Dictating Desire, Dictating Diaspora: Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as Foundational Romance

What's ironic is that Trujillo is this horror in this book, but the readers don't even recognize that the person telling the story is Trujillo with a different mask.

Junot Díaz, Interview with Katherine Miranda

Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) is a seductive novel that probably didn't need the 2008 Pulitzer Prize to endear it to the academy. The abundant scholarly commentary on the novel has found inspiration in Oscar Wao's discursive heterogeneity and drawn attention to its invocation of black urban slang, Spanglish, comic books, and science fiction. The multiple discourses in Oscar Wao call to mind Timothy Brennan's description of the novel as a genre that "mimic[s] the structure of the nation, a clearly bordered jumble of languages and styles," and that serves as a space where "previously foreign languages me[e]t each other on the same terrain, forming an unsettled mixture of ideas and styles, themselves representing previously distinct peoples now forced to create the rationale for a common life" (49-50). Whereas Brennan addresses the novel's role in embodying and imagining the nation, incorporating different subcultures into one community, I contend that Díaz uses the novelistic genre to embody the structure and linguistic diversity of the Dominican American diaspora, rather than the nation.¹ Employing the appealing guise of polyvocality, Oscar Wao charms and entices the reader, especially the academic reader, into becoming complicit with the heteronormative rationale used to police male diasporic identity.

I read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as a corrective to the critical reception of Díaz's short-story collection, Drown (1996), and to definitions of authentic representation that critics brought to the stories. Not only does Oscar Wao explore how these ideas about cultural authenticity are enforced, but also the translation of Yunior from the short stories to the novel emphasizes the Dominican Republic's history of dictatorship as the decisive element shaping belonging. Oscar Wao delves into the intersections and conflicts between the Dominican nation and its periphery, as Yunior goes from embodying both resident and immigrant Dominican American men in Drown to a Dominican-born Latino in Oscar Wao who dictates the life of U.S.-born Oscar de León. So while Díaz's novel aims to represent the linguistic diversity of the Dominican diaspora, it does so by following the nation's logic of consolidation, specifically demarcating the borders of a representative diasporic subject in terms of masculinity and sexuality.

In order to situate Díaz's novel as a foundational fiction for the Dominican American diaspora, I offer several alternate contexts to the dominant reading of Oscar Wao as a transgressive text that challenges the oppressive structures of the nation-state. I first explain how the novel is responsive to the values of an academic readership by addressing the example of diasporic discourse. I follow with a discussion of Latin American national fictions and Díaz's earlier writing in Drown to show how Díaz historicizes the origins of diasporic identity, positioning Oscar de León as a subject that the Dominican nation cannot assimilate. Despite its title, the true protagonist of Oscar Wao is Yunior, and the relationship between Yunior and Oscar calls attention to how narrating a diaspora's history also entails domesticating difference. While Oscar is endearingly inauthentic, Yunior's mission to identify him as a representative subject who can embody the Dominican diaspora leads him ultimately to silence Oscar's points of queer Otherness—his virginity and sentimentality.² Yunior's insecurities as narrator reveal that his investment in telling Oscar's story is motivated by an inability to tell the full story about himself. Just as the ending of the novel projects onto Oscar a transformation into full-fledged heterosexuality, it also hints at a suppressed homosocial romance that cannot be rendered as part of a Dominican diasporic history.

Diasporic Contexts and Foundational Romances

By opening with an epigraph from...