(Literatures of The Americas) Ellen McCracken (Auth.) - Paratexts and Performance in The Novels of Junot Díaz and Sandra Cisneros-Palgrave Macmillan US (2016)

Paratexts and Performance in the Novels of Junot Díaz
and Sandra Cisneros
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0001
Literatures of the Americas
ABOUT THE SERIES
This series seeks to bring forth contemporary critical interventions within a hemispheric perspective,
with an emphasis on perspectives from Latin America. Books in the series highlight work that explores
concerns in literature in different cultural contexts across historical and geographical boundaries and also
include work on the specific Latina/o realities in the United States. Designed to explore key questions
confronting contemporary issues of literary and cultural import, Literatures of the Americas is rooted in
traditional approaches to literary criticism but seeks to include cutting-edge scholarship using theories
from postcolonial, critical race, and ecofeminist approaches.
SERIES EDITOR
Norma E. Cantú currently serves as Professor of US Latin@ Studies at the University of Missouri, Kansas
City, USA. She has published widely in the areas of folklore, literary studies, women’s studies, and border
studies. Her numerous publications include the award-winning novel, Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en
la Frontera that chronicles her coming-of-age in Laredo, Texas. The (co)edited volumes include: Chicana
Traditions: Continuity and Change; Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos; Paths to Discovery:
Autobiographies of Chicanas with Careers in Mathematics, Science, and Engineering; Moctezuma’s Table: Rolando
Briseño’s Chicano Tablescapes; and Ofrenda: Liliana Wilson’s Art of Dissidence and Dreams. She is cofounder of
CantoMundo, a space for Latin@ poets and a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop; her poetry has
appeared in Vandal, Prairie Schooner, and Feminist Studies Journal among many other venues.
Books in the Series:
Pilar Melero
MYTHOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTS OF MEXIAN FEMININITY
Ricardo F. Vivancos Pérez
RADICAL CHICANA POETICS
Edited by Nieves Pascual Soler and Meredith E. Abarca
RETHINKING CHICANO/A LITERATURE THROUGH FOOD: POSTNATIONAL APPETITES
Paulo Moreira
LITERARY AND CULTURAL RELATIONS BETWEEN BRAZIL AND MEXICO: DEEP
UNDERCURRENTS
Edited by Debra A. Castillo and Stuart A. Day
MEXICAN PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS
Edited by Brian L. Price, César A. Salgado, and John Pedro Schwartz
TRANSLATIN JOYCE: GLOBAL TRANSMISSIONS IN IBERO-AMERICAN LITERATURE
Edited by Ellie D. Hernández and Eliza Rodriguez y Gibson
THE UNMAKING OF LATINA/O CITIZENSHIP: CULTURE, POLITICS, AND AESTHETICS
Marco Katz Montiel
MUSIC AND IDENTITY IN TWENTIETHCENTURY LITERATURE FROM OUR AMERICA:
NOTEWORTHY PROTAGONISTS
Edited by Timothy R. Robbins and José Eduardo González
NEW TRENDS IN CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN NARRATIVE: POST-NATIONAL
LITERATURES AND THE CANON
Edited by Ignacio López-Calvo
ROBERTO BOLAÑO, A LESS DISTANT STAR: CRITICAL ESSAYS
Rebecca Janzen
THE NATIONAL BODY IN MEXICAN LITERATURE: COLLECTIVE CHALLENGES TO
BIOPOLITICAL CONTROL
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0001
Paratexts and
Performance in the
Novels of Junot Díaz
and Sandra Cisneros
Ellen McCracken
Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, University of
California, Santa Barbara, USA
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0001
paratexts and performance in the novels of junot díaz and
sandra cisneros
Copyright © Ellen McCracken, 2016.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2016 978-1-137-60261-9
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this

publication may be made without written permission.
No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence
permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS.
Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
First published 2016 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN
The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers
Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG21 6XS.
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One New York Plaza, Suite 4500 New York, NY 10004–1562.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
ISBN: 978–1–349–88817–7
E-PDF ISBN: 978–1–137–60360–9
doi: 10.1057/9781137603609
Distribution in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world is by Palgrave
Macmillan®, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in
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Contents
List of Figures vi
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 Epitextual and Peritextual Portals to
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 12
2 Autographic Peritexts and Expanding
Footnotes in Díaz’s Novel 45
3 Navigating Exterior Networks to Caramelo 72
4 Peritextual Thresholds of the Material
Print Artifact 101
Epilogue 127
References 133
Index 135
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0001 v
List of Figures
1.1 Front cover, Drown 15
1.2 Goodreads ratings for The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao, February 8, 2015 31
1.3 Front cover, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 33
3.1 Sandra Cisneros, 2015 Fifth Star Awards,
Chicago 74
3.2 Sandra Cisneros, “Writing in My Pajamas”
presentation, November 17, 2010 76
3.3 Interior of Sandra Cisneros’s Guenther Street
House, San Antonio, Texas, 2014 77
vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0002
Acknowledgments
Interior of Sandra Cisneros’s Guenther Street house, cour-
tesy Phyllis Browning Company.
Front covers of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of
Oscar Wao, courtesy Penguin Random House.
Goodreads ratings for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar
Wao, © 2015, Goodreads, Inc., courtesy Goodreads, Inc.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0003 vii

Introduction
Abstract: The stellar novels of Junot Díaz and Sandra
Cisneros, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and
Caramelo, respectively, emerge in an age when Latino
ethnicity is often marketed as an exotic commodity. As
a result, a paratextual network of the performance of
latinidad overlays the writers and their cultural creation.
Both novelists interact with this expectation inside
and outside the books, inviting readers to pass through
multiple paratextual portals as they engage with the
texts. Gérard Genette’s analysis of paratexts—the framing
elements inside and outside literary texts that shape the
reading process—is expanded in this study with a broader
conceptualization for the digital age. The interplay of
populist and hegemonic multiculturalism undergirds many
of the paratextual networks of the two novels.
McCracken, Ellen. Paratexts and Performance

in the Novels of Junot Díaz and Sandra Cisneros.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
doi: 10.1057/9781137603609.0004.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0004 1
2 Paratexts and Performance in Díaz and Cisneros
In the opening decades of the 21st century, two powerful Latino novel-
ists took center-stage on the American literary scene. One had migrated
to the US at age six, escaping poverty and the legacy of dictatorship in
the Dominican Republic and the other was born in the US to a Mexican
immigrant father and Mexican-American mother. After publishing
poetry, short stories, and essays, both released their long-awaited novels
in the opening decade of the new millennium to great acclaim.1 Firmly
anchoring their places of honor in the American literary canon, these
magnum opuses mark a new phase of post-1960s US-Latino literature:
lengthy experimental, dense fiction representing nine to ten years of
authorial labor rises to the top and is valorized as stellar American litera-
ture, not a subset or tributary of the canon.
These two novels of Junot Díaz and Sandra Cisneros did not achieve
their success in a vacuum. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007)
and Caramelo (2002) trace their literary acumen and success to the
political and cultural movements for equality in American society
that Chicanos and Latinos waged from the late 1960s on. Seeking the
political rights and cultural recognition that the ideology of the melt-
ing pot and economic segregation denied them, US Latinos refused
the symbolic meltdown with other immigrants into the metaphorical
pot. They militated for equality and full rights in American society and
proudly developed their unique culture and history that the mainstream
had urged them to repress and ultimately erase. US Latinos and other
minority groups engaged in forms of populist multiculturalism that
would soon be overcoded by hegemonic multiculturalism—an attempt
to control and contain these contestational movements.
Soon after the onset of these political and cultural movements that
demanded recognition and acceptance of marginalized cultures in the
US—what I term populist multiculturalism or multiculturalism from
below—institutions and corporations began to seek ways to control and
profit from these movements—what can be termed hegemonic multi-
culturalism. After student and faculty demands for courses and insti-
tutional affirmation on university campuses, centers and departments
were established to recognize and valorize these newly conceived ethnic
and racial subjectivities. Administrators saw such measures as a way to
contain this militancy, although they employed celebratory ideologies
to proudly characterize their magnanimity. In the commercial sector,
the mass media and publishing houses scrambled to find ways to profit
economically from these movements. Especially relevant to this study
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0004
Introduction 3
is the desire of mainstream US book publishers in the 1980s to sign

contracts with Latino writers, whom a handful of literary agents now
also sought out in order to themselves profit from multiculturalism from
below. These publishers then marketed their new Latino writers as what
I term “postmodern ethnic commodities,” with stereotypic cover images
of romanticized latinidad, tropes of exotic Otherness, and various reduc-
tive rhetorical strategies.2
The writing of Sandra Cisneros and Junot Díaz is situated in and
shaped by these important late 20th century phenomena. Thirteen
years apart in age, they came of literary age in slightly different histor-
ical moments. Cisneros was a young college student at the height of the
Chicano Movement in the mid-1970s, having experienced the turbulent
1960s in her formative years and the consciousness-changing anti-war
movement in the Vietnam era. Díaz, in contrast, born on the last day
of 1968 in the Dominican Republic, immigrated to the US at age six.
He comes of age in the 1980s, as a few selected Latinos are beginning
to achieve mainstream recognition, and hegemonic multiculturalism
continually interacts with new forms of populist multiculturalism that
has changed in the Post-Movement period. Both writers grew up in
conditions of poverty in urban centers. Both struggled for many years
to pursue creative writing and were dedicated to crafting first-rate art no
matter how long it took, rather than jumping on the bandwagon of mass
culture to ease their economic conditions. Nonetheless, it is unlikely
that without the Chicano/Latino Movement and the new modalities of
publishing and canon formation in the late 20th century these talented
writers would have achieved the cultural and economic valorization
they have attained. This movement gave impetus to both writers to be
proud of their latinidad and to express it creatively in new ways. Populist
multiculturalism also fomented national interest in Latino culture, and
hegemonic multiculturalism functioned to distribute the work of these
talented writers to a wide audience.
The two magnum opuses are hemispheric novels that link North
American identity to Latin America. As a first-generation immigrant,
Díaz grew up in the Dominican Republic and the US, strongly affected
by the brutalities of the 31-year dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo.
On the interstices of second- and third-generation immigrant conscious-
ness, Cisneros seeks in Caramelo to re-trace her father’s lost homeland
Mexico of which she had only intermittent experience growing up. In
both texts, readers experience a broader definition of America, both
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0004
non-melting-pot US-Latino culture and its integral sibling in Latin

America, whether that of a small Caribbean island or the large adjacent
country to our south about whose history we know so little. The “manda-
tory two seconds of Dominican history” (Brief, 2n1) that US students
receive which Díaz seeks to remedy with his novel might also aptly char-
acterize the minimal or non-existent teaching of Mexican history in US
schools.
As Cisneros and Díaz worked for years on these major novels, hege-
monic multiculturalism continued to exert pressure on both writers to
finish their books so that publishers could begin to make money from
these attractive cultural products. Neither writer gave in to these pres-
sures, and the result is elaborately crafted experimental works as differ-
ent as night and day yet with several striking similarities. Neither writer
subordinated artistic vision to the market’s desire for a saleable ethnic
writer who would exude ethnicity stereotypically to foment quick sales
and consumption.3 Nonetheless, two palpably different varieties of post-
modern ethnicity pervade the novels and their paratextual overlays. In
these tropes both populist and hegemonic multiculturalism are at work,
a dynamic I investigate in this book. That is, situated in the early 21st
century, how are these two immensely successful US-Latino writers over-
lain with the performance of latinidad both in their public presentation
of the self and in their writing? How do the expectations of hegemonic
multiculturalism and the self-valorizing insights of populist multicul-
turalism come together in these works? Here I focus on the paratextual
network of performance through which this duality is enacted textually
and extra-textually.
Paratexts and the digital age
In the 1980s French theorist Gérard Genette carefully delineated a wide

network of framing elements inside and outside of literary texts that
shape the reading process of printed books although they are not part
of the text proper. He termed these paratexts—elements such as book
covers, epigraphs, footnotes, layout, author interviews, and publishers’
ads—entities that surround the main text and affect its interpretation.
This material is neither exterior nor interior to the literary text, but stands
on the threshold—the title of Genette’s classic 1987 study, Seuils. In a
complex taxonomy that Genette developed studying several centuries of
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0004
Introduction 5
print culture, he distinguished between peritexts, those inside or materi-

ally attached to the book proper—the covers, the name of the author,
the dedication, preface, chapter headings, and notes—and epitexts that
surround the book such as advertisements, author interviews, reviews,
and commentaries. These in turn can be autographic (created by the
author) or allographic (created by the publisher or others) in Genette’s
schema.4
Genette’s definition of paratext is both expansive and restrictive. In
broader characterizations, he notes that paratexts are the material that
enables books to be offered to the public as books; paratexts “surround
and extend [the text] precisely to present it”; they point toward the text,
but also turn toward “the world’s discourse about the text” (1–2). In a
key restrictive element of his definition, however, Genette argues that
paratexts should be understood as extensions of the authorial discourse
in that they strongly shape the text’s meaning. They are to one degree
or another authorized by the author or the author’s agents. In Genette’s
schema, critical commentary about a book not sanctioned even indir-
ectly by the publisher or author would not be a paratext, whereas a semi-
official review “somewhat ‘remote controlled’ by authorial instructions”
(348) is paratextual.
Several decades after Genette’s classic study, the model of the portal is
useful to understand the reshaping function of paratexts. These ports of
entry through which we navigate before, during, and after reading the
text effectively reconstitute the literary work so that it is unstable and
mutating. The concept of the paratextual portal relates also to Michel
de Certeau’s formulations on the reader as poacher, but adds key elem-
ents “outside” the text that de Certeau does not focus on. He argues that
readers wander through the imposed system of the authorial text and
that every reading modifies its object. The literary text is a construction
produced by the reader. “Readers are travelers, moving across lands
belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across the
fields they did not write.” (174). Where de Certeau suggests an almost
anarchistic “infinite plurality of meanings,” I would argue that para-
texts shape and limit to various degrees this poaching activity. Readers
encounter many paratextual strategies within the text and outside it that
serve as portals through which they begin to navigate the text.
Here I expand on Genette’s foundational work with a broader concep-
tualization of paratexts that includes material not necessarily sanctioned
by the author or publisher that has a profound shaping relationship to
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0004
the literary work. In the early 21st century, the Internet increases the
range, authorship, and reach of the paratextual portals through which
readers engage with printed literary texts; as they surround the text, these
portals also present it to readers. Additionally, authors now have more
access to commentary, ratings, and other material that readers upload
to the Internet; this newly available material from a wider spectrum of
both national and international readers affects the writer’s relationship
to creative production, opening new dialogic portals to both published
texts and future projects. Chica-lit writer Alisa Valdés-Rodríguez, for
example, asked fans on her website to rate three possibilities for future
novels, announcing what her next novel would be based on the results.5
Further, digital editions of texts frequently bring material that has trad-
itionally been extra-textual inside the text and do so in new ways. Many
other paratextual elements now function in digital versions of books that
need to be considered in updating Genette’s work in the 21st century.
Reading literature in the digital age has widely expanded the variety
of paratexts produced and public access to them. The participatory
advances of Web 2.0 now allow greater numbers of people to commu-
nicate about culture and a significant increase in paratexts. Readers can
annotate texts on the web, see quantitative ratings of books from thou-
sands of other people, blog about books and create podcasts or videos
about them, form small and large discussion communities, comment
on books while reading and publically document progress through the
book, participate in creating tags that link associative features, and view
related books to read through algorithmic suggestions. The individual-
ism and perceived passivity traditionally associated with reading novels
is rapidly changing, and a vast new network of participatory paratexts
invite people into ad hoc digital micro communities of readers. It is no
longer primarily authors and publishers who overlay paratexts on liter-
ary creation; Genette’s category of allographic paratext must now be
expanded to include a wider public’s participatory interventions.
Rather than proceeding horizontally from the beginning to the end
of a book, many interruptions now invite readers to pursue vertical
relations with other material. When reading the print book, readers may
stop to check an allusion on the Internet and then move from links on
an opened web page to other pages that have their own hot links. These
vertical paths are more easily accessed when reading on digital devices
but function as well for readers of printed works. Similarly, people some-
times begin to read a book after having seen a comment or description
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0004
Introduction 7
of it on Facebook or Twitter, sometimes with a link to the book. Such

comments and recommendations on social media spawn niche, ad hoc
communities that are organized vertically, in contrast to the horizontal
model of broadcasting to wide audiences in traditional media.
Paratexts and performance

I argue here that crucial elements of the performance of Latino ethnicity
in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Caramelo are constructed
through new networks of paratexts that constitute a key element of the
creative process of Latino literary production in 21st century America.
A unique set of authorial and allographic paratexts functions as portals
to shape reading before, during, and after engaging with the text proper.
The interplay of populist and hegemonic multiculturalism undergirds
many of the elements in these paratextual networks, as we will see.
Now, digital interfaces reshape reading through very different peritexts
and epitexts. Although both novels were published initially in print,
new peritexts change their textuality when they are published and read
in digital formats. Additionally, a wide variety of new epitexts on the
Internet surround both the print and digital versions, such as images,
ratings, reviews, and new prices in online stores such as Amazon. Blogs,
webpages, Twitter, and Facebook feeds are new epitextual trajectories
of the novels that function like two-way streets—away from and into
the main text of each novel. In this sense, centrifugal and centripetal
paratexts overlay Díaz’s and Cisneros’s novels, offering the writers new
performative spaces to extend and expand upon their books. If such
paratexts help to sell more books, they function at the same time as a
crucial space for extending creativity in new ways.
Two especially rich examples of such epitexts in the digital age are
Cisneros’s multi-layered website and Díaz’s 2013 intervention on Poetry
Genius in which he added 23 new verbal/visual footnotes to his 2007
novel. Among the many paratexts on Cisneros’s site, for example, is her
“Guestbook” in which she carries on an epistolary commentary with
readers about her books. Since the author has written these comments,
they function in a sense as new autographic footnotes added to her
published writing. More overtly invoking this gesture, Díaz creatively
adds 23 explanatory footnotes to footnote 32 of the novel on the Poetry
Genius website. If the printed text normally precludes such expansion,
these 21st century digital-age writers celebrate the unfinalizability of
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0004
discourse that Bakhtin theorized, by transcending the material contain-

ment of the printed text. These epitexts fit into the category Genette
terms delayed epitexts—authorial commentary outside the novel proper,
created months and sometimes years after publication.
Today, a necessary component of the interpretive process is engage-
ment with these digital paratexts, which continue to grow in number
and reach wider audiences before and after a book’s publication. The
peritexts of a novel change in print and digital versions, offering read-
ers varying portals that affect interpretation. The digital format adds a
number of new peritexts, and changes some of those that readers of the
print version encounter. Similarly, an extensive new array of performa-
tive epitexts created and disseminated since the availability of Web 2.0
now overlays reading in the digital age, whether one reads the print or
digital version of a book.
Despite the advances in the last five years of publishing and reading
books in digital formats on portable devices such as the Kindle, the iPad,
and smart phones, a certain degree of primitivism still characterizes
this new reading technology. Errors in digitization, distortion of some
the paratexts of the original print versions, changes in typography and
layout, the new labor needed for readers to navigate through the novels,
and the distractions of multitasking that interrupt reading are some of
the factors that change the textuality of novels such as Caramelo and
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao when read digitally on small port-
able devices. Consequently, in analyzing the peritexts of these novels,
this study focuses on the original hard cover print editions, which, in
combination with the only slightly changed paperback editions, account
for the material mode in which most readers have accessed the novels
up to this point. As we will see, these print editions are at the same time
overlain with a vast number of new epitextual portals widely available on
the Internet.
The chapters that follow focus on the modes in which certain key
paratexts enact the performance of latinidad in these novels through
a tightly woven interplay between hegemonic and populist multicul-
turalism. If mainstream multiculturalism finds it convenient to reduce
Latinos to a single category of ethnicity to sell books, the writers will
perform that ethnicity in their own highly individualized ways. Study
of these performative paratextual networks offers a different optic into
the unique modes of creativity that Cisneros and Díaz construct. While,
for example, both employ the paratextual strategy of extensive footnotes
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0004
Introduction 9
in their novels, the notes take distinct forms and serve distinct narra-
tive ends in each text. If Random House insists on stereotypical, exotic
images of Chicanas on the covers of Cisneros’s books, she rearticulates
that exoticism in her playful vestimentary performances at most of her
public appearances. In their novels and through paratextual perform-
ance both writers engage with and reconfigure stereotypical notions of
latinidad disseminated from above.
In analyzing the paratexts that overlay and shape the primary text
of these two key novels by Díaz and Cisneros, I begin with the exterior
elements not strictly elements of the text proper (epitexts) and follow
with analysis the peritexts attached to each novel. Chapter 1 examines
some of the key epitextual portals through which readers pass before,
during, and after reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and then
the allographic peritexts designed and controlled by the publishers
and materially attached to the book. An extensive evolving network of
public autographic epitexts shapes the reading of the masterful novel. At
various stages of the reading process, we encounter interviews, public
appearances, and social media posts by Díaz that interact with and shape
our understanding of the text. Further, in the age of Web 2.0, readers
themselves write about the text in more broad public venues. Crowd-
sourced annotations online explain Díaz’s esoteric allusions to aid others
reading the novel. Blogs, the “Popular Highlights” feature on the Kindle,
and a wide range of allographic commentary, reviews, and discussions
about the novel on the Web are key new epitexts that overlay Oscar Wao
in the digital age. Equally important are the allographic peritexts that the
publisher designs in the book or attached to it such as the cover, graph-
ics, and formatting. Like the epitexts, they are key portals through which
readers process the novel.
Chapter 2 focuses on the peritexts “inside” the text itself, and the
unique migration of a key authorial peritext to a space outside the
novel in an innovative digital experiment that Díaz undertook in 2013.
The publisher’s peritextual portals such as the images and text on the
cover, interior graphics, formatting patterns, and alterations that occur
in digital versions are outside authorial control and sometimes conflict
with and distort the authorial creation. At the same time, there exists
a network of authorially created peritexts such as the dedication,
epigraphs, chapter titles, and footnotes that profoundly affect reading
and textuality. One of the most significant of these autographic peritexts
is the extensive network of footnotes Díaz includes in the novel. And in
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an exciting digital intervention, he created 23 new footnotes for the novel

on the online site Poetry Genius, as “footnotes to a footnote,” extending
the novel beyond its borders while carrying on the paratextual strategy
of autographic footnotes.
The next two chapters turn to Cisneros’s masterful novel, Caramelo,
focusing on epitexts and peritexts, respectively. In Chapter 3, I examine
several epitexts that Cisneros herself creates centered on dramatic and
performative presentations of the self that deploy spectacles of ethnicity.
These authorial epitexts in which Cisneros performs latinidad function
as cognitive thresholds of the reading experience, and prepare readers
for similar strategies of performance in the novel. Joining these paratexts
are delayed authorial epitexts such as interviews and the material on her
website, and allographic epitexts such as the publisher’s Facebook page
for Cisneros and her work. The epitextual network also includes what
I term “crowd-sourced advertising” for the novel including reviews,
commentary, and ratings on sites such as Amazon and Goodreads. This
extensive and expanding network of epitexts, both auto- and allographic,
combines elements of hegemonic and populist multiculturalism.
Chapter 4 examines the peritexts that are materially a part of Caramelo,
including the cover, layout, design, and graphics created and controlled
by the publisher, along with key autographic peritexts such as the front
and back matter, epigraphs, internal titles, and the extensive footnotes.
Cisneros’s 40 notes at the end of chapters include footnotes to footnotes.
Like Díaz who added notes online to the finished novel, overlaying the
text with a sense of unfinalizability, the authorial voice in Caramelo over-
flows itself as Cisneros adds notes to notes.
Focusing on the vast paratextual networks inside and outside these
two important novels offers crucial information about textuality and
interpretation. Analyzing the peritexts, for example, is an alternate
point of entry into navigating these lengthy novels and reveals perhaps
previously unnoticed elements of the artistic constructs. Given the
vast amount of material to be processed in reading these long books,
readers may overlook, for example, the important ways in which the
ten epigraphs in Caramelo point backwards and forward to adjacent
elements in the text, offering readers hermeneutic challenges essential
for understanding the novel. Besides the information that the footnotes
present, how does a longitudinal view of their placement in the novel
offer readers another interpretive strategy? If a first perusal of the infor-
mation in the Chronology leaves readers thinking it is primarily about
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Introduction 11
Mexican history, how does a quantitative analysis of the entries change

that impression?
An in-depth study of paratexts allows new points of entry into these
novels. Rather than reading a book from page one to the end, a study
of the network of paratexts restructures the text analytically through
diverse thresholds and lenses. We will read from numerous extra-textual
portals into the novel, from paratexts overlain on the text itself, and by
examining new centripetal paratexts that expand the novel on an inward
vector. The metaphor of a multivalent digital network with new nodes
and intersections helps to visualize how a reading through paratexts
reshapes understanding of these novels. While individual readers will
likely engage with only some of these paratexts, an understanding of
the overall scope and variety of these thresholds turns attention to their
great potential to affect interpretation.
Notes
1 Díaz and Cisneros had earlier published volumes of stories, Drown (1996),
The House on Mango Street (1984), and Woman Hollering Creek and other Stories
(1991). Some consider The House on Mango Street to be a novel. I classify it as
a collection or story cycle, a hybrid genre between the novel and short story
similar to collections such as Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio or Pedro
Juan Soto’s Spiks.
2 See, McCracken, New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern
Ethnicity. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999.
3 Although Díaz published an early version of the narrative in The New Yorker,
he insisted on the painstaking, disciplined work for years afterwards that was
necessary to achieve his artistic vision.
4 See Palimpsestes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1981) for Genette’s early
formulation of the concept of the paratext and Seuils (Paris: Editions du
Seuil, 1987) for his extensive, wide-ranging study of the phenomenon.
5 Panel discussion with Alisa Valdés-Rodríguez, Santa Barbara Book and
Author Festival, Sep. 29, 2007.
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1
Epitextual and Peritextual
Portals to The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao
Abstract: A constellation of epitexts (paratexts not
materially attached to the book) is created by the author,
publisher, and the public. At various stages of reading,
people encounter interviews, and social media posts by
Díaz that interact with and shape understanding of the
novel. In the age of Web 2.0, readers themselves also write
about the book in broad public venues. Crowd-sourced
annotations online explain Díaz’s allusions. Blogs and a
wide range of non-authorial commentary, reviews, and
discussions about the novel online are new epitexts that
overlay Oscar Wao in the digital age. Attached to the book
are key allographic peritexts. These peritextual portals
such as the front cover, interior graphics, formatting, and
alterations in the digital version affect interpretation and
are largely outside authorial control..

doi: 10.1057/9781137603609.0005.
12 DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0005
Epitexts and Peritexts in Oscar Wao 13
Early on in his career, American writer Jimmy Santiago Baca was invited
to meet with powerful literary agent Susan Bergholz in New York City to
discuss signing with her. He listened to her grand plans to market him
as a Latino writer at this key moment in American history when minor-
ity groups demanded inclusion on their own terms into the American
literary canon. As I have argued, one result of the militant movements of
ethnic and racial minorities of pride and self-assertion in the 1960s and
1970s was American capitalism’s attempts to profit from these groups.
Mainstream US publishers, for example, began snapping up the new
writing, especially that of women, and marketed them as ethnic and
racial commodities. This phenomenon is an important part of hege-
monic multiculturalism—a system of material and ideological practices
that attempts to contain and profit from the populist multiculturalism
that arose in the 1960s and 1970s during the Chicano and Black Power
Movements.
Jimmy Santiago Baca turned Bergholz’s proposals down. “I did not
want to be boxed and marketed in this way,” he recounts. Instead, he
rose to renown in the American literary canon without such marketing,
and attained international recognition, with his books translated into 31
languages. Japanese visitors sit outside the Albuquerque house he rebuilt
after it burned, described in his poem “Meditations on the South Valley,”
and point to lines from the poem that correlate to the house.1 After
sending the noted American poet Denise Levertov his poems written in
prison, Baca rose to the top on the strength of his writing, published by
New Directions, Grove Press, and Heinemann. He did not escape the
social forces of multiculturalism from above but he chose not to stra-
tegically insert himself into this milieu as a marketing device.
In contrast, as we will see in Chapter 3, from the start Bergholz and
Random House marketed top Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros as a post-
modern ethnic commodity. A superb writer, Cisneros may well have
risen to the top on her own, as did Baca, without the ethnic marketing.
Both writers now command $10,000 for speaking engagements and
make six-figure incomes from book royalties. In contrast to Baca’s stark
black-and-white self-presentation, Cisneros performs ethnicity with
bright colors and ethnic images such as Virgin of Guadalupe jewelry and
clothing and a “Budda-lupe” tattoo. Where many of Baca’s covers have
black-and-white images, Cisneros’s are always brightly colored.
Regardless of the style of marketing, however, both writers and their
texts are inescapably imbricated with the often stereotypical images of
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Latino ethnicity predominant in American society. Whether deliberate

and intentional as in Cisneros’s case, or secondary to a great poet’s ascen-
sion to the American literary canon as in Baca’s case, both publishers
and writers create extensive paratextual networks that sometimes play
on ethnicity and always change the original text, extending it beyond
its borders in new textual formations. And, in addition to the paratexts
representing stereotypical latinidad and a generalized ethnic otherness, a
further set of evolving paratextual formations shapes US Latino literary
writing, causing these texts to be mutable and instable as they interact
with the dynamic new paratextual networks that overlay them. Both
print and digital versions of these books become mutable texts, changed
by the interpretive portals that paratexts create.
Junot Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life
of Oscar Wao (2007) is one such unstable text shaped by a continuing
series of peritexts and epitexts. Some are authorially instigated, others
are market based, and still others are constructed by readers. There is
intermixture among these categories, and all function to “create” the text
in various ways. Both commercial and non-commercial paratexts funda-
mentally affect markets and circulation patterns as they reconfigure the
text to reach a wide variety of consumers. The overtly commercial para-
texts constructed by the marketing department of the Penguin subsid-
iary Riverhead or Amazon’s Author Page contrast readers’ blogs which
are written from various motives, usually non-commercial. Díaz’s use of
peritexts such as the 33 footnotes in the novel combines with his public
epitexts such as interviews and appearances, linking the aesthetic to the
commercial. Both types of paratextual formations work to construct
writers and their works as postmodern ethnic commodities.
The vast paratextual network that structures and overlays the novel
combines elements of hegemonic and populist multiculturalism. Readers
are invited to embark on centripetal navigational paths into the novel
from external epitexts such as a TV interview or the Amazon webpage.
Similarly, they are urged to take centrifugal paths out of the novel to
the vast, evolving network of external epitexts such as Goodreads. More
than ever, the digital age invites readers to engage in more extensive
modes of poaching epitextual artifacts. Although the epitextual fields
they navigate as nomads are more extensive than in previous historical
periods, readers now have a few more options in which to write their
own interpretive epitexts about the novel and upload this material into
the immense paratextual network they navigate.
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Public autographic epitexts
Díaz’s novel is overlain with an especially rich and continually expanding

network of exterior paratexts. As the author of Drown, the 1996 collection
of sparse, gritty tales about coming of age in the Dominican Republic
and the US, Díaz entered the American literary scene as a 27-year-old
new Latino voice, dubbed by Newsweek as one of “the new faces of 1996.”2
The dark image on the book’s cover evokes the nation’s larger fear of
Latino barrios and syncs with similar stark black-and-white images on
the covers of male writers such as Jimmy Santiago Baca.
figure 1.1 Front cover, Drown, Front cover photograph © Ken Schles, courtesy
Penguin Random House
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The new Dominican-American literary star was reported to

have received a six-figure, two-book contract, and later editions of
Drown added new advertising paratexts such as the phrase “National
Bestseller” above the title, and superimposed the San Francisco
Chronicle’s endorsement on the photograph: “Stunning—a front-line
report on the ambivalent promise of the American dream.” Drown then
functions as part of the paratextual network of Díaz’s 2007 novel, as
references to it are embedded in book reviews, ads, and on the front
cover of the new book.
Díaz struggled to complete his second book, eventually holing up with
fellow writer Francisco Goldman in Mexico City, where the character
Oscar Wao came to him as he worked on a longer manuscript about the
destruction of New York City by a psychic terrorist. In the last week of
December 2000, he published 35 pages of the Oscar Wao material in the
New Yorker where he had previously published other stories. Nonetheless,
he did not think the subject was “cool” enough and continued writing
his Akira fantasy about New York City until reality intervened with the
9/11 terrorist attacks.3
From 2000 on, readers of the New Yorker were situated within a very
long paratextual portal written by the author that did not bring them
to interpretive negotiation with the full novel until Fall 2007. After
having reduced 160 pages of the manuscript in progress to 35 pages for
the New Yorker, Díaz then enlarged the novel for six more years. The
New Yorker piece is a mini version of the entire plot of the larger novel
without footnotes, the extensive sci-fi fantasy allusions, the Dominican
history, or the transgressive language. It recounts Oscar’s life in New
Jersey from age seven to his violent death in the Dominican Republic
in his 20s. While a film preview rapidly intercalates fragments of the
movie non-chronologically to entice viewers to pay to see the full
film, Díaz’s “preview” of the novel is a capsule version of the entire
book that readers engage with for perhaps an hour of concentrated
reading. This aesthetic paratext, with its underlying commercial func-
tion of selling both the magazine and the future book, whets readers’
appetite, inserting them within a lengthy portal of desire to read the
full novel.
While readers of the hardcover novel released in October 2007
approached it through authorial epitextual portals such as Drown, the New
Yorker piece, book reviews, and book tour appearances, the novel mutated
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significantly with the announcement a few months later that it had won
the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. Díaz had been positioned within the American
literary canon in articles about him that refer to Melville such as “Chasing
the Whale” in Poets and Writers (September/October 2007), through the
novel’s title which evokes a famous story by Hemingway, and the publica-
tion of the preview in the New Yorker. Now, the award of the Pulitzer Prize
definitively cemented that position. The publisher quickly introduced a
material representation of the prize into the novel’s peritextual artwork.
A gold sticker added to the cover with the words “Winner of the 2008
Pulitzer Prize” invites potential readers to engage in a different relation-
ship with the novel’s language and ideas than the previous cover without it.
Now, the front cover does not portray the book primarily as an ethnic text
with the names “Oscar Wao” and “Junot Díaz,” but as an American main-
stream text that won the Pulitzer. Even readers unaware of the news about
the prize came into contact with this new paratext of the novel in such
mass marketplaces as Costco Warehouses, where the book was displayed
face-up with the gold sticker gracing its cover. Are you uninterested in the
Dominican Republic or dominicanos in New Jersey? Not familiar with the
science fiction and fantasy intertexts in the novel? Not into long footnotes?
But it won the Pulitzer! It must be worth reading!
Genette refers to a category of “factual” paratexts such as the
author’s age and sex that have an effect on the literary text. However,
even such ostensibly straightforward categories need to be nuanced.
In a paratextual statement about paratexts like these, Díaz questions
his categorization as a “Latino” writer, and touches on the ways in
which both hegemonic and populist multiculturalism interact in
his work. In a 2008 interview for Slate, he comments on the ways in
which his writing floats in between the categories of otherness and
Americanness, expressing reservations about those who label him a
“Latino writer”:
We’re in a country where white is considered normative; it’s a country where

white writers are simply writers, and writers of Latino descent are Latino writ-
ers. This is an issue whose roots are deeper than just the publishing commu-
nity or how an artist wants to self-designate. It’s about the way the U.S. wants
to view itself and how it engineers otherness in people of color and, by doing
so, props up white privilege. I try to battle the forces that seek to “other”
people of color and promote white supremacy. But I also have no interest in
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being a “writer,” either, shorn from all my connections and communities. I’m
a Dominican writer, a writer of African descent, and whether or not anyone
else wants to admit it, I know also that Stephen King and Jonathan Franzen
are white writers. The problem isn’t in labeling writers by their color or their
ethnic group; the problem is that one group organizes things so that everyone
else gets these labels but not it. No, not it.4
Here Díaz objects to those who wield the power of labeling and
categorization within hegemonic multiculturalism. By constructing
labels that “other” him and his writing, they sustain white privilege. It
is unfair, he argues that King and Franzen are “white” writers but never
referred to as such. Recognizing the inequity that underlies the desig-
nation “Latino,” Díaz nonetheless wants to write about Dominican
culture and perform his latinidad both textually and extra-textually. He
is caught up in the contradictions of American capitalism that insists
on class, ethnic, racial, and gender divisions while at the same time
celebrating ethnicity and making money from minority writers such as
Díaz and Cisneros.
These paratextual statements, along with the Pulitzer Prize, situate
Díaz as an American writer whose themes happen to be about Latino
history and culture, just as Franzen writes about the American middle
class. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao therefore normalizes the
history of the Dominican Republic and diasporic communities in the
US as important elements of American history because it is innovative,
prizewinning writing, not because it is about ethnic culture. With respect
to the paratextual portal the prize opens, many readers buy and read
the book not because of its ethnic overlay but because of its canonical
status in American literature. Subsequently, the May 2010 announce-
ment that Díaz was elected to the Board of the Pulitzer Prize enhances
this paratextual overlay of the novel. As De Certeau noted about literary
texts, various audiences will poach different significations from the prize
and the appointment—some expressing pride that he is one of only two
Latinos to receive the Pulitzer for fiction, or viewing the award as further
advancing his status as a Latino literary star. Others may focus on Díaz
as a talented new American writer being validated through his prize and
the appointment. Both positions paratextually reshape future reading of
the novel.
Just as a literary text consists of a teeming set of diverging ideas both
overt and subtle, its author is never unidimensional. The implied author
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whose presence overcodes the constructed literary text diverges from the
human being with whom we become acquainted superficially in medi-
ated paratextual venues. Today these venues extend beyond television,
radio, newspaper, and magazine interviews to easily available videos of
interviews, public appearances, and other imaginative authorial inter-
ventions on the Internet. This frequently expanding digital presence of
the author offers an always partial and sometimes stereotypic view of the
writer, yet one that is often changing and contradictory, like the literary
text itself in the digital age as I discuss later.
A search for Junot Díaz on Google Images, for example, offers many
still pictures of the author’s public presentation of the self, excised from
the larger context of their genesis and therefore open to the construction
of a reductive, somewhat stereotypical composite paratext. Díaz displays
an exuberant gleeful grin at an award ceremony in 2007, posing with
his fiancée at the time, Elizabeth de León.5 (The identifying caption on
the digital image also connects readers to the surname Díaz chooses for
Oscar’s family in the novel and Elizabeth de León’s name on the dedi-
cation page and in the Acknowledgements.) He poses for Conde-Nast
Traveler in casual clothes, with a slight smile and tilted head, and holding
onto a rundown iron railing in a working-class urban neighborhood.6 In
an interior setting, he poses with arms crossed, by a window overlook-
ing a poor barrio.7 He exhibits the word “SILENCIO” written in red on
his forearm in another performance image displayed at the 2009 Hay
Festival Cartagena de Indias.8 In other photos he projects the image of
the pensive writer, but also the playful thinker, even posing in a bonnet
in one image.9
In several photos he is positioned in front of bookcases with his book
collection, in dark clothing and in a body stance that communicates
masculinity and seriousness.10 He stands for a photo with black science
fiction writer Samuel R. Delaney at a 2013 benefit event at the New York
Public library, an image that frames these two important American
authors as minority writers.11
In another epitext, his presentation of Oscar Wao at the Google campus
in Mountain View, California soon after the book was published in 2007,
Díaz responded to a comment from the audience that the comics and
video game culture in the novel strongly contrasts the tragic events the
novel recounts. He noted: “In the US if you’re a writer of color, no matter
what you write about, you’re considered a genre anyway; you’re never
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accepted in the real literary [sphere]. Your passport is always checked

three times before they’ll let you in. You’ll get let in, but boy they’ll run
you through security for 20 minutes.”12
Although he had not yet won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel, Díaz
draws the Google audience’s attention here to the contradictory strat-
egy of inclusion through difference that hegemonic multiculturalism
engages in. That is, the gatekeepers of canonical literary culture in the
US select a few minority writers for publication in mainstream venues
provided they present themselves as different, other, and sometimes
exotic. The path to admission is strenuous. For example, even after
receiving an MFA in Creative Writing from an Ivy League university,
Díaz had to continue seeking blue-collar jobs such as custodial work
to support himself. Several stories that would later be included in
Drown would be published along the way in Story, the New Yorker, and
the Paris Review, but Díaz had to spend many years “going through
security.” Despite publishers’ growing interest in signing and profiting
from minority writers in the early 1990s, the path to acceptance was
strenuous. Above all, these emerging writers were expected to focus on
minority culture, themes, and language in their books, and to cultivate
a public authorial persona strongly overlain with an exotic culture of
difference.13
The interplay of hegemonic and populist multiculturalism is again
evident in Díaz’s 2013 appearance on the late-night talk show The
Colbert Report. In this epitext, Díaz cannot be allowed to outshine the
comedic performance of the host but is given a few minutes to present
his views on Latino immigrants and his work to help undocumented
students in Georgia. Colbert shakes hands with Díaz, points downward
in an imperative gesture, saying “Sit down, my friend. May I call you
my friend?” Díaz replies affirmatively but Colbert must introduce an
element of humor and ethnicity immediately: “mi amigo, mi muchacho,
mi compadre” as the studio audience laughs and applauds, no doubt
prompted by the producer’s signs to do so.14
In a professional dark coat and tie, Díaz slightly lowers and shakes his
head somewhat nervously, assenting to Colbert’s stereotypical interpel-
lation of Latino identity. As Genette points out, mediatized interviews
of authors are not in reality conversations between the interlocutors.
Rather, the questions and answers are directed to the audience—here,
both those present in the studio and the vast public who would watch
the show when it was broadcast March 25 and later online. The term
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“muchacho” or “boy” of course demeans the writer whom Colbert

mistakenly credits with winning the Nobel Prize and a MacArthur
Genius award in the introduction. Although he immediately reads the
correct list of prizes after uttering the Spanish chain of male interpella-
tions, the series of Spanish terms hangs over all that follows in the short
interview. Hardly giving Díaz a chance to respond to anything, Colbert
parodies anti-immigrant arguments with a deadpan style that can easily
also be interpreted as serious rather than parodical discourse, so that a
variety of viewers can identify in different ways with his utterances.
Díaz has been invited to the show ostensibly to talk about his affili-
ation with Freedom University, a grassroots educational effort estab-
lished when the Georgia legislature prohibited undocumented college
students from attending the top schools in the state. After an interchange
about labels for the undocumented and their contributions to American
society, Colbert presents Díaz with a sweatshirt that the TV show has
created for the new college with the large block letters “FU,” as the audi-
ence roars with laughter. Colbert’s performance must outshine Díaz’s
and effectively be the last “word”—the visual/verbal signifier he holds
up. Hegemonic multiculturalism allows small intrusions of populist
multiculturalism, as Díaz is given a brief opportunity to speak positively
about immigrants on the show. Although his new book This Is How You
Lose Her was released a few months earlier, the show presents Díaz as
an advocate and spokesperson for undocumented immigrants, with only
brief mention and no discussion of his writing. Díaz is cast primarily as
a Latino who (by the way) has won major prizes for his writing. In this
interview, Colbert “engineers otherness” as Díaz termed the phenom-
enon in the 2008 Slate interview, by reducing his interlocutor to Spanish
identity markers and Latino themes.
In public speeches and readings, Díaz is known for a certain degree
of “bad-boy” language, epithets, and curse words in both English and
Spanish. While this transgressive linguistic register predominates much
more strongly in his writing, he strategically uses it in public speaking
venues to affect a style—a tough macho image of Dominican-American
identity, strangely overlain on the quite gentle tone of his voice. His
slightly high voice contrasts the “tough guy” diction in much of his
writing, and creates an aura of vulnerability and weakness. Despite the
difference separating the writer from the implied author in the books,
this striking aural paratextual layer encountered in interviews, readings,
and some audio versions of his work affects interpretation. This duality
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parallels the confidence/vulnerability dichotomy of the Yunior/Oscar

dyad in Oscar Wao.
In comparison to Sandra Cisneros’s webpage, as we will see, Junot
Díaz’s webpage contains many fewer authorial epitexts. Instead, Díaz
writes extensively on his own Facebook page, unlike Cisneros, whose
publisher runs the Facebook page with her name. Under his picture,
Díaz asserts his authentic authorial presence on the Facebook site: “This
is really me, though I’ll be off fb for a while trying to write another book.
My webpage junotdiaz.com will have my appearances.” By August 2015,
he had accumulated 115,802 likes on the site.15 In his hundreds of posts
over the years, Díaz emerges as a public intellectual of the 21st century,
interacting with his followers and others who see his posts with political
commentary, excerpts from a variety of news sources he reads, recom-
mendations of other writers and upcoming public events, and a bit of
promotion of his own books and accomplishments. The most salient
theme in his Facebook posts, motivated by the desire to inform and
educate a wide public, is social justice and the denunciation of oppres-
sion. Employing one of the best mass communication tools available
now, Díaz writes short posts that his thousands of followers read and
then pass on to others with a snowball effect.
How do these posts relate paratextually to his literary texts? It is likely
that many begin to follow Díaz on Facebook after reading his prizewin-
ning novel but the reverse also occurs when some find out about his liter-
ary texts after seeing one or another of his posts on Facebook. The posts
may interact with the novel before, during, and after the reading process,
depending on individual practices. Sometimes they offer an informative
milieu of oppositional politics. In other cases, they relate very specific-
ally to his literary works, inviting direct paratextual interaction with his
works such as Oscar Wao. The large corpus of Díaz’s posts on Facebook,
and the many responses readers have posted to them, await computa-
tional analysis, an important research project that begs to be undertaken
by a team of scholars in the future.
One example of the richness of this archive of writing is a December
2012 post as Díaz finished his fall book tour for This Is How You Lose
Her. He includes a picture of himself and a link to a recently published
interview he gave to Ross Scarano. Although ostensibly about the 2012
book of stories, the interview functions as what Genette terms a delayed
autographic epitext with information that also opens interpretive portals
to Oscar Wao. Díaz emphasizes the centrality of the “contract with our
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human selves” that occurs when readers see the autobiographical overlay
of fiction like his. He describes that in his own reading practices he is
sometimes “so moved by a book in my body that I go looking for its
analog in the real world. I felt shit for this book in my body, it is real
to my body. Therefore, my mind is like, ‘There’s got to be an analog,
this had to have happened’ . . . you don’t want it to be like a ghost.” He
notes that he used his own nickname for the character Yunior, design-
ing the protagonist as a continuing revelation of the authorial self in
order to move readers in this way. Having first developed this figure in
a 1991 story submitted to enter an MFA program, he plans to write six
or seven books with the Yunior figure that will make one long novel.
The text of this interview, available through the Facebook link, invites us
to reexamine the centrality of Yunior in Oscar Wao, and the character’s
connection to the writer-protagonist figure in This Is How You Lose Her.
Díaz also emphasizes his goal of overcoming “the tyranny of the present”
in his works—our ignorance of the past and our fear of the future and
that this motivated his focus on history in Oscar Wao. He also continues
the “bad-boy” language prevalent in his literary texts. Noting that he
would rather be writing than doing photo shoots, he explains why he is a
good sport about posing: “It’s so fucking bizarre . . . Everybody’s making
an effort, and nobody needs to spend a nickel of time on your ass. You
ain’t fucking relevant. You don’t fucking cure shit, you don’t fucking
employ people—at least I don’t.”16
These examples of a few of the many public authorial paratexts of
Junot Díaz that are easily accessed on the Internet suggest some of
the interpretive portals that readers may pass through before, during,
or after reading his novel. Even when these epitexts do not explicitly
address or refer to Oscar Wao, they play important roles in its signifi-
cation. If, for example, I hear my neighbor’s scream for help and then
see a stranger walking out the door, my interpretation of that act of
departure is strongly shaped by the sounds that preceded it. Perhaps, if
one of the readers I discuss below, who objects very strongly to Díaz’s
“bad-boy” language in the novel, had encountered one of his media
appearances where he sometimes uses these words, reading would not
even have started. On the other hand, how might having heard Díaz’s
gentle voice in interviews or public readings functioned as a paratextual
portal to soften the offensive language for this objecting reader, making
it more clearly an intentional aesthetic construct that the writer also
takes distance from?
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Crowd-sourced allographic annotations
The trope of paratextual annotation is a key narrative strategy of The Brief

Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao with its extensive network of footnotes that
invite readers to navigate back and forth while reading. A rich epitextual
network of annotations also exists outside the novel, with new dimen-
sions of participation, scope, and reception in the digital age. Thanks to
the Internet, another set of epitexts has arisen that strongly shape the
reading of Díaz’s novel whether in print or digital format. And in some
cases, these annotations make their way into the digital version of the
novel, becoming a new kind of peritext if we are willing to broaden
Genette’s scope somewhat.
How do readers navigate a complex narrative densely overlain
with minute details from mass culture and Latin American history,
dischronology, multiple characters and locations, aesthetic subtlety and
other modernist devices, and without even a table of contents of chap-
ter headings to facilitate an overview for cognitively mapping the text?
One early response to Díaz’s complex novel was an online concordance
painstakingly created by one reader, Kim Flournoy, in 2008.
Earlier, Erin Judge, a comedian and writer in Los Angeles posted an
open letter to Díaz in December 2007 humorously complaining about
the difficulty she had in helping her mother understand the Spanish
words in the novel, despite having studied abroad in a Spanish-speaking
country in college. She urged the writer to include a glossary in his
next book, or publish one that readers could buy.17 Numerous people
responded to the blog post and, inspired by these comments, another
reader, Kim Flournoy, took the time to gloss the entire book and create a
website for the novel in December 2008:
I was reading “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Díaz, and
it was extremely slow going since I need my laptop nearby the entire time,
with Wikipedia, Google, and Google translate open. This was also annoying
because it meant that I couldn’t really read on the subway or elsewhere with-
out an internet connection, unless I wanted to miss out on half of the story.18
Kim (the name the author uses on the site) explains numerous allusions
and Spanish words for every chapter of the long novel, encouraging
readers to send corrections and to print out the long text of annotations
to take with them while reading the book away from their computers.
In one sense, this work represents a series of new allographic footnotes
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for the novel—glosses researched by an ordinary reader and shared with

other readers.
The culture of sharing that Web 2.0 affords is especially evident in
Kim’s development of the concordance and readers’ responses to it.
Flournoy explains that she read the book in about a week and a half
and did the annotations as she read. She gathered the information from
shared information on the Internet on sites such as Wikipedia and
Google, and then shared her laborious work with others by posting it
online. A website developer by profession, she created the site over a
weekend after researching the novel’s many allusions. Since its launch,
over 100 readers have suggested corrections, some requesting several
changes. Each month, other viewers of the site also send emails to thank
her for developing it. There are also readers who, Kim notes, “are very
passionate about certain changes . . . The racial terminology and slurs
apparently have very nuanced meanings and people seem to really want
to get their version across,” Kim reports.19 This snowballing culture of
sharing information about Díaz’s novel exemplifies populist multicultur-
alism at its best.
Kim painstakingly created a major allographic epitext for Díaz’s novel,
helping to change the interpretive practices of thousands of the novel’s
readers who come across the digital site. The accessibility of the Internet
is a crucial characteristic of this extension of the novel because potential
users do not have to search for a printed copy of Kim’s work in a library
or bookstore where concordances traditionally are found. Eschewing the
aura of scholarly authority sometimes evidenced in printed concord-
ances, their sense of finality, fixity, and mastery, Kim emphasizes the
provisional nature of the first posted version, inviting readers to submit
corrections. This digitally enabled crowdsourcing is a tool for the ongoing
creation of popular knowledge, a helpful document that is not fearful of
expressing lack of control over the literary text, gaps in knowledge, and
inadequate cultural competence in certain areas. In this moment of tran-
sition between print and digital forms, Kim invites readers to always read
the novel in relation to its intertexts by printing information from the
website to take with them in various reading locations. Here, however,
print is an inadequate crutch because Kim’s annotations contain many
hot links to other digital sources of information that will not be available
in printed versions of the concordance.
In December 2008, Aliza Hausman created a glossary on her blog to
help readers unfamiliar with Spanish to understand the many words not
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translated in Díaz’s novel. Noting that she was tired of hearing people
complain that they could not understand the novel, she paid her little
sister to help with the alphabetic list of hundreds of Spanish words in
the text. Claiming not to understand why the publishers and Díaz did
not include such an aid in the book, Aliza Hausman titles her glossary
sarcastically: “The Oscar Wao Vocabulary Dictionary Glossary. You’re
Welcome Junot Díaz.”20 Like the annotator Kim Flournoy, Hausman
invites readers to submit corrections, and when they do so, credits their
contributions to the list.
Another set of allographic traces of readers reading overlays the
novel. In the Kindle edition of the book, either on Amazon portable
e-readers and tablets or on the Kindle app on computers, tablets, and
smartphones, readers have access to the “Popular Highlights” feature.
This series of allographic paratexts is accessed in two ways according to
the reader’s preference. If desired, the highlights are seen as underlining
in the text one reads, with additional information available about how
many others have underlined this passage. Tapping on the underlined
passage on page 23 of Díaz’s novel, for example, brings up a textbox
noting that 506 other people have highlighted this section of the text.
A second mode of access is to tap on the link “Popular Highlights” in
the main menu, which brings up screens showing every passage that
readers who activated this feature highlighted and how many did so for
each underlined passage. I would argue that this digital highlighting
functions as a new form of peritext inside the digital edition of the novel.
While not authorized by the author, Amazon, as the new publication
site, strongly encourages readers to participate in expanding this overlay
on the text because showing readers’ interaction with the novel increases
book sales. On one level, these allographic peritexts connect readers to
a small community of other readers of the book, but at the same time
they affect interpretation of the novel when the feature is activated on
an electronic device. Highlighting may cause people to read a passage
more carefully, to nod in appreciation that others also valorize it, or to be
surprised at this valorization.
The “Book Extras” feature, accessible from the Main Menu on Kindle
readers and applications on other devices, also opens new paratextual
portals centripetally in the text. This feature lists the material that has
been uploaded by participants on the website Shelfari about characters,
places, terms, themes, memorable quotations, short synopses, and other
categories that can be edited and augmented on the Shelfari site by others
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and even the author. A crowd-sourced type of Wikipedia for books

within the Amazon network, this paratext is a participatory learning tool,
now more immediately available for readers inside the digital text they
are reading. That is, because the material from Shelfari is now included in
the digital copy of the book, and is accessed by a simple click or touch,
it functions as a group of new allographic peritexts that move readers
centripetally into “the bones of the book,” as Amazon terms the material;
it belongs in an expanded category of Genette’s peritexts that now affect
digital reading in the early 21st century. In some cases, these peritexts
may be autographic: Amazon invites its authors to contribute to and
correct errors in the Shelfari annotations and, if some categories have not
been filled out about the book on the site, to do so themselves. Like the
expanded footnotes Díaz added to the novel in 2013 that I discuss in the
next chapter, authorial contributions to the Shelfari annotations augment
the unfinalizability of literary works.
In addition to being easily accessed inside the digital book as one
reads, this material also exists epitextually on the Shelfari website and
marks another path directing potential readers to the book. It functions
as a form of crowd-sourced advertising with no financial remuneration
given to its creators. As material that the public creates voluntarily, it is
incomplete and provisional. For example, under “Themes” for The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the term “No Face Man” is listed with the
vague explanation: “Appears in dire moments of the de Leon family
history; a recurring character in nightmares.” It would be important for
this annotation also to direct readers to Díaz’s story “No Face” in Drown.
Allographic commentary, reviews, and discussions
In today’s interconnected digital world, only a small number of readers

begin to read a book like Díaz’s or Cisneros’s without having encountered
and engaged to some degree with paratextual commentary on it. Even
students who grudgingly start to read an assigned print copy without having
heard comments about it from the teacher, necessarily interpret the words
they read through the lens of its having been assigned by a reputedly know-
ledgeable professional who has chosen this text over others. They certainly
have glanced at the cover images and perhaps the comments praising the
book on the back cover or front matter. A simulacrum of a medal with
the words “Pulitzer Prize Winner” has appeared on the book’s cover since
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2008. The front cover of the Spanish translation includes a praiseworthy

quotation from New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani, “Una de las
voces más distintivas e irrestibles de la ficción contemporánea” [One of the
most distinctive and irresistible voices of contemporary fiction].
Allographic commentary proliferates in the digital age on websites,
blogs, and social media. Traditional criticism, reviews, and discussions
of the novel in newspapers, magazines, television, and radio are now also
accessed on the web in addition to their standard venues. More people can
respond to and participate in this allographic commentary and can do so
more quickly now than previously possible. For example, at the end of
many books on the Kindle device or one of the Kindle apps for PC, Mac,
tablet, or phone, the reader is urged to rate the book through a quick click
and post commentary on the Goodreads site, now owned by Amazon.
Comments and reviews consequently come from a much wider swath of
readers than in the print era where the selection of reviewers for liter-
ary texts was tightly controlled by the guardians of the canon connected
to trusted venues. Now readers encounter commentary and sometimes
produce their own before, during, and after the reading process.
The Amazon website is one major source of ratings and reviews that
affect the reading of the book as allographic epitexts. For Díaz’s novel,
the website posts excerpts of two “editorial reviews,” with a link to other
excerpts of reviews from canonical sources. The first lists the book as
Amazon’s featured “book of the month” in September 2007 with a review
by Brad Thomas Parsons. The second is a glowing review from Publishers
Weekly of the audio version of the novel.
The Amazon webpage then gives a product description, with ISBN,
dimensions, and weight of the book, including its current sales ranking
on the Amazon website. In January 2015, the novel ranked #514 in books,
#89 in historical genre fiction, #86 in contemporary fiction, and #1 in
Hispanic fiction, a ranking Amazon also lists at the top of the webpage.
There is also an hourly sales ranking that moves titles in and out of vari-
ous best-seller categories. Díaz’s novel was listed as #93 in literary fiction
when I accessed the site in January 2015. By March, the title was no longer
in the top 100 in literary fiction but was ranked #59 in contemporary
fiction. This quantitative representation of the book’s ongoing popularity
foments sales—Amazon’s main goal—encouraging readers to be part of
a contemporary trend as much as to read a good book.
There follows a horizontal bar graph that visually and numerically
communicates the ratings from five to one stars created by 1,036 readers.
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(This is a large number of respondents over the eight years since the
publication of the book, given that these reviews require the time and
effort of returning to the website to write comments after reading.) The
average rating is nearly four out of five stars (3.9). Although all of the
ratings and reviews of the product can be scrolled through, Amazon
offers a reductive shortcut, selecting what it claims are three representa-
tive quotations. The first complains about Díaz’s use of Spanish “which
will make this a difficult read”; Amazon notes that 94 reviewers made a
similar comment. The second reviewer complains of boredom, the lack of
a catchy story and uninteresting characters; 85 reviewers made a similar
statement, Amazon summarizes. The third representative review terms
the novel “unputdownable” with great characters and storytelling, simi-
lar to 182 other reviewers. Amazon’s summary engages in what Roland
Barthes (1972) terms inoculation, an advertising practice whereby flaws
of the product are introduced first to “inoculate” consumers against
them, followed by abundant praise for the product in spite of these
shortcomings to convince potential buyers to make the purchase.
Of the 1,036 ratings and reviews on the site, 735 give the book four or
five stars, 120 three stars, and 181 one or two stars. Although the strongly
negative reviews make up only 20 of the postings, many of them
complain about the impediment of un-translated Spanish throughout
the novel, the footnotes, and the difficult modernist style. Nicole del
Sesto from California wrote on February 8, 2009, “There are 3 1/2 page
paragraphs [in] Spanish never translated to English Extremely long
historical footnotes in minuscule print Switching of 1st person narrators
so that when somebody says ‘I’ you have to try to figure out who it is
DIALOG IS NOT IN QUOTES . . . one day, I’m going to write a book,
and not use quotes in my dialog, and then I too can win a Pulitzer . . . ”21
Another reader who ends the review with a biblical citation objects to
the offensive language throughout:
Can you give zero stars? I would like to. I purchased this book as a require-
ment for a college class, and much to my chagrin, I actually read the first
chapter (FULL DISCLAIMER: I did not continue reading, and thus am
technically only reviewing the first chapter) . . . I was completely affronted by
the language and crude/sexual content of this book. It reached an “R” rating
within the first few pages . . . Besides the morally objectionable content, I had
some other complaints:
1 Half of what I read (ok not half, but a significant portion) is in some form
of Spanish, which is not translated.
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2 THE AUTHOR DOES NOT USE QUOTATION MARKS FOR THE

DIALOGUE. I don’t know if he was trying to be clever or modernistic
with this, but it only served to further my frustration.
3 The language . . . and not just the foul-ness . . . is SO below the mark, I am
surprised this novel is highly reviewed by anyone. It is not profound,
beautiful, or clever. Simply put, it is not well-written.22
In contrast, in the New York Times review, Michiko Kakutani emphasizes

that the Spanish in the novel is not an impediment, “a sort of streetwise
brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily
inhale.”23
About 200 of the reviews commented on Díaz’s use of footnotes. Some
two-thirds of these expressed negative or mixed opinions of the foot-
notes in the one- to four-star ratings. One-third highly praised the notes,
mostly readers who had given the book five stars. Overall, the majority
who rated the book on Amazon liked it, about 735 of the 1036 ratings
posted on the site by January 2015.
The digital venue for these reviews also encourages further commen-
taries on the reviews, initiating a dialogue about the novel. For example,
in response to a February 2008 review from D. Kanigan, another reader
F. Jimenez comments: “I was almost about to give up on this book, but
reading your review encouraged me to finish it, and thankfull [sic] that
I did, Thanks!!!”24 These allographic dialogues are posted before, during,
and after reading the novel.
Díaz’s pages on the website Goodreads (purchased by Amazon in March
2013), also contains thousands of allographic paratexts that open inter-
pretive portals to the novel. In quantitative statistics updated hourly as
an incentive for readers to buy books, the site lists the number of ratings
and reviews that people have posted. On January 22, 2015, for example,
Díaz’s novel had 129,803 ratings and 13, 221 reviews, and an average
rating of 3.85. Readers had uploaded 120 quotations from the book to
the site, including tags to enable other views through search engines
and sometimes “likes” by others. There were 433 “likes,” for example, for
the quotation, “It’s never the changes we want that change everything.”
Because Goodreads places the quotations that readers have uploaded in
descending order by likes, the popularity of passages is skewed—viewers
may press “like” on the first quotations they read and then cease to use
this feature of Goodreads.
By February 8, 2015 Díaz’s reviews had increased. Now the novel had
131,125 ratings and 13,300 reviews. Under the rating details link, Goodreads
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rating frequency % #
5 30% 40458
4 37% 48721
3 21% 27749
2 7% 10016
1 3% 4181
89% of people liked it
All editions: 3.85 average rating, 131125 ratings, 13300 reviews, added by 216593 people, 70140 to-reads
This edition: 3.85 average rating, 116771 ratings, 11208 reviews, added by 193786 people
figure 1.2 Goodreads ratings for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, February
8, 2015
presents a bar graph and figures for each of the ratings categories: 30 or
40,458 respondents gave the book five stars, 37 (48,721) four stars, and
21 (27,749) three stars; 10 or 14,197 raters gave the book only one or
two stars. In a caption, the site notes that 89 of people liked the book.
As a further incentive to read the book, the caption notes that 216,593
people have added the book to their Goodreads collection and 70,140
included it in their “to-reads.”25
The site lists 2,502 fans of Díaz, with pictures of many of them. A
picture of Díaz appears next to a quotation from him, that has received
211 likes: “Motherfuckers will read a book that’s one third Elvish, but
put two sentences in Spanish and they [white people] think we’re taking
over.”26
Goodreads also posts a September 2012 interview it conducted with
Díaz to promote his new book of stories, This Is How You Lose Her, asking
the author to answer a series of questions from the website’s users.
Díaz’s comments in this venue also function as an authorial epitext for
prospective readers and continuing interpreters of the Oscar Wao book.
On May 31, 2014, a Goodreads discussion group on the novel was started
as part of the “Writers of Color Book Club Discussion” on the site. By
June 27 there were 64 comments, reactions, and questions posted by
people reading the novel. One commenter urged others to listen to a
playlist of songs relating to the novel hosted on the website 8tracks, an
additional epitext that might influence readers who do so while reading
the novel.27 From December 2008 to early 2015 there were 58 discussion
threads on the novel posted on Goodreads. For example, the topic “Use of
Spanish Gimmicky? Gratuitous?” has 330 views and 26 posts.
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Although one must become a member of Goodreads in order to

post comments, reviews, or ratings, anyone can view the material on
the site without joining. The influence of the multiple crowd-sourced
paratexts about Díaz’s novel on Goodreads is therefore broader than the
site’s membership. This network of primarily allographic epitexts offers
multiple points of entry into the novel and out of it before, during, and
after engagement with the text. While the site’s influence on the inter-
pretation of the text in the context of the vast overall readership of the
novel may be small, it is an important paratextual constellation of read-
ers’ input now available in the digital age and a corpus that will continue
to grow in the future.
The publisher’s peritextual portals
The cover
In its first iteration, the front cover of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar
Wao exudes simplicity, with large block letters of equal size for the title
and author’s name in black on a white background. This predominant
use of black and white had been a successful marketing technique for
the covers of other books by male Latino writers such Jimmy Santiago
Baca and Díaz himself, as we have seen. For the 2007 novel, a splash of
red is added—an opaque silhouette profile of a young man, presumably
the protagonist, with a cartoon-like representation of gunfire exploding
from the back of his head. The red silhouette and explosion, with irregu-
lar dots and dripping lines in the same red ink spilling onto the white
background, might evoke for viewers the implied death in the novel’s
title. In small unobtrusive type also in red, two taglines notify readers of
the genre, “a novel,” and advertise the author’s other book, Drown. As the
novel won awards and accolades, subsequent front cover designs for the
paperback and digital editions became more cluttered with the inclusion
of a gold facsimile of a medal as a visual signifier of the Pulitzer Prize and
a six-line quotation from the New York Times Book Review. An additional
marketing line was also added in red above the title, “New York Times
Bestseller.”
The front and back flaps of the cover are also white, punctuated by
varying amounts of black and red text and images. The red image of
the protagonist’s silhouette is repeated in smaller scale beneath the
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figure 1.3 Front cover, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao © Ricardo Corral,
Courtesy of Penguin Random House
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price—$24.95 in the US and $31.00 in Canada—above the book descrip-

tion aimed at enticing readers to make the purchase. On the back flap,
a stark black-and-white portrait shows Díaz in a simple dark sweater,
gazing directly at potential readers, with no smile and an air of serious-
ness. In contrast, Cisneros’s author photo on the back flap of Caramelo
shows the author sitting sideways hugging her folded knees, with
dangling earrings and a slight smile, also gazing at readers with turned
head. Beneath the short author biography of Díaz on the back flap are
the design credits and the Riverhead Books logo and web address in
matching red. The back cover presents three praiseworthy quotations—
one by crime fiction writer Walter Mosley, another from the New York
Times Book Review, and the third from Newsweek—gathered from pre-
publication reviews prepared from the galleys.
While the authors’ photographs give more visual detail about their
physical appearance and the personality they try to project visually as
part of their public persona, their name on the front cover is a culturally
laden paratext despite only communicating through letters and words
rather than visual images. Part of the publisher’s peritext when displayed
on the front cover, the spine, and the pages inside, the name also repre-
sents authorial choice, even though sometimes publishers pressure
writers to use specific variations of their names. Probably more than any
other writing on the front cover, the author’s name is often an epitext
that readers have encountered before purchasing or reading the book at
the same time that it is a peritext when it appears on the front cover. That
is, names such as Sandra Cisneros and Junot Díaz circulate prominently
in national and international cultural spheres and, as weighted signifiers
outside the novel, lead readers to the book. That they are Latino names
carries immense cultural capital in the age of multiculturalism.
In September 2015, for example, a controversy arose about a white
poet writing under a Chinese pseudonym. Michael Derrick Hudson
noted that one of his poems was rejected 40 times when he submitted
it under his own name but only nine times under the ethnic pseudo-
nym, and it was ultimately accepted by Prairie Schooner with the ethnic
name. He revealed his real name after Sherman Alexie later accepted
the poem for the 2015 edition of Best American Poetry. Alexie admitted
that he paid closer attention to the poem because of the ethnic pseudo-
nym but chose it primarily because it was good. To have dropped it
after learning the writer was not ethnic “would have cast doubt on
every poem I have ever chosen,” Alexie noted, “and implied that I chose
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poems based only on identity.”28 This incident exemplifies the cultural

capital that certain ethnic names carry in the age of US multicultural-
ism. It is unlikely that the work of writers such as Sandra Cisneros and
Junot Díaz would have been received so warmly and garnered such
“name-brand” recognition had their work appeared earlier in the twen-
tieth century. After the political and cultural movements for equality
resulted in a valorization of ethnicity and multiculturalism, Latinos
worked to discover and republish the writing of many of those earl-
ier figures whose work had received little attention previously.29 Now,
in contrast, the names of Díaz and Cisneros carry immense cultural
capital as paratexts of their novels.
Although the Latino names of the protagonist Oscar Wao and author
take up half of the space on the front cover, the words on the top half
place the novel as part of the American literary canon with the intertext-
ual reference to Hemingway’s story, “The Short Happy Life of Francis
McComber.” This allusion and the words of the title are an authorial
paratext that Díaz has chosen himself, included here as part of the
publisher’s epitext. The inside jacket copy briefly situates the work as part
of American literature by noting that it presents “an astonishing vision of
the contemporary American experience”; at the same time, however, the
copy employs stereotypical images of latinidad in phrases such as “ancient
curse,” “prison, torture, tragic accidents,” “ill-starred love,” “dazzling
energy and insight,” “uproarious lives,” “ferocious beauty-queen mother,”
and “epic journey from Santo Domingo.” Such stereotypes are common
in advertising and reveal that the true function of the jacket copy is not
to provide accurate information but rather to sell books. Despite the
novel’s many allusions to fantasy and science fiction, the only hint of this
in the advertising copy on the front flap is to claim that Oscar “dreams of
becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien.” In effect, the publisher markets
the book as Latino literature on the inside front flap, with a secondary
emphasis on the love theme, as twin strategies to promote sales. Readers
expecting a simple Latin love story will discover quite another cultural
artifact after passing through this peritextual portal designed by the
publisher.
As Franco Moretti (2013) has shown in his study of the titles of 7,000
18th and 19th century British novels, the addition of even one adjective
to an article/noun combination in a title entices readers with the seed of
a story. The inclusion of the adjectives “brief ” and “wondrous” opens up
enticing narrative potential that would be absent if the opening words of
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the title were only “The Life of . . . ” Historically, Moretti notes, the article/
noun combination was used more frequently for figures that evoked
exoticism and transgression such as The Rebel or The Libertine rather than
familiar domestic figures (daughter, brother, wife). When adjectives are
added, the titles in Moretti’s study predominantly point to destabilized
domesticity as the narrative impetus.
In this sense, besides invoking Hemingway’s title, Díaz also situates
the protagonist Oscar as his brother, as a member of the larger “family”
of the Dominican diaspora across two geographic spaces, and as an
invitation to readers to see Oscar also as a member of our family. The
problematized domesticity both links us to Oscar and entices us to learn
about the troubled destabilized family. Moretti notes, “if an adjective is
present, then even the most familiar figures can be estranged into infi-
del fathers and posthumous daughters. The adjective relocates narra-
tive from substance to accident . . . [it] introduces predication within the
title, and predication is the germ of storytelling” (2013: loc. 3002). The
adjective “brief ” tells us the ending of the novel before we even open
the book and at the same time piques curiosity. Why was Oscar’s life
brief? And even more enticingly, why was it wondrous? What better
advertising copy to sell the book! Yet, as Moretti points out, the market
constraint that the short title imposes is also a tremendous opportunity
for the literary imagination—a trope through which to invent precise
allusion and the condensed seed of a narrative. The market, in effect,
promotes a literary style.
Graphics
Inside the book, the publisher’s peritext includes several graphics that
are background paratextual portals through which readers approach
and interpret the parts of the novel. Instead of merely listing the title,
author, and publisher, the title page includes a sketch of a rocket in gray,
with the title in a black rectangle superimposed on the image. Similar
black rectangles with gray numerals open the three parts of the novel,
overlain on a comparable large gray drawing. The first depicts an atom,
the second a clenched fist, and the third a curved design of a mask. A
smaller gray rectangle appears above each of the seven chapters with the
correlating number spelled in the center.
Continuing the motif of the rocket on the title page, the designer
perhaps intended the image of the atom to illustrate Oscar’s dreams of
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nuclear annihilation when he is unable to start a love relationship with

his friend Ana and she returns to her ex-boyfriend. It could also connote
the sci-fi adventures and coincidences of the family’s Dominican history,
such as Belí’s near death the same night Trujillo is assassinated and
her rescue by the mongoose/lion figure, defined in the accompanying
footnote as “one of the great unstable particles of the Universe” (151n18).
Readers can perhaps connect the raised fist that opens Part II to Abelard’s
courageous defiance of the Trujillo regime or to Trujillo’s iron-fisted
control of the country. The image the publisher designed for Part III
most likely points forward to the key image of the mask in chapter 8.
After Oscar’s death, Yunior has a recurring dream in which his friend
appears “all mysterious-like, wearing a wrathful mask that hides his face”
and holding a book (325). Behind the mask Oscar’s eyes are smiling, and
Yunior realizes that this is the Zafa—the counter spell. The book we are
reading is a means to counteract the Fukú. When Yunior realizes that
Oscar has no face behind the mask, Díaz subtly alludes to his poignant
story from Drown, “No Face.”
These conceivable connections between the publisher’s graphics and
the novel’s content are merely possibilities of the ways in which read-
ers can “poach” the received paratexts. This semiotic engagement is
only actualized during and after the reading process in a combinatory
engagement with the visual images and the novel’s content. The graphics
can also be understood as simple decorations that create a mood for the
reading that follows. The black and gray shades mark them as match-
ing elements of the printed text, but they are absent from the digital
version and the Spanish translation. While no comparable graphic draw-
ings occur in Caramelo, the frilly, feminine cursive font that Cisneros’s
publisher has chosen for the chapter and section titles contrasts the more
business-like, straightforward font and graphic design of the paratexts
that announce the successive parts of Díaz’s novel.
The allographic paratexts of digital reading
Where Genette devotes a good deal of attention to formatting, layout,

size, internal divisions, and even the kind of paper used in print books,
a constellation of new formatting patterns profoundly changes the text-
ual experience of Díaz’s novel on an e-reader or computer screen from
the text of the printed book. As I will discuss later, one of the most
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deforming alterations in formatting in the digital edition is the change

in the footnotes that puts obstacles between readers and this important
part of the novel, resulting in their diminution or even disappearance for
some readers. Additionally, the absence of page numbers in the digital
version causes us to notice the important and often taken-for-granted
role they play in helping us to navigate through books and judge how far
we have read.30 But reading on an e-reader or tablet also adds material to
Díaz’s novel.
In Amazon’s seemingly infinite capacity to invent new strategies
to sell books, its December 15, 2014 update for the Kindle iPad appli-
cation added a “Book Browser” feature with suggestions of books to
buy, reviews, and ratings. Additionally, in the updated “Book Browser,”
users can tap on the cover image of books in their virtual library to see
additional information such as a description, customer reviews, ratings,
frequently highlighted passages, and the X-Ray feature. This feature lists
characters and terms in the book and a bar graph visualization quanti-
fying their occurrence. These new allographic paratexts begin to shape
the reading process through a haptic gesture—a long press on the digital
image of the cover. If the digital simulacrum of the book cover lacks
space for the traditional paratexts that appear on printed book covers,
Amazon’s “Book Browser” feature transcends this limitation of the digital
precisely through the digital. Now, the hyperlink reveals more paratextual
material than a print cover ever could, offering multiple paratexts to pre-
shape reader’s interpretations of the novel if they choose to engage with
them by pressing the small image of the cover on the screen. When, for
example, a prospective reader sees passages that hundreds of previous
readers have highlighted, the experience of reading those passages later
in the book is already changed. As of March 2015, potential readers can
now also see, and have their reading shaped by, 1,070 customer reviews
of Díaz’s book through the dynamic interface of the e-book cover. The
ostensibly infinite space of the web radically changes the materiality of
the printed book cover, overlaying the literary text with thousands of
new paratexts.
For Díaz’s novel, the Book Browser feature invites prospective readers
to “X-Ray this book,” a function that reveals a list of the novel’s 12 char-
acters with a description and a horizontal bar graph for each, visually
quantifying their presence in the text. Several misleading descriptions
occur in this paratext. The note for the character La Inca, for example,
presents reference material from Wikipedia for Inca Garcilaso de la Vega
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(1539–1616) who is not this character in Díaz’s novel. For the character
Ana Obregón, a biography of a Spanish actress with the same name from
Wikipedia is given. This selected material included in the Book Browser
feature invites readers to see the more extensive X-Ray feature inside the
book after they purchase it. When doing so, readers encounter several
more errors such as these, in which links to material from Wikipedia
about people who share various characters’ names have been uploaded
as paratextual material for the digital edition of Díaz’s novel.
The Book Browser feature also shows readers ten highlights by others
that they will encounter when they read the book. The sentence “Success,
after all, loves a witness, but failure can’t exist without one” is given
quantitative emphasis with the appended statistic, “Highlighted by 960
Kindle Users.” Amazon thus uses this product of Díaz’s creative labor
and the work of readers who have taken time to highlight the passage
as an unreimbursed advertisement for its Kindle device and e-books.
This paratext employs the common advertising strategy of projecting a
shared community of product purchasers that potential customers will
enter when they buy and engage with the product. Those who read this
passage and the statistics about it in the Book Browser will bring this
experience to the passage when they see it in the book, focusing on it
more than had they not seen it before reading. This paratext of readers’
highlights shouts out: “Notice me!” As I noted previously, this practice
of “popular highlights” skews the importance of various passages in the
novel because it works on a mushrooming principle: if a previous reader
has made a highlight public, all one needs to do is tap again to second
that valorization, and this practice often diminishes as one proceeds
further in the book. In this way, earlier readers often shape the trajectory
of the popular highlights function.
Despite the additional resources available to readers of the text on
digital devices, several deformations occur that create new paratextual
portals through which the text is interpreted. A compound paratextuality
now functions as new paratexts are overlain on several of the autographic
peritexts that Díaz consciously designed and included in his novel. His
essential paratexts in the print version are distorted in the digital editions
published for portable reading devices such as e-readers, tablets, and
smartphones. While these new editions make Díaz’s text more access-
ible to larger numbers of people—the book can be downloaded to these
devices over wireless Internet in 60 seconds—they represent a perhaps
undesirable iteration of the text. In these distortions, the cart pulls the
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horse: the technological features of the e-devices, rather than the author,
determine where elements of the novel are placed, and how and what
they communicate to readers.
Amazon, unlike Apple—the two main corporations selling digital
books for portable devices—has excised or at least made less accessible
certain key autographic and allographic paratexts that traditionally
appear at the beginning of printed books. Upon opening an Amazon
digital book on a portable device, readers immediately see the first page
of the main text, because the device is programmed to skip the cover and
copyright page, and other important material the author has included
as front matter such as the table of contents, dedication and epigraph.
Should it occur to readers that this point of entry into the novel has
caused them to lose key authorial paratexts necessary to thoroughly
understand the text, they must go back through several screens to read
them. In its desire to speedily engage readers with texts (a means of
promoting further sales), Amazon partially censors or at least misleads
readers about the contours of the authorial enunciation. Viewing the
table of contents that an author has constructed is a key initial means of
cognitively mapping what will follow—an important paratextual element
like a dedication or epigraph.
Once inside the main text of the digital edition on the small port-
able screen, new modes of tactility draw readers to an alternate set of
intratextual elements that were previously extra-textual such as word
definitions, Wikipedia entries, maps, and videos. Even on the relatively
“primitive” black-and-white screen of the Kindle, readers can tap words
to see definitions and origins, add a typed note, highlight sections of
text, or view related material on the Internet that now appears “inside”
the text. Further, readers can bring elements from other people’s
screens into their own if they activate the “Popular Highlights” feature,
and also sometimes view the notes others have written. The portable
screen becomes an incipient communal screen in these moments of
reading.
The X-Ray feature, made available for the black-and-white Kindle
Touch in 2012 and on tablets, is a paratextual overlay with intratexts that
figuratively delve into the text on a centripetal vector. Tapping on the
X-Ray icon opens screens that list people and terms in the book, with a
graph visualization quantifying their presence on the page, in a chapter,
or the entire book. Then tapping on one of these words opens a screen
with further description and a link to more information on the web if
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desired, and a list of passages and locations throughout the digital text
that can be scrolled through and tapped to access that part of the text.
Readers can scroll through the list of excerpts to find one they wish to
examine further. Beyond a simple word search function, the information
on these intratextual screens offers readers new modes to cognitively
map and navigate through the books they read on the small devices.
The bar visualization promotes a quantitative engagement with the text,
affecting perceptions of a character or a term’s importance in the overall
book. In one example, this visualization changed my notion of who the
main character in a book was when I saw it in the middle of my reading
process. It is a non-authorial paratext, a new element of the semantics of
the text if the reader chooses to engage with this or other enhancements
available when reading on small screens.
For the digital version of Díaz’s book, Amazon invents a table of
contents, inserting it after the first seven pages of the novel, making
these initial pages of the novel appear to be a kind of peritextual pref-
ace rather than part of the text proper. Amazon created and added the
table of contents, a non-authorial peritext, so that readers on e-devices
and tablets could have hyperlinks to the novel’s chapters. Thus, Amazon
adds a mode of cognitively mapping the novel not present in the original
print edition and, instead of placing it at the beginning of the novel,
inserts it after page seven! A further exacerbation of this distortion is
that clicking on “Beginning” in the menu bar, should one want to look
at it again while reading the novel, brings up page 8—the first page after
the inserted table of contents, not the actual beginning of the novel.
The authorial peritext that Díaz chose to open the novel, a poem by
Derek Walcott, is mutilated by appearing as a long prose paragraph
instead of lines of verse. Completely changing the sense and character of
the epigraph, the layout makes it appear that the great poet Walcott does
not know how to write properly, with rambling incomplete sentences
and capital letters before and after commas where line breaks in the
original poem would be. Perhaps readers of the digital version may not
even see the mutilated epigraph when opening the e-book for the first
time after purchasing it or, if they have clicked the “Beginning” option in
the menu. Both of these actions take readers to the opening of Chapter 1,
not the beginning.
Even worse, the footnotes have been relegated to the back of the novel,
accessible by hyperlinked numbers in the main text. They have been
removed from the bottom of the page (indeed, fixed pages no longer exist
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in digital texts themselves, rather “location” numbers, since readers can

change font size and therefore page layouts), and made difficult to access.
It is hard to bring up the footnote by tapping the number on the screen
and then return to the text after reading the note; the long press must be
executed in just the right way so that other material such as a definition
or Wikipedia entry does not appear instead of the note. Even if readers
bother to go to the trouble of finding the notes in this way, this physical
separation impedes the flow of the performative voice that occurs almost
seamlessly in the original novel, as I discuss in the next chapter. The notes
have been effectively excised from the continuum between text and notes
in the original, integrated reading process. Removing footnotes from
their intended position at the foot of the page and burying them within a
series of long presses that the reader must perform in order to see them,
effectively erases them from the linear reading process, destroying the
original text and sabotaging the author’s complete narrative utterances.
The notes become more peripheral, almost external epitexts rather than
the peritexts the author intended. I suspect that Díaz must be dismayed
with this mutilation of his artistic creation—despite the wider audience
that the digital text now reaches.
The epitexts and allographic peritexts discussed in this chapter
combine to “create” the text in various ways, as portals readers pass
through by choice or unavoidably. Readers poach various epitexts from
a growing body of material that they choose to engage with such as
reviews, ratings, or authorial commentary. Other allographic peritexts
are usually unavoidable such as the front cover, graphics and design, and
errors in the digitized edition. Now, more than ever, however, readers are
invited to create paratextual material themselves online, portals through
which other readers will then interact with Díaz’s novel. Readers thereby
also “perform” the text along with the author, joining populist and
hegemonic multiculturalism as they help publishers to sell more books
through their creative activities.
Notes
1 Conversation with Ellen McCracken, Oct. 28, 2010, Santa Barbara.
2 Cited in Frank Bures, “Chasing the Whale,” Poets and Writers, Sep./Oct. 2007,
54. Print.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0005
3 “Interview with Junot Díaz,” Book Browse, 2007, https://www.bookbrowse.

com/author_interviews/full/index.cfm/author_number/1496/junot-diaz.
Web. Mar. 19, 2015 and Burres, “Chasing the Whale.”
4 Meghan O’Rourke, “Questions for Junot Díaz: An Interview with the Pulitzer
Prize-winning Author,” Slate, Apr. 8, 2008, http://www.slate.com/id/2188494/
Web. Oct. 26, 2010.
5 See: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_DtCXqMoxhCQ/SQrEQZiORfI/
AAAAAAAAAFM/o9BgipaSnjY/s400/elizabeth_de_leon_junot_Díaz_
christopher_peterson.jpg. Web. Sep. 2, 2010
6 See https://us-east.manta.joyent.com/condenast/public/cnt-services/producti
on/2014/11/05/545a8d890a0711b245b6c740_junot-diaz-contributor-image-16-
9-lg.jpeg. Web. Jan. 30, 2015.
7 See http://www.independent.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00018/Díaz_18069t.
jpg. Web. Sep. 2, 2010
8 See http://hayfestivalcartagena.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/junot-
Díaz_blog.jpg?w=604&h=402. Web. Sep. 2, 2010
9 See http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2009/09/17/alg_junotDíaz.jpg and
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_xucc9SugiUE/SgVJh0SFnRI/AAAAAAAAAOo/
Q-NFUPfHBS0/s320/JUNOT+DÍAZ.jpg. Web. Sep. 2, 2010
10 See http://stmedia.startribune.com/images/4diaz0902.jpg and Web. Jan. 30,
2015. The book Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books, Ed. Leah Price
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011) devotes an entire chapter to Díaz’s
personal library, with several pictures of the writer and his book collection.
11 See http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/0lIMl8z1ECa/Inside+Norman+Mailer+
Center+Benefit+Gala/QMckGDZ5iXE/Junot+Diaz. Web. Jan. 30, 2015.
12 Talk at Google, Oct. 3, 2007, authors@google.com.
13 Chica-lit writer Alisa Valdés-Rodríguez complains that she can only make
money by performing as a Latina. She notes that her publisher rejected the
second novel she submitted because it had an Irish-American saxophonist
as a protagonist instead of Latina characters. The autobiographical novel
emphasized her Irish heritage from her mother’s side—an ethnicity with less
cultural capital today than her Latino side. Panel discussion with Valdés-
Rodríguez, Santa Barbara Book and Author Festival, Sept. 29, 2007.
14 See http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/bwz16t/junot-diaz. Web. Jan. 30,
2015.
15 Junot Díaz Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/junotdiaz.writer. Web.
Aug. 7, 2015.
16 Ross Scarano interview with Junot Díaz, Dec. 17, 2012, http://www.complex.
com/pop-culture/2012/12/junot-diaz-interview. Web. Aug. 7, 2015.
17 See, Erin Judge, “So Make It Up,” Dec. 4, 2007, http://somakeitup.blogspot.
com/2007/12/open-letter-to-junot-diaz.html. Web. Jan. 18, 2015.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0005
18 “The Annotated Oscar Wao: Notes and Translation for The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao,” http://www.annotated-oscar-wao.com/index.html. Web.
Jan. 18, 2015.
19 Email from Kim Flournoy to me, Sep. 28, 2015.
20 “Memories of a Jewminicana: Aliza Hausman’s Blog,” Dec. 8, 2008, http://
www.alizahausman.com/2008/12/oscar-wao-vocabulary-dictionary.html.
Web. Feb. 28, 2015.
21 See http://www.amazon.com/gp/community-content-search/results/
ref=cm_srch_q_pag_rtr_17?ie=UTF8&excerptSize=170&excerpts=true&fo=
&idx.all=0&idx.asin=B000UZJRGI&index=community-reviews&page=17&
query=footnotes&sort=. Web. Jan. 18, 2015.
22 Review by “A Reader,” Jan. 9, 2015, http://www.amazon.com/gp/
cdp/member-reviews/A21FU9Y326GLK5/ref=cm_cr_pr_auth_
rev?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReview, Web. Jan. 19, 2015.
23 “Tales of an Outcast,” New York Times, Sep. 4, 2007, http://www.nytimes.
com/2007/09/04/books/04diaz.html?_r=2&ex=1189483200&en=8689692aae
a0f735&ei=5070&oref=slogin&. Web. Jan. 22, 2015.
24 See http://www.amazon.com/review/RB9CWCIFVSHXE/ref=cm_cr_dp_cm
t?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1594489580&nodeID=283155&store=books#wasThisHelp
ful. Web. Jan. 19, 2015.
25 Goodreads page for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, http://www.
goodreads.com/book/show/297673.The_Brief_Wondrous_Life_of_Oscar_
Wao. Web. Feb. 8, 2015.
26 See “Junot Diaz>Quotes,” Goodreads, http://www.goodreads.com/
quotes/661808-motherfuckers-will-read-a-book-that-s-one-third-elvish-but.
Web. Jan. 22, 2014.
27 See “Goodreads Discussion Group,” http://www.goodreads.com/topic/
show/1844732-the-brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao-discussion-
board?page=1, and the novel’s playlist on 8tracks.com, http://8tracks.com/
novelsongs/the-brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao-by-junot-diaz. Web. Jan.
22, 2015.
28 Cited in, Jennifer Schuessler, “Hackles Rise over Poet’s Use of Chinese
Name,” New York Times, Sep. 9, 2015, C-3. Print
29 See, for example, the work of Nicolás Kanellos with Arte Público Press and
the Recovery Project.
30 Amazon lists the page numbers corresponding to the print version of Díaz’s
novel next to the chapter titles on the table of contents of the digital edition.
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2
Autographic Peritexts
and Expanding Footnotes
in Díaz’s Novel
Abstract: This chapter focuses on those peritexts attached
to the text itself that the author controls, and the unique
migration of a key authorial peritext to a space outside
the novel in an innovative digital experiment that Díaz
undertook in 2013. Authorially created peritexts such as
the dedication, epigraphs, chapter titles, and the extensive
network of footnotes profoundly affect reading and
textuality. Later, in an exciting digital intervention, Díaz
created 23 new footnotes for the novel on the online site
Poetry Genius, as “footnotes to a footnote,” extending the
novel beyond its borders while carrying on the paratextual
strategy of autographic footnotes.

doi: 10.1057/9781137603609.0006.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0006 45
With the myriad of expanding paratexts such as those discussed in

Chapter 1, authors lose control of their artistic creation after publication.
In agreeing to let a publisher print and sell their work, they also lose the
right to design peritextual portals such as the cover, typeface, visuals,
description, and price. The publisher controls the decision to release a
paperback or digital edition, and, as we have seen, the author is some-
times betrayed by the distortions of the text that result. On the level of
epitexts, thousands of crowd-sourced commentaries, ratings, reviews,
annotations, and algorithmic recommendations overlay Díaz’s novel after
publication. The writer exercises some control over self-presentation in
public appearances and interviews, but hegemonic multiculturalism
overcodes these epitexts. This chapter examines the peritexts in The Brief
Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao that Díaz more closely controls along with
his attempts to expand the novel and control interpretation by adding
new digital annotations to it. Many of these autographic peritexts carry
more weight than the networks of epitexts discussed earlier because of
their physical proximity to the original authorial creation.
Díaz employs several standard rhetorical devices as thresholds that
readers pass through as they navigate in and out of the main text of
the novel. The dedication, epigraphs, chapter titles, epilogue, and the
acknowledgments join the footnotes as key elements of the novel’s
discourse even though they are separated spatially from the main text.
For example, the novel’s dedication to Elizabeth de León, Díaz’s partner
at the time, connects the writer to many crucial aspects of the novel: the
surname chosen for Oscar’s family; Yunior’s recurring love interest, Lola
de León; the apologies he offers for being a sucio in the novel; the words
he cannot find to save their relationship in the dream from which he
awakes crying at the end; and the thanks Díaz expresses to the de León
family in the Acknowledgements. Díaz also creates a peritextual frame
around the novel with the dedication to León at the beginning and the
closing line of the Acknowledgements in which he expresses deep grati-
tude to her. Even though they are somewhat spatially apart from the
novel itself, autographic peritexts such as these enjoy a proximity to the
main text that the more diffuse epitexts discussed in Chapter 1 do not.
Intertitles
With an elaborate system of chapter titles and internal subheadings,

Díaz offers readers aids to cognitively map the novel. At the same time,
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Autographic Peritexts in Díaz’s Novel 47
these explanatory markers represent the author’s desire to secure mean-

ing and to direct our attention to themes he wishes to emphasize. The
eight verbal titles for the seven chapters and the coda are for the most
part concise and simple: they name a place (“Wildwood”), a central
character (“Poor Abelard”), or other cultural works as intertexts such
as “Sentimental Education,” “Land of the Lost,” and “The Final Voyage.”
Díaz also adds chronological anchors to each of the main chapter titles
to help readers establish a time line. The first period narrated, 1974–1987,
takes Oscar from age seven to high school graduation. Lola’s teenage
years from 1982–1984 are recounted in Chapter 2 titled “Wildwood.” The
novel progresses chapter by chapter, with each focusing on a key time
period in Oscar’s family history in the US and the Dominican Republic,
ending with the protagonist’s death in 1995. The last chapters, “The Final
Voyage” and “The End of the Story” give no anchoring dates since they
closely follow from the end date listed for chapter 6.
The ordering of the chapters signals Díaz’s desire to first introduce
Oscar and Lola, the two main people in Yunior’s life at the time, in chap-
ters 1 and 2. These are followed by their mother’s life in the Dominican
Republic in the last years of the dictatorship from 1955 to 1962; then
Yunior and Oscar’s college years, their “sentimental education” between
1988 and 1992; then a flashback in family history telling the story of Lola
and Oscar’s grandfather, Abelard, from 1944 to 1946; and finally Oscar’s
lost years after college from 1992 to 1995. This simple periodization,
although not recounted chronologically, is expanded internally with
numerous intertitles that have what Genette terms a demonstrative
function, that is, to direct the reader’s attention to a particular theme in
the ensuing section.
The first subheading of Chapter 1, for example, “The Golden Age”
recounts Oscar’s initial success with girls in elementary school, a prelude to
his failure in this regard throughout most of the rest of the novel. For comic
book fans, the title also references Neil Gaiman’s issues of the Miracleman
comic in the 1990s. For the subsections about Oscar’s first serious relation-
ship with a girl in his last year of high school, Díaz uses intertitles such
as “Oscar Is Brave,” “Oscar Comes Close,” and “Oscar in Love” to chart
the protagonist’s time with Ana, although she sees him only as a friend.
In a shout-out to readers who know Spanish well, Díaz titles one of these
sections “Amor de Pendejos,” an excerpt from the saying, “Amor de lejos
es amor de pendejos” [Long-distance love is fools’ love (polite transla-
tion)]. Here the phrase refers to the moment in their friendship when it
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might have become romantic but Ana’s mixed signals and Oscar’s passivity
prevent this. In contrast to these four subheadings that employ internal
serialization like a soap opera, the chapter’s second subheading requires
familiarity with high culture. “The Moronic Inferno” refers to the Catholic
boys high school that Oscar attends. Here Díaz redeploys British novelist
Wyndham Lewis’s term for the US that was later used by Saul Bellow and
Martin Amis to refer to the public school system.1
Genette notes that epigraphs often present a hermeneutic challenge to
readers, inviting them to figure out the connection between the quotation
and the text that follows. Some of Díaz’s intertitles are also puzzle-like
utterances that invite decoding. One section of chapter 3 is titled “Kimota!”
The allusion refers to “atomic” spelled backward, the magic, transforma-
tive word that hero Mickey Moran utters in the Miracleman comic book
series. Díaz uses this intertitle to introduce the three-line section about
the young Beli falling in love for the first time in the Dominican Republic.
Chapter 4, unique in that it has no intertitles, achieves a similar hermen-
eutic effect internally with a mysterious utterance with which Oscar greets
Yunior when they first share a dorm room: “Hail, Dog of God.” Díaz
explains the trilingual pun by translating the components of the Latin
word Dominicanis, “God. Domini. Dog. Canis. Hail Dominicanis” (171).
The absence of intertitles in this chapter about their college years signals
the way in which that time period sped by for Yunior, despite the intensity
of trying to help Oscar before and after the suicide attempt.
Epigraphs
Díaz uses epigraphs sparingly, opening the novel with two, and beginning
Part Two with one. Part Two focuses on the role of the Trujillo regime and
its aftermath in the suffering of Oscar and his forebears, beginning with
his grandfather Abelard Cabral’s imprisonment, torture, and death in the
1940s and continuing to Oscar’s last trip to the Dominican Republic in
1995. The epigraph that opens the section is a translated quotation from
the newspaper La Nación, that deifies Trujillo: “ . . . for Trujillo is not a
man. He is . . . a cosmic force . . . He belongs to . . . the category of those born
to a special destiny” (204). The quotation starkly contrasts the counter-
narrative Díaz elaborates in Part Two with details of the tragedy Trujillo
wreaked on the Cabral family because Abelard dared to stand up to the
dictator to protect his daughters. The emotional details of the brutality
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and suffering Abelard and his family undergo stand in stark contrast to
the messianic language about Trujillo in the Dominican newspaper. The
dictator, with “a special destiny” and as a “cosmic force,” interacts with
the allusion in the book’s opening epigraph to Galacticus, the cosmic evil
force of the comic book series Fantastic Four that drains the living energy
from other planets. To the question in the opening epigraph, “Of what
import are brief, nameless lives . . . to Galacticus?” Díaz answers with
the 335 pages of the ensuing novel, giving names to these protagonists of
history and abundant information about their lives.
The novel’s second opening epigraph is a stanza from Derek Walcott’s
long poem, “The Schooner Flight.” The West Indian writer uses dense
poetic language, patois, and a spoken variety of the colonial English
imposed on the Caribbean. The soul of the poetic persona is poisoned
by the extreme gaps between the rich and the poor, and takes flight to
the sea. As a “red nigger” with “sea-green eyes,” he physically commu-
nicates the colonial legacy of racial mixture but re-signifies it for a posi-
tive end. Proudly proclaiming, “I have a sound colonial education,/ I
have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,/ and either I’m nobody, or I’m a
nation” (np). Díaz’s novel constructs and advocates for the latter iden-
tity: the move against being “nobody” to being a nation. This new social
formation is now conceived of as the diasporic Dominican community
stretched between the island and the US, people with names such
as Oscar, Lola, Béli, Inca, Abelard, and Yunior. The epigraph points
forward to the first lines of the novel and the legacy of the fukú that
the Admiral brought to the new world. This curse was evidenced in the
bane of the conquered Taínos and the screams of the African slaves.
Although Oscar would call Santo Domingo the Ground Zero of the
New World—the epicenter of the earthquake or nuclear-like disaster
that colonialism represented—Díaz links that center also to the idea
of a single nation existing in two places because of the Trujillato. This
is his variation of Walcott’s advocacy of nation and community as a
counter strategy to the isolating interpellation uttered by the island’s
rich: “Shabine” or “red nigger.”
Autographic footnotes
Díaz is far from the first creative writer to employ footnotes in fiction.2 A
number of writers from Fielding and Sterne to Joyce, Beckett, Nabokov,
and Barth have adapted the scholarly device of the footnote to creative
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forms of fiction. In Latin America, inventive footnotes appear in the work

of Jorge Luis Borges, Manuel Puig, Ricardo Piglia, and many others. The
stakes are high, for example, in Piglia’s 1975 story “Homage to Roberto
Arlt,” where the writer plagiarizes a literary text, subtly denounces his
crime in the story and its appended footnotes, but manages to trick many
readers who accept his claim of having discovered a new short story by
Argentine writer Roberto Arlt, speciously appended to the story with
numerous annotations. Many failed to carefully read Piglia’s story and
especially its footnotes, and fell victim to his literary hoax.3
The ostensibly scholarly footnotes in Ricardo Piglia’s story both uphold
and undermine the notion of Gérard Genette and others that footnotes
are structurally optional for readers and therefore addressed only to
certain readers. Some perceived them as unnecessary, perhaps desiring
to shorten reading time, and became victims of the hoax. Yet “Homage to
Roberto Arlt” also undermines Genette’s formulation because the foot-
notes in the story may not be skipped if one is to adequately understand
it. That is, while their placement may make them appear to be optional,
reading them is required to understand the story.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao makes extensive use of autographic
footnotes to amplify the apparent main text of the novel and offer another
venue in which the authorial persona can perform. Genette’s character-
ization of footnotes as paratexts is an inadequate concept with which to
understand Díaz’s notes. Rather than impeding narrative flow, as one
would expect of such interruptions, they carry on the performative strat-
egies and themes of the primary text and, in effect, are also the text. Here
I will argue that an overriding non-paratextuality also characterizes the
footnotes in the novel. They are paratexts that are not paratexts.
Díaz tells the public that his footnotes are positioned in the book
to challenge the main narrative, contesting what might be termed the
discourse of “the king.” That is, the novel has certain dictatorial powers
in which a single voice tells and insists upon a narrative, and footnotes
challenge this power by creating a double narrative. He argues:
The footnotes are there for a number of reasons; primarily, to create a double
narrative. The footnotes, which are in the lower frequencies, challenge the
main text, which is the higher narrative. The footnotes are like the voice of
the jester, contesting the proclamations of the king. In a book that’s all about
the dangers of dictatorship, the dangers of the single voice—this felt like a
smart move to me.4
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I argue in contrast, that a single, unified voice predominates in both the

text and the footnotes—that of Díaz’s authorial persona; the footnotes
are in effect non-paratextual material. True to his performative authorial
persona, Díaz is playing with images of hierarchy in stating his authorial
intention here. Their position and size on the page, their only spuriously
digressive paths, as well as their content do not even metaphorically
contest the proclamations of the king; rather, they are in the voice of the
king and continue the main narration. As I will argue, they form a single
narrative with the main text.
Díaz’s lengthy footnotes offer readers topographically distinct navi-
gational paths between an apparent main text and the subordinated
numbered notes in smaller font. These footnotes are paratexts that are
not paratexts because of the essential narrative material they present and
their continuation of Díaz’s idiosyncratic authorial and actorial diction
throughout the book. A strong continuum between text and notes exists:
the enunciative sender of the two distinctly marked utterances is a single
textual construct that combines the enunciative roles Genette terms
authorial and actorial—here, the textual presence of Junot Díaz and the
homodiegetic narrator, Yunior. At the same time, the footnotes represent
an experimental borrowing of a traditional rhetorical practice of non-
fiction writing, pushing the boundaries of literary creation. They invite
readers to move to an authorial/actorial intervention at the bottom of
the printed page, or a hypertextual link if reading on an e-reader or
tablet, accessed through a haptic interaction with the screen. Even on
the printed page, the footnote numbers represent proto-hypertextual
links within the main text, drawing readers to take a new but continu-
ous navigational path and experience only a very minor interruption in
narrative flow.
Genette points to the categorical slipperiness of this kind of paratext,
questioning the accuracy of terming the original authorial footnote
a paratext. He leans toward excluding it from the category paratext,
terming it rather “a local detour or a momentary fork in the text . . . an
undefined fringe between text and paratext” (328). I would argue
instead that it is both text and paratext simultaneously. A double-voiced
discourse continuously overlays Díaz’s footnotes in which typographic
subordination, traditional rhetorical conventions, the trope of exten-
sion, and continued narrative flow are in constant play with the actorial/
actorial enunciative voice that predominates in both the main text and
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the notes. The notes are paratexts that are not paratexts, and both at the
same time.
One might insist that clear topographical signifiers such as reduced
typeface, crowded layout, the superscript numbers through which they
descend from the main text, and their inferior, lower position on the
page mark the footnotes as external and disposable. It is more useful
to understand these visual topographic cues as neutral, sui generis traits
that urge readers to alternate between two codes in assimilating similar
content. We might compare this semiotic process to that which occurs in
the illuminated letter in which readers alternate between alphabetic and
pictorial codes. Together the two codes overlay the opening letter of the
text, and one must engage equally with both to decode the message. The
text and footnotes in a literary work such as Díaz’s are tandem elements
of a single communicative system that must be decoded together. As
Shari Bestock points out in the case of Fielding, the notes continue to
be part of the fiction and “are not extratextual even when they cite other
texts” (206).5
Genette distinguishes between the allographic note (as in an edition,
for example, written by an outsider, neither the author nor a character),
the authorial note (written by the author), and the actorial note (written
by a character in the novel). Díaz’s notes combine authorial and actorial
enunciative status, as does the first-person homodiegetic narrator over-
coding the novel. On page 169, the narrative “I” is identified as “Yunior,”
the authorial persona of Díaz carried over from his first book of fiction,
Drown. The enunciative sender of both the notes and the main text has
combined authorial and actorial status, and this combination allows the
reader to easily slip between the text and notes.
One key footnote makes more explicit this common enunciative status
and distances itself from the usual function of footnotes by recounting
important elements of the plot and moving the narrative forward. Note
6 chronicles the development of the child Oscar’s addiction to reading,
his persecution for doing so by peers and his mother, and his own early
creative writing efforts, “nothing serious for now, just rough fascimiles
of his favorite stories, no sign yet that these half-assed pastiches were
to be his Destiny” (22n7). Here the narrative, although typographically
smaller and subordinated on the page, recounts important elements of
the protagonist’s formation. The note is autographic, in the voice of the
homodiegetic narrator Yunior but is also double-voiced: here Díaz hints
that his authorial persona in the novel is not only Yunior but also Oscar
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the protagonist—the avid reader of genre fiction who experiments with

writing himself as a young immigrant to the US. Implicitly, writing will
indeed become Destiny for the triad Yunior–Oscar–Díaz, and Yunior
and Oscar are two sides of the same authorial persona.
In a strategy of populist multiculturalism, many of the notes provide
information about key figures of Dominican history to compensate for
“the mandatory two seconds of Dominican history” most Americans
experience (2n1). While standard allographic historical notes employ
a straightforward, ostensibly impartial tone, Díaz’s interject humor,
sarcasm, and disgust, for example, as he describes the Dominican dicta-
tor Rafael Trujillo: “A portly, sadistic, pig-eyed mulatto who bleached
his skin, wore platform shoes, . . . (also known as El Jefe, the Failed Cattle
Thief, and Fuckface) . . . Outstanding accomplishments include: the 1937
genocide against the Haitian and Haitian-Dominican community, . . . the
creation of the first modern kleptocracy (Trujillo was Mobuto before
Mobutu was Mobutu), [and] the systematic bribing of US Senators . . . ”
(2–3n1). The “main” text with which this note functions on a continuum
describes the notion of fukú or the curse of doom in the New World, the
revenge of the slaves, and closely connected to Trujillo in modern times:
If you even thought a bad thing about Trujillo, fuá, a hurricane would sweep
your family out to sea . . . And what about fucking Kennedy? He was the one
who green-lighted the assassination of Trujillo in 1961 . . . Bad move, cap’n.
For what Kennedy’s intelligence experts failed to tell him was what every
single Dominican, from the richest jabao in Mao to the poorest güey in El
Buey . . . knew, that whoever killed Trujillo, their family would suffer a fukú
so dreadful that it would make the one that attached itself to the Admiral
[Columbus] jojote in comparison. (3).
Díaz’s style of linguistic performance in both the text and appended note,
along with the similar political perspective of the two passages, create
an almost seamless continuum. Readers are invited to move easily back
and forth between the text and the visually distinct note just as decoders
of the illuminated letter might move between alphabetic and pictorial
signifieds of the compound signifier.6
As noted in Chapter 1, a number of readers’ comments on the Amazon
website complain about the un-translated Spanish words in passages such
as the above and throughout the novel. I would argue that this experi-
ence does not separate the notes from the main text but is a common
narrative strategy in both. Díaz employs onomatopoeia frequently,
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with words such as “fuá,” repeated like an incantation throughout this

section, and rhyming words such as jabao and Mao, güey and Buey
forming an important part of his bilingual performance throughout the
novel. The plot is comprehensible without understanding the Spanish
words. Where some readers must skip over the numerous allusions to
science fiction characters they do not know, others must do the same
for the Spanish expressions—all of us have various competencies and
lack thereof. Listening to the audio version of the novel, most of which is
performed by the talented reader Jonathan Davis, is an important aid for
experiencing the performative rhythm Díaz constructs in these bilingual
utterances.
Díaz has argued that because of what historians term “the tyranny of
the present,” contemporary readers know little about history, especially
the marginalized histories of small countries such as the Dominican
Republic. Even worse, we learn in an authorial epitext, in his own family’s
case the Trujillato was never openly discussed until one day, he tells the
audience at Google, “I saw the scars on my mother’s back.”7 Díaz merges
his mother’s story with that of Oscar’s mother, Beli, who had scalding oil
thrown on her back by a malicious foster family with whom she lived after
her father was imprisoned and killed by Trujillo for refusing to make his
daughters available to the dictator. The repressed personal history of the
family is resurrected and recounted in counterpoint with Oscar Wao’s
narrative trajectory. This attempt to break the tyranny of the present is
intimately tied to the historical information in the footnotes, including
compelling mini-biographies of key Dominican political figures such as
the Trujillo henchmen Joaquín Balaguer and Porfirio Rubirosa; heroes
such as Jesús de Galíndez and the Mirabal sisters, whose assassinations
were turning points in the downfall of Trujillo’s regime; and popular
figures such as actress María Montez and the indigenous rebel Hatüey,
burned at the stake by the Spaniards. Hoping to help readers relate to
these figures, Díaz invokes contemporary references: Hatüey is the Taíno
Ho Chi Minh, and María Montez “was the original J-Lo (or whatever
smoking caribeña is the number-one-eye-crack of your time” (87n8).
Trujillo had Jesús Galíndez kidnapped in New York for writing a disser-
tation at Columbia documenting the dictator’s abuses, and, according to
legend, he was suspended over a vat of boiling oil with Trujillo stand-
ing nearby holding a copy of the dissertation: “And you thought your
committee was rough” (97n11). Díaz shouts out to readers familiar with
academia.
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Díaz invites US readers with competence in the American liter-

ary canon to decode the intertextuality of his title with that of Ernest
Hemingway’s story “The Short Happy Life of Francis McComber” and its
parallel themes of failed masculinity, the sexual triangle, the hunter and
the hunted, and shooting deaths in the Third-World wilderness. At the
same time that he is writing a US-Latino version of several Hemingway
themes, Díaz reaches out to consumers of “genre” literature—speculative,
fantasy, and science fiction. Throughout the novel he employs abun-
dant references to his generation’s “nerd” culture of science fiction and
comic book heroes such as Jack Kirby’s Uatu the Watcher and Tolkien’s
Morgoth. This mass culture is connected to Antillean culture, he argues:
“Who more sci-fi than us?” (21n6) the narrator asks, later noting, “it’s
hard as a Third-Worlder not to feel a certain amount of affinity for Uatu
the Watcher; he resides in the hidden Blue Area of the Moon, and we
DarkZoners reside (to quote Glissant) on ‘la face cachée de la Terre’
(Earth’s hidden face)” (92n10). Some readers might have the mass cultural
competence to know that the Watchers are figures from Stan Lee and
Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four comic book series that observe and compile
knowledge about the universe. Others may recognize the allusion to
the poet Édouard Glissant from Martinique. Addressing a variety of US
readers—from PhDs and readers of Hemingway, to sci-fi aficionados
and J-Lo watchers—Díaz flavors the crucial elements of Dominican and
Caribbean history he wishes to convey with both widely known and less
well-known Americana. In both the main text and paratexts such as the
title and footnotes, he joins US and Latin-American culture as natural
elements of a whole.
The continuum between the notes and the main text is especially
evident in one sequence in which the notes enhance the assertions of the
text by structural repetition. One boy in Beli’s elementary school class
dares to remark that he believes Trujillo killed Galíndez. The next day
both he and his teacher are gone. Díaz appends two notes in succession
that repeat the instance of students and teachers being disappeared or
killed for their ideas. First, the long, detailed story of Galíndez whose
dissertation resulted in his death, and then the case of Rafael Yépez who
ran a small prep school near where the narrator grew up. In response to
one student’s essay praising Trujillo, Yépez remarked that in the future,
young men like his students would also become great leaders like Trujillo.
That night all of the students, Yépez, and his wife and daughter were
roused from sleep to undergo military interrogation; the teacher and
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his family were never seen again. These successively recounted episodes
are boxes within boxes that employ structural repetition to enhance
the premises of the text. Like the illuminated letter with superimposed
images that branch out semiotically while remaining elements of a unit,
the three narratives reinforce and enhance one another and structurally
repeat the narrative of the dictatorship.
While many of the notes present information that historians and popu-
lar accounts have preserved, sometimes Díaz intervenes with a personal
testimony in a note to buttress the assertions of the main text. When the
baby Beli falls into the hands of relatives in a village in Azua, the narrator
asserts that the people there were “real wack jobs, what my moms calls
salvages” (253). A relative sells Beli into servitude and the accompany-
ing footnote offers the narrator’s first-hand testimony about the plight of
servants: “I lived in Santo Domingo only until I was nine, and I even knew
criadas. Two of them lived in the callejón behind our house, and these
girls were the most demolished overworked human beings I’d known at
the time” (253n 31). The note gives a lengthy satellite story about the life
of one of these servants he knew, as a substitute for the main text’s lack of
details about Beli’s life as a servant. Here the text strongly depends on the
narrative in the note that provides surrogate details to compensate for the
family’s repressed or unremembered history of this period.
Díaz extends the main text in the notes through the voice of a native
informant who presents an insider’s ethnography for those unfamiliar
with the nuances of Dominican and US culture. Unifying form and
content with elements of populist multiculturalism, Díaz’s mode of
presentation is often a display of linguistic ethnic spectacularity both in
the text and notes, which leads to an almost seamless transition between
the two. Referring to the aftermath of Trujillo’s assassination in 1960, for
example, Díaz writes, “with El Jefe dead and the Plátano Curtain shat-
tered all manner of escapes were now possible” (161). When Beli must
leave to come to the US, the narrator addresses her:
Oh, Beli; not so rashly . . . What did you know about states or diasporas? What
did you know about Nueba Yol or unheated “old law” tenements or children
whose self-hate short-circuited their minds? What did you know, madame,
about immigration? Don’t laugh, mi negrita, for your world is about to be
changed. Utterly . . . (160).
Díaz’s “take me as I am” performative linguistic spectacularity in these

examples refuses to italicize or translate Spanish bilingual word play
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such as “Plátano Curtain” (the Banana Curtain, playing on the Cold War
anti-Soviet term, “the Iron Curtain” and explained in note 27 as Díaz’s
inventive term for Trujillo’s forced isolation of the Dominican Republic)
or “Nueba Yol” (Nueva York, here a phonetic rendering of a Spanish
translation and Dominican pronunciation of New York), and “mi
negrita” (“my dear black woman,” a popular affectionate resignification
of the negative term “black”). Continuing the linguistic ethnic spectacu-
larity of Díaz’s performance, note 5 explains a Dominican neologism:
The pejorative pariguayo, Watchers agree, is a corruption of the English
neologism “party watcher.” The word came into common usage during the
First American Occupation of the DR, which ran from 1916 to 1924. (You
didn’t know we were occupied twice in the twentieth century? Don’t worry,
when you have kids they won’t know the U.S. occupied Iraq either (19n5).
If readers allow themselves to be immersed in the linguistic spectacular-

ity of the performance of ethnicity in both text and notes, a continuity of
discursive flow overlays the slight visual separation of the notes and text
on the printed page, forming a continuum.
Even the self-referential footnotes, which remind us that the text is a
construct, are overlain with performative spectacularity. Note 17 reads:
In my first draft, Samaná was actually Jarabacoa, but then my girl Leonie,
resident expert in all things Domo, pointed out that there are no beaches
in Jarabacoa. Beautiful rivers but no beaches. Leonie was also the one who
informed me that the perrito (see first paragraphs of chapter one, “GhettoNerd
at the End of the World”) wasn’t popularized until he late eighties, early nine-
ties, but that was one detail I couldn’t change, just liked the image too much.
Forgive me, historians of popular dance, forgive me! (132n17).
Here Díaz calls to readers’ attention authorial errors—a geographic

mistake in a descriptive detail and a cultural anachronism that few US
readers are likely to catch. This narrative strategy is similar to Barthes’
(1972) theory of inoculation—admitting a shortcoming only to reassert
the masterly authority of the performative discourse. Ultimately in this
note Díaz asserts authorial dominance over the material, telling critics
that he deliberately employed a geographic error and an anachronism so
they will not think he has done so from ignorance.
Why, we must ask, does the novel move so quickly when extensive
footnotes ostensibly impede the narrative flow throughout? Díaz has
noted that he cut many pages from the novel, throwing away 40 or 50
versions of each chapter, and, for example, initially writing 308 pages
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for Chapter 2. Condensing is clearly one important technique through

which he achieves smooth narrative flow. Additionally, the orality of
both the notes and text helps to speed us through the novel. Equally
important, I would argue, is the centrality of the notes to the aesthetic
enterprise, their effective non-paratextuality. An ideal readership, in
my view, slides almost effortlessly into these narrative segments that
only have the outward appearance of paratexts and number only 33 in
a 335-page novel. Díaz is careful not to overuse the technique (if only
we academics would use notes so sparingly!), and they are pleasurable
to read. They are so enticing to many readers that there is little danger
they might be skipped in the print version as occurred with Ricardo
Piglia’s extensive use of the technique. Only 123 of the 1,036 reviews
posted on the Amazon website up to late January 2015 complained
about Díaz’s footnotes, a small unscientific sampling, but a figure
suggesting that most of Díaz’s readers enjoy the notes as an integral
part of the novel.
An interesting variation of the presentation of the footnotes occurs
in the audiobook version of Díaz’s novel, in which the performers read
the notes as part of the novel with no pause or verbal indication that
this is a different textual level. This elision upholds the argument that
text and notes form a continuum, uttered in the same voice, with simi-
lar techniques, allusions, and performative overlay. While listeners of
the audiobook miss out on the graphic distinctions Díaz inscribes in
the print version, they experience the novel similarly to those who slide
effortlessly between text and note while reading.
Such readings of the novel make more egregious Amazon’s infer-
ior Kindle version of the novel in which the footnotes are changed to
end notes and are difficult to access. They are lumped together at the
very end of the book, after several pages of Díaz’s personal acknowl-
edgements, the author bio, a screen asking readers to rate the book
just finished, and ads for other books including Díaz’s. A number of
readers who wrote comments on the Amazon website, having tried
to read the digital version on Kindle, complained about difficulties
in accessing the notes on the device and returning to the main text
afterwards. Readers have to press or tap the link with just the right
touch for a screen with the appropriate footnote to appear. In some
cases, the link simply does not work. (This difficulty occurs in many
e-versions of books with footnotes, not only Díaz’s.) The Kindle digital
version distorts Díaz’s original authorial enunciation by removing the
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footnotes from the bottom of the page. While it is true that this is a
technical necessity because no fixed pages exist in books on e-readers
and tablets, Amazon further distorts Díaz’s work of art by locating the
notes many screens after the end of the main text, after several pages of
other paratextual material and ads.8
Further, the link to footnote 15 is an asterisk rather than the numeral,
easily missed and likely confusing. The notes at the very end of the
book are also out of order. Note 1 is followed by notes 10 through 19;
footnote 2 is placed between notes 19 and 20, followed by 21–29. Then
note 3 appears between notes 29 and 30 and the single digit numbers
4–9 follow note 33.9 The computer has ordered the notes by their first
digits, 1, 10, 11, 12, and so on. Clearly, these are digitization errors that
no editor checked or corrected. Frustrated, several readers of the
Kindle version complained that they were skipping the notes entirely
because of the difficulty in accessing them. In this case, the Kindle
version is almost an adaptation or condensed version of the novel for
these readers.
Another edition of the book that changes readers’ relationship to
Díaz’s paratextual network of deeply integrated footnotes is the Spanish
translation of the novel by Cuban-American writer Achy Obejas. Here
the translator overlays a series of secondary footnotes on the novel
which, through their juxtaposition to and intercalation with Díaz’s
original notes, highlight the non-paratextuality of the novel’s primary
footnotes. By sharply contrasting the style and tone of Díaz’s notes,
Obejas’ allographic paratexts draw attention to the continuum of Díaz’s
performative voice between the text and notes. The 131 supplementary
footnotes Obejas adds are numbered in the same sequence with Díaz’s,
using only brackets around the content to alert readers that they were
not written by Díaz. They break up, interrupt, and augment Díaz’s
original series of notes.
The extra footnotes Obejas adds in the translation create a traditional
allographic paratextual network that allows readers of the Spanish edition
another mode of engaging with the novel. They make the text more
consumable by explaining Díaz’s numerous allusions to the genres—sci
fi, fantasy, comic books, and video games. Even though many readers of
the original novel in English are unfamiliar with allusions to Morgoth or
Miracle Man, Díaz does not explain the references in the 2007 novel. In
contrast, Obejas’ additional paratexts clarify these names for Spanish-
language readers. For example, notes 23, 24, and 25 read: elvish: “Los
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idiomas de los duendes en los libros de J.R.R. Tolkien” [the languages of

the elves in the books of J.R.R. Tolkien], chakobsa:”El idioma de Guerra
de la serie Dune” [the language of War in the series Dune], and lensman:
“Superseres clásicos de la ciencia ficción” [classic super beings in science
fiction], respectively (22). As noted earlier, in the second section of
Chapter 1, “The Moronic Inferno,” Abejas adds a footnote to her trans-
lation of the phrase, “El infierno morónico,” explaining that Wyndham
Lewis used this term to refer to the US, and later Saul Bellow and Martin
Amis used it to refer to the public school system.
But Obejas also adds new notes with details about Dominican refer-
ences that Díaz does not give. The allusion to “Hija de Liborio” in the
original novel gets a footnote in the Spanish version, explaining that
Liborio Mateo Ledesma was a messianic figure in the Dominican
Republic between 1908 and 1922. An extra note in the translation explains
Díaz’s allusion to “Lilís” on page 252, a reference to Ulises Heureaux,
one of the strongest dictators of the Dominican Republic (Obejas,
266n144).10 Obejas’ extra footnotes are comparable to those inserted in
a scholarly edition of a literary work, not usually seen in a widely sold
novel. Her explanations of Dominican allusions are an indication of the
diversity of the Spanish-speaking audience that the publishers hope to
reach, where there are widespread national and regional differences in
language and culture. By standing in contrast to the performative voice
in Díaz’s original notes, Obejas’ additions in effect highlight the non-
paratextuality of Díaz’s notes.
Díaz’s novel changes with Abejas’ extra notes, even beyond the alter-
ations that occur in all translation. The augmented notes open new
tools for decoding and interpreting, interrupting the flow of the novel’s
linguistic spectacularity displayed in the text and the original footnotes.
They are optional to read, but enrich the novel and save time by having
the extra material on the same page. They are comparable to the allo-
graphic concordance prepared by the reader identified as Kim discussed
in Chapter 1, but now they are peritexts inside the Spanish-language
edition of the novel, easily accessible at the bottom of the page. These
interruptions, overlain with Obejas’ own authorial voice, re-make the
novel into a different cultural artifact. In another sense, they enrich the
novel and allow readers of the Spanish version a fuller understanding of
the vast series of allusions that mark the text. Although they are in effect
reading a different novel, Spanish-language readers have one advantage
over those who read the original English.
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Overflowing footnotes: new digital autographic

epitexts
So central is the network of autographic footnotes in Oscar Wao to

Díaz’s aesthetic and political goals for the novel that he extended this
peritext beyond the material print artifact a few years after its publica-
tion. Authors have frequently tried to move beyond the permanency
of the printed book by expanding on their works in interviews, essays,
sequels, and even revised editions. Their frustrations with the static
materiality of the printed page is palpable in such experimental works as
Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963) with optional reading orders for chapters,
and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) with a print simu-
lacrum of the Power Point interface. Beyond these print experiments,
born-digital literature with abundant hyperlinks and game-like narrative
strategies gives readers more intense co-participatory roles, resulting in
fluid and unstable literary works.
Mikhail Bakhtin argues that language is always unfinalized and open
to future dialogic interactions, that all utterances are answerable. His
linguistic concept offers a parallel to the desire of some writers to tran-
scend the materiality of the static page (Bakhtin, 1986, 1992). Beyond
the condition of unfinalizability inherent in all of the language they
create, print authors are sometimes envious of the digital, experimenting
to various degrees with versions of the non-static and possibilities for
multiple readerly paths. Like the Bakhtinian notion of language and the
new electronic literature, they search for ways to celebrate a lack of fixity
and creative instability.
Readers also engage in various modes of altering the material texts
they receive. Like writers, they frequently annotate printed material,
adding comments to the text in the form of notes, marginalia, highlight-
ing, or underlining. In so doing, they turn the material literary object,
into a “living,” mutating entity.11 A step beyond Borges’ and other theo-
rists’ notion that all readers are translators, modifying everything they
read, annotators leave a material record of their semiotic engagement
with the words they read, whether they are authors who revise their texts
or readers who comment and mark their thoughts on texts that some-
one else has written. Expanding Genette’s taxonomy of paratexts, we can
understand readers’ annotations as peritexts that surround the printed
text, although the publisher or author is not usually the creator. Most
often they are allographic peritexts written by someone other than the
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author, but they can also be autographic when the author adds them,
leaving a record of his or her posterior reading practices.
Junot Díaz engaged in this kind of autographic annotation in 2013
by publishing what might be termed “footnotes to a footnote,” second-
degree footnotes that turn the literary text into a “living” mutating
entity. Now the peritext expands to epitext, not merely as separate
commentary in interviews in other venues, but as an imitation and
extension of the traditional autographic footnote. Using the popular
annotation website Poetry Genius, Díaz has expanded one of the novel’s
footnotes, explaining and amplifying some of the references and allu-
sions he employed in Oscar Wao. Digital technology in effect allows
the printed book to be a cultural artifact that is never finalized, a novel
that never ends. This process had already begun in the allographic
paratexts that Achy Obejas added to her translation to make Díaz’s
allusions understandable to a variety of Spanish-speaking readers. As
we have seen, Obejas’ 131 supplementary footnotes, numbered in the
same sequence with Díaz’s, have only brackets around them to alert
readers that they are not written by Díaz. The novel’s footnotes expand
in the translation—a process Díaz himself continues in his Poetry
Genius intervention.
In one sense, Díaz now becomes his own “translator” of one of his
long footnotes, extending its discursive trajectory on Poetry Genius.
These digital annotations go far beyond ordinary translation as he
adds pictures, playful language, humor, and new aesthetic discourse in
amplifying the original printed note. The authorial peritext overflows its
boundaries, spawning new epitexts outside the novel. The peritext now
becomes an epitext, as it is transcribed and newly annotated outside the
print artifact. By uploading these autographic second-degree footnotes
to the website, Díaz begins the process of creating an enhanced e-book, a
multi-media version of his novel.
A few friends started Rap Genius as a site for fans to insert pop-up
annotations in digital transcriptions of their favorite song lyrics. On the
site, crowd-sourced rating systems move the most popular annotations
and explanations of lyrics to the top of the threads. In 2012, the venture
capital firm Andreessen Horowitz invested $15 million in Rap Genius and
sister sites were launched: News Genius, Rock Genius, and Poetry Genius.
The Genius sites also allow rappers, singers, and authors to annotate their
songs and texts, creating “verified annotations.”12 Collaborative annota-
tion on these sites brings readers together, and now writers such as Díaz
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can become active in facilitating a more dynamic interchange than is

usually possible in print books.
Writing in July 2013 on the Poetry Genius site, Díaz adds 23 annota-
tions to footnote 32 of the print version of Oscar Wao, using the screen
name “Kidskeya” (a play on Quisqueya, the Taíno word for motherland,
now the Dominican Republic). When viewers click on the words he
has highlighted in note 32, pop-up boxes appear with extra material he
has added in his usual witty tone. Clicking on the word “Tatooine,” for
example, opens a box with a picture of the desert planet from Star Wars
that Díaz has posted with the comment: “Shit, on first viewing, I also
thought my man’s name was Juan Kenobi. But that’s what happens when
you’re an immigrant kid of color in a culture that erases your community
completely. You start inventing filiations.” A viewer comments, “Juan
Kenobi! That is awesome,” enjoying Díaz’s Latino meme of Obi-Wan
Kenobi, the father/mentor figure in Star Wars.
Díaz begins his digital intervention by reproducing the sentence in the
main text to which footnote 32 is appended in the print book and adding
two new annotations to the line. First, he highlights a the name “Outer
Azua,” explaining that it is the edge of a province of the Dominican
Republic that he associated with Outer Mongolia in his school days. He
reveals the typographic wordplay he at first considered—to write it as
Outer aZua with an upper-case “Z” as a reference to OZ, but deciding
against this spelling: “[I] figured Zardoz was enough Oz for this novel,”
he jokes, continuing the frequent word/sound/spelling play that under-
girds the novel. He posts the comment with a colorful map to show
readers where Outer Mongolia is.
Next, Díaz makes the numeric symbol for footnote 32 a hot link,
explaining in the new annotation that the original footnotes allowed
him to transcend the expected conventions and limits of the novel, and
that he had to fight with his first editor about including them. Hinting
at his desire for expansiveness, he characterizes footnote 32 as his
most Melville-like note, where, he tells us, “I simply go buckwild!” He
slightly changes a line from Moby Dick, substituting “Get” for Melville’s
word “Give”: “Get me a condor’s quill! Get me Vesuvius’ crater for an
inkstand.”13 For Díaz, Melville’s limitless inkwell is today’s Internet; his
quill is the keyboard on which Díaz sends digital information to the
Poetry Genius website. His “buckwild” intervention consists of 23 new
footnotes that add material to only one of the novel’s notes. How much
further this process could go, we wonder, as we experience Díaz’s initial
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concrete experiment with the novel’s unfinalizability. Also in this initial

explanatory second-degree footnote, he responds to readers’ queries
by noting that Patrick Chamoiseau, not David Foster Wallace, was the
primary inspiration for his use of footnotes, helping to re-center the
American literary canon to include the writer from Martinique. By
adding a large picture of Chamoiseu in the first meta-footnote on Poetry
Genius, Díaz suggests an alternative literary star system and invites
readers unfamiliar with Chamoiseau’s work to investigate it further on
the web.
Díaz’s new second-degree paratexts invite viewers to navigate visual
and verbal semiotic paths not available in the original print novel. A
picture of Dominican singer Kinito Méndez visually anchors Díaz’s
verbal explanation that the singer “accompanied [him] during the
composition of the novel” and is inextricably connected in his mind to
Azua. If viewers do not understand the term merenguero, referring to
Méndez, they will have to go beyond this verbal/visual pop-up window
to find the information of the web. In this sense, Díaz’s expanded annota-
tions are always partial and invitations to learn more, and perhaps in this
case, listen to Méndez’s music online. In this way, the expanded notes
both demonstrate the unfinalizability of the novel and are themselves
unfinalized.
In the original novel, Díaz employed a string of names of eleven
fictional places from sci-fi movies without explanation: Outlands,
Badlands, the Cursed Earth, the Forbidden Zone, and so on. His goal
was to explain Outer Azua to readers, but this strategy required famil-
iarity with these intertexts. Achy Obejas translated many of the names
faithfully, but for “Outlands” she made a striking change from the
original: “La casaelcarajo the Dominican Way” (La breve, 270n147), the
Cuban equivalent of “damned far away.” In his Poetry Genius intervention,
Díaz enters into dialogue with Abejas’ translation, in effect correcting
the loose translation by advising readers of the original meaning of the
Outlands. Uploading a picture of Zardoz he adds the caption: “Referring
to the blasted landscape of the movie Zardoz, played gamely by Ireland, if
I remember correctly.” That is, director John Boorman filmed the movie
in County Wicklow, Ireland.14 With the allusion to Outlands, Díaz wants
us to see an image like the devastated earth he is recalling from the
Dominican Republic, something not literally possible in the print novel.
If the translator missed the allusion, many readers may also have. The
new visual/verbal annotation Díaz designs for Poetry Genius allows us to
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see the monstrous tyranny of Zardoz in relation to the tiny populace of

Brutals below who live in the surrounding wasteland, perhaps making
the comparison to the Dominican Republic under Trujillo, and further
to Ireland’s colonial experience.15
Díaz adds a new annotation for the word “goats” on Poetry Genius and
deliberately omits a full explanation. In this way he implicitly invites
readers to do further research themselves and thereby actively participate
in the phenomenon of unfinalizability. In this annotation, he uploads a
picture of a goat, anchoring it with the caption: “Couldn’t help but put
up one of José Figueroa-Agosto’s goats. You know, just for the lolz.”
Who is Figueroa-Agosto, most US readers wonder, given the paucity
of information about current events in the Dominican Republic in US
mainstream news. Some might recognize the goat as an allusion to the
nickname of Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, but few will
understand the reference to Figueroa-Agosto, a notorious Dominican
drug lord arrested along with government officials accused of being
involved in his illicit activities. In August 2010 a judge released seven
of them—officers in the Air Force, Army, and Police. Their lawyers and
relatives claimed they were “chivos expiatorios,” [sacrificial lambs], or
goats in the Spanish expression.16 Díaz is not only explaining a word in a
footnote but adding a new meaning to it. In this digital expansion of the
novel, he implicitly warns that currently in the Dominican Republic, the
military and government officials are involved with drug lords and are
thereby continuing the legacy of the “goat,” Trujillo.
But goats are also a familial reference for Díaz. In the original print
footnote, he adds a parenthetical allusion to explain the word: “los que
brincan las Himalayas y cagan en la bandera de España” [the ones that
jump around the Himalayas and shit on the flag of Spain] (256n32, my
trans.). In the extra annotation on Poetry Genius, Díaz gives the refer-
ence for the quotation, attributing it to his grandfather, as would occur
in a scholarly footnote but here with a humorous tone: “A direct quote
from my querido abuelo, Osterman Sánchez Sánchez. He believed
Dominicans should have celebrated independence from Spain. He made
sense like that.” Demanding bilingual competence or further research,
Díaz does not translate his original phrase in Spanish, creating a puzzle
that might intrigue readers who do not know Spanish and inspire them
to use Google translator.
Some new notes on Poetry Genius are text-only without visual images,
and in them Díaz continues the humorous, detail-filled prose he uses in
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the novel. In one new note, he lays bare the process of constructing the
novel by explaining his invented adverb “Glasgow-ghetto.” He clarifies
that the term describes the huge families in Outer Azua, noting: “Don’t
know why I felt I had to put Glasgow on blast except that at Rutgers I
met this sister who was in Glasgow . . . and she said to me If you think
we have some big families go to Glasgow and that stuck with me. And
that’s the way hearsay makes it into a novel.” The run-on sentence with
embedded quotation sans punctuation reveals the sometimes accidental
way in which writers construct language and allusions. Do we need all
this rambling detail? The novel overflows its bounds on this website for
quick commentary, as Díaz leaves behind the careful selection process
that characterizes effective art. It is as if the black hole of the Internet
draws the author to endlessly continue the story he tells, unable to stop
himself from revealing details, no matter how minor.
Díaz interjects feminist lessons and autobiographical references in
explaining the hard life that people in Outer Azua undergo, exemplified
by his “moms,” who, like the character Beli in the novel, grew up there in
the early 1950s. To explain the “twelve-year-old brides” who populated
the region, he adds a link to a text box, noting: “That was one of the great
fears that many of the sureña women I interviewed had back when they
were teenagers at that time and place—that their parents would more or
less arrange-marriage their teenage selves to men three, four times their
age.” As in a scholarly book, in this additional footnote, Díaz cites his
research and the source of the information he weaves into the novel. He
turns a noun (arranged marriage) into a verb, emphasizing the forceful
action involved, and tries to bring us empathetically into the conscious-
ness of the young women with the neologism “teenage selves.”
Many people in Outer Azua, the Dominican Republic where Díaz grew
up, had experienced a close brush with death. In footnote 32 in the print
edition, the authorial persona remarks that his mom survived rheumatic
fever, although it had killed her favorite cousin, and his grandparents
already had a coffin ready for his mom by the time she recovered. In the
text/image note Díaz adds on Poetry Genius, he undercuts the truth value
of these references to his real family. He explains that only the allusion to
the coffin in the sentence is true, and he uploads an image of blue coffins
from Brazil, arguing that they also are “true” in the sense that “we’re all
in coloniality’s grip . . . ” In fact, he notes, his mother did almost die when
she got lost in the highlands of Azua, and the family lost hope of finding
her. “The way my mother tells it just when she was nearly dead from
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hunger and thirst she came upon a talking mongoose in the brush that
led her back to civilization . . . I like to think the mongoose was a visitor
from another planet. I’m way more SF than magical realista.” Invoking
the 1975 animated TV short, “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” and Kipling’s eponym-
ous story about a noisy mongoose, Díaz also has the mongoose figure
help Beli and Oscar at key moments in the novel and devotes footnote
13 to this creature. He argues that the mongoose is an immigrant to the
Dominican Republic and an effective symbol because it is a transplant
like Oscar. But it is sci-fi rather than magical realism, Díaz insists in
an interview: “[M]agic realism in a very simple definition is like using
the fantastic to describe the real, and this book argues that the real is
fantastic. Which is very different. If you ask me [about] the reality of this
book—this character is for real.”17 Thus, when the mongoose paws Beli
and converses with Oscar, it is real in Díaz’s view. In the new annotation
on Poetry Genius, Díaz again asks that he not be stereotypically lumped
in with the Latin-American magical realists and that readers instead
see his allusions as closer to science fiction. He reveals the postmodern
understanding of the instability of truth that underlies his novel and the
interplay between truth and fiction always at work in literature.
Perhaps if an obsessive–compulsive scholar had been in charge of
annotating this footnote, every allusion would be explained to death.
Díaz, in contrast, the selective artist and master of aesthetic subtly, leaves
unexplained a number of allusions in both this note and the second-
degree annotations. Consequently, eight other Poetry Genius participants
(whom the site calls “scholars”) have added annotations to this excerpt
from the novel. After Díaz explains his allusion to “Astronaut Taylor”
with a picture of Charlton Heston and the notation, “Another refer-
ence to the Planet of the Apes of course,” another person highlights
the un-annotated line, “(No, Charlton, it’s not the End of the World, it’s
just Outer Azua.)” and adds a visual/verbal explanation of the allusion:
“Reference to the 1971 science fiction film Omega Man starring Charlton
Heston, which contained one of the first interracial kisses in a movie.”18
Díaz has thus initiated a participatory chain of annotation through which
readers can jointly share their knowledge as occurs in the crowd-sourced
encyclopedia Wikipedia. Although the novel began in print format, it
grows into an unfinalizable construct through the digital dynamism now
available on a site such as Poetry Genius.
As I discuss in more depth in Chapter 4, in her incisive analysis of a
parallel process of footnoting in Sandra Cisneros’ novel Caramelo, María
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Laura Spoturno categorizes three types of notes in the novel: fictional

notes proper, historical–cultural notes, and metadiscursive notes. The
first kind employ the voice of the fictional narrator of the main text. A
different voice—that of a commentator or the implied author—enunciates
the historical–cultural notes. Finally, Spoturno argues, metadiscursive
notes in Caramelo try to exert control over interpretation by explaining a
term or expression in the main text.
In both the primary notes in the novel and the second-degree foot-
notes on Poetry Genius, Díaz often mixes together these enunciative
functions. He always foregrounds the subjective performative voice
that is both authorial and actorial; the notes continue the diction and
tone of the narrator Yunior in the main text. Repeatedly, Díaz mixes the
metadiscursive function with the historical and fictional roles. Notes that
aim to explain obscure historical details and terms also function to clar-
ify and translate, and their enunciative voice is always a continuation of
that of the fictional narrator of the main text. As I argued earlier in this
chapter, because of this mixture of categories, readers do not experience
the sense of a departure from the main text to an alternate enunciative
style in the notes.
Díaz repeats many of the performative and linguistic idiosyncrasies of
the novel in the new footnotes on Poetry Genius. Their historical–cultural
and metadiscursive functions of clarification, translation, and control are
foremost. Again, the distinctive linguistic style and strategies of the main
text of the novel are at work in these added notes as they are in the notes
in the novel. A main departure of the new footnotes on Poetry Genius is
that the authorial pretense of speaking through the intermediary charac-
ter, the alter-ego Yunior, is no longer explicitly present; now Díaz speaks
directly and openly to readers.
Spoturno also notes that the navigational path readers take as they
divert from the main text to the footnote in the book also leads back to
the primary text where readers then re-read it, armed with additional
information. It is easier for this double navigational path of resignifica-
tion to occur in the printed book where text and notes are immediately
adjacent to each other. Will readers who have already read the book
follow a path back to the novel after engaging with Díaz’s second-degree
footnotes on Poetry Genius? Will those who have not read the novel now
decide to buy and read it after seeing his comments on the website? Is
this authorial intervention on Poetry Genius simply a larger advertising
paratext designed to sell the novel, one that itself contains new paratexts
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for the novel? I would argue no, even though there are links to a review
and to purchase the book on the site. Only one respondent expresses a
desire to read the novel. In Díaz’s second-degree paratexts, the original
becomes a distant intertext that viewers may not know. His interventions
offer a metonymical taste of the larger novel, which, given the decline in
long-form reading in today’s digital garden of delights, may not be read
at all. I would argue that Díaz’s main motivation in creating these new
paratexts for the novel on Poetry Genius is his desire for the unfinaliza-
ble—the overflowing of the material boundaries of printed books.
By digitally annotating this footnote from his novel, Díaz does
more than playfully add 23 more footnotes. He moves away from the
constraints of print by materially linking together several previously
separate intertexts in a new digital venue. He begins the process of creat-
ing an enhanced digital version of his novel, similar to Penguin’s 2011
augmented edition of Jack Keruoac’s On the Road. The enhancements
Díaz adds in turn invite readers to participate in the process themselves
by looking up the additional allusions that he introduces. As of January
2015, Díaz’s Poetry Genius page had 10,234 views since July 2013. Although
this cultural intervention is not the same as digital-born literature with
multiple branching and game-like trajectories, it celebrates a writer like
Díaz’s insatiable creativity, the sense of never having said everything
one wants to say. Connecting this desire to the endless space of the
Internet allows Diaz to embark upon a new literary genre—the “living
footnote”—and indeed, the unending or continually expanding novel.
Díaz now extends his peritextual strategies of performance and his
assertion of populist multiculturalism that are so central in the novel to
epitextual sites that function as new interpretive portals to the book. He
continues to try to assert a modicum of control over his artistic creation
and at the same time have fun through his performance on Poetry Genius,
in interviews, appearances, and commentaries. These active authorial
interventions are a means of keeping the book from going stale as a liter-
ary commodity, a continuation and extension outside the text proper of
its key strategies of performance. Indeed, the text and its myriad para-
texts that mushroom in the expanding digital age are central to a 21st
century reconceptualization of what a literary text is.
While many peritexts are outside the author’s control, a good number
remain within a writer’s—such as Díaz’s—purview. As a 21st century
creator, Díaz celebrates these sites of authorial performance within and
beyond the confines of the print artifact. He expands the main narrative
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text with paratexts such as epigraphs, acknowledgements, and, most

importantly, footnotes in and outside the novel. One wonders how much
farther these paratextual extensions will go in the digital age, as this early
21st century text becomes more and more unfinalizable.
Notes
1 In her Spanish translation of the novel, Achy Obejas adds extra footnotes to
explain this phrase and a number of allusions readers are likely unfamiliar
with. This includes cultural references both in English and Spanish, such
as “Hija de Liborio.” (2007: 53), which Díaz does not explain for English-
speaking readers. In this sense, the Spanish edition is a paratextually
enriched version of the original.
2 For a list of many such texts see, William Denton, “Fictional Footnotes and
Indexes,” https://www.miskatonic.org/footnotes.html, Web. Jan. 18, 2015.
3 See, McCracken, “Metaplagiarism and the Critic’s Role as Detective: Ricardo
Piglia’s Re-invention of Roberto Arlt,” PMLA 106:5 (1991): 1071–1082.
4 Meghan O’Rourke, “Questions for Junot Díaz: An Interview with the Pulitzer
Prize-winning Author,” Slate, Apr. 8, 2008, http://www.slate.com/id/2188494/
Oct. 26, 2010.
5 Unlike Bestock’s analysis of Laurence Sterne’s double-voiced footnotes in
Tristam Shandy, the textual contours of the notes on the printed page of
Díaz’s novel do not create a new voice for the authorial/actorial persona that
speaks in them. Instead, I argue, the voice of the footnotes is not parodical
and openly continues the voice of the main text.
6 The comparison to the semiosis of the illuminated letter also functions
through paratext theory. The visual image and enlarged first letter are
peritexts overlain on the authorial utterance. Sometimes authors even agree
to change the opening words to accommodate an image.
7 Talk at Google, Mountain View, CA; You Tube Oct. 3, 2007, Junot Diaz:
“When I was at Rutgers, dancin’ salsa, you know Santo Domingo, the Secret
Police that seemed a million miles away. And yet I would go home and see my
mom and my mom’s back would be all scarred, and it would suddenly be right
there . . . Is it just that I’m pretending that the history’s not here?“ authors@google.
com. Díaz also discussed the “tyranny of the present” in his Dec. 17, 2012
interview with Ross Scarano, http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2012/12/
junot-diaz-interview, Web. Aug. 7, 2015.
8 In the navigation panel one can access specific pages as they are numbered in
the print edition but because readers can change font size and layout on the
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Kindle and its tablet applications, no fixed page numbers can appear in the
digital edition.
9 Kindle edition of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Apr. 30, 2013.
10 Obejas does not mention that Heureaux was a 19th century dictator, which
might confuse some readers.
11 Jorge Luis Borges went even further, arguing that readers fundamentally
remake literature simply by reading. Even if the 20th century translator,
Pierre Menard, faithfully copied every word of the Quijote, the copy would
be a different text.
12 Elisabeth Donnely, “Junot Díaz is a Poetry Genius,” Los Angeles Times, Jul. 25,
2013, http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/25/entertainment/la-et-jc-junot-diaz-
is-a-poetry-genius-20130725. Web. Feb. 16, 2015.
13 See the passage on Google Books, http://books.google.com/books?id=XV8XA
AAAYAAJ&q=Vesuvius#v=snippet&q=Vesuvius&f=false, Web. May 15, 2014.
14 IMDB, “Zardoz,” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070948/
locations?ref_=tt_dt_dt.
15 See Díaz’s picture and annotation for “Outlands,” Poetry Genius, http://genius.
com/2002754/Junot-diaz-the-brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao-excerpt/
Outlands.Web. Mar. 21, 2015.
16 See Cristian Natanael Cabrera, “Juez ordena libertad 7 oficiales vinculaban
con caso Figueroa,” Hoy digital, Aug. 16, 2010. Web. http://hoy.com.do/juez-
ordena-libertad-7-oficiales-vinculaban-con-caso-figueroa/. Web. Feb. 12, 2013.
17 “Guest Interview with Junot Díaz,” La Bloga, Oct. 21, 2007, http://labloga.
blogspot.com/2007/10/guest-interview-junot-daz.html, Web. May 18, 1014.
18 See “Genius Annotation 1 Contributor” Poetry Genius, http://genius.
com/2412861/Junot-diaz-the-brief-wondrous-life-of-oscar-wao-excerpt/End-of-
the-world. Web. Mar. 20, 2015.
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3
Navigating Exterior
Networks to Caramelo
Abstract: This chapter examines several epitexts that
Cisneros herself creates centered on dramatic and
performative presentations of the self that deploy spectacles
of ethnicity. Cognitive thresholds of the reading experience,
these displays of latinidad, prepare readers for similar
strategies of performance in Caramelo. Epitexts such as
public birthday celebrations, interviews, and the material
on her website join non-authorial epitexts such as the
publisher’s Facebook page for Cisneros with multiple links
to other paratexts about the writer and her work. The
epitextual network of Caramelo also includes what can be
termed “crowd-sourced advertising” for the novel including
reviews, commentary, and ratings on sites such as Amazon
and Goodreads. The novel’s extensive and expanding
network of epitexts combines elements of hegemonic and
populist multiculturalism.

doi: 10.1057/9781137603609.0007.
72 DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0007
Navigating Exterior Networks to Caramelo 73
Paratextual performance: author and text
On December 20, 2014, Sandra Cisneros dressed herself in a huge birth-

day cake piñata and walked through the streets of San Miguel de Allende,
Mexico where she now lives. Celebrating her 60th birthday and the
completion of her latest book, she invited friends to dress up in costumes
representing any kind of pastry and join her at a local mescalería to cele-
brate. The colorful cardboard simulacrum of a birthday cake allowed her
to pop in and out of the playful “skirt” and be in touch with her inner
child, she wrote. To complement the huge piñata cake, she wore a giant
bouquet of paper flowers on her head. Reminiscent of Carmen Miranda’s
tutti frutti headdress, the flowers were part of the “icing” on the cake,
directing attention to Cisneros’s face as she paraded through town.
Unlike the Brazilian Hollywood star, a movie studio did not engineer
Cisneros’s vestimentary public performance, “taking over the town” as she
captions the picture of herself in the huge cake on her website.1 Nonetheless,
hegemonic multiculturalism plays a role in this populist presentation of her
ethnicity. This and other paratextual spectacles of the public persona that
Cisneros cultivates, proudly display her ethnicity to combat the ideology of
the melting pot. At the same time, they play into stereotypic expectations
of latinidad across many sectors of US society, which publishers then use
to sell books. If in Caramelo Cisneros attempts to re-trace her connection
to her father’s lost homeland, this “delayed epitext” on her 60th birthday
returns her physically to the ancestral patria, demanding attention from
the Mexican public through her extraordinary visual performance. I will
argue that this event on December 20 in Mexico and its subsequent pictor-
ial and narrative re-creation on her website for a larger international audi-
ence are important paratexts that form a continuum with the spectacles of
performative ethnicity in which the novel engages.
Cisneros has desired to perform since childhood. She comments on the
theme of performance in a June 17, 2013 National Public Radio program,
telling her interviewers and the listening audience that her dream in
childhood was to be on stage as a comedian, ballerina, or a singer so that
she could be popular. She felt that she was a total misfit as a child, shy and
quiet in public, but not when she was home. “I wanted to be able to get
on the stage and have people applaud.” When her mother fixed dinner,
pouring water into the rice sizzling in the pan, Cisneros imagined that
the sound was an audience applauding for her as she bowed.2
Sandra Cisneros is well known for the ethnic displays she constructs
through clothing, accessories, and props in multiple public presentations
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of the self. They combine with the stereotypic images that publishers
create in the attempt to sell Latino writers and their works as postmodern
ethnic commodities. These images exist outside her texts but function
paratextually as what Genette terms epitexts: “any paratextual element not
materially appended to the text within the same volume but circulating,
as it were, freely, in a virtually limitless physical and social space” (344).
Through vestimentary semiotics Cisneros creatively reconstructs images
of second-degree ethnicity that announce her as a Chicana subject, proud
of her Mexican heritage. Like Frida Kahlo, who in post-Revolutionary
Mexico performed a version of the indigenous ethnicity that had been
repressed throughout Mexican history and especially during the Porfiriato
by wearing “native” attire removed from its primary source and use value,
Cisneros re-enacts certain elements of Latino culture repressed under the
ideology of the melting pot. Like Kahlo, she rearticulates these signifiers,
constructing a second-degree ethnicity removed from its original sources
and uses (McCracken, 1999, 2003).3
She frequently wears Mexican folkloric clothing in public appearances.
In one photograph, she lowers her rebozo to display the large “Buddalupe”
tattoo on her arm.4
figure 3.1 Sandra Cisneros, 2015 Fifth Star Awards, Chicago © ZUMA Press,
Inc./Alamy Stock Photo
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Again wearing the caramelo-colored rebozo used in the New York Times
photo for the review of the novel Caramelo, in another image, she also
displays Virgin of Guadalupe cowboy boots and the Buddalupe tattoo.5
In a variation, she stands in front of a bright yellow wall with match-
ing yellow ladders and dried flowers.6 At home, she poses with books
in a pink embroidered dress, matching pink furniture, pink pillow, and
pink shawl on the sofa back. She poses with a pink parasol, embroidered
Mexican blouse, hot pants, and red rebozo in front of her purple house
in San Antonio.7 These visual epitexts are elements of a larger constella-
tion of semiotic performance through which Cisneros deploys multiple
ethnic signifiers to define and individualize herself. Removed from their
original sources and functions, they communicate as second-degree
signs of latinidad in Cisneros’s repertoire. The rebozo which covers,
warms, protects, and carries objects for the poor in Mexico becomes a
fashionable signifier of a Chicana’s ethnicity—reconfigured in the 2002
novel Caramelo as a metaphor of narrative, family history, and ethnic
identity.
For decades, Cisneros has crafted a public authorial persona in which
her body is a site of striking artistic creativity. Tattoos, large pieces of
jewelry, along with playful clothing and costumes are innovative modes
of speaking the self. Often, this artistic experimentation connotes latini-
dad, for example, the large dangling earrings with images of the Virgin
of Guadalupe or the cowboy boots with the Virgin’s image. Sometimes
this corporeal creativity is more generalized: in a photograph for her
55th birthday celebration, she wears a leopard-skin pillbox hat, scarf,
and coat with sunglasses, long black gloves, and holds her dog dressed
in the same attire.8 On the cover of her 1987 volume of poetry, My Wicked
Wicked Ways, she poses revealingly, cross-legged in a black leotard, skirt,
gloves, and boots. Strategic splotches of red decorate the black-and-white
photograph, drawing attention to her lipstick, a nearly empty glass of
wine, its reflection on her gold loop earrings, and drops of spilled wine
on the base of the glass.
In a November 17, 2010 presentation at the University of California,
Santa Barbara in which she read from her forthcoming book of unpub-
lished essays, then tentatively titled Writing in My Pajamas, Cisneros
appeared on stage in a pair of bright turquoise flannel pajamas with large
multicolored polka dots that she had just bought at K-Mart.
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figure 3.2 Sandra Cisneros, “Writing in My Pajamas” presentation, November 17,

2010
As she has argued for many years, writers find their voice when they
imagine they are sitting a kitchen table in their pajamas talking with
someone whom they completely trust and can say whatever they want.
At the event, Cisneros also circulated bright fuchsia-colored postcard
invitations to the “Pajama Pachanga” she was organizing for December
19, 2010 to celebrate her 56th birthday and to benefit the Macondo
Writers’ Workshop she founded in San Antonio. In an image on the left
of the postcard, she poses, wearing a pink wig, a red polka-dot scarf, and
bright red satin pajamas, holding a red pen and pink writing book, and
ostensibly pondering what to write.9 Creative and playful performativity
is central to Cisneros’s writing and persona.
She sometimes deploys these reconfigured signifiers to create what some
view as “ethnic trouble.” She “Mexicanized” her 1903 Victorian house in San
Antonio’s historic King William district by painting it bright purple, creat-
ing a two-year standoff with city authorities that received national news
coverage from CNN, the Los Angeles Times, and other media10 (Figure 3.3).
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figure 3.3 Interior of Sandra Cisneros’s Guenther Street House, San Antonio,
Texas, 2014
Source: Courtesy Phyllis Browning Company, San Antonio, Texas
She argued, “Purple is historic to us. It [ . . . ] goes back a thousand years or

so to the pyramids. It is present in the Nahua codices, book of the Aztecs, as
is turquoise, the color I used for my house trim; the former color signifying
royalty, the latter, water and rain.”11 After the sun faded the color, Cisneros
painted the house pink, having found documentation that a Cuban resident
of the neighborhood painted his house this shade in the late 19th century.
Here Cisneros performs Latino ethnicity through public visual display that
moves beyond the local to the national and international in an age of global
communication. In an understated gesture that carries on this performance,
Cisneros alludes to the purple house on page 305 of Caramelo.
In January 2015, Cisneros sold the house, and pictures of the interior
were available on the Internet.12 Past the statues of sleeping Mexicans in
the front yard and through the bright green front door, a kaleidoscope of
brilliant colors awaits the spectator. The tall wall behind the staircase is
bright red, the adjoining hardwood floor painted turquoise; other walls are
pink, fuchsia, yellow, green, red, violet, and the ceilings are pink and lime
green. In the master bedroom, bright green also adorns the floors, with
purple and yellow walls. Large murals of a cactus and other tropical plants
fill the walls of the bathroom and a bedroom. A colorful array of bright
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pillows, bedding, and furniture are artfully arranged in every room. Indeed,
Cisneros’s decorative enhancements turn the house into a work of art, a
series of paintings that viewers of the pictures on the web “enter” as the
gaze travels from room to room. Like the exterior paint, the house’s rooms
speak “Mexico” and latinidad through bright colors, furnishings, and over-
all décor. Now released digitally into the public sphere because of the sale of
the house, these artful constellations join the author’s vestimentary signifi-
ers, forming a network of authorial epitexts that overcode her writing. How
does the larger network of extra-textual performances in which Cisneros
engages connect to similar strategies of performance in Caramelo?
The writer’s paratextual presentations of the self represent a distinct
version of latinidad from Díaz’s which emphasizes darker colors, less
self-decoration, and a more muted yet transgressive style. In Genette’s
terms, both configurations of Latino ethnicity function as cognitive
thresholds of the reading experience, preparing readers for the strategies
of performance in the texts themselves. Inside both novels, two distinct
styles of bilingual performance emerge. In comparison to Díaz’s bilingual
wordplay and occasional rhyming [e.g., “jabao in Mao . . . güey in El Buey”
(3)], Cisneros’s style Caramelo verges on a baroque celebration of Spanish-
language popular expressions. She employs detailed, densely ornamented
bilingualism, amassing staccato-like fragments of what Walter Ong terms
secondary orality. Instead of listing a few nicknames of her father’s child-
hood friends in Mexico, she presents a litany that seems never ending:
Juan el Chango, Beto la Guagua because he could not say “agua” when he
was little. Meme el King Kong, Chale la Zorra. Balde la Mancha. El Vampiro.
El Tlacuache. El Gallo. El Borrego. El Zorrillo. El Gato. El Mosco. El Conejo.
La Rana. El Pato. El Oso. La Ardilla. El Cuervo. El Pingüino. La Chicharra.
El Tecolote. A whole menagerie of friends. When they saw each other at a
soccer match, [ . . . ] instead of shouting—Hey Gallo!—they’d loose a rooster
crow--kiki-riki—kiiiiiii—which would be answered by a Tarzan yell, or a
bleat, or a bark, or a quack, or a hoot, or a shriek, or a buzz, or a caw. (30)
Thus, the Spanish orality of stories that her father likely recounted to
the children as he reminisced about his youth in Mexico is the impetus
for Cisneros’s later linguistic creativity. Here, she retraces her connec-
tion to her father’s lost homeland through linguistic spectacularity and
a mini-narrative. She highlights the children’s creativity as they playfully
code-switch between word and sound signifiers, just as Cisneros herself
switches between visual and verbal signifiers of ethnicity between para-
text and novel.
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She creatively invents calcos to tropicalize her English rendition of

the discourse of her Spanish-speaking relatives, such as “Aunty Light
Skin,” “Uncle Fat Face,” “shut your snout,” and “What a barbarity!”
Where Frances Aparicio theorized about the tropicalization of English
by Latino writers, the overlay of Spanish syntax on their poetic expres-
sion in English, Cisneros reverse-tropicalizes Spanish with phrases such
as “Vamos al Más-güel” (294) referring to the Maxwell flea market in
Chicago. She translates humorously for English-speaking readers, for
example, in the scene when the family finally arrives in San Antonio and
sees Spanish street signs: “We drive past streets named Picoso, Hot and
Spicy Street; Calavera, Skeleton Street; and Chuparrosa, Hummingbird
Street” (304). For the title of the opening “Disclaimer” she changes the
lyrics to the well-known American song “Too Fat Polka” sung by Arthur
Godfrey and later Bobby Vinton. Instead of the song’s line, “I don’t want
her, you can have her, she’s too fat for me,” Cisneros writes, “I don’t want
her, you can have her, she’s too hocicona for me” (np). These oral-based
codes predominate in Caramelo and are a key part of Cisneros’s linguistic
spectacularity in the novel. Again, the novel credits the fictional father
figure as the model for this creative word play: “—What’s the matter,
Lala? ¿Estás ‘deprimed’? Father says, chuckling. It’s an old joke, one he
never gets tired of, changing a Spanish word into English, or the other
way round, just to be a wise guy” (238). Cisneros then explains the bilin-
gual word play for non-Spanish speakers, indicating that “deprimed”
comes from the Spanish word for “depressed.”
Especially important in Cisneros’s performative narrative strategies
is the postmodern breakdown of the border between truth and lies, the
documentary and fiction. As I will discuss in greater detail later, Cisneros
emphasizes this slippage in several important authorial paratexts—the
novel’s subtitle, the opening epigraphs, and the Disclaimer. In the first
epigraph she writes, “Cuéntame algo, aunque sea una mentira,” [Tell
me something, even if it’s a lie], insisting on the necessary provisional-
ity of any “truth,” especially an autobiographically-based novel such as
Caramelo. The need for stories supersedes accuracy, Cisneros proclaims,
defending her narrative strategy of revealing family secrets.13 Having
labeled the narrative “Puro cuento” [only a story] in the subtitle, Cisneros
expands this peritext in another one, the Disclaimer: “The truth, these
stories are nothing but story . . . I have invented what I do not know and
exaggerated what I do to continue the family tradition of telling healthy
lies. If, in the course of my inventing, I have inadvertently stumbled on
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the truth, perdónenme” [forgive me] (np). Although this verb in Spanish
addresses a plural audience, the primary addressee of the apology is her
father, whose secret she reveals in the novel, even though as Celaya, she
has promised him on his deathbed that she would not. Through this
performative postmodern strategy, Cisneros allows herself to have it
both ways: to tell her family’s true stories publicly in a fictional work yet
insist that they are “puro cuento,” not the truth at all.
Cisneros depicts many scenes in which the characters themselves
engage in performative strategies on a continuum with the strategies she
employs outside the novel. The family purchases items at the Maxwell
Street flea market to sell in Mexico to help pay for their summer trips
south. They are advised to buy the gaudiest items possible because what
sells best is “lo chillante, literally the screaming” (7), the noun that is also
the demonstrative title of the chapter. Here the kitschy flea market items
are intended to figuratively scream American consumerism as the family
drives through Mexico, a reversed mirror image of Cisneros’s own public
vestimentary performances of displaying Mexican culture in the U.S..
Explicitly comparing the extended family’s interactions to those of a
telenovela, Cisneros prepares readers for the dramatic scene that follows
the revelation of the dark family secret. She begins subtly by having the
young girl Celaya experience a moment of truth at the beach in Acapulco:
“When [Candelaria] turns her head squinting that squint, it’s then I
know. Without knowing I know. This all in one second. Before the ocean
opens its big mouth and swallows” (78). The young Candelaria, daughter
of the woman who does the Reyes family’s laundry, is sent home from
Acapulco on a bus by herself, after nearly drowning in the ocean; she gets
lost and appears on a TV show “crying and crying telenovela tears” (69).
After the Reyes family members in Mexico City recognize her on TV and
bring her home, Candelaria and her mother return to Nayarit because of
the mother’s fear for her daughter’s safety in the Reyes house—a clue to
what happened to the mother herself at Candelaria’s age.
A soap operatic performance had also occurred on the family vacation
in Acapulco. There, Celaya witnesses “the awful Grandmother” telling her
mother something on the upper deck of a boat: “I can see Grandmother’s
mouth opening and closing but I can’t hear what she’s saying . . . Mother
is sitting looking straight ahead saying nothing” (81). Shortly thereafter
her mother erupts into hysterical screaming, hitting the father after the
mention of Candelaria’s name. The family thus engages in a spectacle
of soap operatic performance at “the hour everyone in Mexico parades
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out into the streets” (83). A spontaneous audience performing its daily
rituals now gathers for another performance—the Reyes family drama:
“The corn-on-the-cob vendor ignores his customers and moves in for a
better view, as if we’re the last episode of a favorite telenovela. Vendors,
townspeople, tourists, everyone gathers around us to see who it is Mother
is calling a big caca, a goat, an ox, a fat butt, a shameless, a deceiver, a
savage, a barbarian, un gran puto” (84). Out of control, the family unin-
tentionally puts on a performance with the Acapulco public as audience.
The chapter ends, as does a soap opera episode: whom will the father
choose to ride home with him in the car—his wife or his mother? We
do not find out until many chapters later—page 235, the beginning of
Part 3. Like the crafter of a telenovela performance, Cisneros engages in
suspense and delayed narrative disclosure to keep readers engaged. Both
in form and in the character’s actions, Cisneros carries over her extra-
literary strategies of performance to the novel itself.
Delayed authorial epitexts
This continuum of performativity that extends between Cisneros’s

novel and the thousands of public appearances, press coverage, and
other authorial commentary often contains what Genette terms delayed
authorial paratexts. That is, the author in a sense extends the text of a
novel such as Caramelo by explaining intentions, allusions, characteriza-
tion, and background, and creating other amplifications of the literary
work. These paratexts are “delayed” in the sense that they are presented
to the public after the publication of the novel, for example, Junot Díaz’s
23 new footnotes for the novel on the Poetry Genius website. Besides
offering new interpretive portals for those who have read or are reading
the novel, many of these delayed authorial epitexts are available on the
Internet or traditional mass media such as television, radio, magazines,
and newspapers and therefore also serve as advertising to attract new
readers to the novel.
Auditory intertexts
Of the hundreds of explanatory commentaries that Cisneros has offered
after the publication of Caramelo, one important delayed epitext is a
2013 National Public Radio interview in which the author amplifies her
allusions to various songs in the novel. Additionally, the program plays
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several of the songs, allowing an auditory experience of some of the

musical intertexts the novel employs. More than simply increasing our
understanding of authorial intention as delayed epitexts often do, this
paratext allows us to hear some of the musical intertexts of the novel and
helps us better decode a key set of framing peritexts in the novel.
Cisneros reveals in this interview on National Public Radio that she
began to listen to music more regularly as she was writing Caramelo, an
activity essential for her to construct the world she depicts in the novel.
“I had to listen to the music of the last hundred years to get myself into
the sensibilidad of an era or a place, in order to get into the heads of my
characters.” The music of composer Agustín Lara gave her a sense of
her father’s time in the decades of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, especially the
song “Piensa en mi.” Cisneros recorded many different versions of this
song on cassettes as she worked. For her appearance on this NPR show,
LatinoAlt, she plays a version of Lara’s song from Pedro Almodovar’s film
High Heels, commenting on its sadness.14
Cisneros alludes to Lara’s music several times in the novel, for example,
in the Molly Bloom-like interior monologue in which Celaya’s mother
Zoila daydreams about her youthful affair with a married man: “and you
played the phonograph—not the kind of cheap music of the dance halls,
the kind I used to like before I met you, but music like Agustín Lara . . . ”
(226). In the last entry in the paratextual Chronology after the novel,
Cisneros writes about the death of Mexican movie star María Félix, Lara’s
ex-wife, and the “María” of his song, “María Bonita.” Having opened Part
One with the lyrics of a stanza from this song composed and sung by
Lara, Cisneros frames the novel with two peritexts that employ Lara’s
music to communicate the ethos of the era she depicts. The central
positions of these peritexts that bracket the novel are key to Cisneros’s
overall aesthetic in the book. This apparent “decoration” for the artistic
creation in fact points to the central role of paratexts in communicating
the “sensibilidad” of the era Cisneros evokes. In a type of internal serial-
ization, Cisneros waits until the last entry in the Chronology to explain
the song’s diegetic addressee to readers who do not know the identity of
the “María” in Lara’s song.
Cisneros’s delayed authorial epitext on the LatinoAlt radio program
also reinforces and calls readers’ attention to the importance of internal
peritexts of the novel such as epigraphs and the Chronology. Part One of
Caramelo, “Recuerdo de Acapulco,” opens with a compound epigraph:
first, a stanza in Spanish from Lara’s “María Bonita” in which the singer
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urges his soul mate María to remember their time in Acapulco. Cisneros
adds her own writing to the epigraph—a note explaining what the
musical quotation sounds like, since it is read, not heard, in the book’s
epigraph. She notes that the composer, Agustín Lara sings the version
of the song she has in mind and is playing the piano, “accompanied
by a sweet, but very, very sweet violin” (3). Thus, overlaying paratexts
work together to help readers decode this passage. The song lyrics are
a peritext, an epigraph outside the main text, and Cisneros overlays
them with a secondary peritext, the explanatory note. In Genette’s terms,
she combines both allographic and autographic epigraphs in the same
paratext to open Part One of the novel. She adds the extra autographic
peritext in an attempt to make us “hear” the music of the song, not just
read the words.
Cisneros further explains the song in the 2013 NPR interview. In this
delayed epitext, we learn that she chose the lines from Lara’s song not
only because they urge the addressee María to remember a special time
in Acapulco, as the novel’s implied author also does in the accompanying
chapter; additionally, Cisneros wishes this verbal recuperation of Lara’s
music, although limited by our inability to hear the song in the text, to
evoke the era in her family’s life that she is trying to recreate through
fiction. Thus, the NPR paratext is parallel to Junot Díaz’s second-degree
paratexts on Poetry Genius in which he adds further footnotes to a foot-
note to help readers understand the novel.
The autographic website

Much more extensive than Junot Díaz’s website, Sandra Cisneros’s site
offers multiple layers of engagement for both those who have read her
work as well as prospective readers. It is a delayed autographic epitext
that grows as Cisneros continues year after year to add additional writing
and visual information to her published texts. She also posts other allo-
graphic epitexts such as reviews and articles about her life and work. In
a large photograph, the author greets viewers on the website’s homepage,
posing in front of a large agave plant, looking up to the sky, with rustic
earrings and holding a large hat. Directly to the left is a quotation from
the 25th anniversary edition of The House on Mango Street: “I believe in la
Divina Providencia because of the extraordinary places my life has taken
me. I believe in the power art has to save lives, because it saved mine.”
The easily understood cognate of the English words, “Divine Providence”
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in conjunction with Cisneros’s skyward glance in the photo, overlay her

public authorial persona and her writing with an aura of spirituality. The
idea of “Destino” or fate repeated so frequently in Caramelo takes on a
religious signification here.
As of February 2015, an archive of 23 blog posts appears on the site
offering a rich epitextual record of “Sandra’s Letters to Her Readers.”
Cisneros desires that these blogs be a public extension of her liter-
ary expression, an overflow of her published writing that cannot be
contained in the material books. She wishes to open up what can only
be a small degree of two-way communication between herself and read-
ers, transcending the static printed artifact. To that end, in a tone of
apparent intimacy in which the writer ostensibly shares her life with
readers, the blogs begin with such salutations as “Hello, my friends,”
“Dear Readers,” and “Queridos” [Dear Ones], and close with terms
of affection such as “Abrazotes” [huge hugs], “abrazos fuertes, fuertes
[strong, strong hugs], or “besos” [kisses]. As occurs in all autobiograph-
ical writing, a partial and to a certain degree “false” version of the self is
presented here—what theorists term the autobiographical simulacrum.15
Cloaked in the tropes of intimate communication between friends, this
series of Cisneros’s authorial epitexts offers interpretive portals to her
published writing. An aura of public performance overlays many of the
blogs, forming a continuum with many of the public projections of the
self discussed above.
Like the birthday letter to readers December 21, 2014 examined at the
opening of this chapter, five years earlier Cisneros also posted a letter
about her birthday—the 55th birthday party held in San Antonio on
December 19, 2009. Additionally, the party was a fundraiser for her
Macondo Foundation to support emerging Latino writers, and she
encouraged guests to dress in the theme of the leopard-skin pillbox hat
lionized by Bob Dylan. Cisneros’s vestimentary semiotics for the party
included leopard-skin attire for herself and her dog, the pillbox hat, shoes,
and even a loaned leopard-skin limo from one of her attorney friends.
The author writes: “What a fabulous 55th birthday party I had! The BEST
party EVER! Like being shot out of a cannon. I’m still fizzy with joy. If you
weren’t there, don’t miss the next one, next December 19th—the theme
will be Pajama Pachanga. So buy your new pajamas now when they’re on
sale, and save them till then!”16 This public performative spectacularity
that the author has desired to enact since childhood carries over to the
rhetorical strategies she engages in in Caramelo. Delayed epitexts such
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as the birthday parties continue to reach a large group of readers who

access Cisneros’s website or encounter other narratives and pictures of
the vestimentary displays on the Internet.
In her December 2, 2013 letter, Cisneros talks openly about being a
spectacle. Website viewers are greeted with a picture of one of the author’s
most over-the-top performances of exotic ethnicity in which she wears
a huge multicolored headdress and loud, gaudy embroidered gown.
Although she complains about the physical suffering she endured wearing
the heavy and awkward headdress for her performance as Grand Marshall
of the San Antonio Paseo del Río River Parade, she also highlights her
enjoyment in this performance of ethnic spectacle. “[M]y makeup was
by makeup-artist-to-the-stars John McBurney, who used to work with
Selena.” She hints at her similarity to Las Vegas performers in evoking
her suffering while wearing the huge heavy headdress: “How do those Las
Vegas showgirls do it?” Enjoying the large audience along the River Walk
and in hotels and restaurants as her float proceeded in the parade on the
river, she imagines that she is performing in a Mexican movie: “Our boat
looked like a chalupa from Xochimilco in a Gabriel Figueroa movie. It
was glorious to float out under the trees glowing with colored lights, and
then see the crowds above and along the river . . . Well, I could get used to
this, I thought.” Afterwards, when a tourist asks her if she is a showgirl,
she responds “I am now!” adding “If I wasn’t a spectacle that night on
the float, I was [,] folding myself into that taxicab.”17 In this performance,
Cisneros enacted her childhood dream of performing on stage, a trope
that pervades many of her other paratexts and her literary creation.
On her website, Cisneros also posts a short biography, a section
devoted to her books, news about her in the press, announcements
about future public appearances, books she recommends, and selected
letters that readers and fans have written to her. Sometimes she answers
the letters publically on the site either to offer encouragement or in
response to a query about authorial intention in her books. In answers
to inquiries from two male letter writers that Cisneros places first in the
archive of letters, the author reveals her mastery of the art of subtlety
and respect, refusing to take the bait that readers sometimes confront
her with. In response to a literature professor, she refuses to make more
specific the scene of Esperanza’s sexual attack in the story “Red Clowns”
but advises him to read the passage carefully. Answering a student who
appears to have confronted his teacher with a disparaging remark about
the mother in the story “There Was an Old Woman” being on Welfare,
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Cisneros cheerily asks him why he thinks his teacher was offended by his
comment and why is he now apologizing for it. Although she provides
a small bit of further detail about Esperanza in answering the first ques-
tion, in both responses, Cisneros continues the art of subtlety that marks
great literary works.
The section with links to the latest items in the press and media about
her comprises another series of performance scenes that open paratex-
tual portals to her published works. With links to thousands of articles,
reviews, interviews, blogs, photos, and mentions of Cisneros and her
writing, this section of the website offers an immense archive for readers
to peruse over many hours. It is a rich and continually expanding histor-
ical record of Cisneros’s larger presence in US media and the Internet.
While its search function allows website viewers to find material related
to their specific interests, this large body of material also invites future
computational distant reading to uncover trends and primary themes it
holds about Cisneros and her work.
Cisneros’s list of recommended books begins with a picture of her
reading the book review section of a newspaper, adjacent to a headline,
“Favorites and Discoveries.” By picturing herself engaging with a trad-
itional organ of canonical book reviewing, Cisneros places herself within
this hegemonic marketing practice designed to foment the sale of books,
in her case to promote several lesser-known national and international
writers, many of who are new Latino writers. She does this on her
personal website here rather than through the dominant media. The list,
with pictures of the books and publication information, shows that her
site is not only dedicated to promoting sales of her own books but also
those of other writers she thinks highly of. With no information about
the content of the books, the list employs a single marketing tool—its
author’s reputation. As an autographic epitext, this page of Cisneros’s
website also opens new paratextual portals to her own published works
as a record of works the writer reads and valorizes. Next to her photo at
the top of the page, Cisneros offers a statement of her criteria for recom-
mending books:
I don’t know what makes a bestseller, but I do know this: A good book doesn’t
care. What matters is that the story cast its magic, that it silence you into
listening, and move you to laugh—and even better, to cry and then laugh—
and a long time later, to haunt you. Long after you have closed the book, it’s
what haunts and stays with you that matters, for then the story will have done
its work.18
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Even if the books she recommends are not best sellers, Cisneros argues,
they submerse readers in magic, evoke emotions, and resonate long
afterwards. Although the direct referents are the books on the list, these
criteria implicitly extend to Cisneros’s own works. This autographic
epitext offers readers a portal to Caramelo, for example, implying that the
novel will cast magic on them, cause them to cry and laugh, and haunt
them afterwards.
Allographic paratextual portals
Hegemonic and populist multiculturalism in a

publisher’s epitext
A key public site that contains some authorial paratextual communica-
tion is the Sandra Cisneros Facebook page. Launched in August 2008
by Cisneros’s publisher, the site had 44,115 “likes” by early March 2015.
Although its overall appearance and content suggest that Cisneros
herself is posting the hundreds of updates, it is a hybrid space combining
allographic and autographic paratexts—a publicity site that promotes
the writer and her books through multiple visual images, videos, audio
interviews, and written texts by and about Cisneros. The Facebook
page represents the publisher’s adoption of a popular digital space for
commercial ends; buried in the information link, the email listed for the
page is the publisher’s, vintageanchorpublicity@randomhouse.com.19
Nevertheless, like any other commercial communications medium, it is
not entirely hegemonic, presenting opportunities for popular expression,
some significant intellectual content, and, in this case, various elements
of grassroots multiculturalism from below. The seven years of posts
present a daunting body of information for researchers. Like the collec-
tion of media articles on her website, it is a continually growing archive
that invites distant reading data analysis to glean accurate information
about this paratextual corpus. Nonetheless, even a non-quantitative
analysis of the site reveals several significant trends.
The earliest posts in the archive were those uploaded by the Random
House publicist on August 27, 2008. These separate posts present
large pictures of the covers of seven of Cisneros’s books, thus creating
compound paratexts—paratexts using other paratexts. The first advertises
the newly released volume, Vintage Cisneros with a picture of the cover and
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summary of its contents, replete with ad language such as “bestselling,”

“a favorite in school classrooms across the country,” “a chapter from her
new novel,” “a generous selection of poems,” and “seven stories from her
award-winning collection.” The subsequent posts that day each feature
a large picture of Cisneros’s book covers, with the publisher’s blurb or
a reviewer’s comment to promote sales. The next post on September
9 announces with an air of offhandedness: “Just FYI . . . Sandra will be
touring the U.S. in April 2009—to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the
publication of THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET.”20
Some people respond to these ads for Cisneros’s books on Facebook
as if they were communicating with the author herself. On August 21,
2011, for example, Rachel Schneider added a comment to the 2008 post
advertising Cisneros’s poetry collection Loose Woman: “[T]his is when
I first discovered you and your wonderful writing, I’ve read all now
but this always holds a place in my heart & my absolute favorite poem:
‘Cloud.’ ”21 Schneider thus becomes a part of the publisher’s epitext
advertising Cisneros and her books, although the reader is expressing
her own populist engagement with the poetry. The rhetorical strategy
she employs reveals a longing to personally communicate with the living
author/celebrity, to “talk back” to the initial communicative utterance in
the published volume of poems.
One way to navigate the Facebook site is through the pictures stream,
a year-by-year collage of the images of Cisneros that the publicist has
posted.22 The overwhelming signifiers in this visual collection are the
attractive bright colors and exotic images of the celebrity writer. The
dozens of images seen together in this ensemble overwhelm the viewer
to a greater degree than when experienced individually on a book cover,
a single Facebook post, or a news item. Where the cover of a print
book usually has a small black-and-white photo of the author, here the
messages that the bright colors, exotic attire, and background props
communicate are multiplied for a greater conglomerated effect. Readers
who view the dozens of images in the Facebook Photos page before,
during, or after reading a novel such as Caramelo pass through a different
paratextual portal in their interpretation of the text than do those who
do not view them. Cisneros’s visual performance in the repeated tropes
of these photos correlates to the larger network of the performance of
latinidad in the novel.
There is a continuous dynamic between populist and hegemonic
multiculturalism on the publicity site on Facebook for Cisneros. A
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clear-cut example of hegemonic recuperation of Cisneros work is an

October 29, 2009 post announcing that Laura Bush included Cisneros
on her recommended reading list, with a large picture of the first lady. In
contrast, several interviews and videos from Cisneros’s public speaking
events are rich in populist multiculturalism. When the publicist posts a
YouTube video of Cisneros dramatically reading her story “The Family
of Little Feet” on October 5, 2012 at the Librotraficante Banned Books
Caravan in San Antonio, for example, the issue of Arizona banning
ethnic studies books in its public schools and the feminist themes of the
story overpower the hegemonic intention of selling Cisneros’s books with
the messages of populist multiculturalism. When writer Héctor Tobar
converses with Cisneros in an October 10, 2012 video interview in Los
Angeles, ostensibly a promotion for her book Have You Seen Marie, the
lengthy interview is replete with the populist ideas of the two import-
ant Latino writers—multiculturalism from the ground up. Cisneros, for
example, voices her alienation from guardians of the literary canon such
as the New York Review of Books to which she attributes “cultural apart-
heid.” Commenting from the audience, a Chicana therapist who works
with infantrymen for the Department of Defense surprises Cisneros and
viewers with her story of using one of Cisneros’s books for a therapeutic
intervention. Her patient, who was concerned he might be a womanizer,
reported that the book by Cisneros that the therapist gave him helped
him recognize himself as a “sucio” [dirty guy] and made him want to
change. As a Sergeant First Class, he then assigned Cisneros’s writing
to the soldiers he supervised, beginning a book club. Many unexpected
paths of information about ordinary people’s relation to Cisneros’s books
surface in the content of the Facebook site that her publisher runs to
promote her books.
In response to the “Happy Birthday” message posted on December 21,
2014, 980 people posted “likes” and 59 forwarded the message. Thirty-
six people wrote personal comments addressed to Cisneros herself with
birthday greetings and praising her writing. Roy Ayala, for example,
added a picture of a chocolate birthday cake to his message: “Happy
Birthday Hermanita, you[‘re] awesome.” On October 31, 2014 there
is a picture and link to a description of the Day of the Dead altar that
Cisneros constructed in the American History Museum in honor of her
mother, “A Room of Her Own: My Mother’s Altar.” With over 2,000 views
and 59 comments, many of which directly address Cisneros, populist
multiculturalism predominates in this posting. An April 1, 2013 update
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features an image of a silkscreen poster of a Chicana holding some of the

books banned in Arizona public schools, with The House on Mango Street
in the front. The headline on the poster reads: “Save Ethnic Studies. Save
our Stories.” Even though the publicist posted the image as an advertise-
ment to sell Sandra’s books, multiculturalism from below predominates;
the publisher’s desire to make money from multiculturalism is only the
vehicle of transmission of this populist expression.
On April 7, 2014 the title of a post reads: “Sandra Cisneros shared
Vintage Books and Anchor Books’ photo,” with a large picture of the
cover of Caramelo and a quotation from the novel, “Life was cruel and
hilarious all at once.” This post functions as hegemonic multicultural-
ism, an example of the publisher’s marketing epitext with a picture of the
front cover and a blurb about the story. The author’s name and picture
at the top of the post allow viewers to forget that this is the name of the
site, not the author herself speaking, since both Cisneros and the site
share these identifying signifiers. Some viewers think Sandra Cisneros
herself has written this post, and this is a key advertising strategy of the
publisher’s epitext. At the same time, however, the post involves popu-
list multiculturalism because 956 people have “liked” it and 56 have
written responses that then become part of this ad for the book as they
are posted. Readers write about how much they loved the book, that
it is an all-time favorite, the best piece of Chicano literature, and how
it made them cry. The comments of respondents who believe they are
communicating with Cisneros herself reveal the deliberate ambiguity of
giving the site the author’s name; it is easy to misinterpret the post’s title
“Sandra Cisneros shared . . . photo.” One woman addresses the author
bilingually: “Sandra Cisneros que bonito escribes. You Rock” [Sandra
Cisneros, how beautifully you write] and another asks, “It was terrific
getting to listen to you speak at Bookfest at the San Antonio Library
this past weekend and I loved the poem you read. Can you share the
title?”23 The comments and “likes” posted to this ad for Caramelo on
Facebook are indications of the level of popular cultural expression that
infuses the ad.
Although the Facebook page is a publisher’s epitext, many examples of
Cisneros’s populist version of multiculturalism stand out, as also occurs
in her literary texts. In one instance, a comment she makes in a lecture
becomes a meta-paratext (that is, a commentary on her use of paratexts
in the novel), and foments a discussion with populist overtones on the
Facebook page. For Cisneros, footnotes are a rhetorical device employed
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both literally in the novel and as a metaphor. In a March 21, 2014 post
on the Facebook page, a black-and-white photo of the writer lecturing
appears with the quotation: “We are the footnotes of the footnotes,” from
a comment Cisneros made about the search for Latina heroines; 1,884
people liked this post and 254 forwarded it. The 33 comments posted
reveal the delight of this group of readers with Cisneros’s paratextual play.
Ben Ferreira writes: “But You[‘re] Really the Chapters, the Foreword, the
Introduction, the Acknowledgements, the Epilogue, and the Afterword,
the Text, the Bibliography, the Title, The Dedication, the Publisher, the
Printer, the Reader and yes, The Writer” (March 21, 2014 post). The next
day, reader Veronica T. Popescu asked: “Context, please? I can’t possibly
see you as a footnote, but I’d certainly like to know what came before and
followed this statement. Footnotes can certainly open up new directions,
can trigger further explorations. Your work is inspirational in so many
ways. . . . ” Uriel López added: “A different take and worldview: Latinas
are the headers of the headers.” Dialoguing with Cisneros, other read-
ers simply mention Latinas who are not footnotes: Rita Moreno, Sonia
Sotomayor, and Frida Kahlo.24 In contrast to her metaphorical use of the
idea of footnotes here, Cisneros often in Caramelo writes less-known or
forgotten Latinos into history precisely through extended footnotes. That
is, her use of the paratextual device is not to present parenthetical or
unessential details but precisely the opposite, to give less-known figures
a place in history.
Crowd-sourced advertising
We have seen that Cisneros’s Facebook site functions in a liminal space
between the illusion that it is an authorial paratext and its underlying
identity as a publisher’s advertising epitext. This confusion does not
occur on another advertising site, Amazon’s webpage for Caramelo, the
point of sale for many readers of the book. Here, and on the compan-
ion site Goodreads, also owned by Amazon, readers contribute ratings,
reviews, discussions, and commentary that function as crowd-sourced
advertising for the novel without readers necessarily intending this. Like
other paratexts examined here, this unremunerated work by consumers
pivots on the interplay of hegemonic and populist multiculturalism.
Since the early 1990s, abundant commentary, reviews, and discussions
have been written about Sandra Cisneros and her work by both profes-
sional critics as well as many ordinary readers. As in the case of Díaz’s
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prizewinning novel, most new readers of Caramelo will have encoun-

tered some of these paratexts in print or digital media before reading the
book. Although Cisneros’s novel was published five years before Díaz’s,
there are fewer ratings and reviews for her novel from the public on the
Amazon website in early 2015 than for Díaz’s (109 and 1,040, respect-
ively). Sales rankings function as an important quantitative paratextual
portal on Amazon’s and other booksellers’ websites. In October 2007, five
years after its release, Caramelo’s sales ranking on Amazon was #21,090.
In February 2015, the paperback edition of Díaz’s novel was #518 in
books and #2 in Hispanic literature. That day, the paperback edition of
Caramelo was #93,824 in books and #65 in Hispanic literature.25 The sales
figures are updated hourly by Amazon’s computers. They algorithmically
factor in both historical and projected future sales. One source notes that
a rank between 50,000 and 100,000 (Cisneros) represents sales of at least
one book a day, and between 500 and 750 (Díaz) represents between 120
and 175 books sold a day.26
Although there are fewer reviews for Caramelo from the public on
the Amazon site than for Díaz’s novel, with a simple click, prospective
purchasers of the novel with Internet access can read dozens of brief
excerpts from reviews in national publications. These function as the
digital version of the back cover of the print book and the opening pages
of paperback editions that list favorable quotations from reviews. While
the Los Angeles Times reviewer compares Cisneros to canonical writers
Eduardo Galeano, John Dos Passos, and John Steinbeck, the excerpt
from the New York Times Book Review suggests that the novel is partially
akin to popular literature: “ . . . it is one of those novels that blithely leap
across the border between literary and popular fiction.” Several quota-
tions emphasize the novel’s ethnic inflection: “All the energy of a riotous
family fiesta” (Washington Post); and “Cisneros is a wonderful cultural
translator, writing English dialogue so saturated with Mexican-Spanish
idioms and constructions that you feel like you’ve been magically
empowered to eavesdrop in another language” (The Oregonian). Here the
implicit “you” is an amorphous mainstream reader who does not know
Spanish, the presumed primary addressee of Cisneros’s text. The adverb
“magically” adds an aura of Latin American magical realism (hardly a
presence in the novel) as a misleading paratextual portal through which
some readers of this quotation will enter the novel. The Miami Herald
seems to disparage Latino families such as the Reyes clan, noting that the
novel “interlace[s] not just the Reyeses—those conjurers, enticers and
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troublemakers—but also all the rest of us, the good and bad together,
the bitter and, of course, the sweet.” Perhaps unintentionally, this excerpt
portrays Latinos as negative in contrast to “all the rest of us.”27
Besides the press reviews, the Amazon webpage advertising Caramelo
gives an 11-page excerpt from the beginning of the novel and a review
of the audio book. The excerpt has the characteristics of an autographic
paratext since it consists of words the author has written but exists
outside the full text of the novel. Nonetheless, it also has the charac-
teristics of a publisher’s epitext since it is formatted very differently on
the screen, and distorts the novel to some degree by its partiality. The
formatting, for example, irregularly spaces the lines of prose—some
double-spaced and some single-spaced. Further, the wide layout of the
digital screen (both on computers and mobile devices) makes all of
the paragraphs in this digital paratext seem shorter than those in the
print version of the novel. Indentation and some punctuation are also
changed, and the footnotes are not italicized, so that the author has lost
control of her creation to some degree in this paratext. Like the front
cover of books which are always ultimately controlled by the publisher,
this excerpt of the novel is an advertising epitext, a portal that shapes
prospective readers’ perceptions of the novel before they begin to read
and when they ultimately do so.
In comparison to the 1,040 reviews by readers for The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao on Amazon, the 109 reviews for Cisneros’s book seem
scant. Eighty-six of Cisneros’s reviews have four or five stars, the top two
ratings. While on the page for Díaz’s novel Amazon arranged two nega-
tive reviews and a single positive statement at the top as representative
comments, in Cisneros’s case all three of the representative reviews are
positive. Clicking the first sample entry from Jesús in Chicago to see
the full review he posted April 28, 2005 shows the ad tag “Today Show
Bookclub #9 (Hardcover)” above the title Jesús wrote for his review,
“Worth Reading a Thousand Times.” The second representative excerpt,
from Karen Potts of Lake Jackson, Texas, praises Cisneros’s ability to create
“word pictures” and give the reader information about “the Hispanic
culture [sic].” The third praiseworthy review Amazon highlights, by
Kimberly from Los Angeles, is titled “Spectacular, Spectacular”; despite
having been assigned the novel to read, Kimberly praises it exuberantly,
also noting that it seems like “a spanish soap opera [sic].”
While Jesús, in an insider’s ethnographic utterance compares the
novel to “a Mexican soap opera or as we say, a telenovela,” both Kimberly
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and Potts reveal their “outsider’s” relationship to Mexican and Chicano

culture in their comments. Kimberly substitutes the name of a language
for a national origin, using the lowercase “spanish” to refer to Mexican
soap operas; Potts writes of “the” Hispanic culture as if it were singu-
lar. Amazon hopes to attract both Latino and non-Latino readers by
highlighting these positive reviews, and some potential purchasers of the
novel may base their decision on only these three excerpts, which in turn
will shape their reading of the novel. Although claiming the selection is
representative, Amazon does not back this up with numerical figures as
it does in Díaz’s case.
Let us imagine a reader pressured by time constraints and the abun-
dant choice in today’s digital world who reads quickly through several
of the 106 reviews of Caramelo on the Amazon website. That reader will
find an overwhelming number of positive reviews from readers—86,
with only 20 that Amazon classifies as “critical,” rather than “negative.”
Terms such as “exquisite,” “spectacular,” and “out of this world” praise
Cisneros’s writing. A number of readers see their lives reflected in the
novel: “Reading this book was like spending afternoons with my mother
and my [M]exican extended family. Not a page went by that I didn’t
laugh, wince . . . sigh, or most of the time, cry. I kept telling my husband,
this book is me, this book is my childhood,” one reader wrote in 2005.
Evidencing a strong populist multiculturalism, a grassroots pride
grounded in personal experience, many wrote that the book made them
feel proud of their culture. Others, some of whom confessed to initial
apprehension about the subject matter and concern with the use of
Spanish they didn’t understand, wrote about their great enjoyment of the
book and that it won them over. Readers praise Cisneros’s vivid imagery,
poetic, evocative language, and compelling storyline.
The time-pressed reader will probably also consider the negative
reviews on Amazon before committing to engage with this lengthy novel.
Several of the eleven negative reviews on the site (one and two stars) raise
serious concerns not to be taken lightly. In a substantive 2002 review,
“Elverdulero” in Sonoma, California writes that the novel undermines
the achievements of Cisneros’s earlier fiction and poetry: “Much of the
text is marred with forced metaphors, non-sequitors [sic], redundance,
and curio-shop descriptions—contrived and colorful and meant to
appeal to tourist readers from outside the culture.” The reviewer claims
that the transliterated Spanish leaves non-Spanish speakers confused
and they would be better served by functional translations. The truth/
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fiction dichotomy is “frivolous,” the historical footnotes are “banal,” and

the chance encounters with real people are “gimmicky.” The purportedly
unifying symbol of the rebozo is reduced to “occasional metaphorical
allusions and incidental appearances.” This lengthy negative review—well
written with many criticisms to be taken seriously—speaks with author-
ity about the nature of great literary creation and announces itself as an
“insider’s” critique: “As a Chicano who believes we have barely begun to
explore the potential inherent in a literature of our people’s experience,
on a truly world-class level, I feel that the kind of uncritical, ‘sheltered’
reviews our few famous writers usually get are an insult . . . ” Another
“insider” negative reviewer, M. García from Greenville, CA, wrote: “Will
Sandra Cisneros always be our token Mexican? Will she always get away
with mediocre writing?”28 Another Chicana criticized the stereotypes
in the novel: “It reads like a bad tourist vision of Mexico, of Chicanos
whose life is just one cheap joke after another.”29 These criticisms are also
part of populist multiculturalism, showing, as expected, that members
of the Chicano community have many different points of view about art
and other subjects.
Despite the small but vocal number of negative reviews, it is likely
that most who peruse these epitexts will be favorably impressed by the
large quantity of positive testimonies. The seven pages of comments
from five star reviewers are evidence of Amazon’s honesty and fairness
in only showing positive excerpts in the representative comments at the
top, near the horizontal bar graph of the ratings. Both the positive and
negative epitexts will affect interpretation for readers who engage with
them before buying the book or while reading it. Many of these portals
direct readers’ attention to Cisneros’s depiction of Mexican culture, her
well-crafted, innovative language, the compelling story line, humor, and
poignancy. Having read even some of these reviews by fellow readers
flags certain elements of the novel for notice. It would be hard to find
people in today’s digital world who could approach the novel without
having engaged with some of these shaping epitexts.
Another venue for crowd-sourced advertising is the Goodreads website,
also owned by Amazon, where a larger number of reviews and ratings
from ordinary readers appear. On January 8, 2015, there were 6,386
ratings for Caramelo, and an average score of 3.83. (In contrast, The House
on Mango Street, widely read by many age groups, has 60,842 ratings on
the site.) Cisneros has 715 “fans,” many of whose pictures appear on the
Goodreads author page for her. Under the section “Lists with this Book,”
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that is, personalized lists of books that readers have uploaded, Caramelo
is ranked 32 out of 431 books in the category “Latina/Latino Fiction”
in which 720 “voters” have participated. In the “Chicana/Chicano”
category, the novel is seventh out of 122 books, recommended by 53
voters. The novel is included and ranked in 30 other categories on the
site, for example, “Immigrant Experience Literature,” “Hispanic Fiction,”
and “Memoirs by Women.”
The Goodreads categories and rankings appear as “bookshelves” on the
website with images of the front covers of the books displayed in the
order of their ranking. These epitextual ads for the book are visual signi-
fiers of crowd-sourced recommendations from people who have signed
up to participate in the website. Where a bricks-and-mortar bookstore
might have a few covers facing outward on its shelves (positions often
paid for by big publishers) and tags indicating “staff picks” as tools to
sell books, the digital site Goodreads can place images of books with their
covers showing within many categories of related books based on partici-
pants’ input as a means of selling more books. Each category is another
advertising venue for the book, so that multiple paths lead readers to
book purchases. While publishers often decide the category of a book to
facilitate marketing it, now ordinary readers place single titles in a larger
variety of such paratexts, creating many marketing routes for a book. The
front book cover, a paratext in its own right, is now part of many other
paratexts—multiple organizational categories on the Goodreads site.
There is a small link next to the visualization of the star ratings
under the book title on the Goodreads page for Caramelo. Clicking on
it opens details about the rating, listing numbers, and percentages for
each category with a bar graph; 28 (1,944) readers, gave the novel five
stars; 36 (2,489) rated it four stars; and 27 (1,850) rated it three stars;
8 (553) readers gave it only one or two stars. In a caption, Goodreads
summarizes and reframes the statistic in easier-to-understand and more
positive advertising language: “92 of people liked it.” The caption also
notes that 12,593 people added the book to their collection and 105 have
listed it as one of their “to-reads.”30 These percentages are much smaller
than the figures for Junot Díaz’s novel, but they also communicate to
potential readers that a large group of people like Cisneros’s novel, and
new purchasers probably will too.
Goodreads offers a new type of epitext on its site through which read-
ers can post comments and update their status while they are reading
books. On October 10, 2008, for example, a reader named “Z” who is
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on page 15 of Caramelo writes that she is enjoying the book so far. On

December 9, however, she adds a comment “OK . . . so I put this aside,”
offering no explanation. On June 15, 2010, Gustavo Pereyra notes that
he is on page 46. He updates his status four more times as he continues
reading and on June 26 “likes” the book, having finished it. He writes a
short comment, noting that it is one of the best books he’s read and that
it deserves to be read and re-read. Phoenix Valdez writes on January 7,
2010 when she is on page 12: “I’ve found out a lot about her family. Like
her ‘Awful Grandma.’ Who nobody likes but they are going to see her
in Mexico. I like it :).”31 Whether or not participants write comments,
the site lists various readers’ progress through the book if they update it
themselves, or agree to let their e-reader or tablet upload this informa-
tion to Goodreads. Where previously people might have commented on
how far they had read in a book to a friend or two, now an ad hoc digital
reading group exists on the web that they can communicate with and
compare reading progress to while proceeding through the novel.
Although the Amazon webpages and the Goodreads site are owned
by a huge corporation for which the goal is to profit from book sales,
this hegemonic identity advances its aim in the case of Cisneros’s novel
precisely by opening a space for popular expression and certain elem-
ents of populist multiculturalism. Lisa Nakamura argues that Goodreads
“provides users with familiar tools that encourage them to perform
their identities as readers in a public and networked forum” (240). At
the same time that Amazon profits from readers’ participation and saves
thousands of dollars from its advertising budget, readers enjoy express-
ing themselves on the sites and reading what other people have to say
about the novel. Even if a review or star rating is negative, as in the case
of the post by “Elverdulero” cited above, thoughtful elements of populist
multiculturalism come to readers’ attention. As is the case with negative
print reviews in canonical venues, even the criticism keeps the author’s
name and book in the public discourse and contributes to sales. Most
important for this study is that the thousands of ratings, commentaries,
graphs, and multiple pictures of the covers on different readers’ book-
shelves open numerous paratextual portals through which many readers
pass before, during, and after reading the book. The growing number of
devices to access this material on smartphones, tablets, and computers
increases the reach of these paratexts.
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Notes
1 Cisneros, “Letter to My Readers,” December 21, 2014, sandracisneros.com,
http://www.sandracisneros.com/letters/letter_current.php. Web. February. 3,
2015. See also Kristina Puga, “Sandra Cisneros Hits a Milestone,” NBCnews.
com, December 23, 2014. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/sandra-
cisneros-hits-milestone-n273941. Web. January 16, 2015.
2 NPR Interview, Alt Latino, June 17, 2013, http://www.npr.org/player/v2/
mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=167554154&m=169036
453. Web. February 12, 2015. In a 2012 letter on her website, Cisneros also
comments on her childhood dream of performing: “As a child I wanted to
be a performer, a comic, an actress, a ballerina. And a writer. As a writer I
get to be all of those, because I perform my stories, and have to act, be funny
and, on occasion, sing. I have yet to be a ballerina, but I can always dream!”
August 29, 2012 (posted April 2013), www.sandracisneros.com/letters/
letter_018.php. Web. January 12, 2015.
3 Cisneros’s use of supra-ethnicity is also reappropriated by many Americans
as a “safe” non-threatening version of the ethnic Other. The covers of several
of her books can be decoded as stereotypical images of Mexican women’s
passivity that are far removed from the appearance of Chicana and Mexican
women in the US. The two million copies of The House on Mango Street that
have sold to date, and Random House’s use of similar art on other ethnic
texts, attest to American society’s current need for supra-ethnic images of the
Other.
4 See (http://www.austinchronicle.com/binary/e79f/sandra.jpg. Web.
September 2, 2010.
5 See http://www.meredithsuewillis.com/images/cisneros.jpg. Web. September
2, 2010.
6 See http://www.rochester.lib.ny.us/irondequoit/images/sandracisneros.jpg.
Web. September 2, 2010.
7 See http://www.dyerphotography.com/images/mujeres/sandra_cisneros.jpg.
8 See “Sandra Cisneros,” We Wanted to Be Writers, http://wewantedtobewriters.
com/sandra-cisneros/. Web. February 6, 2015.
9 See http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=128669840494432 for an image
of the postcard ad for the benefit. Web. November 26, 2010.
10 See http://www.alamo.edu/sac/english/mcquien/graphics/disk_2/cisnerh.jpg.
11 See http://www.alamo.edu/sac/english/mcquien/htmlfils/kingwill.htm and
“Case Study: On Painting a House Purple,” in Context: Participating in Cultural
Conversations. Ann Merle Feldman, Nancy Downs and Ellen McManus. Eds.
New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 2002: 300–326. Print.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0007
12 Benjamin Olivo, “Sandra Cisneros Sells King William Home,” San

Antonio Express News. Mysanantonio.com. January 24, 2015. http://www.
mysanantonio.com/real-estate/article/Sandra-Cisneros-sells-King-William-
home-6015038.php#photo-7386581. Web. February 3, 2015.
13 Julia Alvarez introduces her 1997 novel ¡Yo! with similar concerns about the
breakdown of the border between truth and fiction and the resentment of the
writer’s sisters that they have been made “fictional fodder” and “plagiarized”
in the public spaces of Julia Alvarez’s novels and talk show appearances. See
Alvarez, ¡Yo! (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 1997), 7. Cisneros also
follows the lead of Alvarez and other writers with the narrative pretense of
allowing the characters to speak back to the author, when the Grandmother
speaks back to the “author” Celaya. In Alvarez’s case, the book creates the
appearance that people she has known are now writing stories about her, a
sort of revenge of the characters, although they are all, of course, created and
controlled by Julia Alvarez.
14 NPR Interview, Alt Latino, June 17, 2013, http://www.npr.org/player/v2/
mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=167554154&m=169036453.
Web. February 12, 2015.
15 See, for example, John Paul Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art
of Self Invention. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985. Print.
16 “Letter to My Readers,” January 17, 2010, http://www.sandracisneros.com/
letters/letter_006.php. Web. February 10, 2015.
17 See Cisneros’s December 3, 2013 letter, http://www.sandracisneros.com/
letters/letter_020.php. Web. February 13, 2015.
18 Cisneros web site, http://www.sandracisneros.com/discoveries.php. Web.
February 15, 2015.
19 An October 16, 2011 post overtly reveals the corporate origins of the Cisneros
Facebook page: “Dear Sandra Cisneros fans, Please check out (and join)
the fan page for her publisher: Vintage Books for more news on great
books. Thank you!” In other words, please let us send more ads about other
books we publish to your Facebook page. See, https://www.facebook.com/
sandracisnerosauthor. Web. February 13, 2015.
20 Sandra Cisneros Facebook Timeline, Aug. 27 and September 9, 2008. https://
www.facebook.com/sandracisnerosauthor. Web. February 12, 2015.
21 Cisneros Facebook Timeline, Loose Woman, August 27, 2008, https://www.
facebook.com/sandracisnerosauthor/timeline?ref=page_internal. Web.
February 12, 2015.
22 See Cisneros Facebook Photo Stream, https://www.facebook.com/
sandracisnerosauthor/photos_stream?tab=photos_stream. Web. February 12,
2015.
23 Cisneros Facebook timeline, April 7, 2014, https://www.facebook.com/
sandracisnerosauthor/posts/10152293944424014. Web. February 12, 2014.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0007
24 Cisneros Facebook timeline, March 21, 2014, https://www.facebook.com/

sandracisnerosauthor. February 12, 2014.
25 See the Amazon pages for the paperback editions of Díaz’s novel, http://
www.amazon.com/The-Brief-Wondrous-Life-Oscar/dp/1594483299/
ref=tmm_pap_title_0 and Cisneros’s novel http://www.amazon.com/
Caramelo-Sandra-Cisneros/dp/0679742581?ie=UTF8&n=283155&ref_=dp_p
roddesc_0&s=books&showDetailProductDesc=1#iframe-wrapper. Web.
February 7, 2015.
26 Theresa Regan, cited in Rob Nightingale, “Eight Things Most People
Don’t Know about Amazon’s Bestsellers Rank (Sales Rank),” http://www.
makeuseof.com/tag/8-things-people-dont-know-amazons-bestsellers-rank-
sales-rank/. Web. February 7, 2015.
27 See the Amazon webpage for Caramelo, http://www.amazon.com/Caramelo-
Sandra-Cisneros/dp/0679742581?ie=UTF8&n=283155&ref_=dp_proddesc_
0&s=books&showDetailProductDesc=1#iframe-wrapper. Web. February 7,
2015.
28 El Verdulero, “The rebozo unraveled—Este rebozo se destejio,” Amazon
webpage for Caramelo, Nov. 18, 2012 and M. García, “A first time author
would never be able to get this to print,” December 1, 2003. Web. http://
www.amazon.com/Caramelo-Sandra-Cisneros/product-reviews/0679742581/
ref=cm_cr_pr_hist_2?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addOneStar&showViewpoi
nts=0&sortBy=helpful&reviewerType=all_reviews&formatType=all_
formats&filterByStar=two_star&pageNumber=1. Web. February 7, 2015.
29 A Customer, “Stereotype after stereotype,” November 27, 2002, http://www.
amazon.com/Caramelo-Sandra-Cisneros/product-reviews/0679742581/
ref=cm_cr_pr_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addOneStar&showViewpoi
nts=0&sortBy=helpful&reviewerType=all_reviews&formatType=all_
formats&filterByStar=one_star&pageNumber=1. Web. February 7, 2015.
30 Goodreads page for Caramelo, http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32957.
Caramelo. Web. February 8, 2015.
31 “Recent updates,” Goodreads page for Caramelo, http://www.goodreads.com/
user_status/show/2964261. Web. February 8, 2015.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0007
4
Peritextual Thresholds of
the Material Print Artifact
Abstract: This chapter focuses on the peritexts that
are materially a part of the novel, including the cover,
layout, design, and graphics created and controlled by the
publisher, along with the the author’s own peritexts such
as the front and back matter, epigraphs, internal titles,
and the extensive footnotes . Cisneros’s 40 notes at the end
of chapters include footnotes to footnotes. Like Díaz who
added notes online to the finished novel, overlaying the
text with a sense of unfinalizability, the authorial voice
in Caramelo overflows itself as Cisneros adds notes to the
text and then notes to the notes. A baroque accumulation
of detail and compound digressions characterize the
performative and aesthetic strategies of the novel.

doi: 10.1057/9781137603609.0008.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0008 101

Chapter 3 examined some of the numerous epitexts not materially

attached to Caramelo created by the publisher, author, and readers.
Working in tandem with these epitexts is a network of peritexts that
are physically part of the book, created by either the publisher or the
author. This series of peritexts in or attached to Caramelo strongly shapes
the textuality and semiosis of the novel. From the front cover to the
increasingly digressive footnotes, these peritexts invite readers to follow
centripetal pathways more deeply into the interior layers of the novel.
Cisneros’s novel does not begin with the first words of the opening
chapter, “We’re all little in the photograph above Father’s bed” (3) or end
with the final words, “Like all emigrants caught between here and there”
(434). Key opening and closing peritexts precede and follow these lines,
shaping textuality as they direct readers to the interior layers of the novel,
and significant interior peritexts such as layout, graphics, chapter titles,
epigraphs, and footnotes are essential parts of the novel’s meaning. One
of Cisneros’s key narrative strategies in Caramelo is to lead readers on
increasingly digressive trajectories of centripetal movement—a pattern
in which autographic peritexts play a key role.
The publisher’s peritext
The book cover

The most important identifying marker of a print book is the front cover,
which usually includes a large visual image, the title, and the author’s
name. The cover addresses potential readers with attractive signifiers,
freighted with primary and secondary signifieds. The author’s name can
evoke ethnicity, gender, canonical status or lack thereof, and sometimes,
previous books by the author that the consumer may know. Even without
reading the title and the name of the author, a viewer seeing the cover
from afar can engage with its identifying role, its naming function. In the
scene in the film Birdman when Ed Norton is interrupted while lying in a
tanning bed, he holds a closed copy of Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths facing
toward the camera. With the lettering of the book title too small to read,
González Iñáritu’s homage to the Borgesian intertext relies on the overall
visual recognition of readers who are familiar with the paperback cover
of the English translation. The scene reveals the naming function that the
front cover as a whole employs, even when its title is unreadable.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0008
Peritextual Thresholds of the Material Print Artifact 103
The book jacket that covers the cloth bound first edition of Caramelo is
almost literally a door that readers open and close, a portal through which
they enter multiple times while reading the print edition of the novel. Its
foremost function as a key advertising peritext that the publisher creates
for the novel entices potential readers to buy the book. But this adver-
tisement continues to impart meaning to the text during the reading
process, a secondary role that recedes in reading a digital version of the
book on portable devices such as a Kindle, iPad, or smartphone. Like
many ads in print media, often the front cover communicates primarily
through visual imagery, anchored by minimalist verbal texts. The front
cover’s signifiers entice readers initially to purchase the book and at the
same time engage with a powerful signifying network as readers figura-
tively walk through them to read the novel.
Two-thirds of the space on the front cover of Caramelo is occupied
by a large image of a smiling young woman with her eyes closed, hair
parted in the middle and smoothly drawn into braids decoratively rolled
around her ears. The black-and-white medium, its sepia tinting, and the
subject’s attire and hairstyle communicate the sense of a past historical
period. Most readers will not know who the subject and photographer
are, allowing the image to communicate a broad sense of anteriority,
female passivity through the closed eyes, and happiness in that role
through the smile. The subject’s pose is a strong example of what John
Berger terms the female as the surveyed; throughout the history of art
and in present-day advertising, women have frequently been portrayed
as the object of a male surveyor’s glance, whether implied or explicit.
As Roland Barthes (1977) has shown, because visual images are poly-
semous, verbal text is often added to anchor particular meanings of an
image. Here, it is the autographic peritext that Cisneros has chosen for
the book’s title, “CARAMELO.” The large capital letters appear directly
beneath the photograph and are the second largest visual signifier
on the cover. Outlined in white, the large red letters function visually
with the green shades on the cover to communicate a vague sense of
Mexicanicity—the colors of the Mexican flag. This meaning will later be
made explicit in the novel itself. Readers who know Spanish may decode
the title’s meaning as “candy.” The Spanish-language name of the book
combines with Cisneros’s own Mexican name which appears in large
black letters directly below the title. The third verbal identifier of ethni-
city on the front cover is the tag line beneath the author’s name: “A novel
by the author of THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET.”
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0008
Advertisers know that too much detail produces clutter that can hurt
sales. Simple, stereotypical signifiers predominate in ads, aiming for the
least common denominator of cultural competence to encourage wide
sales in the demographic groups sought. Therefore, the publisher hides
further information about the cover photo inside the back cover flap, and
even this paratext gives only partial information. Paralleling Cisneros’s
black-and-white author photo at the top of the back flap, the cover
photo is reproduced at the bottom of the flap without the decorative
color frame that surrounds it on the front cover. It is anchored simply
with its title, “Rose, Mexico, 1926 by Edward Weston.” This information
gives most readers only a vague sense of early 20th century Mexicanicity,
perhaps then serving as a photographic correlative to the Grandmother
Soledad as the reader progresses through the novel.
Curious readers may do the extra research to discover that Weston’s
photograph depicts Rosa Covarrubias, the wife of famous Mexican artist
Miguel Covarrubias who met her in New York in the 1920s where she
performed in Broadway shows. Born in Los Angeles as Rose Cowan, she
took her Mexican mother’s surname for her stage name, Rosa Rolanda.
The subject of Weston’s photograph thus parallels Cisneros’s own flam-
boyant recuperation of her Mexican heritage, a trajectory in which Rose
Cowan Mexicanized her name, moved to Mexico with Covarrubias, and
became famous for the spectacular meals she prepared for key members
the art community such as Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.1 Whether or
not Cisneros herself suggested this photograph to the publisher for the
cover image or was conscious of the way in which Rosa Covarrubias’s
story parallels her own, the photograph on the cover combines authorial
and allographic paratextual levels, in addition to imparting a general
sense of Mexicanicity and a visual connection to the figure of Soledad in
the novel.
Color, shading, and other visual rhetoric on the front cover shape
this signifying portal through which readers pass. Red and green are
the primary colors of the picture frame that the designer has added
around the photograph, depicting flowers from a Mexican retablo from
the colonial period—the decoration around a religious image.2 The oval
frame around Weston’s photo “Rose” is an inviting keyhole that we are to
peer through, and perhaps, like Alice, pass through in order to read the
book. The turquoise background color is darkly smudged on the lower
and side edges of the jacket, making the book appear old, like the period
photograph. This level of the cover paratext offers a chronologically
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0008
appropriate lens through which to re-create the early 20th century past
of the grandmother Soledad in Mexico.
Adding paratextually to the synopsis, the author biography, the
list of Cisneros’s other books, the publisher’s web address, the credits,
and Cisneros’s photograph on the inside flaps, the back cover includes
praise from four major writers of the Americas to promote the book.
Author Studs Terkel, alluded to in the novel itself, compares Caramelo to
Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath: “Beginning on Highway 66, it’s a salsi-
fied variant of the Joad family’s odyssey . . . ” While situating Cisneros
within the American literary canon, Terkel’s blurb also reifies her work
as an ethnic commodity, similar to the way in which Mirabella magazine
referred to her 1991 Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories as “a particu-
lar spicy brand of text-mex.”3 The other authors of the thoughtful and
well written blurbs—Dorothy Allison, Elena Poniatowska, and Edward
Galeano—give Caramelo its proper location as a novel of the Americas,
not only a US text. Significantly, Knopf released the Spanish translation
simultaneously with the first English edition in September 2002.
Although the analysis of the book as object in this study focuses on the
first edition of Cisneros’s novel, it is worth noting that the front covers
of subsequent editions continue the paratextual strategy of marketing
the writer and her work as postmodern ethnic commodities.4 The 2003
Vintage paperback employs the motif of papel picado [cut-out paper]
used as decoration for parties and other festive occasions in Mexico. The
letters announcing the title, author, and other textual promotions peek
through cutouts in the bright purple and orange tissue paper depicted on
both covers, with the tagline, “All the energy of a riotous family fiesta . . . ”
on the front. The sheets of overlain papel picado replace the front cover
photograph prominent on the cloth edition, although a black-and-white
image of Cisneros peeks through the two layers of a cut-out flower on
the back cover. On the British paperback edition, an image by Jesús
Helguera fills the entire front cover. A Mexican artist trained in Spain,
Helguera was famous for his cigar box and calendar art with folkloric
and exotic depictions of Mexicanicity. In the image on Caramelo, a
woman in a long flowing pink skirt and white peasant blouse raises her
long rebozo above her head as if she were dancing. With flowers and
bows in her braided hair, she gazes dreamily down, with large maguey
plants and a jarro (water jug) behind her on the rough dirt surface. While
there is no such character in Caramelo, this image of Mexico parallels the
flamboyant vestimentary displays of post-revolutionary artists such as
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0008
Frida Kahlo and Cisneros herself today. Similarly, the German edition
employs a blurred image of a dancer in motion, wearing a loud red and
pink costume, perhaps that of a flamenco or other folkloric dancer.
Again, there is no corresponding character or event in the novel; the
large image depicts ethnicity stereotypically to sell books.
Layout, graphics, and design

The first edition of Caramelo gives readers no table of contents through
which to cognitively map the expansive novel before, during, and after
reading the book. In the paperback and digital versions, a table of
contents has been added. In the digital version, this paratext is a neces-
sary component that allows readers to tap individual titles and be linked
immediately to the corresponding chapter, rather than flipping through
screens one-by-one to find various chapters. For readers of the hard-
cover first edition, the absence of a table of contents deprives readers of
an important organizational tool to see an overview of what lies before
them. This absence makes the novel seem a vast terrain of reading that
lies ahead. Readers may flip through to see some of the chapter titles, but
they lack a mapping tool to concisely envision the novel’s organization.
Instead, the chapter titles are released sequentially, one-by-one, as read-
ing proceeds.
More than likely, the publisher made the decision about the formatting
of the footnotes—the asterisks, daggers, and double daggers to help read-
ers find the corresponding notes at the ends of chapters. These symbols,
as well as the location of the notes at the ends of chapters, contrast the
decision to use numerical indicators and place them on the same page in
Junot Díaz’s novel. As we will see, these choices by Cisneros’s publisher
make it more difficult to navigate to the notes in her novel and to find
one’s place in the main text after reading them. Readers may be less
inclined to interrupt the narrative flow of the main text because of this.
Some may skip the notes entirely, or read them at the end of the chapter,
rather than at the place in the narrative that the author intended.
Cisneros’s publisher selected the frilly cursive typeface for the chapter
titles, a paratextual element that disappears in the digital version of the
novel that uses standard font for the intertitles and the main text. This
cursive font is also used for the title and subtitle on the title page, creating
aesthetic consistency. Distinct font also overcodes the footnotes. In all
the editions, the footnotes are distinguished from the text by appearing
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0008
completely in italics, perhaps again, a decision of the publisher. The

clothbound edition is printed on thick paper and is a heavy, massive
tome bespeaking importance. These material peritexts designed by the
publisher and perhaps approved by the author are paratextual portals
that affect readers’ engagement with the novel.
Autographic peritexts
Front and back matter

A variety of autographic paratextual strategies shape Caramelo. The
novel’s front matter including the full title, the dedication, the initial
epigraphs, and the Disclaimer are key elements of authorial enunci-
ation, forming an introductory bracket that pairs with the posterior
peritexts: the epilogue or “Pilón,” the Chronology, the final epigraph,
and the Acknowledgements. These paratextual portals are thresholds
of interpretation through which readers who pay attention to them
pass at various times as they read the text. Once readers have noticed
the Chronology, for example, they may often look up information in it
while reading. The dedication, initial epigraphs, and Disclaimer not only
suggest key themes that the reader will find in the long novel to follow
but also interact with what has been read for those who see them again
as they open the book at various times to continue reading.
The subtitle “or Puro Cuento” [only a story], which first appears
on the title page, announces the novel’s central narrative strategy: the
breakdown of the border between truth and lies, fact and fiction. In the
subtitle, Cisneros proclaims that all that follows is a made-up story with
nothing truthful. As we have seen, she reinforces this “disclaimer” in
the epigraphs in Spanish and English that follow (“Tell me a story even
if it’s a lie”). The intervening dedication, “Para ti, Papá,” announces the
primary reason for the emphasis on the fictional nature of the family
events recounted in the book: the novel reveals the deep family secret
that her alter ego Celaya has promised the father on his deathbed that
she will never tell: another daughter he has in Mexico. At the same
time, the dedication centers readers’ attention on the novel’s primary
desire: to re-invent the lost homeland of the author’s father—Mexico.
However, Cisneros nuances her claim to complete fictionality in the
Disclaimer where she tries to have it both ways. As in the dedication to
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0008
her deceased father written in Spanish, Cisneros asks his and her family
members’ pardon in Spanish in the Disclaimer: “If, in the course of my
inventing, I have inadvertently stumbled on the truth, perdónenme” (np).
Like a telenovela that attracts wide audiences because it draws from real
life, Cisneros warns readers (and her family) that she will also be telling
certain elements of the truth in the novel. Taking advantage of postmod-
ernism’s emphasis on indeterminacy and the elision of truth and fiction,
she wants to have it both ways: she is telling the truth at the same time
that she is not. If she has broken the promise not to tell embarrassing
family secrets that Celaya has made to the father in the last line of the
novel, it is only because she has stumbled on this material inadvertently
while making things up.
While the epilogue “Pilón” is a coda to the novel, it is also a bridge
to the Chronology. Cisneros writes that hearing Agustín Lara’s sad,
romantic song “Farolito” in Mexico City reminded her of her long-lost
pre-puberty self, that unselfconscious, confident girl who had not yet
passed over “that red Rio Bravo . . . that red Rubicon” (433–434). The song
brought back key memories of her childhood summers in Mexico, such
as the girl with the caramelo-colored skin in the ocean at Acapulco, and
her family’s connection to indigenous Mexico. The author is homesick
for that country “that doesn’t exist anymore,” that she has invented in the
novel because she is “[l]ike all emigrants caught between here and there”
(434). The Chronology that begins on the next page offers a different
mode of knowing that country than what has preceded in the novel. The
alternative history Cisneros offers in this peritext teaches readers a rudi-
mentary overview of the history of Mexico and its embattled connection
to US history.
In contrast to the lengthy 400-page story, a style of concise shorthand
characterizes the Chronology. Nonetheless, it is packed with informa-
tion and represents an alternative, counter-narrative to the master narra-
tives of US history in standard textbooks. Whereas Junot Díaz presents
information like this in the footnotes and sometimes the main narrative,
Cisneros chooses a different paratextual form—the appendix—in which
information is ordered chronologically to create a different cognitive
map. Linearity is the overt ordering principle of this list, inviting read-
ers to view history diachronically over five centuries. Conciseness and
selectivity are the predominant tropes—discursive strategies similar to
those Cisneros employs in her poetry and her first novel, The House on
Mango Street.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0008
The chronologically ordered pinpoints, announced by numerical

years, are alternative points of entry, distinct camera angles into particu-
lar scenes of history to which Cisneros draws our attention. Instead of
the standard watershed date of 1492, for example, the novelist begins
with 1519, re-centering attention on the conquest of Mexico and the
meeting between the Spanish imperialist Cortés and the indigenous
King Moctezuma. By including a single detail recounted by a famous
historical chronicler of the encounter, she re-asserts the importance of
evocative storytelling in connecting readers to history: “[Moctezuma]
was seated on a low stool, softly and richly worked . . . ” allows us to see
the scene and imagine the sophisticated advanced civilization that the
Spaniards disrupted.
Surprisingly, an initial quantitative analysis of the entries in the
Chronology shows that those centering on US history predominate
almost two to one. Forty entries focus on events in US history while
26 recount events in Mexico (some of the 52 total entries do both). Of
the entries primarily about Mexico, 12 focus on culture and seven on
political–historical events. Of the 40 entries primarily focusing on the
US, 21 are about official policy and legislation regulating immigration
and deportations; six relate to war, three to the economy, and three to
culture. By centering more of the Chronology on US history, Cisneros
hopes to make readers aware of the powerful and arbitrary role the US
has played throughout its history in restricting the poor of other coun-
tries from accessing a more humane life in the United States. Beginning
in 1639, the British colonists in what is now America ejected “pauper
aliens” from their communities; later, the persecution of Chinese, Irish,
Italian, German, and other newcomers prefigured the consistent attacks
on Mexican immigrants of the 20th century. One-half of the entries
about the US in the Chronology focus on the history of immigration
policy, nativism, xenophobia, and arbitrary legislation connected to the
ups and downs of the US economy. Although much of the novel is about
the history of her immigrant father’s homeland, Mexico, the Chronology
centers readers’ attention on the role of the US in that history.
At the same time, the Chronology offers an important alternative
overview of key figures and events in the history of Mexico. About half of
these entries give information on culture and popular media figures, and
seven are on historical and political events. While the entries about the
US redefine this country’s history for mainstream US readers, they also
explain to immigrants and people outside the US a number of the ways
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0008
in which US government policies greatly affected the history of Mexico.

Cisneros is emphasizing that the disturbing history of US immigration
policy is also an essential part of Mexico’s history. In addition, the 26
listings in the chronology that specifically focus on Mexican culture and
history remind mainstream US readers that this also is an essential part
of their cultural competence. Everyone should know about the “Boy
Heroes” who died in 1847 during the US invasion, and that one-eighth of
Mexico’s population emigrated to the US between 1900 and 1933. While
readers may have heard the famous song “Júrame” recorded in 1926,
did they know that it was sung by the Mexican equivalent of Rudolph
Valentino, José Mojica? Does today’s generation know about Orson
Welles’ treatment of two great Latina movie stars, Dolores del Río and
Rita (Cansino) Hayworth? Cisneros includes a brief synopsis of this
telenovela-like story with the 1941 entry listing the entry of the US into
World War II. She adds a playful postmodern comment that reveals the
everyday dramas of history that all can relate to: “ . . . that gordo Orson
Welles, the only one [Dolores del Río] really loved because we always
love the one who doesn’t love us, has dumped her for another Latina . . . ”
(437). Cisneros’s re-invention of the chronology as novelistic paratext
can under no circumstances be dry and boring!
Outwardly using the rhetorical device of postmodern uncertainty to
undermine received ideas, Cisneros challenges the commonly used name
for the Los Angeles “Zoot Suit Riots” of 1943 by suggesting the alternate
name “Military Riots”: “ . . . depending on your point of view, weeks of US
servicemen hunting down and beating up zoot-suit-dressed pachucos . . . ”
(437). Under the guise of presenting postmodern uncertainty about the
assumed truth of historical narratives, Cisneros in fact advocates for the
alternate view that US servicemen caused the riots against Los Angeles
Mexican men in 1943. In the entry for 2002 about the Pope’s canoniza-
tion of Juan Diego, Cisneros offers an alternative view of history: “Some
state that he was simply a story told to the Indians in order to convert
them from their devotion to Tarantzin [sic],5 the Aztec fertility goddess”
(439).
Cisneros unabashedly inserts personal commentary into the docu-
mentary form of this paratext. After conveying a counter-narrative
about Betsy Ross in the entry for 1776, she writes: “Which just goes to
show the power of a good tale told well” (435). Here she also engages in
postmodern self-reflexivity, subtly pointing back to her own text as well,
complimenting herself on the successful storytelling of the novel we are
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reading. Recounting the death of the former foreign empress of Mexico,

Carlotta, she adds authorial direct address to the historical figure:
“Adiós, mi Carlota” [Good bye, my Carlota], which can be interpreted
in two ways—as a nostalgic sympathetic utterance or with the sarcastic
undertone of “good riddance!” In the entry for 1940 she notes, “Frida
marries Diego—again!” using the exclamation point to inject humorous
commentary.
In selecting cultural figures to include in this brief chronology,
Cisneros aims to validate various examples of Mexican culture such as
“Cri-Crí” and movie star María Félix as well as to re-read American
cultural icons through the optic of Mexicanicity. She presents an alterna-
tive view of US icon Elvis Presley by calling to readers’ attention his 1963
film Fun in Acapulco: “[Elvis] dives off the cliffs of La Quebrada, is chased
by Ursula Andress and a Mexican lady-bullfighter, and finishes the film
singing “Guadalajara” with a bunch of mariachis” (438). The compression
of this summary of the film critically re-reads the pop icon’s stereotypic
appropriation of Mexican culture for commercial ends. It also announces
a mainstream mass cultural intertext that the protagonist Lala may have
connected to the family’s trip to Acapulco that opens the novel.
In this re-structuring of the interconnected narratives of Mexican and
US history, Cisneros offers an alternate form of knowledge that employs
the concise form of the outline so that it can serve as a reference tool and
an alternate means of navigating through the novel. Read on its own as
a single, historically based construct, the Chronology both compresses
and adds to the history recounted in the novel. As a unit, it offers readers
a diachronic overview, rich with counter-narrative information. As an
authorial peritext that is materially part of the book, it invites readers
to engage with it before, during, and after reading the novel. Cisneros’s
artistic touches, commentary, and selection of information link it to the
larger discourse of the novel. Like the footnotes, however, readers who
view it as unnecessary extra material and choose not to read it, miss out
on a key organizing principle for interpreting the events in the novel.
Epigraphs
Cisneros includes only ten epigraphs in Caramelo, placing them before
the opening section and several chapters, and at the beginning and end
of the book. Six are quotations from old Mexican songs, one is from a
song by a US artist, and three are popular sayings. As Gérard Genette
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notes, most epigraphs are allographic but sometimes they are auto-
graphic when the writer wishes to call notice to his or her own writing.
Epigraphs can point back to the title they appear under, or ahead to the
main text that follows them. Epigraphs present readers with a hermen-
eutic challenge, Genette notes. They invite readers to decipher the inter-
pretive link between the epigraph and the adjacent title or the text. In
some cases, their intention is to heighten readers’ emotional response to
the text.
Caramelo opens with a double set of epigraphs on two separate pages,
one in Spanish and the second an English translation: “Cuéntame algo,
aunque sea una mentira” and “Tell me a story, even if it’s a lie” (np). By
translating the saying, repeating it twice, and placing it immediately
after the dedication, Cisneros signals that it is an essential interpretive
threshold through which we must pass to properly interpret her novel.
Referring back to the novel’s subtitle “Or, Puro Cuento,” it also points
ahead to the central rhetorical strategy of inventing the past in the novel
and her wish to avoid criticism that she has revealed personal family
secrets. In this way it also points to the disclaimer that follows in which
she insists on the novel’s fictionality and at the same time its truth value.
In this sense, the repetition of the same epigraph in two languages at the
beginning parallels the larger pattern of the novel’s frequent repetition of
this theme—the breakdown of the border between fiction and truth.
While the initial epigraphs appear without attribution, curious readers
can find the source in the Acknolwedgements—Ruth Behar’s Translated
Woman. At the end, another unattributed and untranslated epigraph,
“¡Ya pa’que te cuento!”, closes a frame around the novel in conjunction
with the opening epigrahs. Although the “qué” should have an accent to
correctly communicate the usual sense of the common saying, “What’s
the use of telling you this story!” or “No need to tell you this story (you
know what I mean!),” the epigraph closes the novel with the preoccupa-
tion about telling truth and lies that pervades the novel’s project. This
untranslated final epigraph primarily addresses Spanish speakers, offer-
ing a well-known popular saying as a key communicative gesture to the
Latino community at the end of the novel.
Cisneros includes excerpts from romantic Mexican songs as epigraphs
to six of the chapters. A romantic verse from “La Zandunga” from
Tehuantepec opens the chapter about Narciso Reyes’ affair with a woman
when he was away working on the isthmus. Not translated, it requires
knowledge of Spanish to understand its connection to the title and the
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text below. Besides creating an atmosphere of the Tehuantepec region, it

points back to the chapter title, “Esa Tal por Cual” [That So-and-So] (168)
and to the first words of the chapter, “Exaltación Henestrosa,” the name
of Narciso’s lover. Similarly, in chapter 52, Cisneros does not translate the
verse and chorus from the old Mexican song, “Cielito Lindo,” also the
title of the chapter. Here the epigraph functions to anchor the meaning
of the title to its musical referent, and works in apposition to the first
line of the chapter: “This is the song that the Grandmother teaches us
on the trip to Chicago” (237). The epigraph on its own does not commu-
nicate the precise feeling Cisneros wishes to convey, so she focalizes the
passage through the homodiegetic narrator’s commentary about how it
was sung in the car. Lala takes a critical distance as the whole family
screeches “that corny old song” as they speed along the highway. “The
words thunder out the window . . . and roll down the bleached desert hills
of northern Mexico, startling the vultures in the scrub trees” (237). Here
the novelist includes the epigraph both to remember a moment from the
past and to make fun of it.
Cisneros joins allographic and autographic voices in several of the
epigraphs. Following the title page of Part One, “Recuerdo de Acapulco”
[Souvenir of Acapulco], she inserts a verse of Agustín Lara’s song “María
Bonita” that begins with a similar phrase, “Acuérdate de Acapulco”
[Remember Acapulco]. Playing on the double meaning of the word
“recuerdo” (souvenir and I remember), Cisneros links the title and verse
of the song to the first line of the chapter that follows. That sentence
describes the souvenir photograph from her childhood summer in
Mexico that her alter ego, the protagonist Celaya, was left out of. The
connection between the title, the epigraph, and the first image in the
adjacent text is the seed of the overall project of the novel—to write a
narrative of what is missing from the souvenirs and remembrances of
the family’s life. At the same time that she does not translate the musical
epigraph, Cisneros adds an autographic description of its sound to
communicate a mood, as I noted earlier: “ ‘María bonita,’ by Agustín
Lara, version sung by the composer while playing the piano, accompanied by a
sweet, but very, very sweet violin” (3). The epigraph tries to set a mood for
the section of the book as well as to emphasize the novel’s intention to
figuratively re-insert the missing protagonist into the family picture.
Cisneros reverses the order of the quotation and the accompanying
authorial commentary in the next epigraph. Autographic discourse
predominates in this epigraph that begins chapter 3 in which a descriptive
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paragraph is set off from the main text in italics, with only a small quota-
tion from a song at the end. Attempting to connect readers emotionally
to the pain that Aunty Licha suffers from her philandering husband,
Cisneros tries to re-create the experience of hearing Lola Beltrán’s song:
Pouring out from the windows, “Por un amor” from the hi-fi, the version by Lola
Beltrán, that queen of Mexican country, with tears in the throat and a group of
mariachis cooing,—But don’t cry, Lolita, and Lola replying—I’m not crying, it’s
just . . . that I remember (10).
Cisneros not only translates the short two-line quotation from the
Mexican song in this epigraph but describes the emotional rendition we
cannot hear ourselves in this print novel, a similar strategy used for the
“María Bonita” epigraph, as discussed above.
The most extensive use of autographic discourse in an epigraph occurs
in chapter 39. After a long quotation with three verses and the chorus
of the famous romantic song, “Júrame” [“Swear to Me”], Cisneros adds
two paragraphs about the poignant emotions conveyed in the sound of
a 1927 recording of the song by José Mojica as well as a long description
of this famous singer, “the Mexican Valentino.” Further, the paragraphs
are interrupted by the intervention in boldface type of the Awful
Grandmother, a second homodiegetic narrator and commentator on the
text in this section of the novel. The long song, printed in two columns
in English and Spanish, amplifies the chapter title, “Tanta Miseria” [So
Much Misery] which Cisneros does not translate. Together the title, the
long epigraph, and the creative, dialogic explanation of it work to convey
the anguish Soledad feels when she learns about her husband’s unfaith-
fulness while away in Tehuantepec, after he has sworn to her, as the song
“Júrame” pleads, that she is the only one he loves.
Cisneros chooses a musical epigraph corresponding to the diegetic
time and place of chapter 82, quoting several verses of Harry Nilsson’s
1971 song “Think about Your Troubles.” The song advises listeners to
ponder their troubles, drop their tears in a teacup, and throw them into
the river, where they will be swallowed up into the many life forms in the
ocean. Similarly, Celaya’s mother tries in the chapter to convince both her
daughter and husband to “Stop thinking about your troubles. You and
Lala are always going over the past. It’s over, it’s finished! . . . Look at me.
You don’t catch me worrying.” (401). While she is apparently unsuccessful
in persuading the father to do this, it is probably the advice in Nilson’s
soothing popular song quoted in the epigraph that helps Celaya.
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Intertitles
Cisneros employs continuing numeration for the long novel’s chapters
but divides the book into three principal parts that represent distinct
temporalities in the past. The titles of each part announce the time
period of the fictionally embellished remembrances to follow. Each title
is followed by a short introduction to the section and an explanation
of why it was chosen. The first, “Recuerdo de Acapulco” [Souvenir of
Acapulco] orients readers to the time of the summer trips to Mexico in
Cisneros’s childhood. As noted, the initial Spanish noun is also a verb
meaning “I remember” in another syntax, hinting at the active process
of the narrative’s remembering rather than only the static object, the
souvenir. The words also refer to the key family secret that the novel
will repress until much later, and its first shocking revelation to Celaya’s
mother in Acapulco. The recuerdo is a photograph that compresses and
emblematizes the fragment of the narrative that the protagonist witnesses
on the momentous day in Acapulco in her childhood.
The intertitle for Part Two, as Genette terms these paratexts, “When I
Was Dirt,” is a peritextual portal to the second time period of the novel,
the history of the family of Celaya’s father in Mexico before she was born.
After an ethnographic explanation of the intertitle, that it is “how we
begin a story that was before our time,” Cisneros creates a chapter title
and opening sentence that the novel later on page 409 ascribes to the
Grandmother’s speech: “ ‘So here my history begins for your good under-
standing and my poor telling . . . ’ And so the Grandmother began: Once,
in the land of los nopales, before all the dogs were named after Woodrow
Wilson . . . ” (409). Graphics and layout differentiate the repetition of
these two formulaic sentences on pages 91 and 409 of the novel. When
the first sentence appears as the title of chapter 21 the publisher prints it
in the frilly, cursive typeface used in the novel’s main title and intertitles.
The second phrase is indented as the opening line of the first paragraph
in that chapter. These peritextual overlays are altered when the two
sentences are repeated on page 409. Now, written as dialogue, they are
attributed to the oral storytelling of the ghost of the Grandmother at the
deathbed of her son, Celaya’s father. Peritextual attributes are essential to
the novel’s metatextual gesture in this repetition, creating repetition with
difference for those who decode the peritextual cues.
The title of Part Three, “The Eagle and the Serpent or My Mother and
Father,” invites readers to make a connection between it and the section’s
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content—the family’s life in Chicago and Texas in Celaya’s teenage years.

The narrative voice of Celaya immediately explains that the intertitle is
a reappropriation of the image on the Mexican flag that she previously
interpreted as the US and Mexico fighting. Now it is a more important
metaphor for the quarrels between her mother and father; the family
is a microcosm of the battle of cultures between the US and Mexico.
Further, this section of the novel immediately answers the mystery left
untold at the end of Part One about whose side the father chose in the
disagreement between his wife and his mother in Acapulco. This internal
serialization employs a common strategy of the telenovela to ensure the
audience’s continued interest.
Cisneros has also chosen to create titles for each of the 86 numbered
chapters in Caramelo. Genette points out that such thematic titling
represents a “demonstrative—indeed insistent—stance on the part
of the author toward his work” (315), that is showing readers directly
what is being referred to. For example, for chapter 51 Cisneros includes
a humorous title and subtitle: “All Parts from Mexico, Assembled in
the U.S.A. or I am Born” (231). Having presented the narrative of the
protagonist’s family origins in Mexico, Cisneros now arrives at the time
of the narrator Celaya’s birth. Here the author humorously reverses the
economic trend of the growth of the maquiladoras, or assembly plants,
on the Mexican side of the US border. The Chicana protagonist Celaya is
both a biological assemblage and a narrative construct, the first-person
narrator of the novel.
While Cisneros’s titles aim to demonstrate and center readers’ attention
on what the author considers the important points of the chapters, they
are also a key part of the spectacular ethnicity, humor, and playfulness
she performs in the novel. The title for chapter 72, for example, accumu-
lates an imposing string of words: “Mexican on Both Sides or Metiche,
Mirona, Mitotera, Hocicona—en Otras Palabras, Cuentista—Busybody,
Ogler, Liar/Gossip/Troublemaker, Big-Mouth—in Other Words,
Storyteller” (351). While Cisneros performs and translates this litany of
derogatory Spanish words, she focuses attention on the central themes
of the chapter: name-calling, racism, and bullying in the schools, truth
and lies, and the connection of storytelling to recuperation, remedy,
self-assertion, and identity. The chapter titles often perform ethnicity
through orality, transliterations, and aphorisms: “Orita Vuelvo” [I’ll be
right back] (205), “¡Pobre de Mi!” [Poor Me!] (174), “Esa Tal por Cual”
[That So-and-So] (168), “The Rapture” [ transliteration of el Rapto] (361),
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“Sin Madre, Sin Padre, Sin Perro Que Me Ladre” [No Mother, No Father,
No Dog to Bark for Me] (97), “Cada Quien en Su Oficio Es Rey” [In
their Profession, Each Person Is King] (212), and “Leandro Valle Street,
Corner of Misericordia, Over by Santo Domingo” (111).
Cisneros also employs what Genette terms “descriptive intertitles in the
form of noun clauses” (300), a practice that may date to the Middle Ages
and has been used over the centuries to create humor and sometimes
parody. She evokes the long titles of early British novels that summarized
the plot and required a whole title page, as Franco Moretti’s distant read-
ing charts. “How Narciso Falls into Disrepute Due to Sins of the Dangler”
(155) and “A Scene in a Hospital That Resembles a Telenovela When in
Actuality It’s the Telenovelas That Resemble Life” (402). Although playful,
this intertitle about the telenovelas for chapter 83 points to a central theme
of the novel and the chapter. Insisting further, Cisneros unconvention-
ally adds a footnote to the intertitle, disputing the theory that Mexicans
model their storytelling on telenovelas. To the contrary, Cisneros writes in
the note, the telenovela emulates Mexican life.
She then emphasizes this point in the chapter by dramatic confronta-
tions between mother and daughter, grandmother and granddaughter.
As Celaya’s father lies very ill in the hospital, her mother tells her the
scandalous family secret that has also been withheld from readers since
the hints on pages 78 and 81. Celaya then engages in a tell-all confron-
tation with the ghost of the Grandmother in a battle between them to
possess the father, that is, to prevent the Grandmother from dragging
the father into death with her. As the Grandmother begs for her story
to be told so that she can be forgiven, the two reach an agreement. The
ghost begins telling her own story with the exact words the novel has
used at the beginning of Part Two: the formulaic intertitle “So Here My
History Begins for Your Good Understanding and My Poor Telling”
(91) and the first sentence of chapter 21. Cisneros’s paratextual strategy
of descriptive, noun clause intertitles is not simply playful. Rather, the
intertitle of chapter 83 encapsulates key postmodern narrative strategies
of the chapter and the larger novel: self-referential representation and
the eroding border between truth and lies, between life and simulacra
such as the telenovela and the novel itself.
Footnotes
Like the extensive paratextual network of 33 footnotes in Díaz’s novel,
the 40 notes Cisneros includes in the first hardcover edition of Caramelo
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carry on the performative strategies of the main text.6 In strict parlance,

they are endnotes because they appear at the end of chapters, not at the
bottom of the pages. Because the term footnote is more common in
everyday usage, I use the terms interchangeably in this study. Cisneros
does not number them, making them appear less of a scholarly para-
textual apparatus. Instead, she relies on less obtrusive (and also less
easily noticed) signals—the asterisk, dagger, and double dagger—to lead
readers to the notes printed at the end of the chapter. This placement
causes a bit more disruption and effort for the reader than Díaz’s at the
bottom of the page. In my reading and study of Caramelo, I found it
difficult to locate and return to the place of departure in the text after
engaging with the notes, given the less noticeable visual symbols. This,
coupled with the extra effort of flipping back and forth through pages,
may cause some readers to skip the notes and stay immersed in the main
narrative without them. Díaz’s visual signifier of alternate textuality is
smaller font for the notes, while Cisneros uses italics to communicate
this. Italics signals otherness more strongly, and it is often also used in
the main text of Caramelo for words and phrases in Spanish; this fact
adds an additional layer of separateness to the words in the notes. Díaz’s
simple numerical indicator of the notes and continuing typeface makes
it easier to navigate between text and note and back to text, and to appre-
hend the overall scope of the notes. The typography, visual symbols for
classification (asterisks and daggers), and the technique of adding notes
to notes impart a layer of baroque ornamentation to these paratexts in
Caramelo not present in Díaz’s more streamlined presentation of the
main text and notes.
Of the 40 notes in Caramelo, 11 are the second note in a chapter signaled
by a dagger, and two are the third note in a chapter, indicated with a
double dagger.7 Complicating our ability to cognitively map and mentally
organize the scope of the notes is that in addition to using asterisks and
daggers, Cisneros amplifies six of the notes with an additional note for
each. Both the main notes and the secondary notes-to-notes signal an
overflowing of discourse in the novel that finds it hard to stop itself.
While Díaz adds new notes to one of his footnotes outside the book on
the website Poetry Genius, Cisneros employs a similar strategy inside the
printed text six times, creating second-degree notes that annotate the
preceding note.
A longitudinal examination of the strategy of notes in Caramelo, shows
that Cisneros employs only five notes in Part One which has 20 chapters,
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23 in Part Two with 30 chapters, and 12 in Part Three with 34 chapters.

The paucity of notes in the first section parallels the partial understand-
ing of the child Celaya and her siblings as they watch the family events
unfold during summer trips to Mexico. Part Two, while still set in child-
hood, rediscovers the history and culture of the father’s lost homeland
with the more sophisticated tools that the adult researcher/novelist now
has access to, as is also the case in Part Three, set in the US. Although
Cisneros adds a new note to a note in Part One in the paperback edition
of the novel, this longitudinal proportion of notes among the three parts
remains intact.
As I noted earlier, María Laura Spoturno categorizes the notes in
Caramelo into three categories: fictional notes proper, historical–cultural
notes, and metadiscursive notes. In fictional notes, the voice of the
enunciator of the note corresponds to that of fictional character who
narrates the main text—Celaya in Caramelo. Fictional notes carry on
the discourse of the narrative voice of the main text. Historical–cultural
notes, in contrast, are enunciated with a different narrative voice, that
of the commentator or the figure of the author of the novel. They place
the narrative in a broader historical, political, and cultural context and
because of their enunciative status, more strongly represent a departure
from the main narrative. Metadiscursive notes, in Spoturno’s schema, are
glosses that serve a type of translating function, providing information
about a term, expression, or fragment in the main text. The narrative
voice can be that of a character or the authorial presence. Metadiscursive
notes aim to exert control over interpretation and meaning. In
Sportuno’s calculation, 20 of the notes in Caramelo are fictional, 70
are historical–cultural, and 10 are metadiscursive. In effect, in contrast
to Díaz’s footnotes, the enunciative voice of most of Cisneros’s notes
does not coincide with that of the narrator of the main text, according to
Spoturno’s analysis.
These categories are very useful in trying to classify the various enun-
ciative voices in the notes. Additionally in the notes, however, Cisneros
engages in other strategies such as insider ethnography, translation,
documentation, counter narratives, and playful devices such as direct
address. In one note she reports that the historical figure María Sabina
asked: “Was it all right that I gave away the mushrooms? Tú, what do you
say?” and then inserts an insistent authorial clarification, “Tú, reader,
she is asking you” (195), hoping to get readers involved in thinking about
whether Americans took advantage of the generosity of Mexican folk
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healers. In contrast to the many translations of Spanish that Cisneros

offers throughout the novel, she refuses to do so in the note on page
15 by asking readers to say the Spanish lines out loud, as in a language
class or acting exercise, to get the feeling of a telenovela: “¿Qué intentas
ocultar? ¿Por qué eres tan cruel conmigo? Te encanta hacerme sufrir . . . ”
(15). This strategy privileges readers who know Spanish and can properly
understand the humor of the note.
She sometimes engages in meta-translation for feminist ends. In
chapter 51, which describes the day Celaya, the narrative “I,” was born,
Cisneros adds two short notes, one a secondary note to the other. The
two paratexts translate the concerned comment by Celaya’s father that
the baby is a girl: “¡Otra vieja! Ahora, ¿cómo la voy a cuidar?* “ (231). The
note corresponding to the asterisk reads: “*Tr. Another dame! Now how
am I going to take care of this one?†” The second note reads “†Tr. Of Tr.
How am I going to protect her from men like me?” (232). Playfully, with
overlain self-referentiality, Cisneros interjects a feminist decoding of
male ideology in the second-degree footnote.8 Continuing the rhetorical
strategy of this note, Cisneros often speaks with the voice of the more
knowledgeable author, offering counter narratives to the characters’
ideological self-presentations. In chapter 35, disputing the Reyes family’s
contention that they had eaten oysters on mother-of-pearl forks and
porcelain dishes, the note asserts its own power of truth: “The truth was
they had only recently learned to eat with knives, spoons, forks, and napkins.
Their ancestors had eaten food cooked with sticks, served on clay dishes, or on
that edible plate, the tortilla” (163).
While the traditional role of footnotes in scholarly writing has been
documentation or adding extra, non-essential information, Cisneros
avoids real documentation in the notes that would help readers to
pursue further reading about the information she presents. Although
this absence reminds readers that the book is primarily fiction that does
not want to be weighed down with real scholarly rubrics, it also leaves
readers floating with only partial information. Wishing to give credit to
the Mexican photographer Lola Alvarez Bravo for a phrase in the main
text, Cisneros explains in a note that she borrowed the phrase from the
photographer but gives no documentation of the source for readers
who wish to pursue this further. In presenting a little known historical
event in chapter 29, Cisneros states in the note that in 1915 during the
Mexican Revolution, more than half the Mexican-American popula-
tion of the Valley of Texas fled the Texas Rangers to return to war-torn
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Mexico. Cisneros notes that the US Cavalry and the Texas Rangers were
responsible for “the death of hundreds, some say thousands of Mexicans
and Mexican Americans, who were executed without trial” (142) but
gives no source for the information for readers to learn more. What is
Cisneros’s source for the figure Pánfila Palafox discussed in a note in
chapter 38? Although the note employs the appearance of the traditional
rhetoric of the scholarly footnote, it leaves readers balancing between
history and fiction. When the author lacks documentation for a piece
of family history that she remembers, she pokes fun at documentation.
In one note, she playfully invents the title of a song, calling it “ ‘A Waltz
Without a Name’ because I lost that paper but I remember it went . . . ” (122).
Before quoting the lyrics in the note, Cisneros interjects a sub-note: “This
song was actually written by the author’s great-grandfather, Enrique Cisneros
Vásquez” (123). Throughout, Cisneros playfully merges the rhetorical
traditions of scholarly documentation with the liberties that fiction
allows.
Often in the novel, Cisneros accumulates paratextual utterances in the
notes that spill out from the main text to create a dense, baroque orna-
mentation, and then lead readers back inside the main text. The voices,
laden with extra detail, branch out as tributaries from the main text and
continue its grand style of performance. Because digression is a pervasive
strategy both in the main narrative and within the notes, it is almost as
if the rhetorical technique of adding these peritexts is like a coordinated
decoration, a well-planned series of clothing accessories that matches
the overall look.9 Digression and performance are an important part of
the common style that links the notes and the main text.
In most chapters, Cisneros piles layer upon layer of narrative detail,
running the danger of excess. This danger parallels what happens when
the family buys too much junk at the Maxwell Street flea market and
liquidation sales: “[a]ll of the rooms in our house fill up with too many
things . . . Gold cherub lamps with teardrop crystals, fine antiques and
Aunt Jemima dolls on top of a stack of photo albums, souvenir Mexican
dolls, an oversized table lamp bought when a hotel went bankrupt and
liquidated all its furnishings, a pink plastic tree in a plastic box . . . ” (14–15).
To guard against this urge to accumulate excessive narrative detail that
permeates the novel, Cisneros has the Awful Grandmother caution the
diegetic author Celaya to be selective: “Careful! Just enough, but not too
much . . . ” (92), a warning repeated twice in succession in chapter 21 and
then again in the story being written in the chapter to describe Soledad’s
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own process of remembering and recounting. Soledad’s caution to her

granddaughter applies both to the aesthetic need for selectivity in narra-
tive details on the metanarrative level and to the adjacent diegetic scene
being recounted—the soaking of cloth to obtain the black color of the
rebozo: “Careful! Just enough, but not too much . . . Otherwise the cloth
disintegrates and all the work is for nothing” (92).
As in the main chapters themselves, the notes in Caramelo engage in
a similar strategy of the overflow of boundaries, the accumulation of
detail, the multiplication of digressions, and chain embedding. In the
account in chapter 50 of Celaya’s mother and father’s first meeting, the
main text employs italics to flow off into the private daydreams of Zoila
Reyes about her on-going love affair with a married man. After the first
mention of the man, Enrique, Cisneros inserts a lengthy paratextual note
delving far back into his past. Then another detailed digression occurs
early in the note, describing President Carranza during the Mexican
Revolution, whose gold stolen from the Huerta government helped
Enrique’s father get wealthy. Then, in a digression from the digression,
Cisneros adds a sub-note to the note, this one about Carranza’s cousin
having to flee to San Antonio during the Revolution where he opened
a butcher shop: “Thus, Venustiano Carranza, the butcher of the Zapatistas,
would have a cousin who would become a famous butcher too, but not for skew-
ering Zapatistas” (230). Inserting the voice of the author, Cisneros adds
that she highly recommended the shop’s brisket and smoked sausages
before it went out of business after a fire. Even though the recommen-
dation is not helpful to consumers now that the shop is closed, Cisneros
implies that this detail must be written in order to adequately document
Mexican and Mexican-American history. Because that history did not
receive adequate attention before the Chicano Movement, it must be
written with every possible detail now.
But the note at the end of chapter 50 will digress even further. Enrique’s
father, who had opened movie theatres for Mexican immigrants in Los
Angeles and Chicago, had fallen in love with Greta Garbo’s stand-in,
according to Cisneros, “a little Cuban thing named Gladys Vaughn”
(229) whose real surname was Vasconcelos. Cisneros then adds another
lengthy note to the note, this one about the life of Gladys Vasconcelos in
Mexico, including a narrative tributary about Fidel Castro falling in love
with Gladys’ young daughter. Again inserting herself into the text, the
author backs up the at least partial truth of what she has written in the
digression, attributing the story to the mother of a friend who lived near
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the Vasconcelos’ family in the 1940s and 1950s in Mexico City: “[She]
made me promise never to tell anyone, which is why I am certain it must
be true, or, at the very least somewhat true” (230). Eschewing the usual
role of the footnote for scholarly documentation, Cisneros plays with
the convention to connect the digression to the larger interplay between
truth and fiction in the novel.
These patterns of the excessive accumulation of detail and digressions
from digressions occur often in the novel. To the long historical note on
the Empress Carlotta at the end of chapter 21, for example, Cisneros adds
an extra paragraph beginning with the aside, “I forgot to mention . . . ”
(96). The paragraph becomes almost another note, continuing the style
of the overflowing and difficult-to-contain performance that pervades
the novel. A similar add-on occurs in the note to chapter 28 in which a
long paragraph is added between parentheses in the note about Woodrow
Wilson’s invasion of Mexico, followed by a veiled apology for having
digressed: “(This is interesting because . . . But I digress)” (135–136). The
novelist is conscious of her difficulty in containing the flow of detail but
instead of limiting it, apologizes and carries on.
Like the expanding notes that interrupt the main narrative, Cisneros
recaptures the interrupting staccato of competing voices in the account
of the family’s long car ride from Mexico to the US, bringing the grand-
mother back with them. The loud utterances of the occupants collide
with each other, competing for diegetic attention and for space on the
page like the notes. Celaya’s brother Toto has received number 197 in
the Vietnam War draft lottery and the fear of his impending encounter
with the brutalities of war overshadows the family’s journey. His ques-
tions to Father about experiences in World War II are intercalated with
comments about another brother flunking math, powder hairspray
that replaces shampoo, and a ponderous comment that sometimes
Mexicans hate each other the most. Cisneros has the naive narrator
Celaya simply report the Grandmother’s question about this comment:
“Who hates each other the most? . . . ” and that the mother who is dozing
then “snaps to attention” (243). The now mature author re-reads this
memory of the short utterances and body language remembered from
the car trip as a signifying emblem of the long-standing battle between
the two women. The competing voices that recapture the ambiance
of the car ride are a surface-level account of the high-stakes and life-
altering events that the family now faces that will only adequately be
explained in the notes.
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The montage between the trivial and the highly serious in the main
text also characterizes this chapter’s three notes. The first explains the
Vietnam War draft lottery, the second gives details about a popular
Mexican comic book, and the third brings together both threads—the
serious and the more frivolous. During the interrupting verbal inter-
change on the car trip, the Mother suddenly vehemently protests the
father’s reference to having served “this great country” in World War II
(245). She insists that she will take Toto to Mexico before letting him be
drafted and that there is a government conspiracy to put black and brown
faces on the front lines: “You can’t pull the wool over my eyes, I listen to
Studs Terkel!” The allusion to Terkel is the occasion for the chapter’s long
third note that begins by explaining the mother’s crisis of faith when
Toto’s draft is imminent. Now he has moved up to number 137. Listing a
litany of titles of articles in women’s magazines that the mother has saved
and now will burn with other junk in the back yard, Cisneros places this
trivial reading material in opposition to the transformative reading the
mother will engage in as she responds to the family crisis. Now she will
read the alternate voices in the college books by Paolo Freire, Eldrige
Cleaver, and Pablo Neruda that her sons bring home and listen to Studs
Terkel on FM radio. Without explaining who Studs Terkel is, the long
digression of the note defines this oppositional people’s intellectual by
the context of abundant details referenced in the note.
Extending the metaphor of the finely woven rebozo, Cisneros justifies
the pattern of digressions in the novel at the beginning of the endnote
for chapter 24: “Because life contains a multitude of stories and not a
single strand explains precisely the who of who one is, we have to examine
the complicated loops that allowed Regina to become la Señora Reyes” (115).
Here, with a justification rather than an apology, the novelist suggests
that such digressions are a key part of her overall aesthetic strategy of
narration. The technique of notes for Cisneros is not simply to offer read-
ers print versions of the navigational paths common in digital literature
and games. Aware of the necessity of choice and reduction in creating
art, Cisneros at the same time insists on the need for the novel to also
overflow its bounds through internal digression and peritexts at the ends
of chapters in order to do its job properly.
In the early 21st century, readers move into and away from the literary
text in new ways through paratextual formations. Depending on an
individual’s point of entry into the process of interaction with the novel,
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these paths can be centrifugal or centripetal. When starting from the

front cover as the first experience, a reader will pass through layers of
peritexts both authorial and allographic while proceeding centripetally
more deeply into the novel. Occasionally, during the period of reading,
centrifugal pathways out of the text may lead to reading and writing
comments on sites such as Goodreads or Cisneros’s autographic website.
Even though reading the footnotes involves a brief departure from the
main text, I would argue that this process represents a centripetal passage
through textual layers to arrive more deeply into the novel’s semiosis. On
the other hand, given the ubiquity of digital paratexts in the early twenty-
first century, many readers will travel on a longer centripetal path before
reaching the novel, passing through many epitextual portals. They may
have experienced ratings and reviews on Amazon or Goodreads, seen
interviews and videos with Cisneros on the Internet, or navigated parts
of her website. They will pass through these paratextual portals as they
move toward the novel, laden with many more interpretive lenses than
those who only start the inward process with the front cover. As we have
seen, the overarching trope of many of these paratexts in Cisneros’s case
is the performance of latinidad. The baroque overlay of peritexts inside
the novel works in conjunction with the ever-expanding group of exter-
nal epitexts through which the author and the public reshape the text
with elements of populist multiculturalism.
Notes
1 See, Stephanie Wright Hession, “La Cocina: The Culinary Treasures of Rosa
Covarrubias,” SF Gate, May 14, 2014. http://www.sfgate.com/art/article/
La-Cocina-The-Culinary-Treasures-of-Rosa-5478588.php. Web. Feb. 22, 2015.
2 The book jacket notes that the image of the retablo frame is used courtesy of
Colonial Arts, San Francisco, CA.
3 Rachel Pulido, Mirabella, Apr. 1991. Print.
4 For examples of this phenomenon in other US–Latina writers and Cisneros’s
other books, see McCracken, New Latina Narrative, 11–39. Print.
5 This typographical error is corrected to “Tonantzín” in the 2003 paperback
edition.
6 Cisneros added an additional sub-sub-footnote to page 9 of the 2003
paperback edition of the novel, an apparently quickly produced addition
with a grammatical error, suggesting that the publisher’s editor did not check
the new material.
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7 The note on page 159 has no corresponding asterisk in the main text, perhaps
a typographical error, but one not corrected in the paperback edition.
It apparently is meant to follow the word “clacker” in the last line of the
chapter, but no asterisk appears there.
8 Spoturno insightfully points out that a further subtext of the father’s word
“another,” is the other secret daughter he has in Mexico.
9 Gérard Genette also employs the metaphor of clothing to analyze the book
jacket and the band some publishers place around the book to advertise and
keep people from opening new copies. (Paratexts, 28). In a related but reverse
gesture, Roland Barthes, analyzes fashion as a linguistic system in The Fashion
System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990). Print.
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Epilogue
Abstract: Although this book focuses primarily on the
first editions of the novels, paratextual performance also
characterizes the Spanish translation of Díaz’s novel and
the audio books. Altered paratexts and entirely new ones
overcode these versions of the novels. The vast networks of
paratextual performance of latinidad in these novels also
call out for new research methods. The constantly growing
corpus of readers’ on-line comments needs computational
analysis. A broader, scientific understanding of the
paratextual corpus requires the techniques of distant
reading. Beyond the performance of latinidad and the
interplay of hegemonic and populist multiculturalism
studied here, an enormous cache of information about
these novels and their paratexts awaits discovery and
analysis.

doi: 10.1057/9781137603609.0009.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0009 127

The point of entry I have chosen as one analytical optic for these two
stellar works of contemporary American literature is the role of para-
texts and authorial performance inside and outside the novels. I have
argued that the duality of populist and hegemonic multiculturalism
come together as the writers perform latinidad in both spaces, each in
a distinct manner. The networks of paratexts for the two novels are a
space in which authors, publishers, and readers participate in this dual-
istic multiculturalism. The decoding of literary texts in both the age of
print and in the current transitional period of the emerging digital age
increasingly occurs through these portals, and the number of paratexts is
now greatly expanded because of the new participatory activities of Web
2.0 in early 21st century. Publishers set up Facebook pages that osten-
sibly belong to writers, and readers rate books, add commentary, high-
light passages, and publically chart their progress through novels on the
Internet. Authors use the Web to add new paratexts to their published
books, and through these delayed epitexts, reach expanded audiences.
Paratexts continuously reveal the competing elements of populist and
hegemonic multiculturalism in contemporary Latino writing. Epitexts
that publishers create to sell books such as Cisneros’s Facebook page, the
Amazon webpages for the two novelists, and the Goodreads site are adver-
tising mediums and at the same time spaces in which ordinary readers
express themselves publically and connect to each other and the authors.
These sites affect interpretation as readers access them before, during, and
after engaging with these two novels. Some readers amplify the strategy
of poaching that de Certeau analyzed by, for example, creating concord-
ances as new paratextual portals that they share with others. Although
the Facebook page for Cisneros is created and run by the publishing
conglomerate that owns and markets her books and is designed for
broad, horizontal reach, vertical links within it take readers to videos and
interviews with many populist multicultural interventions.
Both Díaz and Cisneros engage in varieties of paratextual perform-
ance inside and outside their novels. Díaz’s “take me as I am” linguistic
spectacularity discussed in Chapter 2 spills over into the footnotes in his
novel and further into the second-degree footnotes he creates on Poetry
Genius. Cisneros’s well designed vestimentary performances and display
of bright colors throughout her house parallel the baroque performances
of latinidad in Caramelo such as the calcos in her tropicalized English and
the novel’s detailed descriptions of the emotions in popular Mexican
songs. Close reading of both the external epitexts and the peritexts
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Epilogue 129
attached the two novels is necessary to adequately engage with their

textuality.
Although this study focuses primarily on the first hardcover print
editions of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Caramelo, important
areas of analysis of the two books remain to be explored in extending
Genette’s theorizations of paratexts. The Spanish translations of the
books, released simultaneously in the case of Caramelo and one year
later for Díaz’s novel, add new paratextual portals to the novels that
merit analysis. Earlier I pointed to the way in which Díaz’s network
of footnotes is changed with the translator’s addition of 131 new notes,
including such factors as new numbering of Díaz’s original notes, more
annotative clutter and textual interruptions, and more interpretive lenses
for negotiating the novel. The translation omits Díaz’s four pages of
Acknowledgements, including the final shout out to Elizabeth de León
that forms a paratextual frame with the opening dedication to de León.
Half of this frame around the novel disappears in the translation.1
While the allographic voices of the translators overlay those of
Cisneros and Díaz in the Spanish-language editions, both autographic
and allographic paratextual overlays are at work in the audio versions
of the novels. The audio book of Caramelo is a 17-CD set that runs 16
hours of listening time. Cisneros herself reads the book and her voice
and expression create a new paratextual portal to the novel, a new layer
of performance. The audio overlay releases “the poetry of individual
linguistic expressions” as Lutz Koepnick notes, beyond only supporting
narrative development (235); in a number of product reviews on Audible,
Koepnick notes, consumers express preferences about the oral qualities
and skills of the reader, drawn more to the performer than to the author.
Cisneros’s audio performance is also deficient, however. Despite the label
“unabridged,” she does not read the notes, leaving out a substantial and
important part of the novel. Nonetheless, her intonation, phrasing, and
expression are an additional paratextual overlay that shapes listeners’
interpretation of the text.
Díaz does not read his own novel in the Oscar Wao companion audio
book. Instead, the deep, strong voice of Jonathan Davis captures the
performative style of the narrator Yunior for most of the novel, tempor-
arily replaced in Chapter 2 by the softer, more soothing voice of Staci
Snell portraying Lola. If desired, one can read along in a print or digital
version while listening to the performance of the text allowing for
two-channel decoding. Some people alternate between the two modes
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depending on circumstances, and some only listen. Each of these uses

of the audio version shapes interpretation in its own way. The profes-
sional readers add a specific expressiveness to Díaz’s language, a strong
allographic paratextual portal to the novel.
The footnotes are read with no numerical indicator or change in
voice, as if they are part of the main text at the points where they
appear in Díaz’s novel. As I argued earlier, this performative reading of
the text buttresses my contention that the notes function as paratexts
that are not paratexts. Nonetheless, the deletion of the markers of this
alternate rhetorical strategy so central to the novel betrays the original.
One approach to conveying this important peritextual overlay might
have been a change in tone to indicate the slight departure from the
main text, or at least an indication of the footnote number as it is read.
Additionally, the Acknowledgements section of the novel does not exist
in the audio version, leaving a similar gap as occurred in the Spanish
translation.
Many of the peritexts of the print editions of the two books discussed
earlier recede or disappear entirely in the audio versions of the novels.
Layout, graphics, and distinct typefaces no longer overlay the authors’
words. Those who experience the novels entirely through the audio
versions, for example, miss the significant peritextual signal of using
italics or Roman type for Spanish-language words. Cisneros italicizes
these words while Díaz does not. Cisneros thereby adds a visual layer
of semiosis that shouts “notice me,” giving emphasis to these words,
while Díaz’s graphic strategy implies that Spanish is to be seen as a
normal part of an American novel, with no need to mark these words
with an additional layer of difference. Listeners do not see that italics
is used for all of the footnotes in Caramelo where they stand out from
the main text, or that Oscar Wao uses smaller font for the notes. The
frilly cursive of the chapter titles is also absent for those who only
listen to Caramelo, as are the black and gray sketches that open the
three sections of Díaz’s book.
Further study also needs to be done of the digitized versions of these
novels. Earlier I examined some of the quantitative visualizations and
extra material that Amazon makes available for Díaz’s book. However,
except for the Word Wise and the Popular Highlights features, Cisneros
has not yet made her novel available for several other amplifications
such as X-Ray and Book Extras. Not only do these new paratexts shape
digital reading, but they also offer a new set of tools for literary analysis.
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Epilogue 131
Further, how do the new graphics of digital interfaces and the haptic
interaction readers engage in change these novels and their interpret-
ation? Even if the footnotes remain in their original location at the end
of each chapter as Cisneros intended them, are they read less frequently
because the screen of the Kindle, iPad, or large smartphone does not
always respond to the reader’s long tap on the number? On the other
hand, an easily accessed word definition on a tablet or e-reader func-
tions as a new allographic paratext to enhance meaning. The highlight-
ing function allows the reader to review all of the segments of the text
personally underlined in the book in a single list, offering a new way to
process what one has read.
In the early 21st century, thousands of new paratextual portals for
books are available on the Internet. Although I have examined a number
of the new paratexts related to these novels of Díaz and Cisneros, further
work needs to be done on this vast and constantly growing corpus.
Readers’ comments on such sites as Goodreads, the Amazon web pages,
the Google search engine, and other material such as digitized book
reviews are in need of computational analysis. While one researcher can
interpret specific commentary and analyze some trends in this material, a
broader understanding of the paratextual corpus requires the techniques
of distant reading pioneered by scholars such as Franco Moretti and Ed
Finn. Can it be argued that any individual readers actually experience
paratexts through the trends that distant reading would reveal? Of course
not; nonetheless, there is much to learn from these analytics about the
patterns in the vast number of paratexts now available on the Internet. It
is one more piece of information about the sociocultural milieu through
which readers interpret texts at this stage of the 21st century.
The expanded paratextual networks of these key 21st century US
Latino novels enact the duality of hegemonic and populist multicul-
turalism textually and extra-textually. Attending to these portals opens
new interpretive paths to these multilayered texts, new ways of seeing
the dynamics of mutable textuality in the digital age. Elements of popu-
list multiculturalism underlie many of the authorial paratexts as well as
certain allographic paratexts such as online reader commentaries and
reviews. These interact with the commercial strategies of hegemonic
multiculturalism, also strongly present in paratexts inside and outside
of the novels. Paratexts and performance are two central tropes that
mark the stellar entrance of US Latino writers into the American liter-
ary canon.
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Note
1 The publisher may have made this decision to delete the lengthy
acknowledgments section to save printing expenses, since the Spanish
translation is already a longer text. Díaz’s discourse is censored nonetheless,
and an important autographic peritext is excised from the novel.
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0009
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Index
advertising Chicano Movement, 2, 3
crowdsourced for Cisneros, Cisneros, Sandra
91–7 birthday-cake piñata, 73
on Goodreads, 95–7 blog, 84–5
front cover as, 103 vestimentary performance,
Alvarez, Julia, 99n13 73–6, 84–5
Amazon, 39, 40 website of, 83–7
interplay of hegemonic Colbert Report, 20–1
and populist color
multiculturalism on, 91 on Cisneros’s Facebook site,
rankings for Junot Díaz, 88
28–30 on cover of Caramelo,
webpage for Caramelo, 91–5 103–6
annotation, 9, 24–7, 61–70 as performance in Cisneros,
audio books, of Caramelo and 76–8
Oscar Wao, 129 Covarrubias, Rosa, 104
authorial persona, in Oscar cover
Wao, 52–3 as advertising peritext,
103
Baca, Jimmy Santiago, 13 of books on Goodreads, 96
“bad-boy” language, 21, 23 of Caramelo, 102–6
Bakhtin, Mikhail and on digital devices, 38, 40
unfinalizability, 61 of Oscar Wao, 32–6
baroque ornamentation in crowd sourcing, 9, 10, 24–7
Caramelo, 121–5 of ads for Cisneros, 91–7
Barthes, Roland, 103, 126n9 on Goodreads, 96–7
Beltrán, Lola, 114
Berger, John, 103 de Certeau, Michel, 5
Bergholz, Susan, 13 Díaz, Junot
Bestock, Shari, 52, 70n5 images of, 19
Borges, Jorge Luis, 61, 71n11 digital
distortions in, 93
Caramelo experiments, 9–10, 61–70
press reviews of, on reading devices, 6, 8, 37–9
Amazon, 92–3 distortions on, 39–42
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0011 135

136 Index
digital – continued second-degree, 74, see also supra-

haptic interaction with, 40–2 ethnicity
versions of Oscar Wao and Caramelo, spectacles of, 10, 116–17
130–1 ethnography
digression, in Caramelo, 121–4 in Caramelo, 119
Dominican Republic, 2, 3, 18, 65 insider, 93
history of, 4, 37, 53 in Oscar Wao, 56–7
Drown, 15, 27, 37
Facebook, 7
epigraphs, 10, 41, 48 Junot Díaz’s site, 22–3
allographic and autographic in pictures of Cisneros on, 88
Caramelo, 113–14 site of Sandra Cisneros, 87–91
in Caramelo, 82, 111–14 Fantastic Four, 55
Genette’s definition of, 111–12 Félix, María, 82
hermeneutic challenge of, 48 feminism, 66, 120
Mexican songs in Caramelo, 81–3, footnotes, 7–8, 9–10, 38, 41–2
112–14 annotations of, 63–70
in Oscar Wao, 48–9 in audiobook of Oscar Wao, 58
epitexts, 5, 9 authorial and actorial voice in, 51, 52
ratings on Goodreads as ads for as baroque ornamentation in
Cisneros, 95–7 Caramelo, 118
allographic for Cisneros, 87–97 in Caramelo, 117–24
annotation of Oscar Wao, 24–6 difficulty of accessing in Caramelo,
autographic 118
for Oscar Wao, 15–23, 61–70 digital, 69–70
Cisneros’s letters to readers, 84–6 distortion of, on Kindle, 58–9
commentary and ratings for Oscar lack of documentation for, in
Wao, 28–32 Caramelo, 120–1
definition of, 74 as metaphor, 90–1
delayed authorial, 7–8, 10 non-paratextuality of, 51–8
by Cisneros, 81–7 in Oscar Wao, 49–70
digital, 6–7, 131 style of performance in, in Caramelo,
glossary for Oscar Wao, 24–6 121
public autographic, 9, 10, 19–23 secondary, 59–60
vestimentary performance by Sandra second-degree, 62
Cisneros, 73–6 in Spanish translation of Oscar Wao,
e-readers 59–60
distortions on, 39–42 symbols for, in Caramelo, 106
ethnic trouble, 76–7
ethnicity, 20 Galacticus, 49
of author’s name, 34–5, 102 Genette, Gérard, 4–5
as commodity, 13–14, 105 Goodreads, 28
performance of, 8–9, 116–17 pages about Cisneros, 95–7
by Sandra Cisneros, 73–8 ratings and reviews for Junot Díaz,
postmodern commodification of, 30–2
3, 105 status updates on, 96–7
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0011
Index 137
Helguera, Jesús, 105 Obejas, Achy, 59–60, 64

Hemingway, Ernest
“The Short Happy Life of Francis paratexts
McComber”, 55 allographic, 5
history autographic, 5
as counter-narrative, 108–11 centrifugal, 7, 14
diachronic, 108 centrifugal and centripetal in
of the United States, 109 Caramelo, 125
centripetal, 7, 14
illuminated letter, 53, 70n6 compound, 87–8
immigration, U.S. policy on, 109 definition of, 4
inoculation, in Oscar Wao, 57 delayed authorial
intertexts definition of, 81
auditory in Caramelo, 81–3 digital, 6, 8, 37–42
iPad, 8, 38 meta-, 90–1
non-paratextuality of, 50–2
Kahlo, Frida, 74, 104, 106, 111 of Oscar Wao, 15–42, 45–70
Kindle, 8, 9, 26, 38 as portals, 5, 7
“Book Browser” feature, 38 “second degree”, 62–4
“Book Extras”, 26 performance
X-Ray feature, 38 bilingual, 78
Cisneros’s childhood dream of, 73,
Lara, Agustín, 82–3, 108, 113 98n2
latinidad, 3, 18, 35, 73–8 Cisneros’s house as, 76–8
performance of, 4, 8–9 digression in Caramelo as, 121–4
second-degree, 75 and ethnic spectacle, 85
stereotypical, 14 in footnotes in Caramelo, 121
Latinos, 2 linguistic, 53, 56–7, 78
linguistic spectacle in Caramelo, 78–9
magical realism, 67 postmodern in Caramelo, 80
melting pot, 2, 73 of the telenovela in Caramelo, 80–1
Mexicanicity, 111 vestimentary, 9, 73–6, 84, 105–6
folkloric, 105 peritexts, 5, 9, 10
Mexico, 3 allographic, 9
history of, 4, 108, 109, 119, 122 for Oscar Wao, 32–42
Mojica, José, 114 in Spanish translation of Oscar
Moretti, Franco, 35–6, 117, 131 Wao, 59–60
multiculturalism, 2–4, 7, 17 autographic
hegemonic, 2, 4, 13, 20, 73 in Caramelo, 107–24
interplay of hegemonic and populist in Oscar Wao, 46–59
on Cisneros’s Facebook site, 87–91 centripetal in Caramelo, 102
populist, 2, 4, 53, 87 Chronology in Caramelo, 108–11
populist and hegemonic, 128 cover of Oscar Wao, 32–6
in publisher’s epitext, 87–91 dedication
of Caramelo, 107
Nilsson, Harry, 114 in Oscar Wao, 46
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0011
138 Index
peritexts – continued simulacrum, autobiographical, 84

digital, 7, 37–42 Spanish
disclaimer in Caramelo, 107–8 Díaz’s use of, 21
epigraphs in Caramelo, 111–14 in Oscar Wao, 24
epilogue of Caramelo, 108 Spanish, in Caramelo, 94, 112, 115, 120
footnotes Spoturno, María Laura, 68, 119
in Caramelo, 117–24 supra-ethnicity, 98n3, see also ethnicity,
in Oscar Wao, 49–70 second-degree
front and back matter in Caramelo,
107–12 table of contents
graphics in Oscar Wao, 36 and cognitive mapping, 106
intertitles in digital version of Caramelo, 106
in Caramelo, 115–17 in digital version of Oscar Wao, 40,
spectacular ethnicity in, 116 41
publisher’s in Caramelo, 102–7 telenovelas, 117, 120
secondary, 83 titles
subtitle of Caramelo, 107 demonstrative function of, 116
table of contents in Caramelo, 106 of parts, chapters, and sections in
titles, 35–6 Caramelo, 115–17
titles and subheadings in Oscar Wao, Tobar, Héctor, 89
46–8 translations, of Oscar Wao and
typeface, 130 Caramelo, 129
in Caramelo, 106–7, 115 tropicalization, 79
Piglia, Ricardo, 50 Trujillo, Rafael Leonidas, 3, 37, 48, 53,
Poetry Genius, 7, 62 55
Díaz’s footnotes on, 62–9 as goat, 65
postmodernism Twitter, 7
in Caramelo, 79–80
indeterminacy, 108, 110 US book publishers, 3
Pulitzer Prize, 17–18 United States
history of, 108, 109
readers, 5, 6
comments of, 28 Valdés-Rodriguez, Alisa, 6, 43n13
diversity of Spanish-speaking, 60
highlighting, 38 Walcott, Derek, 41, 49
highlights Web 2.0, 6, 8, 25
in Oscar Wao, 39 website of Cisneros, 83–7
misleading of, 40–2 letters from fans on, 85
ratings and reviews of Caramelo, recommended books on, 86
91–7 Weston, Edward, 104
sales rankings on Amazon, 92 X-Ray feature, 38, 40–1

science fiction, 67
Shelfari, 26–7 Zoot Suit Riots, 110
DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0011

(Literatures of The Americas) Ellen McCracken (Auth.) - Paratexts and Performance in The Novels of Junot Díaz and Sandra Cisneros-Palgrave Macmillan US (2016)

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Paratexts and Performance in the Novels of Junot Díaz

and Sandra Cisneros

Books in the Series:

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this

DOI: 10.1057/9781137603609.0003 vii

McCracken, Ellen. Paratexts and Performance

is the desire of mainstream US book publishers in the 1980s to sign

non-melting-pot US-Latino culture and its integral sibling in Latin

Paratexts and the digital age

In the 1980s French theorist Gérard Genette carefully delineated a wide

print culture, he distinguished between peritexts, those inside or materi-

of it on Facebook or Twitter, sometimes with a link to the book. Such

Paratexts and performance

discourse that Bakhtin theorized, by transcending the material contain-

an exciting digital intervention, he created 23 new footnotes for the novel

Mexican history, how does a quantitative analysis of the entries change

McCracken, Ellen. Paratexts and Performance

Latino ethnicity predominant in American society. Whether deliberate

Public autographic epitexts

Díaz’s novel is overlain with an especially rich and continually expanding

The new Dominican-American literary star was reported to

We’re in a country where white is considered normative; it’s a country where

accepted in the real literary [sphere]. Your passport is always checked

“muchacho” or “boy” of course demeans the writer whom Colbert

parallels the confidence/vulnerability dichotomy of the Yunior/Oscar

Crowd-sourced allographic annotations

The trope of paratextual annotation is a key narrative strategy of The Brief

for the novel—glosses researched by an ordinary reader and shared with

and even the author. A crowd-sourced type of Wikipedia for books

Allographic commentary, reviews, and discussions

In today’s interconnected digital world, only a small number of readers

2008. The front cover of the Spanish translation includes a praiseworthy

2 THE AUTHOR DOES NOT USE QUOTATION MARKS FOR THE

In contrast, in the New York Times review, Michiko Kakutani emphasizes

89% of people liked it

Although one must become a member of Goodreads in order to

The publisher’s peritextual portals

price—$24.95 in the US and $31.00 in Canada—above the book descrip-

poems based only on identity.”28 This incident exemplifies the cultural

nuclear annihilation when he is unable to start a love relationship with

The allographic paratexts of digital reading

Where Genette devotes a good deal of attention to formatting, layout,

deforming alterations in formatting in the digital edition is the change

in digital texts themselves, rather “location” numbers, since readers can

3 “Interview with Junot Díaz,” Book Browse, 2007, https://www.bookbrowse.

McCracken, Ellen. Paratexts and Performance

With the myriad of expanding paratexts such as those discussed in

With an elaborate system of chapter titles and internal subheadings,

these explanatory markers represent the author’s desire to secure mean-

forms of fiction. In Latin America, inventive footnotes appear in the work

I argue in contrast, that a single, unified voice predominates in both the

the protagonist—the avid reader of genre fiction who experiments with

with words such as “fuá,” repeated like an incantation throughout this

Díaz invites US readers with competence in the American liter-

Díaz’s “take me as I am” performative linguistic spectacularity in these

If readers allow themselves to be immersed in the linguistic spectacular-

Here Díaz calls to readers’ attention authorial errors—a geographic

for Chapter 2. Condensing is clearly one important technique through

idiomas de los duendes en los libros de J.R.R. Tolkien” [the languages of

Overflowing footnotes: new digital autographic

So central is the network of autographic footnotes in Oscar Wao to

can become active in facilitating a more dynamic interchange than is

concrete experiment with the novel’s unfinalizability. Also in this initial