Invented Filiations in Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Two influential accounts of romance, Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Preface to The House of the Seven Gables, read romance as allegory. For Sommer,... [ view full abstract ]

Two influential accounts of romance, Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Preface to The House of the Seven Gables, read romance as allegory. For Sommer, nineteenth century Latin American novels produced and consolidated the nation by representing heterosexual romances. Meanwhile, for Hawthorne, romance emerged as a defining characteristic of American literature that figured the United States in the realm of the fantastic rather than hewing closely to realist portrayals of the nation. Junot Díaz’s 2007 novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, contends with the romance tradition in both hemispheres by considering an alternate genealogy to the bildungsroman based on the Latin American Dictator Novel. In this new genealogy, the bildungsroman becomes a form of anti-romance that refuses national consolidation on the one hand and pivots on the notion of invented filiations, or imagined kinships, on the other. Yunior’s notion of invented filiations revises Hawthorne’s notion of romance by resisting the allegorical aspects of romance while simultaneously operating in the realm of the fantastic. As a diasporic subject, Yunior bases his sense of kinship with Oscar through the invented filiations he discovers as he researches the de León family history. In doing so, Yunior develops a political consciousness based on homegrown literary traditions rather that those offered by the Global North.
More specifically, Yunior’s invented filiations with Oscar offer a model of revolutionary instruction that Yunior then uses to establish invented filiations with the readers of the novel. By “schooling” the North American reader on the history of the Dominican Republic, Yunior reveals the entangled histories that link the United States and the Dominican Republic together. In this way, invented filiations become a way to imagine new solidarities across the Americas that go beyond the “mandatory two seconds of Dominican history” (2n1) that characterizes the educational system’s neglect of the Dominican Republic. Referencing the first United States occupation of the Dominican Republic from 1916-1924, Yunior parenthetically comments, “(You didn’t know we were occupied twice in the twentieth century? Don’t worry, when you have kids they won’t know the U.S. occupied Iraq either)” (19). By comparing the two occupations, Yunior points to a transnational network of forgotten wars and forgotten people. By drawing upon this neglected history, Díaz offers a new aesthetic genealogy for the bildungsroman that relies on the historical specificity of the Americas rather than the installation of the European middle-class in the nineteenth century.