Nerd Nation: La breve y maravillosa vida de Óscar Wao and Life in Tolkien’s Universe

As a cultural figure, it never seemed probable that the “nerd” could be hot. After all, when combining his or her anti-social behavior with a startling devotion to fantastic or computer-related minutia, social obscurity and scorn would appear to be quite understandable consequences. The current so-called “nerd phenomenon,” however, resists facile application between Western cultures. For example, the similar Spanish term “empollón” truly succeeds in describing the nerd’s studious nature, and yet, fails to address other more specifically North American associations with this often rejected social enigma. Following this trend of increasing culture credence for the once-lowly nerd stands the bestselling novel La breve y maravillosa vida de Óscar Wao (2008), written by Pulitzer Prize winning author Junot Díaz. Yearning to belong, whether socially, romantically, or culturally, the novel’s protagonist struggles mightily with this task due to his unequivocal classification as a nerd by the book’s narrator, Yunior. In addition, Óscar Wao’s lack of connections only becomes magnified in light of his bi-national identity; he retains familial roots in the Dominican Republic while inhabiting New Jersey with his mother and sister. Certainly, alienation at a multitude of levels represents a defining force in the life of Óscar Wao. Nevertheless, his devotion to the genre of fantasy, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy specifically, suggests a sort of literary “nation” that provides a measure of order and belonging not available to nerds in strictly the Dominican Republic or the United States.

In or Out?

The mix of nerds with literature is an imminently historical and productive one. Enjoying the outlandish time and focus to channel toward reading, the aforementioned “empollón” (bookworm) manifests the distinctly literary side of the nerd. Far before the possibility of amassing almost infinite tomes on a zip drive, Walter Benjamin mused about the pleasure of physically accumulating and organizing a library capable of satisfying a vast literary appetite: “O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected, and no one has had a greater sense of well-being than the man who has been able to carry on his disreputable existence in the mask of Spitzweg’s ‘Bookworm’” (67). Luxuriating in personal time, this book collector neglects both responsibility and social stature for the sake of collecting and consuming discourse. Still, this status is fulfilling, for although he or she fails to yield any tangible product from this lettered activity, the satisfaction resulting from burrowing through page after page and book after book speaks to a figure entirely content with a hermetic existence. On the other hand, this literary connection between nerd and bookworm also hints at the potential for increasing the fertility of its surroundings; corporeal negotiations through discourse allow for the voracious reader to contribute to textual enrichment as well. The inner peace realized through discursive gathering and reading, conversely, only provides a frustratingly temporary escape from the lived disorder constantly encountered by the nerd.

Once again, the physically closed space offered in book form permits a clean sense of starting and ending that appeals greatly to the so-called “bookworm.” Living in their own minds, indifferent to extratextual social contact, nerds readily relate to the more general figure of the “outsider” in literature who values order above all else: “For the Outsider, the world is not rational, not orderly […] it is a distressing sense that truth must be told at all costs, otherwise there can be no hope for an ultimate restoration of order” (Wilson 15). While Wilson’s idea of the “Outsider” moors itself firmly within the literary traditions of (European) Modernism and Romanticism, this feeling of a world that disobeys rules and the consequent anxiety to reestablish (discursive) control combine to characterize the nerd as well. Indeed, both of these figures demonstrate an acute despair regarding social and existential surroundings that defy their best efforts to make sense of them, often with a strict connection between signifier and signified. For the order-obsessed nerd in...