8th Thesis: The Cultural Body As The Monster

In Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s essay Monster Culture (Seven Theses) he lays out how the genre of monster fiction—or horror—has historically nearly always been a direct commentary on the particular cultural anxieties of a given place and time. Cohen’s first thesis is that “the monster’s body is a cultural body.” In this thesis he claims that the physical form that the monster takes on will reflect certain cultural fears. Cohen then expands on this in his fourth thesis: “the monster dwells at the gates of difference,” explaining how the monster often takes on a demonized form of a marginalized group. I feel that Cohen’s Seven Theses are generally correct and that the truth of his work can be seen in several famous works. For example, Buffalo Bill in Silence of The Lambs depicts a rather on the nose example of how monsters are used to ‘other’ those who present a perceived threat. Buffalo Bill is someone who now would probably be considered a transgender woman. But in Silence of The Lambs Buffalo Bill is an evil, cruel, and disgusting figure who murders women to use their bodies as clothes. This depiction clearly serves a political purpose: to depict transgender women as threats to cisgender women. Another example of Cohen’s theses in action is in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, which was based on a real contemporary serial killer—Ed Gein—fears of whom were clearly dominating the cultural imagination at the time. But with all that being said, despite the truth of Cohen’s theses, in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao the primary monster is fukú, a theoretical concept as opposed to a physical one. The fact that fukú is not a physical being makes it seem to be diametrically opposed to Cohen’s theory of the monster as a cultural body, with the key word being ‘body’. However, I actually see fukú as a sort of inversion of Cohen’s first thesis. Fukú takes the physical concept of the monster as established by Cohen and embeds it into every aspect of life. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao it is not that the monster reflects culture or everyday life, but that culture and everyday life are, themselves, monstrous.

Psycho movie poster. Reflective of growing public fascination at the time with sexualization of female pain.

The novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao begins with an explanation of what fukú is: “Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú—generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World. Also called the fukú of the Admiral because the Admiral was both its midwife and one of its great European victims; despite “discovering” the New World the Admiral died miserable and syphilitic, hearing (dique) divine voices,” (Díaz, 1.) On the very first page of the novel the reader learns that the monster of this novel will not be a physical threat, but a curse which materialized as a result of horrific—yet not necessarily supernatural—human activity. The Admiral—Christopher Columbus—is described as both a handmaiden and a victim of fukú, and yet his victimization or punishment is entirely natural. Even for a man as evil as Columbus, fukú is not a monster which takes the ordinary and makes it paranormal, it is a monster which uses the ordinary in monstrous ways.

The narrator continues with his explanation of fukú, describing it in a more contemporary state. “But the fukú ain’t just ancient history, a ghost story from the past with no power to scare… It was in the air, you could say, though, like all the most important things on the Island, not something folks really talked about. But in those elder days, fukú had it good; it even had a hypeman of sorts, a high priest, you could say. Our then dictator-for-life Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina,” (Díaz, 2.) Once again, fukú (a concept so immaterial it can be felt in the air) is tied to a person: this time, Trujillo. Trujillo and Columbus are definitely assigned monster status, but at the same time, they are absolutely human, on a biological level. This then may make fukú itself human, or if not human, a natural presence in the world. Fukú is not a monster in the traditional sense that Cohen lays out: fukú is an evil inherent in life as opposed to a constructed evil to reflect a time and place.

Fukú is physicalized in a distinct way in the novel. Oscar de León’s body is described as monstrous and his physical form itself is his personal fukú; fukú inflicts its curse on Oscar not by being a monster itself, but by making him into a socially ostracized monster: “he locked himself in his room, lay in bed for a couple of stunned hours, then got up, undressed in the bathroom he no longer had to share because his sister was at Rutgers, and examined himself in the mirror. The fat! The miles of stretch marks! The tumescent horribleness of his proportions! He looked straight out of a Daniel Clowes comic book,” (Díaz, 29.) This description follows a moment of self-realization when Oscar discovers the negative way that his friends—whom he thought of as his allies socially—view him. Oscar’s self perception was already poor, but he carries this bodily fukú only as a result of the social world he finds himself in. While Columbus and Trujillo are human beings who project fukú through their actions, Oscar is himself a physical manifestation of fukú; fukú made Oscar into a ‘monster’ (based on how he is viewed socially) yet, he is not evil. His body itself isn’t evil, either. It is the way that his body is perceived culturally that is evil: it is the cultural and social perception of him that fuels his bad luck, or his fukú. In this way, the monster is not created by society, but society itself is the monster in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

After reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in conjunction with Monster Culture (Seven Theses), I have come to the conclusion that Díaz’ novel supports Cohen’s theses, but also adds to them. There are many examples of times when the monster of a story is a cultural body, but Oscar Wao represents a scenario in which the monster is not a physical being constructed of stereotypes and cultural fears, but in which the culture itself is the monster inflicting harm. One does not come from the other, but they are one in the same. The monster is something inherent in human existence in Oscar Wao, and is representative in all people and all aspects of daily life.