Forms of nostalgia and (mis)recognition: The impossibility of homecoming in the Countess of Merlin's la Havane

This essay suggests that the prose of Mara de las Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, known as the Countess of Merlin, should be read as a writing of non-arrival. It focuses on the pages dedicated to the description of Cuba and Havana from the narrator's ship before she actually arrives. These pages present a series of temporal and spatial oscillations that constitute an image of Merlin's own writing. If one of the main topics of La Havane is longing, and if distance is a condition for longing, then the homecoming becomes impossible. Spatially speaking, then, Merlin's writing inhabits a threshold; it could be said that temporally hers is a writing of imminence. In this sense the fact of the book having been first written in French operates as her voyage: it is a partial homecoming, in which each gesture of return is interrupted by the interference of a new distance; a distance which, in most cases, is imposed by the same approaching movement.