The Poetics of Exile in Cristina García's Dreaming in Cuban

This article examines how Cuban-American writer Cristina García interweaves all possible experiences of Cubans through Dreaming in Cuban in terms of Bakhtin's concepts of heteroglosssia, hybridization, and the chronotope. In so doing, it reaffirms the applicability of these concepts as tools for interpreting speech genres while reevaluating and reexamining the novel in terms of Bakhtinian narratology. García identifies a sociopolitical cacophony in both America and Cuba from an open-minded perspective, striving to maintain a balance between them despite undesirable experiences with her patriotic mother and individuals in the Miami community where she worked as a journalist. In practice, she projects sociopolitical ideas onto her heroines' depictions, representing their consciousnesses in a process of interaction with others. In particular, García allows her three generations of heroines, Celia del Pino, her daughters Lourdes and Felicia, and her granddaughter Pilar Puente to live as staunchly political figures. In this way, García creates a unique novelistic situation by opposing or juxtaposing all aspects of her heroines and pitting them in a dynamic interaction with their environments. As they repeatedly tease, contradict, refute, and do battle with each other, her heroines expose various problems with the sociopolitical ideologies in both the Cuban and American contexts. García succeeds in her attempt by introducing Bakhtin's model of the "becoming" hero and depicting her heroines in dynamic interaction without her own interference. In particular, the devouring inner monologues of Pilar and her Cuban aunt Felicia are presented as the products of their extraordinarily developed self-consciousnesses, through which García attempts a multilateral approach of showing, rather than telling, her heroines' interactive inner worlds as well as introducing sociopolitical contexts. Generic factors such as epistles, diary entries, and ads copy are hybridized into Celia's and Lourdes' stories, serving the heroines' interactive contexts while filling in the many narrative gaps that result from the approach to Cuban and American history. The Bakhtinian perspective permits the interpretation that this generic hybridization enables García to cover narrative gaps resulting from the expansion of chronotopes.