Junot Diaz @ Rutgers

Junot Diaz - Writers at Rutgers Series

3pm Student Center (CAC) Rutgers University

Introduced by Richard Miller (Chair of the Literatures in English Dept and Executive Director of the Plangere Writing Center @ Rutgers), Junot Diaz (Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) gave the small but vibrant group of students, professors and Rutgers staff assembled a wonderful time as he described several aspects of his writing process - with a few anecdotal moments from his time spent as an undergrad here at Rutgers.

Part of the Writers at Rutgers Series, this intimate conversation worked as a prelude for Junot's reading later that day. Witty, crass and all too humble, Diaz made the conversation with Richard start off as a meditation on reading (why aren't kids reading these days?), pedagogy (what books should we be teaching?) and literary abstractions (talk to us about the poli-vocal nature of the book) and ended oddly enough as an exploration of writing for a new era, the changing nature of literary traditions and weird theories of reading rooted more in Bio and Psych than in Eng and the humanities.

The conversation began with an obvious literary/pedagogical leaning with Diaz explaining the role of the footnotes in the novel - as an interrupting force, as a way to invoke and imitate the poli-vocal/lingual world he had grown up with in Central Jersey; the seemingly opposing forces of History (with capital H) and Literature (ditto) in the fabric of the novel (Diaz is, if you didn't know, 3 credits away from having a major in History to match his English major) - how does one tell a history of oppression in the language of the oppressor? how does one encapsulate the violence and trauma of an horrific episode in your history? etc.

When the conversation got interesting for me was when Diaz started philosophizing about the ways in which we read - which seems to be taken out of those Sci Fi books Oscar Wao loves and Diaz scatters through his book: "Literature," for Diaz, "communicates the lived components of experience." But he went further and suggested that reading was the only process by which we are connected to someone else's nervous systems. This of course was, for Diaz, very true in its abstraction but also in a very bodily way: history may teach you scary things, but that won't match the way literature can make you feel scared. He writes, then, in order to get into other people's bodies; to help YOU imagine with him and feel along.

It therefore follows - for Diaz, that it is the art being done in the margins of society (of capital "c" Culture) which engages more fully with what it means to be human. (On a lighter note, he suggested that if in hundreds of year we are in dire need of explaing what it means to be human to some species of Aliens, we should offer those books in pharmacy racks rather than the past 112 Pulitzer Prize winners, for they'll exemplifiy the truest anxieties of our species better).

In the Q&A session, Diaz was asked everything from why he chose to infuse his book with SO much info (he's parodying what's normally called the "info-dump" from Sci-Fi books), to whether he felt a sense of catharsis after having written the book (straightforward answer: No) and as if returning to where the conversation began, the last question reignited the discussion about reading in schools. Calling fave high school books such as Catcher in the Rye and Brave New World "atomic bombs" we're dropping on our kids way too early (Diaz's metaphor shifted from bombs to athletics comparing high school students as weak toothpick-armed athletes who can't "lift" the weight of Salinger's prose) Diaz - probably too blunt for the audience and the setting - said that we should trust in the atrophying nature of the New Media which is putting out such garbage that it would eventually lead (at least 1 in 10) kids to read ("Have you tried to watch VH1 for 24 hours straight? if that doesn't make them want to read... I don't know what will!"). That said, he understands reading - in its alleged obsolete position nowadays, is fighting the gargantuan force of multinational capitalism ("Every hour they spend reading, is one hour less spent in front of a screen buying stuff!") and thus we should just be happy that at this rate, we still have a(n albeit) minority group of readers... and that will hopefully get reading to survive long enough for Utopia to arrive. And that, to Diaz, shoudl be enough!

Memorable quotes from Junot:

"You recuperate a sense of self through a sense of humour" (RE: Living under Trujillo's dictatorship, commenting that the people in the Dominican Republic are "the funniest motherfuckers you'll ever meet!")

"Spanish knows how to cut off heads" (RE: How the process of translating his novel into Spanish taught him that, coming from a warrior people, Spanish is much more violent than English)