Anthologizing “Little Calibans”: Surplus in Junot Díaz’s Linked Stories

Abstract

Author(s): York, Janet Zong | Abstract: Anthologizing stories from linked short story collections gives rise to a troubling tension. To select and curate a story in an anthology elevates it to paradigmatic status. Yet, linked collections are anti-paradigmatic: interweaving fragments, rejecting representative conventions and monolithic narratives, and producing a surplus of feeling and knowledge beyond individual stories. These qualities become obscure when reading a single story contextualized in an anthology. This tension is particularly evident with anthologization of authors like Junot Diaz, whose works are suspicious of neoliberal multiculturalism’s totalizing embrace, but whose inclusion as an ethnic, national, or world writer in different anthologies results in varied thematic framings specific to each. Juxtaposing the linked story in two settings, anthology and linked collection, expands scholarly conversations around emergent forms of transnational American literature. This article argues that linked collections preempt, primarily through formal means, the flattening and functionalizing of their stories into unified exemplars of multicultural diversity or universal experience. Examining stories from Diaz’s Drown and This is How You Lose Her alongside these same tales as framed in three Norton anthologies illustrates this possibility. Diaz develops a paradigm of surplus through stories connected by a sense of displacement. This surplus is a literary strategy that anticipates and addresses anthology curation’s effects and expectations. Rather than recuperating identity or loss to construct more unified notions of ethnicity, nation, or world, linked stories give shape to assembled fragments. They point toward a transnationalism invested in how narrative fragments of displacement and diaspora constitute an irreducible surplus.