Challenging Colebrook's Conception of Concepts and Contexts

In Sarah’s post, “Reading Without a Map: (Il)legibility in Jewett,” she clearly articulates some of the difficulties of reading texts with disjointed structures and complicated historical contexts, by means of Claire Colebrook’s “The Context of Humanism.” Sarah writes that “the text’s fragmented structure draws attention to itself; it bogs you down in minute details of the lives of seemingly random individuals.” Similarly, in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the text is formally disjointed, chronologically nonlinear, and consistently fractured by footnotes that, needless to say, dwarf Lee’s. Furthermore, in Díaz’s novel, readers are subject to a “highly mythologized conception of the past,” through the presentation of Trujillo as a “superhuman” or “alien,” as I discussed last week. However, this week I would like to respond to the convoluted relationship between context and content, and how, “for Colebrook, a text’s legibility is not tied to its historical context but to something that communicates across time,” which Sarah precisely elucidates as Colebrook’s position. I will argue, on the other hand, that this view of context is erroneous and incompatible with Díaz’s presentation of the past.

There are varying levels of context that are requisite for a true attempt at understanding The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Structurally, Díaz inundates the novel with footnotes, which give ancillary pieces of information (i.e. a context), but which also elaborate upon various culturally transmitted stories from the Dominican past. These stories are simultaneously contained within the overarching narrative thread referentially and uncontained independently. Moreover, the narrator, Yunior, who may or may not be reliable, frames his discussions within the footnotes through his own cultural, familial, and individual prejudices about the historical narratives of the DR, which creates a profound subjectivity that overcomes the traditional objectivity of historicizing footnotes.  Like Sarah, therefore, I find that “we [readers] have no anchor, map or familiar structure,” when analyzing Díaz’s text. Colebrook, when responding to this dilemma, argues that “there can be a shared meaning of a concept because of a context, but that same possibility frees the concept from any speaker and any closed context” (Colebrook 715-16). However, being outside of the rebellious and politically fraught history of the DR (i.e. its closed context) and having no cultural ties to that island, I find it hard to find a shared meaning with many of the concepts that Díaz presents, even with the provided context of the footnotes, let alone by some seemingly impracticable separation from context, which Colebrook seems to suggest. Moreover, since the given context is largely idiosyncratic and biased (what retellings of history are not?), I wonder to what extent a separation from that context would allow for an adequate understanding of the text.

From the moment that Abelard said the “Bad Thing” about Trujillo, the de Leóns consider their line doomed because of a curse. But Yunior questions the problems of this subjective historiography in a footnote: “There are other beginnings certainly, better ones, to be sure – if you ask me I would have started when the Spaniards ‘discovered’ the New World – or when the U.S. invaded Santo Domingo in 1916 – but if this was the opening that the de Leóns chose for themselves, then who am I to question their historiography?” (Díaz 211). Here, Yunior seems to advocate for Colebrook’s sentiment that “one must assume some mediating horizon from which all contexts might be view and compared, even if one then goes on and acknowledges the necessary limitations of one’s own context” (Colebrook 715). Still, tracing the origins and demonstrating the implications of the fuku is inherently problematic for Yunior, who is not a member of Oscar’s family (but he raises an interesting point, nonetheless). I would argue that the context (Abelard Cabral’s actions in the mid-1940s) is what allows for a concept (the fuku) to be made; however, as Yunior reveals, there have been numerous historical events with similarly incalculable, negative effects upon Dominican families, yet the de Leóns are completely willing to devotedly cling to that one unfortunate event, because it relates solely to their own family. This fundamentally contradicts Colebrook, because it demonstrates that a context does not belie the force of concepts (715). For the de Leóns, the context is the only justification for and the originary of the concept. The “ultimate context” (the originary) is never ruptured by the “power” that makes contexts possible (715); conversely, in Díaz’s work, contexts open and destroy concepts, which enables an orientation to and mode of thought towards what is specific to the de Leóns and their complicated relationship with(in) the DR.