrated effort to synthesize and put together again stories in ways that are non-linear, inclusive, and holistic.
Díaz’s novel is only partially about Oscar. It seeks to relate the story of the Dominican diaspora, the globalization of Latin America, and the effect on history and storytelling of the clash of cultures, by examining Oscar and the curse surrounding his family. The novel questions postmodernism’s difficulty in establishing necessary hierarchies, challenging the notion that nothing begins and that text is infinite; that the world and everything in it is a construction. The book’s epigraph bellows the question: “Of what import are brief, nameless lives...to Galactus??”—Galactus, of course, being a creature of godlike status and power in Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s Fantastic Four comics. The entire novel serves as Díaz’s riposte. That stories are unimportant, that individual histories lack value, is the postmodern, Galactic view of literature. In his novel, Díaz contends that no lives are nameless; that words have lives. It is this contention, perhaps, that leads him to open the novel with a curse, a nod to magic realism ringing of satire. The curse, dubbed by the narrator as Fukú americanus, is described as “the great American doom,” (5) a tearing open of reality brought to the New World by Christopher Columbus, whom the narrator refers to only as “the Admiral,” because “to say his name aloud or even to hear it is to invite calamity on the heads of you and yours”(1). Despite the clever wordplay (fukú is eventually reconfigured as “fuck you”), Díaz from the outset establishes the notion that words have very real, substantial existences. Instead of continuing in the magical realist tradition of treating the supernatural as commonplace, however, the narrator calls attention to the curse as a reality, inviting and wryly dismissing skepticism. “It’s perfectly fine if you don’t believe [in the curse],” he tells us. “In fact it’s better than fine—it’s perfect. Because no matter what you believe, fukú believes in you” (5). Originally a foreign threat in the form of the colonization of the new world, fukú turns inward when the Dominican diaspora begins. The novel, framed as a fukú story of Oscar’s family, centers around the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, described by the narrator as “our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkseid, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up” (2). In the first of the novel’s lengthy footnotes, the narrator provides a primer for “those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history” (2):
[Trujillo was] famous for changing ALL THE NAMES of ALL THE LANDMARKS in the Dominican republic to honor himself (Pico Duarte became Pico Trujillo, and Santo Domingo de Guzmán, the first and oldest city in the New World, became Ciudad Trujillo) [...] Outstanding accomplishments include: the 1937 genocide against the Haitian and Haitian-Dominican community; one of the longest, most damaging U.S.-backed dictatorships in the Western Hemisphere...the creation of the first modern kleptocracy...the systematic bribing of American senators; and, last but not least, the forging of the Dominican peoples into a modern state. (3)
Combining the concept of the curse with science fiction and fantasy provides a unique outlook on Dominican history. Díaz uses genre fiction, a kind of Western magic realism, as a lens through which Dominican history can be viewed. It is this magical realist practice, merged with the historical footnotes peppered throughout the novel, that seeks to cause us to question our concept of reality and fantasy. As the narrator describes the havoc Trujillo wreaks on the Dominican Republic and Oscar’s family, we wonder how the Dominican Republic’s history manages to match the fantastic stories of Tolkien, Moore, and Kirby. By treating “magic” and “realism” as equals, however, Díaz illuminates our perceptions of both.
In addressing Oscar’s relationship to genre fiction, Díaz also makes a statement about Western attitudes toward fantasy. “Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman his lens” (21), he writes, making it clear that Oscar, immersed in the fantastic, is both tragic and heroic. While Western mind equates science fiction and fantasy with immaturity, for Oscar, the outlet becomes a necessary one. Instead of treating Oscar’s obsession with science fiction and comic books as a means of escaping history, Díaz uses it to confront history. He seems to suggest that only through imagination, through fantasy, through “magic,” can we truly understand reality and harness the power of love in a world so bleak and corrupt we can barely escape. While Oscar’s immersion in his genre fiction is both delusional and tragic, it leads him to an understanding of love greater than that of those around him. Indeed, he dies for love, sacrificing himself and confronting the curse rather than attempting to escape it. His last words in his last letter—“The beauty! The beauty!” (335)—directly parallel the final words of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: “The horror! The horror!” By the end of Oscar’s life, the epigraph has been answered; a story not about Oscar but about the Dominican Republic; about history, about story, about love, has been told.
After describing the curse at length, Díaz mentions “the one way to prevent disaster from coiling around you and your family safe. Not surprisingly,” he writes, “it was a word. A simple word (followed usually by a vigorous crossing of index fingers). Zafa” (7). Again, we see an example of Díaz’s reverence for the power of the word as an entity rather than a construction. The book’s investment in the living utterance, the palpable life of the word, refutes the postmodern position that stories are meaningless, non-hierarchical, perpetually collapsing texts. The word in Oscar Wao is very real and alive—the fukú of the curse and the zafa of Oscar’s demise carry with them the ability to alter history. This blurring of magic and realism—indeed, this questioning of what is magical and what is real—is what makes Díaz’s novel so compelling. “What’s certain,” we are told, “is that nothing’s certain. We are trawling in silences here” (241). That the question of what is real and fantastic is often unanswerable is a testament to the significance of storytelling. Oscar Wao is a sharp response to postmodern apathy toward the power of the story—a cultural reclamation to those who posit that magic realism is a means of escapism. The book’s method of merging the esoteric and exoteric, offering a critique of the Eurocentric tendency to cling to categorization, is unique. After all, Díaz reminds us, “it’s only a story, with no kind of evidence, the kind of shit only a nerd could love” (246). The importance of our individual histories, far from being doomed to dissolution by fukú, can truly be saved by a word. Indeed, by the novel’s end, Díaz has reclaimed—snatched from Galactus’s all-powerful grasp—the brief lives of the nameless, the unsung.
Works Cited
Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007.
Zlotchew, Clark. Varieties of Magic Realism. New Jersey: Academic Press ENE, 2007.
6