Before his appearance at the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival, the Pulitzer Prize winner speaks to Patrick Brzeski about love of literature in the age of corporate media.

When Junot Diaz burst onto the book scene in 1997 with the release of his first story collection, Drown, at the age of 27, he was hailed, like many before him, as the next big literary thing – a writer who could effortlessly fuse high-flown literary academese with an authentic, urban American mode of speech. His characters, like Diaz himself, were often appealingly disaffected young Latino men balancing a life between two worlds, the impoverished Santo Domingo of their birth, and the dynamic multiculturalism of contemporary inner city New Jersey. News of a large-figure advance for a first novel soon followed, but the big expectations for Diaz were met largely with silence – 11 years of it.

When the novel finally came, in 2008, it was in many ways not at all what his admirers had expected, but exactly what they had hoped for. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was instantly hailed as a book of uncommon originality and generosity of spirit. The story centres on the life of its titular character, Oscar, a fat sci-fi and fantasy-obsessed Dominican nerd who pines for love, connection and romance, but can achieve none of the typical macho triumphs expected of a young Dominican-American male.

In telling Oscar’s story, the book jumps through time, to the land of Oscar’s forbearers – the Dominican Republic during the days of the almost incomparably brutal dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo – switching perspectives, interrogating notions of power, recounting the Dominican Diaspora, infusing the narrative with countless fantasy and comic book analogies, mixing Spanish dialects and gangsta-inflected vernacular, appending detailed footnotes, and introducing a semi-unreliable narrator behind the whole show very late in the game – all while remaining deeply engaging on a line-by-line basis, from its exhilarating start to its final-page surprise finish. The achievement won Diaz The National Book Critics Circle Award, The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and numerous other accolades.

Naturally, then, we were thrilled to see that the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival had secured Diaz as a keynote speaker. We caught Diaz by phone, while he was on break from teaching creative writing at MIT and awaiting an early-morning flight from Boston to one of his many recent speaking engagements.

On the eve of the festival, our conversation turned to the topics that will likely be lurking in the backs of many a Hong Kong lit fest-goer’s mind: what’s the value of literature in the age of new media and how does one nurture an artistic vision in a commerce-driven culture largely indifferent to independent creative pursuits? Midway through our discussion, it became apparent that Diaz was eating a very large snack of some sort, but it didn’t at all hinder his impassioned discourse and went entirely unmentioned.

You’ve been travelling quite a bit lately, appearing at a lot of universities. Do you know what you’ll be discussing when you’re here in Hong Kong for the festival?
Hopefully very little [Laughs]. I was hoping it would be a reading. They always try to assign you on a panel. I don’t know why. They seem to think that art doesn’t stand on its own, that it requires some sort of intellectual abutment. I suppose I should have done due diligence and actually checked the schedule. But you know, if I’m asked to be on a panel, of course I’ll look at the areas that interest me and will speak to those. I tend to be very interested in gender relationships – boy and girl bullshit.

Why is that?
For god’s sake, why wouldn’t I be? [Laughs] You know, it’s just shortcuts. These larger abstractions are just shortcuts that somehow collect all of our various and often disparate interests. Being a heterosexual dude, with a certain kind of background from a certain time period, boy and girl relationships allow me to explore a whole battalion of my crazy preoccupations and to crystallise them in perfect, perfect ways. And you know, you gotta say, love, or the failure to achieve love, has been a proven narrative template for a very long time. Sometimes it’s okay to lean on the old stuff.

Okay, here’s some new stuff… I was just rereading a Wall Street Journal story you wrote in 2008 about Grand Theft Auto 4. In the article, you celebrated how video games now have the potential to do all the powerful, challenging, redemptive things that really great narrative art does, but you also stressed that no game had yet lived up to that new potential. Do you still feel that way?
Well, yes and no. The central component of video games that creates interesting possibilities, and that’s missing from the novel, is of course interactivity. You know, at MIT I’m plugged into the cutting-edge video game world, where people are doing some really weird shit that’s nonlinear and challenges the idea of what we could call the Skinneresque reward schedule – this idea that you’ve always got to win. These guys are doing games that are simply about experience. It’s strange, but I think the mainstream gamemakers are in some ways afraid of the larger, greater potential that interactivity offers. They basically have interactivity as chained down as humanly possible. I think of this in the same way that adults fear children’s play.

How do you mean?
Contemporary adults have done everything possible, at least in US society, to eliminate, to regulate, to contain children’s play, which is why American children, if they’re not under pharmaceutical regimes, they’re in these insane adult regimens that limit all their free playtime, with everything scheduled and ‘productive’. I think that in the same way that children’s play is contained in the larger culture by adults, I find that these corporate parents shackle the real potential of interactivity in video games and prevent them from achieving what they could. On the other hand, while these small games pursue the frontiers of interactivity and are questioning what a game is and what winning is, they lack the design teams and enormous budgets that have become de rigueur of the video game industry. It’s almost like the day that these companies get some balls and decide to risk putting out some incredibly weird game, a really interesting creative revolution could follow. That’s my long way of saying not yet, but for very specific structural reasons.

It’s really cool to hear a novelist celebrating the potential of video games and not just feeling threatened by them. But I wonder whether you’re also troubled, like many writers, by the fact that all the new forms of technology and new media are destroying the long-form reading experience for many young people?
Well, what can you do? Mediums and practices live and die, that’s the nature of human evanescence. Also, I grew up in a place where reading and writing were absolutely specialised ‘minority’ interests. I grew up in a fucking ghetto, yo. So it’s not as if I’m accustomed to this golden age where everyone loved reading and writing. And besides, really, what can you do? I can’t force people to love my nerd, to love my bag. Just because I love A, it seems strangely solipsistic for me to judge everything based on what I love. You know? And as a writer, like really? I’m going to fight video games, and the internet, and cell phones, and all these new forms? I’m going to fight them for a slice of pizza? It’s such a fearful paradigm. And it doesn’t have to be such a fatalistic thing either. Each generation has got to embrace its nerd and pursue its bag to its own end. For positive or negative consequences.

So you’re not at all troubled by the notion of a dwindling literary readership?
Well, considering that writing and reading are dealing with competitors that are bankrolled by billions of dollars of corporate spending, that multinational corporations are literally injecting what would amount to the GNP of many countries into persuading young people into abdicating their free time into these corporate hobbles, whether it’s video games, Facebook, texting, whatever – anything that you pour your imagination into. Considering that in some ways we writers are the incredible underdog, that our own publishing corporate masters don’t have that much money to spend and we’re up against entire areas where there are billions of dollars at stake, I don’t think we’re doing too bad. If you think about what we’re up against, we’re not doing too bad.

But do you think we might be losing something as a society as these habits of long-form reading become less popular?
I would clearly argue that the novel and literature are tried and true ways in which a person can come into contact, most intimately, with another human subjectivity, and that this in itself is an incredibly good thing that yields benefits across that spectrum of what we consider the human. But, having said that, I can’t twist anyone’s arm. Just because I know that how I’m eating and how I’m living is good for being, you can’t make a person be healthy. You can’t make a person stop eating fucking doughnuts and gulp-size Cokes. It’s impossible. So I guess I’m not in the combative mode against new media. I’m highly critical, but also understanding that the next generation might take the new forms that attempt to enslave us and do things with them that will surprise us. There’s always ways for people to re-imagine and recapture corporate energies. I’ve got faith. Maybe I’m a fool, but I’ve got faith.

Are there any forms in the new media landscape that particularly inspire you?
Like I said, all the crazy work being done by these young, hotshot, video game designers. And I love these Japanese cellphone novels. Do you know these things?

Yeah, you’re into them?
I fucking love these things man. The idea that you’re on a fucking train and reading little serial installments of a novel on your phone. I mean, wow! What a good use for a goddamn phone. I think about the shit I do on my phone: I text you and say, “What’s up?” You text me back, “Uh, nothing”. I text you back, “That’s dope”. Great – good use of fucking 6,000 years of technology. At least a cellphone novel, no matter how frivolous, engages you in narrative, engages you in other people’s imaginations. It’s just wonderful. There’s also some really great webcomics out there. That’s another interesting new serial form. And who hasn’t lost their shit, watching some of these flash animations that the kids kick out? I’m just touching on a few things here. There’s a lot of fucking weird shit happening, man. I’m not a big techie at all, my students be laughing at me all the time, but I’m not a Luddite, you know? I think you just have to always keep your knife in hand against the corporate master. As long as you do that, you can enter into these forms – as long as you have a rather critical mind. It’s a very, very healthy stance. It’s this unthinking, uncritical, all-embracive fucking tech boosterism that’s going to get us plugged into the Matrix.

Can you share with us what you’re working on now, writing wise?
I’m kind of writing, or attempting to write, a crazy science fiction novel. It’s kind of insane. But I never expect people are going to respond to what I write with a [speaks in a smarmy movie producer’s voice], “Oh Junot, love it baby”. When I was writing my last book, I told people it was about a fat Dominican nerd and an almost forgotten 20th-century dictatorship and they looked at me like I was fucking crazy. Now I’m writing a science fiction novel about the end of humanity. It sounds so stupid. [Laughs]

Yeah, I wondered whether you would continue to tell the story of your origins and the Dominican story in America, or would move in what might constitute a new direction for you.
Well, my joke about this science fiction book is that it’s just Dominicans in space. I sort of possess that very peculiar form of American narcissism that cannot imagine a future without itself being absolutely central. It’s just that in my version I can’t imagine a future without Dominicans being absolutely central.

In your acceptance speech for the Pulitzer Prize you said, “For any young person who’s attempting to make art against all the odds, I hope this can be inspiration and motivation”. Hong Kong is a place that many readers, writers and artists probably find somewhat inhospitable to the things they really adore. It’s a commerce-driven city that can at times feel rather culturally arid, or the show of money can make cultural endeavours seem somewhat insignificant. Oscar Wao is a character who harbours loves and obsessions in a world that’s indifferent to them and I wonder whether you’ve experienced any of that yourself.
I think what you’ve just described about Hong Kong holds true for Tokyo, or New York, or even a place like Santo Domingo, and it feels very, very true to me. I always feel like I’m chipping away at art, while everyone’s busy running into the Salvatore Ferragamo stores, where someone’s handbag is more interesting to them than any sculpture, painting, novel or art show. It strikes me, at least in my experience, that this is just the lot of the artist. Part of the reason I go to writing festivals is because it’s one of the only places where I get to meet, in an intimate way, my tribe. All these other people got malls, and stores, and lounges and clubs – which I do like – but they have all these places where they can congregate and pursue their consumer capitalist dreams. But you know, for those of us who love books, man, there’s very few places where books are celebrated.

So how did you cope with that, before success came?
How don’t you? You don’t got many choices. This is a deeply dehumanising civilisation that does everything possible to disconnect you from your higher self. Art is an extension of your higher self. It seeks to interact with it. Being an artist is just a more explicit form of finding out how to stay human when you’re being told that the only thing that matters is acquisition, and that the greatest virtue is competition, and that the only religion is hierarchy. How do you stay human? You’ve just got to. There’s no other choice, man. And we sometimes lose our way, we sometimes lose our way, but you gotta find your way back, you know?

Yeah, but more specifically, how did you do that? Maybe that’s a difficult…
Nah, it’s an easy one. By cleaving to all the parts of myself that exist outside of a price tag, by cleaving to all the forms and all the joys that have little to do with status or price tags. The things that are art for me. Not art that can be purchased, but art – enjoying a novel, or a poem, or going to see an exhibit. Civic responsibility, which isn’t art, but again, it connects you to your higher self. A society that requires people to be atomised so it can sell to you finds civic engagement anathema. All these things help.

So what is it like for you when you turn up at a lit fest and find yourself on the inside, around people who love the things you love? Is it a relief or a little uneasy?
No, it’s a joy. The human condition is a deeply uneasy one; so I’m going to be uneasy whether I’m at the gym or at the airport. It’s just wonderful to be around folks where everyone wants to talk and swap stories about books. How often does that happen, bro?

Junot Diaz speaks at Wei Hing Theatre at the City University of Hong Kong on March 15 and at The Pawn (3/F, 62 Johnston Rd, Wan Chai) on March 16. Book tickets at www.festival.org.hk. For more Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival events see Around Town, p53.

For full listings see: www.timeout.com.hk/books.