So, I’ve done something interesting.
First, I’m reading the book called The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. It's the fourth book of the back right group and I have really begun to enjoy reading it. Each character unfolds his or her existence as a complaint against their fate: "It shouldn't be this way," until the audience cries out in sympathy: "Yes, it's true, no one should suffer any curse, especially me."
And that was the hook for me, because the narrator, well, he's talking to me (or so I believe). I realized something pretty intense: the narrator puts me in a place outside his world (that's the function of the footnotes: they are meant to give us a proper eyepiece through which to see this world) . He's providing me a window from the inside, and he is trying to keep me outside because of all the hints he's leaving, indicating that there is more to come. It's as if he is saying, "just sit back and let the question build." How far does the curse go? Well, the curse takes each character to the limit of their existence, and we wonder, with popcorn crunching, how they will respond once they've been pushed too far. Like Beli: what happens to Beli in the "Choice and Consequences" chapter, when the Gangster abandons her, leaving her to her death? The rival kills her off, and he lets it happen.
Not so fast. She doesn't die, because if she did, then the hermeneutic question of the text would come to a quick end in an easy answer, like what happens to the teacher and student who openly expressed a desire a democratic state free of el Hefe, without the "boss" Trujillo. Don't you dare speak out against the narrator or you will suffer the curse too. Stay till the end until "zafa" can be said completely. Be a true believer.
She doesn't die. But how will she come back from this limit? We know that she becomes the mother of Oscar and Lola, that she has a greater limit than this to cross: cancer (oh! I'm giving it all away! Not really!). In any case, Beli must live because the curse is only a curse if you live to suffer through it. We the reader are let off the hook. We, when we have become the narrative audience, we come from the land of no curses. A land of privilege, and of access, for whom the narrator is bending over backwards to give us a kind of telescopic vantage point to see in depth, but from afar, this land of the fuku americanus curse.
So here it is, the piece of the text that rose up and smacked me out of my narrative stupor, pulling my eye away from the eyepiece of the telescope the narrator begs me to never relinquish--behold!--I see the telescope, there on page 148:
First, I’m reading the book called The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. It's the fourth book of the back right group and I have really begun to enjoy reading it. Each character unfolds his or her existence as a complaint against their fate: "It shouldn't be this way," until the audience cries out in sympathy: "Yes, it's true, no one should suffer any curse, especially me."
And that was the hook for me, because the narrator, well, he's talking to me (or so I believe). I realized something pretty intense: the narrator puts me in a place outside his world (that's the function of the footnotes: they are meant to give us a proper eyepiece through which to see this world) . He's providing me a window from the inside, and he is trying to keep me outside because of all the hints he's leaving, indicating that there is more to come. It's as if he is saying, "just sit back and let the question build." How far does the curse go? Well, the curse takes each character to the limit of their existence, and we wonder, with popcorn crunching, how they will respond once they've been pushed too far. Like Beli: what happens to Beli in the "Choice and Consequences" chapter, when the Gangster abandons her, leaving her to her death? The rival kills her off, and he lets it happen.
Not so fast. She doesn't die, because if she did, then the hermeneutic question of the text would come to a quick end in an easy answer, like what happens to the teacher and student who openly expressed a desire a democratic state free of el Hefe, without the "boss" Trujillo. Don't you dare speak out against the narrator or you will suffer the curse too. Stay till the end until "zafa" can be said completely. Be a true believer.
She doesn't die. But how will she come back from this limit? We know that she becomes the mother of Oscar and Lola, that she has a greater limit than this to cross: cancer (oh! I'm giving it all away! Not really!). In any case, Beli must live because the curse is only a curse if you live to suffer through it. We the reader are let off the hook. We, when we have become the narrative audience, we come from the land of no curses. A land of privilege, and of access, for whom the narrator is bending over backwards to give us a kind of telescopic vantage point to see in depth, but from afar, this land of the fuku americanus curse.
So here it is, the piece of the text that rose up and smacked me out of my narrative stupor, pulling my eye away from the eyepiece of the telescope the narrator begs me to never relinquish--behold!--I see the telescope, there on page 148:
The narrator sums all the horror up into a single nonchalant phrase: "All hope was gone," like the period to a sentence, a guilty afterthought. But then! "True Believers"! Yes indeed, those who believe the curse must go on are relieved that out of the blue some magic has come to her rescue, her "Cabral magis." Oh really?!
All she had to do was "realize," just as the narrative audience must (to return to the narrative) realize "once again" that "she'd [that is, I, the actual audience, have!] been tricked" to ignite this last pocket of strength, to push forward into the narrative, even though I have taken the inferential walk that tells me, like a post card of sorts, that all is going to go bad, but hopefully with some humor, and it must come with some wisdom. If I'm going to be along the whole hermeneutic ride, and if the narrative is worth it, it might just give me some perspective in dealing with in my life. How would I tell the story of my curse? Am I (un)lucky enough to have my story told by Yunior?
Another really great thing: I’ve gone back and read parts of the first Oscar chapter, "GhetoNerd at the End of the World," to my mother-in-law, who is Latina, who knows how to read the dips into Spanish, but even she can't catch it all. In any case, reading it out loud, I really had to begin to take on the speaking rhythms of the narrator, to bring in a multitude of nuances in the delivery that are hard to get to when reading silently. Try it out, by the way: really try to take on the voice of the narrator. See how close you can get.
But then you run into some ethical troubles. What if this complex of aesthetic emotions, and the values of the narrator, and the text: what if they evoke a form that we can infer will take us into troubling territory? How can we avoid the curse just by reading the text, following its movement to the end?