Days of Diaz

Figured I would put up an essay I wrote last semester, touching upon the readability and polyglossia within Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Any comments here or on my twitter are welcome.

Ghettonerd and Beyond: Polyglot Discourses within Oscar Wao

     In a 2008 interview with Meghan O’Rourke shortly after winning the Pulitzer Prize, Junot Diaz was asked whether he was worried that readers of his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, might not be able to fully understand the significance of the book if they did not have a grasp of the Spanish language. Diaz replied, “I want people to research, to ask each other, to question. But also I want there to be an element of incomprehension. What’s language without incomprehension?” (2). Nonetheless, I would argue that Diaz’s levels of incomprehension are mild at best, for in his novel he writes in such ways that a multitude of different readers would be able to glean the necessary information needed to make sense of the text. Diaz incorporates his own style of polyglossic discourse, one in which he combines English, Spanish, academic footnotes, urban street slang and his own invented “ghettonerd” speak, in order to tell his story of three generations of a Dominican family in their homeland as well as their experiences in America. In this style, he is able to unite different levels of readership and produce a new form of neocolonial literature, one that could be read with equal aplomb by various individuals. Oscar Wao represents a modern approach to writing, one that is focused on worldwide matters and is not confined to a singular language or culture.

     Besides dealing with basic human emotions of the Bildungsroman variety, the story also tackles the Dominican diasporic experience in America while simultaneously serving as a Latin-American dictatorship novel. In Mikhail Bahktin’s paper “Discourse in the Novel” he advances the idea of heteroglossia and defines it as “another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (442). Within this larger heading of heteroglossia is Bahktin’s conception of the hybrid construction, defined as a juxtaposition of “two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two ‘languages’” but belonging to a single speaker (426). It is the narrator of the novel, Diaz’s literary alter-ego Yunior, who employs the majority of this polyglossic discourse throughout the story. Take the opening paragraph of the first chapter, in which Yunior says about Oscar, “Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about–he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock” (11). This passage is relevant because it implies a multitude of possible meanings, and one could infer the basic gist without knowing exactly what the word bachatero (a Dominican slang word meaning either one who likes to carouse and act in a drunken manner or a musician) implies. Through this narrative voice, Yunior makes his point clear to readers that Oscar is no ordinary Dominican. By situating the Spanish word in the middle, the reader can guess the meaning through the examples sandwiched on either side (the home-run hitter an allusion to either the Dominican’s prevalence for exporting high caliber baseball players to America or a sporting metaphor that plays on his lack of sexual prowess, which in turn would correlate closer to the idea of a playboy with a million women wanting to get with him). Either way it is analyzed, it shows immediately how different Oscar is from the stereotypical Dominican male. Also, the usage of the double negative in the passage is the first example of the urban English grammar that the narrator will use throughout the text.

     Max Abrams, in his essay entitled “Immigrants and Galactus: Junot Diaz’s world in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, states that “Diaz does not adjust to accommodate the reader, but instead forces the reader to make meaning from all these discourses at the same time and see into his reality. The result is the subversion of the power hierarchy of knowledge” (3). This is obvious throughout the text as a multitude of descriptions, metaphors, and examples are used to describe certain events, people, or things. When describing Oscar as a nerd, Yunior lists the authors that Oscar faithfully reads: “Lovecraft, Wells, Burroughs, Howard, Alexander, Herbert, Asimov, Bova, and Heinlein” (21). These writers are seemingly listed in an unfixed order, a mixture of horror, science fiction, and pulp fiction writers, some more well-known than others. Later, when describing more of Oscar’s peculiarities, Yunior claims, “Perhaps if like me he’d been able to hide his otakuness maybe shit would have been easier for him, but he couldn’t. Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens” (21). This allusion is important because it references not only popular American culture (Star Wars)  and the more specialized science fiction soap opera (Lensman series), but also throws in a Japanese word (Otaku, meaning technologically savvy but socially lacking youth) to attract a different readership, one that is more at home with anime and manga than with George Lucas or Doc Smith. In one of his David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes, Diaz says of Oscar, “Maybe it was that in the DR he had watched too much Spider-Man, been taken to too many Run Run Shaw kung fu movies, listened to too many of his abuela’s spooky stories about el Cuco and la Ciguapa?” (22). Again, Diaz shows the impetus for Oscar’s development with assorted references: the Stan Lee created American superhero; the Hong Kong media tycoon; the Hispanic folktales and legends. By bridging east and west, the new homeland with the old, Diaz aims to unify different readers. And while Diaz uses educated sources, he clearly does not want to alienate the less erudite reader. These examples show Diaz’s intent to blend different languages, ideas, and cultures into one large metaphorical melting pot; a panoply of sources high and low that will attract many and marginalize none. As Abrams incisively states, “Information is taken in equally, not ordered by its social and intellectual importance...The result is a natural narrative without the uncomfortable formalism often associated with novels that use numerous references and languages” (5).

     Another example of narrative authenticity in Oscar Wao comes in the form of abundant code-switching. According to Ismail Talib, in his book The Language of Postcolonial Literature, he states that, “The use of code-switching in a literary work may depend on the author’s need to reflect the accuracy of language use by the characters” (145). Talib later adds, “The use of code-switching may be judged not only in terms of the accuracy of linguistic representation, but also on aesthetic grounds” (146). In the case of Oscar Wao these are both applicable. When Diaz has his character’s integrate Spanish into their English, it is not only stylistically pleasing, but also representational of actual bilingual speech, especially in Hispanic-American communities. Many emigrants to America feel the need to assimilate into their new culture, and besides soaking up the culture, they must also try to learn the language. And while the basic framework for English might be easy to grasp, the nuances of their first language are what enriches their meaning. The entire novel could be cited for examples of code-switching, but an important instance occurs when Yunior describes Oscar during his sophomore year in high school. Oscar had the tendency to balloon in weight when he was depressed and “it had become clear to everybody, especially his family, that he’d become the neighborhood parigüayo” (19). Here, Diaz uses the Spanish word parigüayo, a “corruption of the English neologism ‘party watcher,’” to describe Oscar (19). If he were to describe Oscar as just a party watcher, the true meaning of this designation would not be certain. However, by using parigüayo, which is a disparaging word stemming from the first American occupation of the Dominican Republic, Diaz manages to write back towards the center and affix a more flavorful and accurate depiction of Oscar’s role as an outsider looking in. Moreover, Diaz makes sure to spread the conscious language interference to other characters as well, most notably Oscar’s older sister Lola. After a particularly brutal argument with her mother, Lola reminisces about “The life that existed beyond Paterson, beyond my family, beyond Spanish” (55). Lola felt shackled by the reach her “Old World Dominican mother” employed over the family and yearned to break free, but she could not do so completely (55). “What it’s like to be the perfect Dominican daughter, which is just a nice way of saying a perfect Dominican slave,” she declares (56). Lola was mature, intelligent, a role-model to Oscar, yet conflicted in her own skin. She exclaims, “I was a fea, I was a worthless, I was an idiota” (56). It is interesting to note Lola’s injection of derogatory Spanish words (ugly and idiot respectively) into her list of characteristics, but more noteworthy is her inclusion of the article ‘a’ before adjectives without nouns (a worthless what? daughter? woman? Dominican?), another example of this hybrid urban grammatical structure. We could see the interference of Spanish in Lola’s English, a reminder that she could never leave the old world behind, that it would always be a part of her no matter how hard she tried to flee.

     Finally, the “ghettonerd” vocabulary that Oscar speaks becomes one of the novel’s most endearing qualities. Oscar has a tendency to pepper his speech with large words in an attempt to distinguish himself even more as an individual. As Yunior says, “he used a lot of huge-sounding words like indefatigable and ubiquitous when talking to niggers who would barely graduate from high school” (22). He describes a girl in his SAT class as orchidaceous, refers to the same girl’s boyfriend’s penis as an anatomical enormity, talks about his love for writing speculative genres. When attempting to pick up a girl on the bus one day Oscar says, “If you were in my game I would give you an eighteen Charisma!” (174). He makes comments like, “I am ill fated, I am going to perish a virgin, I’m lacking in pulchritude” (176). No matter how hard he tries, Oscar cannot escape from who he is; a role-playing, comic- loving, sci-fi fanboy with an irrepressible urge to find love and to acquire that Dominican “hypermaleness” that is so prevalent in his world.

     In these brief passages it is clear to see that Diaz is an alchemists of sorts, one who  combines and mixes languages like potions and tries to create discourse gold. He does more than just capture and remold language; he fuses in into a unique substance and allows the reader the flexibility to play with it in different manners. While one may not be able to grasp all of his meanings, there is enough variety to convey his points. He wants people to research, to question, to find meaning in his text, and by doing so, a wide array of possibilities can be discovered. But even for those less bookish readers who cannot comprehend his multitude of references, there is still enough to ascertain.