To understand the cobbled structure of Junot Diaz’s “WILDWOOD”, one has to look no further than the story itself. There is a moment when the young, female narrator has been exiled to the Dominican Republic, and is dating a Dominican boy named Max, whose job is to exchange the film reels shared among the movie theaters in Santo Domingo. The reader is told (the whole story is told more than experienced) the job is important because, “if [Max] is held up or gets into an accident the first reel will end and there will be no second reel […] Because of me, he brags, one movie becomes three.” This is the structure of “Wildwood:” three different reels packaged as one movie.
The first reel is a beautiful, second-person account of the day a young girl learns her mother’s life force, her large, eye-awing breasts, are sick. Despite the inherent (male?) silliness of making large breasts a metaphor for a woman’s life force, this opening is the most powerful section of the story. The metaphor works because of the ambivalent relationship the daughter has to her mother’s breasts. She says of them: “the aureoles are as big as saucers and black as pitch and at their edges are fierce hairs that sometimes she plucks and sometimes she doesn’t.” This description of the mother’s breasts has a grotesqueness that speaks directly to the narrator’s feelings about her mother. The narrator tells the reader: “you don’t know what it’s like to grow up with a mother who never said anything that wasn’t negative, who was always suspicious, always tearing you down and splitting your dreams straight down the seams.” These lines suggest the mother’s breasts match her monstrous parenting. (Monstrous seems too harsh a word? She did feed and house her daughter, but, for me, the mother’s neglectful, abusive parenting becomes horrific when she tells her molested daughter “to shut [her] mouth, and stop crying.”) Yet, our narrator admires her mother’s breasts, saying they “are immensities. One of the wonders of the world.” Furthermore, the most tender exchange in the story is when the daughter feels her mother’s breasts, and says of the experience: “at first all you feel is the density of the tissue and the heat of her, like a bread that never stopped rising. She kneads your fingers into her. You’re as close as you’ve ever been.” This opening reel successfully shows the conflicted, strained, but tender relationship between a mother and daughter through the daughter’s relationship to the mother’s breasts.
However, this tender moment becomes the impetus for the daughter’s rejection of the typical idea of a Dominican woman and becoming a punk rocker– the type of girl who spends late nights at Limelight, ignores house-hold duties, and rejects hyper-sexual street-yapping men with responses like, “Why, so you can rape me?” In this middle reel, the daughter becomes hostile to her mother and argues to the reader, “you don’t know the hold our mothers have on us, even the ones that are never around […] What it’s like to be the perfect Dominican daughter, which is just a nice way of saying a perfect Dominican Slave.” (By the way, moments like this make the story's intended audience unclear. Certain things are addressed and explained to the reader, because he or she isn't going to be Dominican.) Now, Junot Diaz has always been critical of Dominican culture, and by revealing its flaws, he has often unveiled its humanity; however, this story starts to go further than “Drown” dared. This second reel shows the narrator, not simply being critical of her mother’s culture, but outright rejecting it: we are told she wanted “the life that existed beyond Paterson, beyond [her] family, beyond Spanish.” Running away becomes her dream. Books like “Watership Down,” “The Fountainhead,” along with television shows further her desire to escape.
The story’s opening, however, rejects this change : “It’s never the changes we want that change everything.” So the reader isn’t surprised when the middle reel leads to a boring(for both her and the reader), anguished, boardwalk life; a disastrous failure, and the daughter, betrayed by her brother, is dramatically caught by her mother and forced to make another change: the last reel takes the exiled narrator to the Dominican Republic, where the reader sees her third and final transformation. Whereas, the second section introduces a remarkable struggle between a mother and daughter that ultimately feels like a daughter’s battle for a fate different than her mother’s, this third reel is as simple and cliché as “The Alchemist.” It seems Diaz wants the reader to believe our narrator finds what she always needed at home. I can accept this, but what is the alteration our narrator finds in Santo Domingo? “so much has changed these last months, in my head, my heart. Rosio has me dressing up like a real Dominican girl. She’s the one who fixes my hair and helps me with my makeup.” Can’t believe your eyes? Neither can I! The story's revelatory change is for the daughter to become “a real Dominican,” – with fancy hair and make-up to add gloss to insult. It gets worse: after sex with movie-reel Max, our narrator says, “when we were done and he was in the bathroom washing himself I stood in front of the mirror naked and looked at my culo for the first time. A tesoro, I repeated. A treasure.” Are we supposed to believe part of our narrator’ epiphany is that she learns to see her ass as a treasure? Here, I believe the problem is the story starts to ask important questions, like what does an individual owe to a culture he or she finds unsatisfactory, confining, and alienating, but then falls onto an easy, absurd suggestion that the needed change is for the character to see the treasure of her big ass and pretty hair. This inherently fails, because the real necessary change isn’t being addressed: the expansion of a culture, not the conformity of an individual, as if a spike-haired, flat-chested, punk-rock girl is less Dominican than her big-breasted, abusive, and overworked mother.
8 comments:
youre probably right. i never know how these things fall out until much later: the sub-text of stories, that is. i probably did screw it up. my guiding sense of the tale wasn't whether or not lola or her mother were more dominican or less domo than each other--they're clearly both dominican, whether they want to admit it or not and their very existance clearly means the culture has expanded to include them both--whether they like to admit or not or value it is another question--but for me the story was about whether or not these two sets of experiences, often antagonistic, often unwilling to see one another, could be reconciled in any way, could exist together without erasing one another. and this is important: just because lola falls for the easy comfort of a pre-packaged dominican feminity doesnt mean the story or the author supports that foolishness. that's too simple a read, i think, to draw a direct line from a narrator or a protagonist to an author. the failure of a narrator to come to terms with certain complexities is the very reason we write these things--because it means the story is tragic, which is how i see lola at the end, trying to keep herself together in the face of santo domingo, of her mother--of both these 'master narratives'--and yet succumbing. what makes her a new kind of dominican for me is not that she likes her big ass or not or that she's into 'punk' or not--its her constant ability to transform herself, without losing sight of some deeper historical things. at the end she's ready to transform again and so even that trite ass-accepting sense of her is at risk of being demolished, same way her old meek self was demolished. that to me, at least, is how i structured the story. anyway my student sent me this and i thank you for doing any kind of reading on WILDWOOD. at least next time ill have a chance to get it right. cuidate, j
I think you make a good point about the fact that many times a writer disagrees with the narrator’s beliefs and conclusions. I often read characters where the writer seems to be in disagreement with the character’s psychology and morals. One never thinks Flannery O’Connor’s racists are her. She is using them to make a point about the blatantly hypocritical psychology of racism.
So we agree on this. I never said this story’s writer believes this or that about Dominican women, for me it only about what the story says. What we have is a young Dominican girl, who feels extremely unhappy as the daughter of her mother, and makes a change, becoming a punk rocker as a form of rebellion. Which fails because she is just trading one culture for another. She didn’t have to become a punk rocker to assert her own identity. So, sensibly, the punk rocker, runaway life only brings her a different type of miserable. Then, she goes to the Dominican Republic, dresses herself up, gets a hair-do, make-up, an appreciation of her ass, and starts to get this feeling she has chased the whole story. She achieves a sort of spiritual revelation at the end. What did she have to do to receive this? When she gets it, what does she look like? That’s not the narrator. That’s the writer’s decision. She could have gone to the Dominican Republic, and (more likely in my mind) become even more miserable. Instead, she gets a fairy god mother, grandmother, and the tender relationship with her grandmother she always wanted with her grandmother. The tone of the story’s end isn’t tragic. The logic of the story says this is the change that changes everything, not one change amongst a life of them.
That’s really my opinion, yet I think it’s a great story, because it deals with such a complex issue: the relationship between the individual and his or her culture, and it dares to go further than many texts have the deep-hearted honesty to approach. Many of us writers of color, in my opinion, write literature that rests on a denial about our own cultures and their individuals. This story, with some great language, asks a compelling question but gets the last scene wrong. Any individual life within a culture comes with a sort of oppression. Culture tries to group, which is fine, but isn’t one of the great tasks of literature to fight for the individual? Consciously, or sub-consciously, the story’s end asserts a lie; that happiness is to be found in the heart of culture; an entity, truthfully, often beautiful at heart, but also always painfully limiting. I think this is why most of us dream of being something other what we are; whether its movies, or rap or story-telling or jewelry or drugs, why we constantly need to escape.
I think 'writer' has some points, and overall i thought the piece wasn't bad. However, here's my issue with a lot of latin and afro-american writing...there's often this undertone of a superiority complex. Like in this story the description of the white family structure with the first boy and his vet father is a perverse living arrangement and broken family structure compared to the dominican boy who's family structure is not even discussed but the reader is made to assume that his situation is more virtuous, and pretty much everything in DR is moreDR and wash your evils away... come onnnnnn! I don't begrudge anyone the love of their culture but I think it weakens stories when the reader is meant to understand an implication they might not or even agree with. Also, I think black and latin writers need to be more balanced and self critical when drawing parallels in their cultures to others, particularly the dominant one.
Clearly it’s the writer who chooses all the elements of a story, whether the character wields a hat or a battleaxe -- it is clearly the writer’s choice. As for your larger argument i agree that i as the writer CHOSE to have Lola’s succumbing to the ass cliche and that that CHOICE means somethings; i just disagree with your gloss on WHAT that choice MEANS. You believe that because Lola is in A) kind of clothes, loving B) kind of ass that the writer consciously or unconsciously has greenlit that narrator’s, Lola’s, facile POV and therefore has supported a ‘lie’ – that happiness can be found at the heart of some sort of ‘authentic’ culture. But bro: just because Lola falls for it doesn’t mean the writer condones it. Representing doesn’t mean condoning. That cannot be said enough. Representing doesn’t mean condoning. In WILDWOOD Lola’s falls for the illusion of the ass-thing community-thing and now she’s about to have a vision. The real question for me is not whether Lola is asleep or not but will the vision wake her up or will it not? She, as a character, has longed for a second vision since she experienced her first but since we’re talking about a story and a story has very clear structure the logical question in any interrogation should be --- what happened the last time that Lola had one of these so-called visions? Her life went down the fucking tubes. Magic, alas, at least in the DR, has its price, and this brujeria is no different. Now the story COULD be as you say – the writer starting strong and then falling for (and more damningly perpetuating) a toxic lie about the promise of happiness in the heart of authentic culture. OR the story could be a writer providing both his narrator AND his reader with a phony self-proclaimed ‘happy’ ending that Lola’s about-to-strike vision will ultimately brutally upend. In all fairness the story doesn’t answer that question directly—structurally and narratively it fails to give us the final vision --- but given what’s come before in the vision-category i wouldn’t be too hopeful. You think that the fact of Lola’s happiness and the fact that i wrote it are proof positive that lola’s happy ending is mine. You think i think that this is the way a person gets healed: go back to the ‘authentic’ Santo Domingo, leave complexity and conflict and punk music behind and all will be well, my child!
I’m not going to say your WILDWOOD reading is perpetuating a lie (such a weird word for such a complicated thing); i just think it’s wrong. lola’s first vision in WILDWOOD was less than cute and that implies, argue yo, that Lola’s second vision probably won’t be much cuter. Beginnings, I can tell you from experience, never are . cute. i WANTED my readers to be challenged by that ending—which is why i wrote the damn thing the way i wrote it—i was hoping some people would cheer lola’s reconciliation, the kind of people who actually believe that one day they will be reunited with an authentic ‘home’ and an authentic ‘self.’ But i also wanted some readers, upon hitting that ending, to shake their heads and think: Oh man is she in for a surprise. Kansas is about to go bye-bye again. And clearly i knew there were going to be another mess of people who were going to resist or dislike or just not see the game and say the story was just wack and unconvincing and that the story was in the end an ill call for conformity. What i can say? That’s certainly not what i had in my mind while writing. I know how to write a sap endings with the best of them; but what i wanted in WILDWOOD was to write a sap ending that would, in its belly, carry another possible ending, more brutal and (i hope) satisfying but that would only reveal itself upon careful sympathetic reading. And by sympathy I don’t mean towards the writer but towards the humanity that Lola represents; one that can be immensely heroic but that is always too quick to wrap itself in the dreams that we, out in the desert of the Real, often comfort ourselves with. But i agree the story doesn’t end negatively, there’s a subtle upward lilt, emotionally, at the end. But the positive onda isn’t because Lola think she’s happy or because she’s into her butt or because i think that butt-love the ultimate in Dominican diasporic identity. There’s a blast of energy at the end because A VISION IS COMING! It doesn’t matter that Lola, the first thing she did with her freedom was plug herself right back into the fucking matrix. What I’m celebrating, if I’m celebrating anything at the end of that story, is that a VISION IS COMING! Which is my way of metaphorizing my belief that on its best days the world i inhabit and try to represent the life, never fails to keep offering us chances to awaken to ourselves. To begin.
Whether or not we take the hint and awaken is another matter altogether.
But again, thanks for the chance to brain out. Cuidate mucho. j
A few thinks below:
Stories are just stories. They’re as liberated and as limited as their sources. To write a story is to critique humanity. To critique a story is to somehow critique the writer. And to critique the writer is to critique humanity.
So Yunior, not so sure how I felt after reading “Wildwood”. Ambivalent for now. Yeah, the language seduces—sometimes too much—and there’s a heartfelt probing of alienation and inclusion, rejection and acceptance, love and hate, and of all the extremities of relationship to self and others. In the end, story stresses need for everyone to self-assert, whether male or female in Paterson or in DR and in whatever form it comes for individual at the moment. Fact that Lola’s epiphany manifests as somewhat cosmetic really does reflect her general ambivalence—her need to make her own choices, any choice, so long as SHE's made them. That's 150% fair game. That, I liked, her "udder" contradiction of being. Choice is what women have been writing about, like, forever.
But gotta weigh in on the female...tip, however much this may contradict my conclusions about Lola. What prickles me about the ass-ertion in “Wildwood” is how it unsurprisingly serves up T&A, when you carve out in the story so much space to do more with Lola. In just a few pages so much of the story’s core engine is fueled by women’s bodies: tetas (a most favored word), nalgas (big, of course--can't have a dominicana with a flat ass or story will sink), and olfactory references for good measure (right next to fishnet stockings, in case readers dare imagine the scent of strawberries). One can argue that this fixation is cultural, that it's artistic license (most certainly), that it just reflects life, that it's, hu-man. Okay. But in the end a writer picks and chooses what he wants to convey or break from. I point all this out much in the same way I'd think about any writer's iffy treatment of their characters. Kudos either way for extending your perspective to a female character. Much appreciated on this end. But for extra credit: Hold gaze just a tad longer above neck.
Crown me one more "simplistic reader". Surely this is only ONE reading of a much more complex story. Still chewing cud on some other stuff but no space in comments box. I'm also running the risk of tying a writer's hands. I'm not down with censorship. That's what worked for me in "Wildwood," your holding up to the light the many dimensions of culture and the individual, along with the question of exile on many fronts. Escaping family and culture is risking the loss of a center of gravity, however screwed up that center might be. It's an age-old dilemna. And it's too bad that in life, it's never the liberation we want that liberates us.
BTW, caveat to Max, Lola's DR beau: turning one movie into three can lead to deja vous.
shit i wrote this whole long thing and now it's gone. i guess i'll have to abridge. probably better this way.
i was feeling like yunior should have skipped town like david chase after the last sopranos episode aired, answered no questions, addressed no comment, let the consumers fill in the blanks.
the story i am now deciphering is that last sopranos episode and it has somewhat of a similar open ending. it can go many ways depending on what the reader/viewer brings to it. what i brought to reading wildwood was an appreciation for the levels of exile the character goes through, at home, in another part of jersey, in DR. i was tickled by the idea of the new yorker adding "dique" to their style sheet. and i was thrown by a flag-waving phrase for which one appearance, much less the several it made, was too much, "we Dominicans."
i didn't think the character would speak such words. perhaps many years later, i don't know from what age she's telling the tale but i get the sense she's still close to it time-wise. the phrase just connotes a consciousness that i don't think she has, that i know the writer has. i leave the story when those words flap at me. i sense the soapbox and i'm out.
i'm makes me think a venue like the new yorker encourages such generalization cuz there aren't any dominicans in there ever except the one. if there's anything i would omit it would be the speaking-for-the-culture phrase. in those white pages, a non-white writer is always speaking for the culture. a reader like me is already trying hard to take in the pleasure of the word knowing how heavy the environment is. a phrase like we dominicans weighs it all down even more, reminds me why it's always so hard to even crack this magazine open.
i think that's it. i think in the aborted post i tried to throw in a matrix reference but my matrix cult card fell behind my desk and is gathering dust now anyway.
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