According to the Diccionario de la lengua española, chisme signifies “oticia verdadera o falsa, o comentario con que generalmente se pretende indisponer a unas personas con otras o se murmura de alguna” (“true or false news or comments that generally attempt to make certain people indisposed towards others, or which whispers about someone”). one who delights in idle talk a newsmonger, a tattler.” Merriam-Webster, meanwhile, speaks of a “rumor or report of an intimate nature” or “a person who habitually reveals personal or sensational facts about others.” Turning to the Spanish word chisme reveals other nuances. about persons or social incidents.” A gossip, the same volume states, is a person, “mostly a woman, of light and trifling character, esp. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests “trifling or groundless rumour” or, more favorably, “unrestrained talk or writing, esp. Gossip is at best a slippery concept, easier to recognize than to define. As Díaz’s text reveals, gossip can be a means of perpetuating official narratives but also of subverting them when public narratives are violently imposed rather than consensually generated, gossip emerges as an important way to keep other narratives percolating beneath the surface and, in so doing, challenge official discourses. A proper understanding of the Caribbean requires an engagement with its gossip, for it is frequently through gossip that the region’s “questions of power” are asked and answered, challenged and renegotiated. Díaz’s deployment of gossip recalls Stuart Hall’s assertion that it is “impossible to approach Caribbean culture without understanding the way it was continually inscribed by questions of power” (28). 2 In Oscar Wao, however, gossip is neither condemned nor vindicated but rather revealed as a malleable, pervasive, and potent narrative form that can be marshaled to very different ends by those seeking to resist or to sustain established hierarchies of power. Scholars of gossip have generally adhered to polarized readings of gossip, seeing it either negatively, as a corrupted and corrupting form of discourse, or positively, as a source of social cohesion and a medium of self-assertion. It also provides important new insights into the practice of gossip itself, a remarkably pliable narrative form that reveals new traits and uses when viewed in Dominican social, political, and historical contexts. 1 Bringing the critical discourse on gossip into conversation with the recent literature of the Hispanic Caribbean and its diaspora allows fruitful readings of Díaz’s text. I offer a reading of Díaz’s novel against the growing body of gossip scholarship, which has largely focused on the practice’s markedly distinct function in Anglo-American literature, primarily from the nineteenth century or earlier. Gossip, in Díaz’s text, grants a measure of narrative power to those denied a place in official discourses, but it is also shown as readily harnessed, and ultimately monopolized, by the Trujillo regime, which repeatedly used it to suppress dissent and to strengthen its grip on power. In so doing, however, Yunior also reveals gossip’s status as a contested medium, capable of both comforting Dominicans and of serving as a tool for their oppression. He does this in a manner that titillates the reader even as it subtly draws them into ideological complicity with him and seduces them into accepting, and perhaps even adopting, the ideological stance on which Yunior’s telling of the events is founded. Yunior deploys gossip both as an essential source of information and as a narrative strategy that allows him to disseminate previously silenced or suppressed stories. The text’s proliferating gossip frames an account of the twentieth-century Dominican experience: Yunior’s attempt to write a biography of his friend, the eponymous Oscar, quickly spirals out to incorporate, through succeeding layers of gossip, the broader story of Oscar’s family and, more obliquely, of the Dominican people, the Trujillo regime, and the Dominican Republic’s diaspora. Its characters both gossip and are revealed through gossip its Dominican American narrator, Yunior, gossips even the Dominican dictator, Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, is shown as both gossiped about and gossiping. Junot Díaz’s 2007 novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (hereafter Oscar Wao), is saturated with gossip.
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