Caught in the Ethnographic Trap: The Disenchantment of Magical Realism in Novels by Junot Díaz and Alberto Fuguet

Abstract

The novels The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), by the Dominican American Junot Díaz, and Las películas de mi vida (The Movies of my Life, 2003), by the Chilean Alberto Fuguet, are at odds in their representations of globalization and, yet, they meet in their impulse to disenchant the narrative mode of magical realism. In Las películas—originally written in Spanish—the disenchantment is performed through a narrative that seeks to impose a rational and scientific logic over seemingly magical phenomena. In Oscar Wao, on the other hand, the disenchantment is effected through the skeptical gaze of the main narrator, who may accept the existence of supernatural events but neither experiences nor narrates them as mundane. This essay traces the path of these different forms of disenchantment toward their common origin in what I call the ethnographic trap—or the widespread misinterpretation of magical realism as an anthropological portrait of Latin America. Such disenchantments of magical realism, I argue, neutralize its power as an aesthetic of rebellion designed to subvert playfully, through the craft of fiction, the ethnocentric and neocolonial narratives of globalization.