Genre Allusions and the Desire for Moral Simplification

This is coming from having read up through 261.

Still thinking about the use of genres as I read the novel, and as I write this, and was trying to come up with additional ways to look at the  constant references.  One of the most compelling reasons I came up with for them has to do with a desire for moral justice or simplification.  The torture, terror, death, and oppression of Trujillo’s reign was something almost unfathomably evil.  (I hesitate to use terms like “evil” because they situate the world and people on a black and white moral spectrum of “right and wrong” which I don’t really believe in, but with Trujillo, I will make an exception.)  As was suggested in class, genre villains and heroes can be used to express the immensity of this evil.  But I want to go one beyond that and say that these genre figures are situated in universes in which moral justice is assured, or at least the immorality of the villains is certain and the morality of the heroes is also certain.  The moral or innocent underdog will eventually succeed, against overwhelming odds, to crush and dispel the influence of the evil tyrant.  Obviously, this represents an ideal, fantasized situation for both Oscar and for the Dominicans under Trujillo, a moral universe which the real world is brutally at odds with.

So, why, specifically, is there the desire to put the narrative and the history of the DR in that moral universe? Going back to the idea of trauma, is it an attempt to achieve psychological control over a traumatic and baffling situation?  Is looking at life through these genre universes a way for Oscar and Yunior to achieve catharsis which they couldn’t find in their day to day lives?  I think it’s easy to look at the use of genre references in the novel as something merely stylistic, but it’s increasingly obvious to me that they have fundamental importance to the narrative.  They aren’t something that should be glossed over, and, on closer examination, they provide a number of significant and deeply layered interpretative opportunities for the reader.

1 comment

  1. The idea of moral simplification is intriguing. Historically speaking, this distillation of the world into Good v. Evil is one of the allures of apocalyptic thinking. The world is a complicated, muddy place, where we’re all a bit complicit with pain and suffering, and the idea of Absolute Evil rids us of the moral ambiguity of it all.

    I wonder, then, how we can “push back” against this decomplexification (to coin a word) that the characters find refuge in. Are there ways in which Diaz himself seems to be critical of this moral simplification?

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