Teaching Philosophy and Materials
Junot Diaz, Drown
To aid our discussion of Junot Diaz's short-story collection Drown, we benefitted from four student presentations. Many ideas -- coupled with overviews of Diaz's biography and academic history -- abounded in these presentations, ideas that brought into the present-day some of the themes of this course regarding immigration, gender, religion, family, class, and movement. All of these ideas form lenses that we might use to consider the notion of "American otherness," the theme that has driven the discussions in our class. For all of our class texts, we have considered insider/outsider status and the ways these statuses are constituted within the political or ideological domain of our nation. As a class, we seemed to conclude that Diaz's stories were less about "outsiders in America" (outsiders who are usually represented as such as a consequence of immigration) than they were about issues specific to one's family or one's evolution from childhood into "manhood." It is interesting, then, that in a late-twentieth-century Dominican-American writer's world that the "hyphen" isn't the subject. I am not saying that it should be; rather, it is interesting to us to see the evolution or the empowerment of the writer's voice in America in this regard. Some of you might say, though, that nevertheless these stories are propelled by the fact that the writer identifies strongly with his native heritage (some of you would disagree with me and say that these stories are, if anything, about the hyphen). On this point, the stories are underpinned with ideas native to Diaz's homeland and rooted in his native language (as we see it peppering all of the tales in Diaz's collection). So, can this collection be a "both at once" type of collection, a collection that has two levels that we read simultaneously (obviously) while really paying attention to one? So the immigration story, the native-identity story, is thus subjugated and the coming-of-age story, the family-dynamics story, is elevated? Maybe this elevation happens as a consequence of the in-your-face nature of Diaz's prose. Some of you commented that these weren't tales full of beautiful descriptions; they were brasher, coarser, harder, and sadder. Diaz isn't really encouraging, via his style, the reader to be contemplative about the nature of geographical, racial, or linguistic otherness. Maybe that's not a primary concern of his. (Although, regarding linguistic otherness, the epigraph would seem to say that that is the essence of this collection.)
So what, then, are Diaz's concerns? We can look at this collection as one that offers us a lot of ideas about women's roles in Dominican culture, about religion and its situation within families as ritual practice rather than spiritual litany, about quests for machismo and manhood, about movement from rural to urban or from one country to another. These ideas about movement are really interesting to me. How does Yunior's development -- as we piece it together -- into a man correspond to his movement, the movement Diaz describes him experiencing. All of his revelations occur as a consequence of travel (whether on a bus to go beat up Ysrael or a plane to come to the United States or a delivery truck to deliver a pool table or a VW bus to go to his auntie's house for a party). There is a lot of travel in this collection.
Just a few more ideas to consider as you reflect on Drown: we discussed masks after reading the first third of the collection. Cristian spoke about how these stories are about the various disguises people wear, as protections, as artifice, as culturally mandated performances. As these masks are peeled back, we see glimmers of empathy. We see the truths the underlay the bravura or performance of a man or within a family or of a conversation that mimics codes of behavior. Ysrael is a character who literally wears a mask, but there are versions of masks scattered throughout this collection. We also thought about masks or disguises historically and culturally, ranging from the ways in which women's bodies have been arrayed, draped, and disguised over time, or the ways in which certain religions require covering of bodies (from Islam to Catholicism -- think of a nun's habit). We see a lot of masks in these stories but we also see a lot of purging and undressing (from vomiting to the peeling off of clothes during sexual encounters). What does disrobing and purging, as we see it in these stories, tell us about "truth"?
Now, as for style, some of you were not big fans of Diaz's textual tactics. You offered that his characters lacked emotional depth or subtlety. Why do you think that? What textual examples can you offer to show that? Also, we talked about the fact that these stories were originally (many of them) published in magazines that publish fiction and thoughtful reporting on current affairs (namely, as one example, The New Yorker). Why does it matter that these stories were published in various places originally and were then, later, collected into a single volume? What impact does this publication history have on your understanding of this collection's "style"?
Finally, think about this collection as a study of fatherhood and fathers' roles. Is it viable to think about this collection that way? Would it have been still a story of the challenges and betrayals within father/son/family relationships if there had been no geographical movement? What does travel, or immigration in this case, do to this collection as a series of considerations about father/son relationships? Does it add a certain dimensionality? Does it thus allow this text to comment on the evolution of these relationships in emergent American families?
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