{Excerpted from Of Power and The American Condition, an interview with Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Junot Diaz and Sonora Review’s PR Griffis and Mika Taylor.}
“Diaz: Sure, but the Egyptians didn’t breed people. My interest is that the Dominican Republic was just kind of a proxy for talking about what I consider The American Condition. I know that the book makes strong arguments to point out that they are analogous, that the Dominican Republic and the United States are just so uncommon. For me, it was more that The American Condition cannot be understood if we only deploy realistic narrative lenses to understand it. The American Condition is the condition of Melville, it’s the condition of Faulkner, and it’s the condition we’re always talking about, and yet all of them, in their attempts to embrace what we call The American Condition, they all end up having to deploy bizarre fucking narratives, because otherwise you can’t get your arms around it fully. Part of what makes Cormac McCarthy and Toni Morrison very interesting is that both of them understand and are interested in The American Condition – which is apocalyptic, which is a wrestling between curse and blessing – and I feel like their work is a perfect example of how we cannot understand ourselves without deploying a full range of narrative devices we’ve invented, and that includes science fiction, horror, fantasy, because it’s only there that we admit what’s really happened to us. It’s only in science fiction that you actually get the preoccupations that 99% of the people live under, which is totalizing power. If you only read literary traditional fictional work, you would never think there are any dictators.”
