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RESEARCH PRODUCT

The Marvelous History of the Dominican Republic in Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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Few things are as noticeable in Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) as its references to a wide variety of movies, TV series, comics, and most centrally to fantasy, the genre in which worlds are created that allow for the existence of magic, monsters, and other elements of the marvelous. Interweaving the story of the fictional Cabral family in the Dominican Republic and in the diaspora with the history of the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (1930–1961), the novel offers a sweeping reinterpretation of Caribbean history in a way that is completely intelligible only if one understands the relevance of its primary fantasy intertext, The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), both for the reader and for the characters. It is the growing familiarity of the novel’s main narrator, Yunior, with the (Western) genre of fantasy that makes possible in the first place the novel’s reinterpretation of Caribbean history: in Diaz’s novel, fantasy is the closest approximation of the truly marvelous nature of the Caribbean, almost completely forgotten in an increasingly secular Dominican diaspora. The Lord of the Rings offers an already accepted fantasy narrative capable of undermining the reader’s resistance to a marvelous reading of Caribbean reality. However, Diaz’s novel does not totally distance itself from any of the influences of Dominican tradition, Western fantasy, or Western realism and its Caribbean and Latin American adaptations. Instead, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao offers a uniquely Dominican-American fantasy perspective that enables Dominicans to recover in the diaspora a sense of how to relate to their history, even as that history remains tantalizingly out of reach. Contemporary Caribbean literature offers a great number of novels concerned with diaspora, identity, and history, and the Trujillo regime has inspired many writers, such as the Dominican American Julia Alvarez and Haitian American Edwidge Danticat. In contrast to these texts, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao the Caribbean homeland is not a privileged space in which to recover an identity lost in the diaspora. The novel’s historical narrative is the product of the discovery of a unique explanatory mode by Yunior, which foregrounds the ostensible outsider’s perspective to what may be called “Dominicanness.” Dominicans, and especially Dominican males in the diaspora, are revealed to have no appreciation of the marvelous historical aspects of the Dominican Republic. Yet the diaspora itself offers ways of recovering a Caribbean historical identity; indeed it becomes a necessary precursor to recovering that identity because it enables access to the mediating genre of fantasy. It is only Yunior’s immersion in fantasy that enables him to perceive the “real” marvelous nature of Caribbean history, even if fantasy does not ultimately suffice to fully