Styles and strategies of remembrance in the novels of Oscar Hijuelos and Cristina Garcia

The novels of Oscar Hijuelos and Cristina Garcia are masterpieces of memory. Arguably the most gifted and inarguably the most mainstream of Cuban-American novelists, Hijuelos and Garcia write lush, sensual, sophisticated explorations of the personal, familial and cultural pasts. Unlike so much of Cuban-American literature, however, these novels are not hospitable to unalloyed nostalgia; they are, in fact, profoundly suspicious of the tendency of nostalgia to distort the facts of the historical past for the political interests of the present.;Part of this suspicion arises from the authors' having come of age outside the Cuban cultural microcosm of Miami. Both authors were raised in the proverbial melting pot of New York City, where there were many Cubans but where the ideology of conservative Cuban-America was confronted by the more immediate challenges of assimilation. Hijuelos's novels are inspired and haunted by his upbringing in Morningside Heights, a chiaroscuro of play, violence and overwhelming cultural heterogeneity; his protagonists are too distanced from Cuba and Miami to be concerned with ideas of exile and repatriation, and too preoccupied with the pressures of self-assimilation to pay much attention to the philosophical abstractions of cultural identity. Garcia, a New Yorker who served briefly as a Time magazine correspondent in Miami, reports being vilified there for her comparatively liberal political convictions; later, she would write novels which condemn nostalgia as a byproduct of personal insecurity, ideological hostility, or political deviousness.;This project explores the various alternative forms of apolitical remembrance promulgated in the novels of Hijuelos and Garcia. Given the political polarization of the Cuban-American literary community, I pay as much attention to the formal "styles" employed by these authors as I do to their "strategies" in employing them. The intersection of aesthetics and politics is nowhere mapped out in greater depth and complexity than in their novels. The primary purpose of this study will therefore be to offer a formal analysis of, and a contextual framework for, the full range of Hijuelos's and Garcia's literary accomplishments.