Spectral Illuminations: Leonardo Padura’s Herejes (2013)

Abstract

Abstract Leonardo Padura Fuentes is the preeminent living Cuban novelist. In his Mario Conde detective series, whenever the eponymous protagonist is not preoccupied with solving crimes endemic to Special Period Cuba, he longs nostalgically for his prelapsarian youth. The leitmotif of Conde’s nostalgia reveals Cubans’ profound impression of temporal disjunction from the Revolution during the Special Period, when the state’s future-oriented teleology jarred with the seemingly eternal present in which they languished. In the 1990s, Cubans would have agreed with Hamlet that “[t]he time is out of joint,” who Jacques Derrida quotes in Specters of Marx, his riposte to the triumphal euphoria of capitalist society in the wake of Soviet communism’s collapse. Yet in the eighth installment of the Mario Conde series Herejes, Padura surrenders the specters of aborted futures that haunt the detective in prior novels to make room for a conversation with ghosts of the past, which Derrida terms revenant in his hauntology. In talking to revenant, which, curiously enough, are almost exclusively ghosts of Jews, Padura once more short-circuits the Revolution’s linear, progressive narrative, an historical conception against whose dangers Walter Benjamin warns us in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” a text that informs Derrida’s Specters.