Leonardo Padura Fuentes And The Contemporary Cuban Detective Novel: Modern, Postmodern, or a Combination Thereof?

LEONARDO PADURA FUENTES AND THE CONTEMPORARY CUBAN DETECTIVE NOVEL: MODERN, POSTMODERN, OR A COMBINATION THEREOF? by Janet Pérez Texas Tech University BRIAN McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction (1987)1 distinguished succinctly between the modern and postmodern: “the dominant of modernist fiction is epistemological [. . . it] deploys strategies which foreground questions such as ‘How can I interpret this world of which I am a part?’ [. . .] .‘What is there to be known? Who knows it? How do they know it?’” (9). This logic is that of the detective story, the “epistemological genre par excellence,” argues McHale, noting that characters in these stories (and many classic Modernist texts) sift through the evidence provided by several witnesses of varying degrees of credibility in order to reconstruct and solve the enigma, mystery or crime. McHale lists various Modernist or epistemological themes, structures and devices including the focalization of evidence through a single consciousness. Epistemological difficulties are transferred to readers via strategies of “impeded form” (dislocated chronology, withheld information) and the “modernist tradition of radically unreliable narrators [producing] a text of enormous epistemological uncertainty” (9-10). By contrast, the “dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological” deploying strategies which foreground questions such as “Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?” (10). Differentiation is less simple, because “at some point epistemological uncertainty becomes ontological [. . .] plurality or instability” (11). Unsurprisingly , all of the foregoing remarks apply to the whole or to parts of the detective fiction of Leonardo Padura Fuentes. Impeded form, dislocated chronol61 ogy, and withheld information, while present throughout, multiply in Padura’s more recent, post-tetralogy works, as will be shown, increasing epistemological uncertainty to that point mentioned by McHale where it becomes ontological instability or morphs into the Postmodern. Linda Hutcheon, in The Politics of Postmodernism2 includes a chapter on “The Politics of Parody,” especially relevant to Padura Fuentes’s works, as implied political commentary and sociological critiques occur in varying degrees throughout his fiction. Under the subheading of “Parodic Postmodern Representation ,” Hutcheon equates parody with ironic quotation, pastiche, appropriation , or intertextuality (93), all constants in Padura’s narratives. She argues that the “notion of the original as rare, single and valuable [. . .] is called into question” (93-94), an affirmation applicable to Padura’s representations of the Castro regime, the Cuban economy and more. Hutcheon notes that “parody works to foreground the politics of representation” (94), and Padura’s novelette , Adiós, Hemingway, a focus of this paper, exemplifies that process. In The Poetics of Postmodernism3 Hutcheon terms the “basic postmodernist stance [. . .] a questioning of authority” (202), which conveniently sums up Padura’s most enduring attitude. Lyotard’s questioning of metanarratives of legitimation and emancipation led to his arguing that Modernity could not be separated from notions of universality and unity, i.e., metanarratives, while Postmodernity questions all such narratives. He nonetheless argued in The Postmodern Condition4 that narrative is still the quintessential way of representing knowledge , for which reason Lyotard defined the postmodern condition as that which is defined by an active distrust of master narratives, a point especially applicable to the question of modern and postmodern in Padura and clearly visible in Adiós, Hemingway as regards political (Socialism, Marxism) and cultural metanarratives. Another point noted by several writers, stemming from the questioning of language itself and whether it really “communicates anything,” leads to the general Postmodernist rejection of the concept of ultimate truths, increasingly evident in Padura’s more recent work. This paper postulates an ongoing process of development in Padura’s novels over the nearly two decades since he began the Conde series, a process reflected in the trajectory of his protagonist and reminiscent of the personal liberation through art or writing whereby many youths of bourgeois or upperclass backgrounds rejected conformity, adopting Bohemian lifestyles, typically accompanied by political radicalization (i.e., rejection of the political Establishment , its values and metanarratives). Observing Padura’s (and Conde’s) trajectories from the beginning to the present, the emerging pattern is at first predominantly Modernist through the end of the tetralogy “Las cuatro estaciones ” (1989-1997), followed by a brief period of transition with increasing Postmodern elements in the pivotal year of 2001...