Creolizing the Canon: Manuel Puig, Junot Díaz, and the Latino Poetics of Relation

In 2008, Nicaraguan author Sergio Ramírez writes an opinion piece on the state of the contemporary Latin American novel, which he commences with a provocative and radical question: "¿Se escribirá la nueva novela latinoamericana en inglés?" (Ramírez) [Will the new Latin American novel be written in English?]. In the essay that follows, he remarks on the literary success of two Latino¹ writers, Peruvian-American Daniel Alarcón and Dominican-American Junot Díaz, and claims them as quintessential authors of Latin American fiction, based primarily on their chosen subject matter: Spanish American culture and history. Despite writing in English—of course, mixed with a healthy dose of Spanish code-switching—Ramírez sees these authors as opening a new, bilingual chapter in Spanish American literary history.²

Setting aside the case of Alarcón, whose work lies outside of the scope of this essay, the integration of Díaz into a purely Spanish American canon seems somewhat reductionist—a homogenization of a rich cultural mixture that is affected (on an aesthetic level) by "high art" US and Spanish American literature as well "low art" pop culture forms and (on a cultural level) by Dominican, African-American, Anglophone, and Francophone Caribbean cultures. This criticism notwithstanding, Ramírez's essay does raise the important question of where to situate Latino literature within literary history. Fitting discretely into neither the US nor the Spanish American canons, does it exist as a marginal, satellite movement, situated on the periphery of both and fully participating in neither? This hypothetical characterization would seem to run the risk of relegating Latino literature to an inferior, second-class status, a subordination which Díaz already sees as a socio-cultural reality: "los escritores latinos de EEUU […] en mi opinión son ciudadanos de segunda en la república de las letras norteamericanas y latinoamericanas" ("EE.UU. tiene pesadillas en español") [Latino writers from the United States […] in my opinion are second-class citizens in the North American and Latin American Republic of Letters]. Additionally, the designation of Latino literature as a marginal art form would fail to account for its growing impact on both the US and Spanish American literary canons, as evidenced by the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Díaz in 2008, and by the growing recognition of the literary value of Latino writers in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The difficulty of positioning Latino literature neatly within literary history reveals another possible way of thinking through this conundrum—that the hybrid, multicultural, and transnational nature of Latino writing unmasks the fundamental limitations of literary canons. In other words, the variety of cultures, languages, and literatures that are put into dialogue within Latino works exposes the artificiality of literary histories that create narratives of literary development based on geographic or linguistic boundaries. Following this train of thought, this essay will seek to portray Latino literature as a fundamentally creolized³ art form, a writing which draws from US, Caribbean, and Latin American literatures and cultures, and which challenges the existence of all three as discrete categories. However, given that a careful examination of all of the cultural and literary influences that figure into the syncretic production of Latino literature would certainly exceed the scope of a single essay, I will limit myself here to the analysis of one dimension of this creolized literary production: the comparative study of Spanish American and Latino literature. In other words, I would like to follow one thread out of the tangled cultural nexus that is Latino literature, and trace its trajectory back to the Spanish American canon. As such, I will re-evaluate the relationship between Spanish American and Latino literature hypothesized by Ramírez in his polemical op-ed, showing that while Díaz's work cannot be reduced to the limited status of either "Latin American" or "US" fiction, Spanish American literary history does form one important element in the transcultural synthesis that produces his texts. A comparative analysis of El beso de la mujer araña (1976; The Kiss...