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| Jaime Hernandez's illustration for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao excerpt in The New Yorker. Hernandez collaborated with Díaz to produce an illustrated version of This is How You Lose Her (2012), a collection of Díaz's short stories. |
Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 99-101.
Study Question:
1. Previously, we have been discussing how The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao makes allusions to less reputable genres such as science fiction, fantasy, and superhero comic books. Clearly, the novel is not any of these genres. However, it clearly takes part in the tradition known both as lo real maraviilloso and/or magical realism. Look at the below definitions of lo real maravilloso/magical realism. How do these generic definitions apply to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao? Why might these generic conventions appeal to Díaz?
1. Lo real maravilloso americano--The marvelous begins to be unmistakably marvelous when it arises from an unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle), from a privileged revelation of reality an unaccustomed insight that is singularly favored by the unexpected richness of reality or an amplification of the scale and categories of reality perceived with particular intensity by virtue of an exaltation of the spirit that leads it to a kind of extreme state. To begin with, the phenomenon of the marvelous presupposes faith. (Alejo Carpentier, "On the Marvelous Real in America." In Magical Realism. Ed. Zamora and Faris, 85-86)
2. Rushdie sees 'El realismo magical, magic realism, at least as practiced by [Garcia] Marquez, [as] a development out of Surrealism that expresses a genuinely Third World consciousness. [Magical realism] is a way of showing reality more truly with the marvelous aid of metaphor. (Patricia Merivale, "Saleem Fathered by Oskar: Midnight's Children, Magic Realism and The Tin Drum." In Magical Realism. Ed. Zamora and Faris, 331).
3. Magical realism turns out to be part of a twentieth-century preoccupation with how our ways of being in the world resist capture by the traditional logic of the waking mind's reason.The magical realists' project to reveal the intimate interdependence between reality and fantasy is shared by modernists, but magical realism and modernism proceed by different means. Magical realism wills a transformation of the object of representation, rather than the means of representation. Magical realism, like the uncanny projects a mesmerizing uncertainty suggesting that ordinary life may also be the scene of the extraordinary. (David Mikics, "Derek Walcott and Alejo Carpentier: Nature, History, and the Caribbean Writer," In Magical Realism. Ed. Zamora and Faris, 372).
4. Magic realism--[is characterized by] the mingling and juxtaposition of the realistic and the fantastic, bizarre and skillful time shifts, convoluted and even labyrinthine narratives and plots, miscellaneous use of dreams, myths and fairy stories, expressionistic and even surrealistic description, arcane erudition, the elements of surprise or abrupt shock, the horrific and the inexplicable. (A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory)
