Search for Utopia, Desire for the Sublime: Cristina García’s Monkey Hunting

Cristina García’s 2003 novel Monkey Hunting departs significantly from the novelist’s first two highly-praised books, Dreaming in Cuban (1992) and The Agüero Sisters (1997). Instead of focusing explicitly on Cuban American/Cuban relations and depicting a specifically Cuban diaspora post-1959,¹ Monkey Hunting takes place in China, Cuba, the United States, and Vietnam. In just over 250 pages, the novel tells a family history of four generations, covering a time period between a Chinese man’s 1857 migration to Cuba and the middle years of the Vietnam War. It employs third- and first-person points of view, male and female voices, and fragmented sequencing. While García used multiple viewpoints and settings in her first two novels, Monkey Hunting expands in ethnic, geographic, and chronological focus. Moreover, Monkey Hunting defies tidy genre classification. It blends genres, including the slave narrative, family saga, historical and immigrant fiction, prose, and poetry. The novel’s beginning seems more like a slave narrative than anything else, but as soon as the protagonist Chen Pan escapes from a Cuban sugar plantation, this description becomes insufficient.² A helpful family tree signals a family saga, yet the novel’s relative brevity contrasts with celebrated family sagas such as Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits (1982). Ethnic mixing in the novel—Chinese and African, Afro-Chinese Cuban and Vietnamese—also impedes neat classification.

Perhaps because of some or all of these issues, Monkey Hunting received more mixed reviews than García’s first two novels.³ While many praised García’s knack for sensuous detail, several reviewers found the novel’s lack of development dissatisfying. Jennifer Schuessler of the New York Times Book Review claims that Monkey Hunting “is an honorable attempt to recover ancestral memories. But all her blossoms and incantations and tears don’t quite succeed in making those ancestors live again” (11), and Michiko Kakutani perceives Monkey Hunting as lacking “the fierce magic and unexpected humor” (E6) of Dreaming in Cuban and calls the novel’s beginning “workmanlike.” An additional review claims that “García leaves too much story unexplored. The book is succinct at the expense of the fine characterizations and plot developments that grace García’s previous works . . . this novel whets, but doesn’t sate, the appetite” (González O2F). Another states, “the novel jumps abruptly” and “reads jerkily” (Cobb E3). Carlo Wolff, meanwhile, views “character development” as García’s greatest weakness (E10), and Anne Stephenson believes that the “novel seems unfinished” (E4).

Rather than evaluating the novel according to a realist paradigm, as these reviewers do, I analyze how the novel’s compressed aesthetics enact a search for utopia and a desire for the historical sublime. These concerns posit a political perspective different from that of 1960s radicalism and post-1960s multiculturalism. Thus, my reading of Monkey Hunting adds further support to Raphael Dalleo and Elena Machado Sáez’s argument about post-sixties Latino/a literature as a whole: “rather than turning away from politics, contemporary Latino/a writers are renewing that [Civil Rights] political tradition by engaging with the triumphs and defeats of the past, formulating political projects that will mark our future horizons in substantial and creative ways” (7). My analysis highlights how Monkey Hunting adds to this thread in contemporary Latino/a literature. The novel’s search for utopia and its desire for the historical sublime advance a creative political project that criticizes top-down government programs, including Castro’s application of communism and, to a lesser extent, the US version of free-market capitalism. I focus on utopia and the historical sublime to show the narrowness of negative evaluations of Monkey Hunting and to uncover continuities in vision among García’s first three novels.

The utopian impulses of Monkey Hunting derive from a recuperation of historical horrors that suggest parallels with the contemporary world. These recuperations encourage readers to imagine a society significantly different from the present and the past. García...