ABSTRACT
At the opening of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, a reunited family on a steamer leaves behind Ellis Island and heads toward Manhattan. Between the Jersey coastline and Brooklyn emerges the magnicence of the Statue of Liberty. In the late afternoon light, the statue is invested with ambivalence, and its luminous aura is reduced to threatening spikes of darkness. Shadow transforms the torch into the blackened hilt of a sword. Similarly, in his unnished America, Franz Kafka introduces Karl Rossman standing on a liner slowly approaching New York Harbor. As if in a staged ceremonial welcome, a burst of sunshine illuminates the Statue of Liberty. In its unexpected glimmer, the beacon of a welcoming America rises up as if bearing a sword (2005, 12) instead of the customary torch. For Georges Perec, this is what being an immigrant actually meant, “to see a sword where the sculptor, in all good faith, had thought he was putting a torch. And not really to be wrong” (2008, 134). Rewritten through the hospitality lens, it is possible to argue that being an immigrant might be summed up in a similar conceptual confusion: to see hostility where others see hospitality.1 This chapter proposes that such visual and conceptual ambivalence structures Junot Díaz’s “Invierno,” included in This Is How You Lose Her (2012). As in Kafka’s and Roth’s novels, in Díaz’s story hospitality and hostility become part of the same vision. This visual and conceptual bifurcation is akin to Derrida’s argument that hospitality “remains forever on the threshold of itself” (2000a, 14), at the crux of a bifurcation, between opening and closing, between welcoming and rejecting. In the story, rejection does not expel, but folds in on itself, creating different enclosures that immobilize
the immigrant in the neighborhood and the family apartment. Díaz displays what Derrida would call “a conjugal model, paternal and phallogocentric,” as he introduces Ramón, the familial despot, the father, the master of the house who lays down the laws of hospitality as well as the violence of the power of hospitality (2000b, 149). As pater familias, Ramón’s laws of hospitality relate to space and language. In the apartment, as a microcosm of the United States, Spanish is viewed as a migrant language and is relegated to the sphere of the domestic, while English becomes the master language that secures social and spatial mobility.2 Thus, Díaz’s story chronicles the interaction between hosts and guest, but also between host and guest languages.
