The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

I might be late to the party, seeing how Junot Diaz has already won a fucking Pulitzer for this shit, but this does not prevent me from saying that The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a very good, if flawed book. But of course, this is only a platitude: all books are flawed. What I really mean is that this book is flawed enough to prevent it from becoming an undisputed, timeless masterpiece, Pulitzer or not.

But first, let’s just get its style out of the way. Make no mistake, the book has all the telltale signs of a po-mo novel: multiple narrators, intertwining narratives that span across multiple time periods and multiple locations, a mixture of high and low (Proust with Tolkien, just to name a few), copious footnotes that obviously break the literary fourth-wall (obviously an homage to or rip off from David Foster Wallace), and sudden bursts of Spanish/Spanglish street lingo that goes untranslated. To top it off, the book’s central conceit takes a blatant page from the magical realism playbook, as if magical realism is not already cliched enough in Latin American literature!

Somehow, Diaz manages to transcend what might be an otherwise hocus-pocus, hodge-podge “ethnic” story of immigration and creates something that is emotionally resonant, filled with rich characters, all written in a voice that rings true. I want to use Diaz’s narrative voice as an entry to discuss the merits of the book. Simply put, I consider Diaz’s narrative voice to be the best thing about the book, for both its formal and emotional qualities.

One thing I really admired about the book is how Diaz manages to slowly transform the narrator to an actual character named Yunior. In the beginning, it’s unclear who is narrating? Slowly but surely, Diaz makes his narrator emerge from the shadows and reveals his role in the story. This is a very rewarding part of the reading for me, because the narrator goes from a disembodied voice to an actual person, and Diaz manages this transition pretty gracefully.

Second, the narrative voice itself is just so damn fun to listen to! Yunior speaks in a mix of street-wise lingo (a mixture of Spanish and English) and didacticism (it turns out all the footnotes are his). He drops nerd/geek references all over the place (witnesses the references to the Lord of the Rings, Fantastic Four, and anime), but does so in a way that illuminates those very references become the lens with which he views the events happening around him. In his voice one can hear a mixture of both youthful bravado and geeky erudition, of sexual swagger and romantic insecurities.

In a sense, the book is about Yunior’s coming of age, and Oscar’s life story (and Yunior’s participation in it) only provides the impetus for Yunior’s own transformation. In fact, out of all the major characters in the book, Oscar proves, at least in my opinion, the least interesting, mainly because Diaz’s portrayal of him seems so one-dimensional at times. Once Oscar becomes the obese ghetto-nerd with girl troubles, he basically stays that way until the end, when Diaz tries to completely change his character. But this ring false to me, and it constitutes what I think is probably the biggest flaw of the book.

Yet if Oscar turns out to be an uninteresting character, Diaz does a wonderful job of providing the family history that spans three generations. The descriptions of Oscar’s grandparents and his mother’s life in the Dominican Republic during the reign of Trujillo provides the substance of the book’s conceit, namely, that Oscar’s family is cursed. I was much more interested in the stories of these people than Oscar himself, and here Diaz does not disappoint. His writing for this part of the book is poignant, although it does occasionally slip into the whole “look at how exotic a Latin American country is”-itis.

Which brings me back to where I started: the central conceit of the book. Of course one should not interpret it literally (of course there is no curse!). But all Diaz is trying to say is that a person, especially an immigrant, can never really completely escape the history of his family, and by extension, of his motherland. The whole “curse” conceit is merely a fantastic way of re-stating this simple truth. In the end, the book, to me at least, is about the immigrant and his relationship to his homeland and its history: no matter where you are or how long you have been gone, the homeland calls. And if you can never completely be free of your homeland, you are also not completely free from its history, no matter how dark and brutal it is.

All in all, a tremendously enjoyable book: I bought the book at 1 in the afternoon, and by 12AM midnight, I finished it. I can’t remember the last time I was that hooked to a single book. So while it might not be a masterpiece, it is no slouch either.

Life without God?

In this week’s New York Review of Books, Steven Weinberg writes:

“Let’s grant that science and religion are not incompatible—there are after all some (though not many) excellent scientists, like Charles Townes and Francis Collins, who have strong religious beliefs. Still, I think that between science and religion there is, if not an incompatibility, at least what the philosopher Susan Haack has called a tension, that has been gradually weakening serious religious belief, especially in the West, where science has been most advanced. Here I would like to trace out some of the sources of this tension, and then offer a few remarks about the very difficult question raised by the consequent decline of belief, the question of how it will be possible to live without God.”

As you can see, this is some serious heady stuff, the kind of “big” questions (if not THE big question) that just might excite the minds of corruptible youth like yours truly.

Weinberg does a pretty good job of describing some sources of tension between science and religion, and although some of it is oversimplified, one can cut him some slack for trying to fit such a huge topic in a short essay. However, this is not what interests me about the article; what interests me is the implication (the correct one, in my opinion) about non-belief in God:

“Worse, the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.”

This has to be the correct conclusion for any committed naturalist: namely, that not only does one have to reject the existence of any supernatural deity, but also that one must reject everything supernatural completely.

In other words, it is not enough that one be an atheist–it must be the case that one is, and cannot be, spiritual. After all, there is nothing spiritual if everything is physical. Yet a lot of people, who are otherwise atheists, claim themselves to be spiritual. To me, this is merely evading the logical conclusion of naturalism.

Of course, this does not mean that being a complete and utter naturalist is good: in fact, it makes life miserable, and there is the constant danger, as Weinberg rightly points out, of slipping into nihilism. If life is either completely deterministic (in a Newtonian kind of way) or completely random at its most basic, sub-atomic level (in a quantum mechanics kind of way), then nothing matters.

But if one rejects God and faith, what else is left? This is the real question that confronts us. Writers, philosophers, and theologians have grappled with this question for the last century, but in my opinion, none has offered a convincing alternative.

In my mind, four thinkers have offered what I consider to be four paradigmatic way of grappling with nihilism. They are: Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, Camus, and Nietzsche. Of the four, Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard offer what I consider to be “Christian” alternatives while Camus and Nietzsche offer the “non-Christian” alternatives.

I. The Christian Alternatives

1. Dostoyevsky: One way to confront nihilism is to affirm Christianity all the more, which is what Dostoyevsky does in all of his works of fiction. They all feature an alienated, nihilistic individual who can only be redeemed by the suffering of other pious Christian individuals (usuaully a woman). But this isn’t just a straight up re-affirmation of Christianity: rather, it is an assertion of a specific kind of Christianity, namely, the Eastern Orthodox kind which explicitly rejects the Protestanism of Western Europe. The solution to nihilism, as the Elder Zosima says in The Brothers Karamazov, is to recognize that one is responsible for everyone else’s sins and suffer for them. In other words, everyone must become like Christ, and redemption can only lie in suffering for one’s own and others’ sins.
2. Kierkegaard: Unlike Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard does not advocate embracing a religious institution like Eastern Orthodoxy. Instead, he takes the opposite tack and advocates a radically individualistic religious consciousness. Nihilism is overcome by the individual’s faith (absurd and totally incommensurate with reason) in some defining commitment. Here, man’s duty is not to any organized religion (Christendom) but rather to a singular God, but even this duty is incommunicable to anyone else. Again, it’s worth noting that like Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard does not defend traditional Christianity. Rather, he proposes an alternative conception of Christianity that is radically different from orthodoxy.

II. The Non-Christian Alternatives

1. Camus: An simplistic way of saying something about Camus’ alternative is that it’s Kierkegaard without God; this would not be a bad way of putting it. For Camus, God’s non-existence is already taken for granted, but man, like Sysphus, must create his own meaning in the absurd.
2. Nietzsche: In some ways, it might seem misleading to characterize Nietzsche as a philosopher against nihilism, since he’s always portrayed as a nihilistic thinker. The finer distinction here is that Nietzsche is for a certain kind of nihilism while also being against another. The nihilism that he rejects is the kind that leads to passivity, to despair that impedes action. The nihilism he embraces is the active kind, the kind whose realization will set the individual free to create new meanings and new values for himself, the kind of nihilism that will create his famous Overman.

Having briefly outlined these alternatives, I have to ask: is any of them any good? The answer, sadly, is no. The Christian alternatives are rejected out of hand because they both posit the existence of God, which, as a committed naturalist, one must reject. The non-Christian alternatives are simply too demanding as to be feasible: I know of no one who is strong enough to laugh in the face of apparent meaningless and be joyful. Sysphus might find joy while pushing the boulder up and down for an infinity, but mortals like us will inevitably despair. Similarly, Nietzsche’s Overman is an ideal, which he even acknowledges will not be realized anytime soon. Therefore, none of these alternatives offer any real hope for an ordinary person to overcome nihilism.

But Weinberg apparently has another alternative—humor:

“One thing that helps is humor, a quality not abundant in Emerson. Just as we laugh with sympathy but not scorn when we see a one-year-old struggling to stay erect when she takes her first steps, we can feel a sympathetic merriment at ourselves, trying to live balanced on a knife-edge. In some of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, just when the action is about to reach an unbearable climax, the tragic heroes are confronted with some “rude mechanical” offering comic observations: a gravedigger, or a doorkeeper, or a pair of gardeners, or a man with a basket of figs. The tragedy is not lessened, but the humor puts it in perspective.”

Yet laughter can fend off death only for so long, and the joke is only funny if it’s morbid (see the gravedigger in Hamlet). Ultimately, the joke is that we all die, and that there is nothing after death. The joke mocks our desperate desire that somehow our existence continues after death.

Weinberg ultimately acknowledges a fairly grim conclusion:

“Living without God isn’t easy. But its very difficulty offers one other consolation—that there is a certain honor, or perhaps just a grim satisfaction, in facing up to our condition without despair and without wishful thinking—with good humor, but without God.”

But I’m just not sure if we can even have that little bit of a grim satisfaction. I think Weinberg overstates the case that most people can in fact face up to our condition without either despair or wishful thinking.

In the end, the one person with whom I identify the most, as far as nihilism is concerned, is Kafka: there is ultimately no meaning in life (this much is certain), but more importantly, the quest for such meaning will inevitably prove to be fruitless and frustrating. We will never gain entrance to the Castle, never find out what crimes we are guilty of, all in a world we cannot comprehend, seemingly governed by rules and people just outside of our sight.