Glenn Beck and Oscar Wao

How does one account for how grand narratives--like conspiracy theories--become part of one's identity? In particular, how does one account for how such narratives intersect with one's gendered identity--one's sense of oneself as a woman or man in real or imagined social space? (One way, perhaps, to define gender, though "woman" or "man" are of course limiting.) To start, one must examine how narratives--self-created, amalgamated from others', reworked--becomes part of one's identity. Literature, because it is always borrowing narratives and often concerns its own intertextuality, provides an excellent realm in which to interrogate these questions. Frequently, literature foregrounds how characters borrow from existing narratives, drawn from popular culture, literature (famously, Emma Bovary), spy movies (Oswald in DeLillo's Libra). In each of these cases, the text establishes an uneasy continuum between exterior narratives--those outside one's identity--and the narrative that the character tells herself. Such narratives frequently supplement, or even replace, the limited narrative that a character draws from her immediate circumstances.

To take one example, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the title character struggles with his masculinity: living in a heavily gendered Dominican-American context, Oscar is nearly unrecognizable as a man to himself, his family, his friends, or--most desparately--the women who Oscar desires. In the real, everyday world of the novel, Oscar's identity is badly limited. But in the imagined world of fantasy, which Diaz wraps around his characters, Oscar is a hero, an avenger, the family's last bulwark against the mystical, all-encompassing fuku--a global-grade curse with the same heft as a conspiracy. Oscar's masculinity, then, functions more effectively in this imagined realm than in the real world. But beyond this, Diaz continually demands that readers view the "fantasy" narrative and "real" narrative as inextricable from one another, because of the language his narrator uses to describe Oscar: at one point, Oscar is kidnapped by two police thugs that Yunior names Gorilla Grod and Solomon Grundy, both names drawn from comic books. Because Yunior never calls the two anything but, the reader can't help but picture, at least momentarily, supervillains from the DC universe dragging Oscar into a cane field.

In the following post, I'm going to hazard that Oscar isn't alone, by comparing his case to the vastly different case of Glenn Beck and his followers--a set of texts that also rely heavily on an imagined realm to solidify their subjects' gender identities, though admittedly such gender identifications are more dispersed and less overt than that of Oscar. This comparison is rich with possibilities in its contrasts: both texts emerge in the same timeframe (Oscar Wao is published in 2007; Beck rises as a national figure in 2008 in connection with Obama's election), both texts traffic in conspiracy material; both feature protagonists who fuse their figures to the grand sweep of History, imagining such history in terms of great narrative arcs--the end of days, a curse, the Great Threat to Our Way of Life. Both figure themselves as beset minorities, both attempt to work out some grand wrong, first a wrong in History, in the grand sweep of government and mystic organizing forces, second a wrong in the personal, the self as it navigates the world, the latter struggle manifested, at least in part, in terms of gender. For Beck and crew, the masculine lack starkly visible in Oscar is less overt, since, of course, Beck doesn't focus on what he and his followers lack. Of course, Beck continually claim a position of loss--of some America slipping away (implicitly bound up, as countless commentators have shown, in both gender and race).

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is Diaz's postethnic, postpostmodern, pop-culture situated, Dominican-framed tale of Oscar and his family, their immigration and relationship dramas as they take shape under the long shadow of the Trujillo dictatorship. Real history, real struggle--but an imaginary curse. In contrast, Glenn Beck offers an imaginary history, an imaginary struggle--and, perhaps, a real curse, in the form of the cascading political and cultural fallout from the radical ideas expressed on his television and radio shows, books, blog, and speeches. Formally, Beck offers a diverse amalgam of infotainment, right-wing conspiracy theory, new male emotionalism. It emerges under the Obama administration, but is shaped by the conspiratorial tone of the Bush years, the widely-telegraphed sense of a country under siege, a rhetorical stance repeated throughout conservative history, but intensified by the events of 9/11. In many ways, of course, these two texts couldn't be different: one text is a literary novel, written by a Dominican-American author who teaches at MIT, and which concerns a poor Dominican family. As a novel, the text occupies a relatively "elite" space, and yet its subject matter is anything but elite. Beck's show, in contrast, is utterly populist (and regularly described as much) and yet its subject matter--the plight of rich white men--is implicitly elite. He works the same contradiction as circulates elsewhere on the Right: we're mainstream, the real America, and yet we're also the minority, those threatened with extinction.

It's Oscar, though, who's really threatened with extinction--or at least his species is threatened. Oscar is failed, obscure, unsuccessful by his chosen measure--getting laid, which is what is appears to be, but also, as Diaz explains in an interview, about much more--a sense of rootedness and home which is the diasporic subject's continual desire. Oscar is cast in obscurity, meaningless, alone in his room with his role-playing games and fantasy novels--pop culture profferences of meaning, a place to locate himself as beseiged postapocalyptic survivor, the only one who can save Maria (she with the coke dealer boyfriend) from the Grand Forces threatening her. Oscar fails in the everyday world; he is unable to achieve mastery over the forces shaping his life; he is unable to be legible as a man in his cultural context. How much Trujillo, or immigration-shaped poverty--has to do with Oscar's plight is never quite clear. But what is clear is that his life is not wondrous without a layer of the imagination, without framing his experience in terms of the fuku.

And here's where he has something in common with Beck's presumed viewers, who also grasp hold of an imagined grand narrative to make sense of themselves in the world, to see themselves as successful--though threatened--in their cultural context, as white men after whiteness, who perceive that the culture no longer automatically grants them phallic power, that phallic power is something granted to others (perhaps others with darker skin, perhaps others who embrace the contemporary world).

Fantasy saturates both worlds. Both texts draw, it seems, on pop cultural forms for heft and shape: Diaz on fantasy, comic books, scifi, hiphop, Beck on political thrillers. Beck has not only repeatedly interviewed thriller authors, he's authored one himself (a thriller he refers to--as if to drive home the point--as "faction," a mix between fiction and fact). The thrillers tend to share a theme: a small, dangerous group seeks to take over the United States, and only a few, brave, patriotic souls have the wherewithal to stop them. This story, fictional, repeatedly crosses over into Beck's nonfiction political analysis, which itself often sounds like a political thriller, wherein Obama and Acorn, Obama and Marxists, Obama and the Left are plotting to take over the country and impose fascist rule. I'm less interested in what Beck is saying, though, then the way he's saying it--the thriller, conspiracy-tinged narratives on which he draws, narratives which assert a particular identity, or at least frame a set of stakes for identity, in gendered terms. Arguably, Beck uses thrillers in the same way Oscar uses scifi and comic books, as a way to organize, condense, and rearrange his world, so that people like him are validated, and people not like him (for Oscar, brutally masculine men; for Beck women, minorities, leftists) are invalidated.

In Oscar Wao, it doesn't seem a stretch to say that gender is the conspiracy. The book is rooted in Oscar's life, of course, and Oscar's main problem is that he can't get laid--though as Diaz emphasizes, getting laid is a synecdoche for having a home, for feeling secure, for feeling rooted despite one's diasporic existence. So for Oscar, to get laid is to have a legible self. Moreover, nearly all of the family's tragic trajectory results from the choices of violent, domineering, patriarchal men, from Trujillo himself, who imprisons and destroys Oscar's grandfather, to The Gangster, who causes Beli to be nearly killed and then exiled, to the police captain who ultimately kills Oscar. In each case, too, the brutality stems from these males' violent sexual conquests, their imperial gaze suffused over the women of the book (The Gangster's brutality is augmented by his wife; still, one could argue that she herself engages in an imperially masculine brutality). Evil, in Oscar Wao, stems from the brutal carelessness of male desire (arguably, this is the lesson that Yunior needs to learn by the book's close). There is no de Leon family tragedy without the possessive desire of men for unlimited sexual conquest. It's not power, not greed, not unexamined privilege that forms the root of the problem here (as it does in other conspiracy novels): it's a destructive form of masculinity run rampant. Incidentally, this nicely intersects with Sedgwick's argument in Between Men: that power accrues to men, who use people like Oscar and the female de Leons as symbolic trophies of conquest.

Back to Beck, then, and the next question for my research: is it possible that some form of gender identity shapes his paranoia--his sense of how power operates in the world? One thing that I've begun to track re: Beck--and Rachel Maddow tore up the Right on this topic recently--is that much of Beck's Obama-paranoia seems to take shape around racial issues: Van Jones is black and worked on behalf of poor blacks, Acorn is nearly all minority and works on behalf of poor minorities, and, of course, the Shirley Sherrod NCAAP dustup. More widely, the underlying tone of "they're taking it from me" is frequently manifested as "minorities are getting my money," a statement that likely translates into "minorities are supplanting me," in an echo of the struggles over Alan Bakke, busing, and welfare that occurred in the late seventies and early eighties. There's an interesting symmetry, then, between Oscar Wao and Beck: one is a minority who re-imagines himself as significant via conspiracy, the other who uses conspiracy to imagine himself as insignificant, as somehow detached from the multiplying privileges of whiteness.