Memory Heroics: Ethos Daimon

This article is an extended meditation on Javier Cercas’s 2014 novel El impostor. An extant fragment from Heraclitus says “ethos anthropoi daimon.” Marco, Cercas’s protagonist, is undecidably a “man of destiny” or a “man of character,” to use Hegelian categories recently reappropriated by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio. But, if “character” is “destiny” for the man, as the conventional translation of Heraclitus asserts, how does a destructive character relate to history?