Mil Máscaras: An Interview with Pulitzer-Winner Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)
"But I do think that because we're sort of 'living in the Matrix,' we have this hunger for truth and fact because we know these things are important--and we’ve abdicated truth and fact in the larger society--so we’re just projecting our need for them onto other areas. I just think that fiction, like many other areas, is being asked to carry the burden for a society that no longer wants to confront itself."
Walk into a big-box bookstore anywhere in the
Western world. What, maybe a hundred thousand books--bargain volumes,
self-help editions, plus all those pulpy, fat little New York
Times-approved tomes--line the shelves, but how many are really
worth reading? And how many have been written by dynamic, compassionate
thinkers whose scribblings encourage their readers to be: smarter,
lighter in spirit, and ultimately more humane? Here’s one, Mr. Junot
Díaz. He’s the best writer under 40 in either lowercase or uppercase
America, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao is available in paperback beginning September
2. Avoid it, and be forever damned to literary hell. (Seriously,
yo.)
Matt Okie: Mark Twain scholar and Stanford University professor
Shelley Fisher Fishkin has argued that the character Huckleberry
Finn was, in part, inspired by Twain’s encounters with a ten-year-old
African-American servant. If true, what does it mean for American
Literature that under its seemingly white male guise, is really
a black consciousness?
Junot Diaz: [laughs] That’s the
first question?
MO: [laughs] Yeah, yeah. I figured I’d start off
with a bang, man. If you want, we can go in a different order. I
have a number of questions about your recent work as well.
JD: I don’t know. I mean, I guess there
are a number of ways to approach that. There’s basically the
Toni Morrison approach from her one critical book, in which she
basically argues exactly what the implicature in that question is:
that at the core of the whitest of white American letters is the
infrastructure of the African diasporic experience.
You know, I guess that this is nothing new. I guess I
just don’t know--beyond that this seems to be a given fact--I
don’t know what more can be said. I mean, the erasure and
marginalization of all people of color...in what we call the
canon is well-documented. It really doesn’t come as any surprise.
I guess that that’s always been the tension. As a writer--as
an artist--in the Americas, I work in a culture that simultaneously
marginalizes the traditions and the people from which I come, while
plundering all their physical, intellectual, representational, and
cultural works. There just is nothing new to that. I don’t
what else could be said. After so long, it’s something that
we know. It’s the pivot along which the culture swings. We
do our work; we point it out a million times.
Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens [co-opting black culture]--that just
strikes me as an incredibly safe point to argue. Who besides scholars
are going to really get hyper-incensed about this? I mean, what
about the fact that the supposedly liberal and open-minded
National Book Award jury nominated no people of color last year?
That to me is, like, the height of what I call: The Unthinking White
Reflex. Which is, you know, a couple of months after this all-white
jury nominates a slate of all-white books, we get the demographic
report that--sooner than we thought--the majority of folks
in this country are not going to be white.
I just think that this junction is really telling and also in some
ways really tragic, how disconnected even the cultural workers are
in the white community, how blind they are to their privileges,
but also how, in some ways, stupendously damaging their blind spots
are. Jesus, last year, [the National Book Award jury] couldn’t
find--with all the tremendous books written by people of color--one
person worth nominating.
Again, it goes to the question: there’s always been a reflex
in the United States of celebrating the new and the strange and
the other, but there’s also been a tendency of making sure
that while the celebration is going on: white privilege is not in
any way undermined. I think it’s not so simplistic
that it’s like, “Oh, this is a white-only country.”
You know? It’s by having both strategies that you’re
able to obscure how the prerogative of white privilege has been
maintained, despite what appears to be on the surface, an opening
and a multi-culturalization of what we call our society.
MO: Now, bear in mind, that I am in awe of The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao [pronounced “wow”]--I
think it’s a monumental work; one that, no doubt, hurtles
you into the upper strata of the canon--but when I first reached
the end of the novel, I must admit that I was staggered by the bold
simplicity of Oscar’s tale. I mean, on some level, you’ve
written and won a Pulitzer for a Penthouse Letter about
an obese Dominican-American fanboy’s quest to get laid. (Which
is, of course, fuckin’ brilliant!) Even in a number
of the Drown stories, sex seems to play a central role.
Why do you think that carnality plays such an integral role in the
fiction of Junot Díaz?
JD: Really? I’m not so sure. Again, I always
question how much folks are bringing to the page. I mean, how many
pages of actual sex are there in the book?
MO: No, no, no. I meant that in a hyperbolic way. I don’t
mean that there are actual graphic descriptions of sex in Oscar
Wao.
JD: Sure...as a kid I knew the [Penthouse
Letters] genre extremely well. I wish I could say that as an
adult that I had the time to brush up on the genre, but I do not.
Look, I think the difference is that this is a book that follows
the quintessential american (in lowercase) narrative, which is the
quest for home. Oscar is deluded or just simply doesn’t realize
that he’s looking for a version of home, which is intimacy.
But he thinks that intimacy is sex. In his mind, he thinks that
getting laid is where he will find home. And what’s fascinating
is that each of the family members...and all the characters involved
in this--from Yunior on to Abelard--are all on the exact same quest.
How do people in the Americas who are historically displaced [and]
historically have a very problematic relationship to lands that
they’ve either helped colonize, colonized, or suffered colonization
on--how do we make a home? How do we make a home given
all those experiences and all those ruptures...? Because for many
of us a home isn’t just a shelter. I mean, how do we find
intimacy? How do we find real love, you know? I only wish that Penthouse
Letters were about people who spent five hundred years being
bred and...legally prevented from finding home.
But what I do think is very present in the book is the root of
the word “carnality,” which is carne. Bodies
are extremely present in this book. Because there is no Caribbean-African
diasporic experience that doesn’t in some ways revolve around
the question of these bodies--these bodies that guaranteed us for
a certain period of time that we were going to be slaves, that we
were going to bred. And the problematics around those bodies, how
those bodies work. Given the history of the Caribbean and the Americas,
if you’re a person of African descent, that kind of discussion
of what role the body plays not only in organizing identity, but
in organizing a quest for home--it just couldn’t be avoided.
It felt too rich.
MO: One of my favorite sections in Oscar Wao is
the chapter narrated by Yunior (who also appears in the short-story
collection Drown), in which the oversexed Yunior agrees
to let fanboy Oscar become his roomie as a favor to Oscar’s
sister, Lola. I think part of the reason that their relationship
comes across so powerfully is because both Yunior and Oscar represent
dysfunctional modes of masculinity. Yunior: jockish, hypersexual,
and largely anti-intellectual; Oscar: fat, effete, bookish, and
geeky. What were you attempting to say by placing these characters
together in the same apartment?
JD: Well...what would be a functional masculinity?
MO: I don’t know, maybe by splitting the difference
between Yunior and Oscar somehow? Some character that exists in
the space between Yunior and Oscar.
JD: It’s only by simplifying the characters
that they seem diametrically opposed. I mean, Yunior might--on
the surface--perform a typical American anti-intellectualism, but
Yunior’s clearly, like, hyper-intellectual. His knowledge
of multiple areas is terrifying to me, and I had to write this motherfucker.
He’s a lot smarter than I am, and I’ve always considered
myself a bright kid.
What for me is at stake with these characters is how masculinity
gets performed, and what is the disconnect between the masculinity
that you seem to perform--your discourse-around-masculinity versus
your practice [of masculinity] versus what-lies-beneath-the-masks.
And I think that a character like Oscar is fascinating because
he doesn’t he seem to have any masks. In some ways, the person
that he performs is the person who lies beneath the masks. There’s
a much more direct relationship between the Oscar that we see and
the Oscar who lives inside.
Whereas in Yunior, it’s very, very different. I mean, the
challenge of Yunior is: there’s Yunior as character, Yunior
as person narrating the Rutgers chapters, Yunior as the narrative
persona of the novel (as The Watcher), and then there’s Yunior
as Yunior in the narrative persona where he breaks out and speaks
almost, like, autobiographically about what’s happening. He
takes off the narrative mask to make some straightforward, honest
comments. And I think that what makes Yunior fascinating is that
he’s this remarkable Caribbean shape shifter. It’s very
hard to pin down what he is and where he’s at...what’s
so problematic with Yunior is that he doesn’t seem to have
any life besides masks. Yunior’s at his most honest when he’s
not being himself, and why in some ways the tragedy of Yunior--why
he suffers, why he falls, why he fails--is because he’s unable
to be himself. You can’t find intimacy--you can’t find
home--when you’re always hiding behind masks. Intimacy requires
a certain level of vulnerability. It requires a certain level of
you exposing your fragmented, contradictory self to someone else.
You running the risk of having your core self rejected and hurt
and misunderstood. And, you know, the whole thing with Yunior is:
that’s not going to happen. Yunior doesn’t present his
core self to anyone; he presents just various masks. Oscar, on the
other hand, seems incapable of wearing masks...of performing another
male self...even for the reward that he desires the
most--a girlfriend. I just found that dialectic fascinating and
in some ways, fruitful on a level of meaning and a level of signification.
I just thought that’s, like, brilliant. A guy who desperately
wants intimacy and can’t put on a mask to get it, and a guy
who gets nothing but opportunities for intimacy, but is too terrified
to actually confront it.
I just thought that said a lot on the...incredibly performative
nature of masculinity. I was really excited about putting [Yunior
and Oscar] in the same place. Again, I don’t find them--at
their core--very different. I find that what is really painful to
Yunior after Oscar’s death is how much they had in common
and how much Yunior refused to reveal their similarities because
he didn’t want to be tarred with the nerdery-ness and unpopularity
that is Oscar.
MO: American writer John Fante populated much of his fiction
with the character Arturo Bandini--a literary creation that numerous
critics considered Fante’s alter-ego. Similarly, the character
Yunior--on the surface anyway--appears to bear a marked resemblance
to one Junot Díaz. Do you consider Yunior your alter-ego?
And is the Yunior who crops up in Oscar Wao the same Yunior
readers experience in such Drown stories as “Fiesta
1980”?
JD: Yeah, they’re exactly the same character,
and I consider Yunior my alter-ego. But for me an alter-ego is less
about pursuing my autobiographical details than it is just having
a conversation about how in this age, we’re very hungry for
autobiographical details in an area, fiction, where we should not
be looking for them. Yunior has some things in common with me, but
he certainly is not just a glossed [me]. I mean, he’s
very different than me in many ways. Again, we share certain things--he’s
coming out of me, so there’s clearly going to be a lot of
connections. I think Yunior’s sort of protein particularities
are what’s most compelling to me. Because, you know, he can
be very different from situation to situation. And for a writer,
that’s a wonderful character. My joke around [Yunior] is that
there’s this great Mexican wrestler called Thousand Masks,
Mil Máscaras. And I always felt that that [Mil
Máscaras] in some ways is Yunior’s, like, totem.
If Yunior has an alter-ego it’s this Thousand Masks, and I
think the reason why I make Yunior my alter-ego is because he is
good at representing how many sides we have to us. I’ve always
liked that.
MO: Is Yunior someone you plan to explore again in future
works, or is he “on the shelf,” so to speak?
JD: You know what: I have no idea. You never know
until something gets written. I mean, that’s the real thing.
Who knows? You wonder, and then something comes up.
MO: Throughout Oscar Wao, and particularly in
the stories of characters such as Dr. Abelard Luis Cabral who is
confronted directly by Trujillo’s terror, you seem to be mixing
liberally of both fact and fiction. In this era where fiction reigns
(see: the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Pat Tillman’s death, Fox
News, oil prices, the Olympics, prescription drug ads, the Russian
invasion of Georgia, etc.), and truth is in increasingly short supply,
what role should so-called facts and/or historical truths play in
novels and short stories?
JD: Well, I don’t know. I mean, I actually
have no idea, because it’s such a large question, and I’m
no expert. We have arguments about how it might work in one very
specific, narrow, particular framework. But beyond that, it’s
hard to say.
MO: I guess my question is this: when so much of our social
discourse and interaction is fictional, does fiction then have to
become something other than mere fiction in order to continue to
have meaning?
JD: I just think that what we’re talking
about--maybe this is what we’re talking about, I don’t
know--but it strikes me that we’re talking about a civilization
where people prefer their myths to a semblance of reality, or a
semblance of complexity. And that there’s so much disconnection
from any kind of historicity, any sense of historical understanding.
Most people...have no historical knowledge, which...means at any
moment they can be sold anything because they have nothing to compare
it to. If you had some historical awareness that the government
had been selling fake invasions for the last hundred years, you
might think, Hmm, maybe [our government’s] lying about
the need for an Iraqi invasion.
Senator Rockefeller proved without a shadow of doubt that the U.S.
invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965...headed by President
Lyndon B. Johnson was illegal, was a farce. It was totally trumped
up. There were hearings about this, and in the end, no one cared.
No one [even] remembers. And, therefore, we’re being sold
the same cow every year. In some ways, we have a dedicated amnesia.
It’s possible to sell the same cow every time. Again, what’s
hilarious is that this willingness to be sold the same collection
of rags and be convinced that it’s a kingly robe goes hand
in hand with a fetishization of truth.
Think about the way that people are obsessed with memoir writers
and whether they’re telling the truth. I mean, what a displacement.
I’m just like, “Wow!” You don’t understand--or
maybe you do--how many times [interviewers say to me]: “Sir,
your field is, uh, organized lying. This is what you do. Despite
this, I’m going to ask you how much of this book is real.”
Now who would ask someone who works in the field of organized lying
[cracks up, laughing] how much of their work is true? You’ve
basically just given me an opening to lie some more. But I do think
that because we’re sort of “living in the Matrix,”
we have this hunger for truth and fact because we know these things
are important--and we’ve abdicated truth and fact in the larger
society--so we’re just projecting our need for them onto other
areas. I just think that fiction, like many other areas, is being
asked to carry the burden for a society that no longer wants to
confront itself.
MO: In an age dominated by picture-driven media (i.e.,
film, television, YouTube, etc.), what significance, if any, does
the novel still hold in the lives of average middle-class folks?
JD: That’s too big of a question; I don’t
know. I mean, what role does art have? The average person is much
more likely to walk into a bookstore than a museum. So does that
mean that because the novel is a minority interest--in other words,
only a small group of people sees it--it’s on the edge of
extinction? I’m not so certain.
I don’t think that the centrality of art in the development
of a true human subjectivity has anything to do with its popularity,
or has anything to do with how underappreciated it is in a society.
I think that if the best way--and certainly the most beautiful and
elegant way--to develop a true human subjectivity is to expose yourself
to art in all its varieties. The fact that most of humanity is brutalized
and inhuman isn’t entirely linked to the fact that [laughs]
we don’t have enough contact with art. I wouldn’t say
that. I mean, history and economic and social and political forces
have a lot to do with this, too. A lack of artistic contact isn’t
helping. I think that the novel--until it is no longer relevant--will
continue to have an enormous impact on the people who want it or
encounter it.
I mean, again, as a writer, if I help two people in my lifetime
on their journey to, like, a better sense of the human within themselves,
that’s well worth it. That’s more than anybody who runs
a company can say. I mean, of course, look: I don’t
have four-hundred trillion dollars of ad money to convince people
that art is good. Late-modern capitalism has trillions of dollars
to convince human beings that disconnecting from their true selves
and becoming consumers is good. I mean, I can’t compete with
that. But, then again, I’m not trying to compete with that.
I’m trying to reach into, like, one person at the most--that’s
what you pray for. And the impact that an artist has on a person
and what that impact has on a collective cannot be measured. It’s
a mystery. You know, capital can measure its impact. They can tell
you how many tickets they sold; they can tell you how many people
came to their baseball game; they can tell you how many people wore
their designer, bulletproof socks. But what’s tremendous about
the arts is that we don’t understand how it works, and so
trying to apply a sort of logical criteria on its value, its importance,
and its impact obscures the fact that we don’t really understand
how a book read two hundred years by one person only has impacted
all of us.
MO: There’s a near-legendary Junot Díaz story
that circulates the halls of the Texas State University MFA Program
in Creative Writing. Apparently, while you were on tour in support
of Oscar Wao, you gave a reading-slash-talk at the BookPeople
bookstore in Austin, during which you argued against the gatekeepers
of agenting and publishing and said, more or less, that everybody
should be published. Cut to the end of the reading: a twentysomething
Texas State M.F.A. student named Matt Stuart approaches you and
inquires as to whether you’d be willing to read his pages.
Six months or so later, you publish his story in the Boston
Review. Why go out of your way to help a young writer whom
you barely know? Also, what obligation, if any, do established,
big-time writers have in helping to secure literature’s future?
JD: Those are multiple questions. It all depends
on what your values are. I don’t think my worldview should
be everybody’s. I’m not arguing for universalization
of my values. So I think we have to be very, very specific here.
I have a worldview where I do not think literature and art is a
zero-sum game. I don’t believe that having young writers in
the game is bad for anybody; I don’t think having five hundred
people who do what you do is bad. Nobody is reading anybody
anyway, so what the fuck are we fighting for? I’m just like,
you know: yeah, there are maybe a hundred people who are living
off their writing. I’m sure there are more, but let me just
say that the people I know--the people I have a sense of--it’s
maybe a hundred people. So OK if we’re all starving and some
people want to come in and starve with us, what’s the big
deal? My thing is, like, for fuck’s sake, the only thing that
privilege is good for is to try to help other people.
The second part of your question is: what should established writers
do? It’s really up to them. I have my view of what they should
be doing, but we’re sort of sidestepping the real issue. It’s
not writers, but what are people’s obligations to the human
project. We have a society and an economic system that argues that
people--for the most part--have no obligations, and that the selling
of humans is not only forgivable, but that it’s actually desirable.
And, again, I don’t think that even though that might be the
core message of capitalism, I don’t think that the majority
of people adhere to its core message. I think everyone has a degree
of acceptance...of that core message. My sense of what a human
being is, is that you’re in a collective and that you’re
supposed to help people and that you’re supposed to do your
best to bring more love and complexity into the world than you’ve
taken out of it. And so, you know, I guess there’s not much
else to say about that.
Other writers have a different sense; there are many writers who
believe that it’s all about them. I’ve got to do for
me, and why am I fucking going to spend time on people who ain’t
ever going to do anything for me? And, you know, there’s something
to that. Look, you’d be amazed at how many young people you
can help out, and then when they have a chance to help you out,
they won’t. Most of us because of our family lives are trained
to be very unidirectional when it comes to collectives. We’re
fine with taking, but when it comes our turn to give, we certainly
find it much more difficult. But I don’t hold that against
people; I don’t help people because people tend not to be
grateful; I help people because I think it’s good for my humanity.
If you’re not grateful and you’re not into reciprocity,
well, that’s on you, that’s got nothing to do with me.
And it certainly doesn’t make me any more bitter.
MO: Handicap, if you will, Democratic Presidential Candidate
Barack Obama’s chances of winning in November?
JD: Like a novel, it’s a great mystery.
Nothing makes you look stupider than prognostication...but the thing
is: if you strip it all down, this is a battle between the American
dumbness that has destroyed our economy and shackled our future
youth to meaningless and ridiculous fucking wars--yeah?--versus
what is often best in us as Americans. Now, I don’t want to
sound too Stephen King-ish/The Stand, but I do feel that
unlike maybe the last six elections, nothing has made more explicit
the two most salient strands of the American character [than this
current presidential campaign]. One of them is: dumb, militaristic,
blind. You know? And the other one seems--on face value anyway--slightly
more hopeful. Instead of using wars and economic violence to confuse
people, he’s trying to get people to participate in their
own lives.
And it all depends. It’s like when we wake up that Election
Day, who in our hearts do we really want to be? And that’s
who we vote for, and we have consistently voted against our best
selves. Always. But I’m an optimistic motherfucker.
I’m hoping on that day, people wake up, and they decide to
vote for their better selves, instead of voting out of their worst
selves--their fearful selves--their militant selves--their let’s-bomb-some-fucking-A-rab-selves.
I mean, I have great faith that Obama is going to take it. I also
know that with that faith comes the recognition of the human character,
which is we’re really messed up. Americans more than anybody.
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