The Marvelous History of the Dominican Republic in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Few things are as noticeable in Junot Díaz’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.¹ 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 Díaz’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.² However, Díaz’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.³ 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 explain Caribbean history. The consequence is a concept of diasporic Dominican identity that absorbs Western fantasy in order to understand the marvelous nature of its heritage and thus to arrive at a new idea of Caribbean history.⁴

In this context, I use the term marvelous in the sense in which Tzvetan Todorov has used it, as the unexplained supernatural (52), and fantasy as the genre in which the marvelous mode becomes naturalized, in which characters act at ease with the supernatural, where supernatural elements can exist “without the reader’s ever questioning their nature,” as Todorov says is the case with fables, for example (32). The marvelous (and fantasy) contrasts with the fantastic; fantastic moments are those when either a realistic explanation or a supernatural interpretation is possible, so that the narrated event becomes ontologically ambivalent. Fantasy texts, in this sense, are not fantastic, as there is no doubt about the supernatural nature of events; they are, instead, marvelous. When I speak of a marvelous text, therefore, I mean a text written in a mode that permits the existence and explanatory power of the supernatural. Through the accumulation of references, Díaz’s novel conditions the reader to accept the various metaphors, allusions, and allegories of its marvelous intertext...