I can’t help but feel that in its own way The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a magical realist novel. I hadn’t heard the term used before we talked about it in reference to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but having read several of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novels, I think I understand well enough what the term means.
The fuku curse is the most striking example of this because it isn’t something one finds in everyday life. Most Americans don’t believe in this sort of thing, and curses need belief in order to have any power at all. The power of this curse does stem from a supernatural source, it is something too big to be avoided: “no matter how many turns and digressions this shit might take, it always — and I mean always — gets its man” (5). One of the questions that stands out in my mind about this is what about Beli? She managed to escape from the canefield, despite being terribly injured: “Cursed people, after all, tend not to drag themselves out of the canefields with a frightening roster of injuries and then happen to be picked up by a van of sympathetic musicians in the middle of the night who ferry them home without delay to a “mother” with mad connections in the medical community. If these serendipities signify anything…it is that our Beli was blessed” (152). It’s true, people who are cursed don’t usually have such good luck. But if she were blessed, how would she have landed herself in such a situation anyway? I mean, really? An affair with Trujillo’s brother-in-law? That has to be fuku right?
The creature that eventually leads Beli out of the canefield is what stands out to me as magical realism, though. “But before Beli lost hope she heard the creature’s voice. She (for it had a woman’s lilt) was singing! (149-50). Beli is able to follow this voice out of the canefield, which would normally not happen. Beli got help from a supernatural force, which to me signifies an element of magical realism.
I definitely agree with you about this being Magical Realism, Katie. For me, the fuku was the first hint of that, and then the Golden Mongoose really cemented it for me. However, I think that La Inca’s prayers are part of the accepted magic in this novel as well. The Golden Mongoose almost seems summoned by the collective prayer of La Inca and the other women of the neighborhood. So what exactly is the Golden Mongoose? Is it an angel? A familiar? A spirit that protects the family? I tend to lean toward the latter because of all the Tolkien references we get inside Oskar Wao. I think that all the genre references, apart from being entertaining for knowledgeable readers, give the novel an epic fantasy feel that it would otherwise be lacking. In this epic vein, the Golden Mongoose becomes a force for Good against the Fuku, the force of Darkness. Oskar’s life becomes a battleground between his family’s protector and the Fuku, a battle that the family ultimately loses.The death of Oskar is the death of the family, in that the family name ‘dies’ with Oskar. The sole male heir dies, and the Fuku is victorious. So why doesn’t Lola, as a woman, doesn’t undergo the same sort of continuous failure as Oskar? It could be argued that she, traditionally, can’t pass on the family name, but Beli appears to have done so. Beli, however, is falling to a particularly gruesome form of breast cancer. Is it because she has passed the family name down? Is Lola doomed in the same way as Oskar and Beli if she gets married, has children?