Cross-Temporality and Genre

Jenny Colmenero and Zach Kissinger

“In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends” - Watchmen (1987)

Rebecca Schneider writes about reenactments and their curious temporal disjunctions as a way of accessing the subject of her book: an exploration of the ways in which art is capable of "falling or crossing in and out of the spaces between live iterations" in a vision of the past as a "porous" and recursive matrix, twisting and turning in on itself such that "memory remains a future act: not yet recalled, if also never yet forgotten" (Schneider 6, 22). In this way it is not only hardcore Civil War reenactments, but all of history that becomes theatrical: a constant re-envisioning and rewriting of past events.

Junot Díaz directs for us a performance of genre, in which seemingly disparate cultural forms and artistic mediums are deployed in order to enact an argument about an artistic and cultural milieu that is created by a Dominican/U.S. diaspora: the notion that the resulting culture is an inextricable fusion of multiple ethnic and national histories. Furthermore, these cultural forms -- comic books, sentimental literature, Japanese anime -- are used not only to illustrate Oscar’s subject position as a product of diaspora, but also as an active means of refiguring the past.

Framing Brief Wondrous Life are two epigraphs at the beginning (a Fantastic Four quote that refigures Trujillo as Galactus and a Derek Walcott poem), and at the end another Fantastic Four quote and what seems to be a reversal of Kurtz's death in Heart of Darkness ('the horror!' becomes "The beauty! The beauty!") (Díaz 335). In the body of the text, one chapter is titled "Sentimental Education" -- and yet instead of narrating Flaubert's restless Frédéric, we follow Yunior's journey to developing empathy (a momentum mostly driven by his attempts to get in Lola's pants). Díaz’s allusions to works from various genres construct a history of family and nation that is meant to exist not only in parallel to the creations and contexts of canonical art  -- but in concert, forever bound simply by being evoked together. “Dead art” and “dead history” are reanimated through their conversation, and the discourse creates a sense of temporality that is always in flux, never fixed.

Schneider attempts to unravel this tangled relationship between cross-temporality and historically informed performance, writing: “All representation practice and indeed all communicative behavior… is already a practice of reenactment” (10). Thus, she argues that performance as a representation practice dramatically is both mimetic and originary. Similar theorists* of performance as practice expose shortcomings in traditional Western performance theories, which view performers as having presence only in the present.  

Schneider’s work poses two very important questions in that vein: “What if time returns? What does it drag along with it?” (2). The violent actions that occur in the cane field, an important setting that appears repeatedly in the novel (Oscar’s mother, Beli, is brutally beaten in a strikingly similar way as Oscar), incisively address these questions. Although Oscar had never been to the fields, that “world seemed strangely familiar to him; he had the overwhelming feeling that he’d been in this very place, a long time ago” (298). Not only can reenactment as performance occur by someone but it can also happen to someone, and we can see that this “act of live repetition makes the pastness of the past both palpable and a very present matter” for Oscar (Schneider 30).

Time-based art as performative practice encounters “againess,” which fragments the view of the past as fixed and the present as immediate, leading to a “temporal tangle” (Schneider 6, 10). This tangling is simultaneously both passive and active. Characters, like Oscar, within the narrative acknowledge that the past can lie ahead and behind, even if this occurs only in dreams, because if “one [notices] the similarities between Past and Present, [one does not] speak of it” (Diaz 301). Oscar does not actively acknowledge the violence of the cane fields as a reenactment, for fear of actively perpetuating fuku, since fuku is a lived experience that transcends time. To imagine reenactment as anything but an active performance is difficult; nonetheless, it can also be passive or dormant. Conversely, choosing to not speak about something is itself active and performative.

One could define Oscar as, what Schneider terms, a “hardcore” reenactor -- someone who is “eager to touch an absolute and transcendent historical ‘authentic’ through a repetition of acts” (Schneider 13). In many ways, the final moments of his life (once again in the cane fields) are his choice; he actively chooses to reenact, which ultimately causes a deadly recurrence. He decides to acknowledge fuku, accepting that his death is fated, but realizes simultaneously that his work and life are themselves eternal and can be reenacted.

*Deborah Hay, a prominent scholar on performativity and performance practice, would agree with Schneider in many ways. Hay’s work, to a great degree, shows how performance practice helps “loosen the tyranny of the myth of the [performer] as a single coherent being” and, as such, demonstrates that the performer is unconsciously embodying and interpolating pastness to truly be “present.” Performance as Practice. Dance Theater Journal, The voice of Dance. vol. 17 no.2, 2001