SOURCE: “La paradigmática historia de Caperucita y el lobo feroz: Juan Goytisolo's use of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in Reivindicación del conde don Julián,” in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Vol. LXV, No. 2, April, 1988, pp. 141-51.

[Six teaches at Queen Mary College, London, and is the author of Juan Goytisolo: The Case for Chaos. In the following essay, Six traces the development of the “Little Red Riding Hood” story and asserts that Goytisolo's version of the tale in Reivindicación del Conde Don Julián exhibits the author's “preference for chaos over order.”]

Juan Goytisolo's re-working of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in Reivindicación del conde don Julián produces a radically unconventional, psychoanalytical version of the tale.¹ This article seeks to analyse it in the light of research by folklorists, psychologists, and social historians, with the aim of providing a new reading which, it will be argued, conveys in microcosm an important element of the author's fiction since Señas de identidad, namely, a preference for chaos over order.

The use of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in the text of Reivindicación may be studied on two levels. First, there is the way in which Goytisolo chooses to retell the story: which details he omits and which he emphasizes, which aspects of classic fairy tale he lifts verbatim and which he bypasses or alters. These considerations raise psychological and socio-historical questions which link this level with the second: the effect of the insertion of his version of the tale on the rest of Reivindicación and indeed the other novels of the trilogy of which it forms part. In this article, which confines itself to a psychological focus and to the text of Reivindicación only, we shall base our analysis on the fullest account of the tale given by the author. This appears at the beginning of the fourth and final section of the novel, but there are allusions to Little Red Riding Hood scattered throughout the text, which provide a prefigurative hint at the significance of the story for Goytisolo, later to be elaborated by him.² On reading the fullest account of the tale, its most potent influence is exerted on what comes immediately afterwards, namely, the closing passages of the book. These deal principally with the progressive destruction of the protagonist's child self by the adult that he is destined to become, the two being depicted as separate characters. However, in addition to this most obvious effect, the pattern of repetitions and echoes which Goytisolo has built into the whole of Reivindicación links the account to earlier passages in the book, as well as parts of Goytisolo's other novels, and the episode may thus alter and enrich their interpretation too.

The classic European fairy stories, of which ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is one of the best known, have been recognized by psychologists of both the Freudian and Jungian schools, by anthropologists, sociologists, and historians, quite apart from the folklore specialists, as something far more important, far weightier than charming little yarns for the entertainment of small children. As Mircea Eliade puts it, in Myth and Reality: ‘Though in the West the tale has long since become a literature of diversion (for children and peasants) or of escape (for city dwellers), it still presents the structure of an infinitely serious and responsible adventure’.³

The publication in 1697 of Perrault's Histoires ou contes du temps passé started the trend which has converted these formerly powerful—often harrowing—narratives into the quaint prettily-worded nursery tales, or even the prettily-drawn Disney films, of modern times.⁴ Clearly, Perrault's purpose in altering and distorting folktales was more than a Disney-style prettification process, though he must surely have felt that some of the lurid details in the original versions could not be included if his collection was to be suitable for refined French ladies and children. However, in addition to censoring the most gruesome elements of the stories, more importantly, Perrault refashioned the traditional narratives so that they would be morally instructive for the children who were to constitute his main readership.⁵ The Brothers Grimm did much the same; although they claimed to have simply recorded extant folktales, scholars have shown that their selectivity and adaptations were designed to comply with the moral standards of their time and environment.⁶

‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is one of the most overt examples of this refashioning, as the following summary of its versions will seek to demonstrate. First, the salient points of the narrative will be discussed, as they differ from non-literary folklore to Perrault and to the Grimms. Next, the psychological implications of the different versions will be assessed, in the context of how they reflect on the characters in the story. Then we shall turn to Goytisolo's treatment and in the light of these background observations, we may examine how he makes the story paradigmatic for the psychological aspect of Reivindicación.

Taking the events of the tale in the order in which they occur, the first step is that Red Riding Hood's mother sends her to her grandmother's house. This is to be found in the folkloric versions as well as in both Perrault and the Grimms. Logically, this is the raison d'être of the whole story and yet it is depicted almost as a mere premise. In folklore and in Perrault, Red Riding Hood's mother is little more than a device to set the story moving. In the Grimms, she has a little more character as she warns her daughter to stay on the path through the forest and to conduct herself in a ladylike fashion. Thus, it is only in the Grimms' version that the child comes to grief through disobedience. The next step in the narrative is common to all three versions: the meeting with the wolf in the forest. The exchange which takes place differs in its details, but shares the basic feature that Red Riding Hood tells him where she is going. The wolf arrives before her, devours the defenceless grandmother and, disguised as her, waits for Red Riding Hood. When she reaches the house and encounters the wolf again, sexual innuendo is scarcely concealed in the folkloric and Perrault versions, for she complies with the wolf's request to join him in bed. In Grimms, however, she remains fully clothed and no suggestion of this kind is made. At this point, the three stories diverge significantly. In the folkloric version, the eponymous protagonist escapes by pretending that she needs to go outside to relieve herself; the wolf tries to keep her captive by tying a thread around her ankle, but she outwits him by undoing it once outside, tying it instead around a nearby plum-tree and running home to safety.⁷ In Perrault, the wolf devours her and so the story ends. The author then appends a moral in verse form which underlines the exemplary message. This states that Le Petit Chaperon Rouge has suffered the consequences of her naïveté in trusting the wolf, who, as the rhyme makes abundantly clear, stands for cunning male seducers.⁸ In Grimms, she is also devoured, but a passing huntsman rescues both her and the grandmother by cutting open the wolf's belly as he sleeps. They fill him with stones and sew him up again, so that when he awakes, he topples over and dies. It would seem that the Grimms took this ending from ‘The Goat and the Seven Kids’, which ends almost identically.⁹

The fidelity of Perrault's unhappy ending to a folkloric version is a source of controversy among scholars, owing to the long-standing popularity of Perrault's tales in rural communities. Indeed, many apparently traditional accounts have been recorded from countryfolk as ending with child and grandmother both eaten by the wolf, just like his dénouement, but this need not necessarily prove that Perrault was faithful to some traditional version, although this must of course remain a possibility. It could just as well be that they are post-Perrault distortions. Marc Soriano, for example, is of the opinion that both the unhappy ending and the one where the heroine escapes are rooted in genuine French folklore, both acting as warning tales for children, with the latter version as a toned-down one, for the sake of those who might be too terrorized by the fatal dénouement.¹⁰

Since ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ lacks lengthy descriptive passages in all three versions, the characters of the mother, the child, and the wolf must be inferred from the way in which they behave. The mother's failure to warn her daughter about the dangers of the forest in Perrault does not, as one might logically expect, cause her to be depicted as a wicked character; any guilt to be apportioned to her is left only implicit in the text. Rather than fixing attention on her, Perrault seems to be at pains to stress that she is out of the picture, as it were, that it is the child's own responsibility to look after herself. From the traditional tale of an ingenious and courageous girl, Perrault has turned the story into a cautionary tale about the perils of naïveté, stressing that ‘la pauvre enfant … ne savait pas qu'il est dangereux de s'arrêter à écouter un Loup’ when she meets him in the forest. In the same vein, he draws attention to her ingenuousness when she climbs into bed with him, saying with tongue clearly in cheek that ‘elle fut bien étonnée de voir comment sa Mère-grand était faite en son déshabillé’.¹¹ The transition from ingenious to ingenuous in the traditional and Perrault versions is not one which the Grimms were content to leave as it stood; they made the protagonist of the tale a culpably disobedient child, a character who learns the hard way that tedious rules made by those in authority are really for one's own good. Furthermore, maternal attempts at protection are supported, in Grimms, by the strongly paternal character of the rescuing huntsman.

The shift from the sharp-witted and plucky heroine of the traditional story, to the hopelessly naïve protagonist of Perrault, to the naughty child of the Grimms, is not just interesting for its own sake, but has an important effect on the female status of Little Red Riding Hood. In the traditional version, the girl would seem to resemble the male heroes of classic fairy tales more than other female protagonists. Jack Zipes characterizes the former as follows: ‘Brains are better to have than brawn … The heroes … all have remarkable minds, courage, and deft manners.’¹² Like so many male heroes, she uses her sharp wits to defeat a creature much stronger than herself. She needs no one to rescue her; indeed, her behaviour evokes in us just the same sort of admiration that we feel towards the Valiant Little Tailor or Hop o'My Thumb, for example.¹³ Perrault is the first to describe her as pretty: ‘une petite fille de Village, la plus jolie qu'on eût su voir’,¹⁴ thus endowing her with one of the essential traits of fairytale heroines. However, the masculine epithet by which she is known—Le Petit Chaperon Rouge—if not meant to imply masculinity, is at least suggestive of a lack of pronounced femininity. Sexual ambivalence is deeply rooted in the story itself: the male wolf is disguised as a woman—the grandmother—when Red Riding Hood is ‘devoured’ by him; he is also lying passively in bed when she enters the house and later she joins him in bed, rather than the more standard converse pattern. Moreover, in the Grimms' version the two female characters, Red Riding Hood and the grandmother, are ‘reborn’ from the male wolf's belly, ‘delivered’ by the male huntsman, not a midwife. It is also noticeable in this respect of Red Riding Hood's non-conformity to the feminine stereotype of the classic fairy tales that none of the different endings depicts a happy marriage (unlike ‘Cinderella’, ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, to name but a few stories with a female protagonist). Even in the Grimms' version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ with its happy ending, the male rescuer remains a fatherly figure, rather than the typical handsome prince, whom the heroine could then marry. In this paternal role, the child's sex is tacitly devalued, for fathers have sons as well as daughters, whereas the handsome prince can only be matched with a female character.

In summary, it may be asserted that, although Red Riding Hood loses her essentially virile self-reliance and bravery in both Perrault and Grimms, vestiges of a certain interchangeability of gender are not eradicated, either from the depiction of the protagonist herself, or from the wolf ‘in female clothing’. The seducer disguised as a woman recalls this animal's association with the devil, who may also appear as temptress, dating back to the Fall of Man and reappearing, notably in the Revelation of Saint John the Divine.¹⁵ There is more to the wolf's demonic connection than this, however. In the Papal Bull Summis Desideratus Affectibus of 1484 and the Malleus Maleficarum of 1486, the Church declared wolves, along with witches, to be Satan's deputies on earth.¹⁶ This is vestigially discernible in the Grimms' version, where the huntsman calls the wolf an ‘old sinner’. The traditional version, where the wolf is explicitly a werewolf, illuminates the ancestry of the anthropomorphic, talking, reasoning wolf of Perrault and Grimms; and in the former, as we have seen, the rhymed moral shows that the wolf does not stand for fierce animals but for human brutes.

Before turning to Goytisolo's treatment of the tale, one final aspect should be considered: the temporal dimension. Bruno Bettelheim, in his Freudian analysis of fairy tales, sees in them a way of helping children to grow up into well-balanced adults, with id, ego, and superego in their proper places. He uses ‘The Three Little Pigs’ to show how such a story teaches a child via his or her unconscious how to mature healthily: ‘Since the three little pigs represent stages in the development of man, the disappearance of the first two pigs is not traumatic; the child understands subconsciously that we have to shed earlier forms of existence if we wish to move on to higher ones’.¹⁷ He postulates that the three little pigs are really one and the same pig, as it matures; perhaps the same point could be made about the three generations of females in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. The protagonist's budding sexuality—perhaps linked to the timing of the grandmother's present of an alluring garment—destines her to motherhood. This role will in its turn give way to decrepitude and isolation, so that, like her grandmother, she will end by being reliant on the charity of the young and helpless in the face of brutality and cunning (the wolf's trick of pretending to be her granddaughter in order to gain entry to her house).

This suggestion of the successive stages of life portrayed in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ leads us on to the interpretation of the tale in terms of initiation ritual, convincingly argued most notably by Saintyves and Eliade.¹⁸ It is traditional worldwide in communities where these rituals take place, that the elders assume the responsibility of initiatory instruction to the adolescent novices of the same sex. The grandmother as the one who makes Red Riding Hood the garment which gives her a new name, the location of the grandmother's house in or beyond a wilderness, lend credibility to such a theory, with ritual garments, new names, and the requirement to leave the confines of the community to receive initiatory instruction being extremely common features of initiation rites, not only in extant primitive societies, but also in the records of ancient European traditions. Separation from the mother is usually a prerequisite of all adolescent initiations and a ritual death, often in the form of being swallowed by some type of symbolic monster-god, followed by rebirth as an adult, are also widespread, if not universal motifs.¹⁹

II

Having briefly surveyed the folkloric and literary antecedents, we may now turn to Goytisolo's use of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. In an interview, he stated that the version which he was told as a child was ‘el que acaba mal’.²⁰ From this one might assume that it was a translation of Perrault which was in circulation in Spain during the 1930s. This, indeed, is taken for granted by Linda Gould Levine when she refers to ‘“la nueva versión sicoanalítica” de la fábula de Perrault’.²¹ However, an examination of 1930s editions of ‘Caperucita Roja’ shows that, even when Perrault is named as the author on the title-page, the versions published were not faithful translations, but adaptations of the story, with elements from Grimms too.²² Perrault may not, therefore, be taken as the sole source of Goytisolo's version and echoes of the German account need not be regarded as merely coincidental or fortuitous.

As far as the plot is concerned, the first choice which Goytisolo makes is whether, like Grimms, to have the mother warn Red Riding Hood to stay on the path in the forest, or whether, like Perrault, to have the child set off in unsuspecting naïveté. He opts for Perrault's model here, stressing Caperucito Rojo's innocence; the ‘tierno infante’ is of ‘carácter tierno’ and ‘virtud acendrada’ (206), so that there is no hint of the naughty disobedience of the Grimms protagonist.

The next important stage of the story as it is told by Perrault, the Grimms, and all known traditional versions, is the encounter with the wolf in the forest. Goytisolo omits this altogether. His protagonist's walk through the forest is occupied instead by reciting prayers for souls in purgatory and limbo, and performing good works: he rescues a nettle from the path, straightens a withering flower and chastizes two copulating flies: ‘un kilómetro y pico de trayecto bien aprovechado en suma’ (208). When this Red Riding Hood reaches the cottage, the grandmother is already dead and the wolf in bed disguised as her. The account then proceeds on the same lines as Perrault; Red Riding Hood joins the wolf, played by Julián, in bed and the traditional exchange matches Perrault's exactly, until the last line, where instead of teeth, we find ‘bicha’ and correspondingly, the reply is not ‘—C'est pour te manger’, but ‘es para penetrarte mejor’ (209).²³ Thus, Goytisolo makes explicit in the narrative what Perrault implies by the moral; he dispenses with the symbolism of ‘devouring’ signifying sex, stripping the story of its concern with bienséances and in this sense, returning to the bald style of the folkloric version.

Turning from Goytisolo's treatment of the plot to what this implies about the characters, we note that he follows Perrault as far as the mother's unsuspecting nature is concerned. The mother of Julián's child self in the passages following the Caperucito Rojo account is reminiscent of the French model, for she too is simply unaware of the dangers besetting her child: ‘la piadosa madre sigue sin darse cuenta’ (226). However, the role accorded to the mother is more important in Goytisolo than in Perrault, and this becomes apparent in the passages following the narration of the tale itself. Not only is she the unwitting cause of her child's death (as in Perrault), but she is also the torturer of the protagonist's child self, in effect at least. As he comes closer and closer to becoming his adult self, it is the fear of upsetting his mother which haunts him, not fear of Julián. On the contrary, he is fascinated by the latter and cannot resist returning again and again, but he does so reluctantly because he is racked with agonizing guilt. The child is ‘irresistiblemente atraído’ and ‘no puede ni quiere apartar de ti [the adult self] la vista’ (218 and 219 respectively; my italics). Then, after this first encounter, ‘jura y perjura no volver’, not because he has not enjoyed it, but because he is now ‘sin atreverse a mirar de frente el rostro puro y lenitivo de la madre’ (221). When the adult starts blackmailing the child, it is at the mother's expense and when the child is finally driven to suicide, it is because the adult wants the child's mother to come herself, or else, ‘si no la traes, iré a verla yo y le contaré cuanto has hecho’ (229). In other words, what should be a natural relationship, as the child undergoes the transition to adulthood, is a harrowing nightmare, all because of the guilt towards the mother for the loss of childhood innocence. The guilt arising from the betrayal of the mother is also associated with the betrayal of the patria or motherland; thus, the theme of the novel as a whole is represented in microcosm by this image which originates in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’.²⁴

In short, then, Caperucito's mother would seem to be largely based on Perrault, but the consequences of this depiction are exploited and extended imaginatively, thus fusing the character from the fairy tale with the thematic and symbolic structure of Reivindicación. The depiction of the eponymous protagonist of the tale diverges much more radically from literary antecedents. The most immediately obvious change that Goytisolo makes is surely the depiction of Red Riding Hood as a boy instead of a girl. Yet, perhaps this is not such a drastic alteration as it might at first appear. As we have seen, there is much sexual ambiguity in both the details of the story—the wolf's female disguise, for example—and its overall presentation of the heroine, perhaps as a vestigial reminder of its roots in the tough, down-to-earth folkloric version. Goytisolo rejects the specifically feminine additions to Red Riding Hood, principally by means of three devices. Firstly, he questions the convention that a protagonist's beauty is only important if the personage is feminine; thus Caperucito is emphatically described as ‘el [niño] más hermoso que la mente humana pueda imaginar’ (205). Secondly, he casts doubt on the supposition inherent in all the literary antecedents, that a child's initial sexual curiosity is directed at a member of the opposite sex; Caperucito is fascinated simultaneously by his own adulthood—for Julián is what he is to become—and by a homosexual relationship, for Julián is depicted as an autonomous character, separate from himself. This may be linked to the Freudian approach, discussed above, that like ‘The Three Little Pigs’, the grandmother represents on an unconscious level what Red Riding Hood is destined to become. Thus, by getting into bed with who she thinks is her grandmother, the child may be expressing a curiosity about her own future self. Furthermore, as in Goytisolo's treatment, the character of the wolf-grandmother is portrayed as separate and, ostensibly at least, of the same sex as the protagonist. Thirdly, and on the linguistic level, Goytisolo rejects the translation of the masculine French epithet—‘Le Petit Chaperon Rouge’—into the feminine Spanish ‘Caperucita Roja’, changing it to ‘Caperucito Rojo’. The feminization of the name in Spanish might, of course, be attributed to the fact that the word for hood—caperuza—happens to be feminine in Spanish and masculine in French. Nevertheless, the masculine ‘Cendrillon’ is needlessly feminized to ‘Cenicienta’ in Spanish, so it is perhaps a deliberate policy of Spanish translators, more than a mere accident of gender, that female characters must have female names. If this is so, Goytisolo refuses to comply.

In addition to the sex-change of Little Red Riding Hood, which, as we have seen, is not such a radical metamorphosis as it might at first seem, but rather makes explicit the undercurrent of sexual ambiguity in the tale, Goytisolo selects some details of the plot and omits others, refashioning the character of the protagonist in this way too. The omission of the encounter with the wolf in the forest acquits Caperucito of the charge of foolish naïveté for having trusted the wolf enough to tell him where she was going. Whilst the Grimms' Red Riding Hood is both disobedient and naïve, and Perrault's unwarned protagonist is at least the latter, Goytisolo's Caperucito is wholly guiltless, which is to say that he is in no way responsible for what ensues. Hence, Perrault's warning moral not to trust even the nicest-seeming wolves is no longer applicable. In sum, the didactic element of the story has been removed: the events have become inexorable and unwarranted.

This serves a dual purpose: in the immediate context of the fourth section of Reivindicación, it leads into the inexorable course of events which will bring about the protagonist's child self being supplanted by his adult self. In a wider context of themes in Goytisolo's novels from Señas de identidad to Paisajes después de la batalla, we could assert that the general pattern is one of order being undermined while chaos is being reinforced. Most of the classic fairy tales are structured in a perfectly ordered fashion, with good characters clearly delineated as such and rewarded by riches and/or a happy marriage, while bad characters are equally clearly defined as villains and punished by death or some other suitable horror. Goytisolo acknowledges that it is this essentially just order which makes fairy tales important psychologically: ‘un mundo limpio y perfecto, nítido como una demostración algebraica’ and ‘reino ideal donde la astucia obtiene la recompensa y la fuerza bruta el castigo, utopía de un dios equitativo de designios profundos y honrados’.²⁵ This order within fairy tales is so important because, as Goytisolo depicts it, real life is utterly chaotic, illogical, unjust; the second quotation above continues: ‘antídoto necesario de la vida pobre y descalza, el hambre insatisfecha, la realidad inicua’. He overturns the traditional concept that the cosmos is perfectly ordered, typified by Fray Luis de León in ‘Noche serena’:

el gran concierto
de aquestos resplandores eternales,
su movimiento cierto,
sus pasos desiguales,
y en proporción concorde tan iguales.(26)

Goytisolo prefers to see the cosmos as chaos: ‘la caótica y delirante geometría de los astros’.²⁷

The fairy-tale world provides a much-needed escape from this chaos—the ‘antídoto necesario’—but when Goytisolo comes to use a fairy tale as a metaphor for, rather than an escape from, an aspect of real life—the transition from child to adult—he chooses one which is striking for its departure from the typical orderly reward and punishment structure, given that he takes Perrault's ending of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. After all, even if Perrault's heroine is guilty to some degree for being gullible, the grandmother has done nothing whatsoever to deserve her fate and the wicked wolf is unpunished. Goytisolo heightens the injustice—that is to say, lack of order—in the tale, by omitting the encounter in the forest; he renders it completely chaotic and thus provides one more illustration of the ubiquitous implication of the novels from Señas de identidad onwards, that the world is essentially governed not by some natural order, but by natural chaos.

Thus far, parallels with and divergences from Perrault's version have been established in Goytisolo's treatment of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. Now let us consider the influence exercised by the German story. In the first passage of the fourth section of Reivindicación, where the actual parody of the fairy tale is to be found, we have remarked that the mother gives the child no warning to keep to the path in the forest, just like the Perrault version. However, in the subsequent passages, dealing with the child self's destruction by the adult self, we find that mothers in general, if not the child self's own mother specifically, do warn their children off the ‘wolf’ of the adult self: ‘apúrate niña dicen las madres’ as they pass his abode; ‘no le miréis: dicen que con sus ojos hipnotiza’ (216).

Zipes characterizes the Grimms' version, in contrast with Perrault, as ‘fundamentally a justification of law and order and against individual autonomy and imagination … Salvation comes only in the form of a male patriarch who patrols the woods and controls the unruly forces of nature—both inner and outer … Erotic play and seduction appear to capture the imagination of the French, whereas the Germans are more concerned with law and order.’²⁸ If Zipes is correct in his theory that it is the Grimms who emphasize the rule of law and the control of inner and outer unruly nature, then it is against their version that Goytisolo is striking back in his treatment of the theme of inner and outer temptation. The child self is ‘acosado de … demonios e íncubos’ (215). On the level of the narrative as it is told, we may see the adult as the external demon and the child's fascination with him as the internal incubus driving him towards evil. However, at the same time, we know that the apparently external character of the adult is really the child's own future self. In other words, on the more abstract level, the adult—the child's potential—is within himself. Thus, Goytisolo undermines the concept of an evil outer force in the world by showing it to be fundamentally and ultimately illusory. As for the supposedly evil nature of the internal force which drives the child into becoming the lupine Julián, the whole book, as its title establishes, is dedicated to its defence.

The concept of the path as the way to avoid the dangers of the wild forest, which is found in Grimms (there is no mention of a path in Perrault), is ironically subverted in Reivindicación, for here the path leads to the adult self's door, so that when the child succumbs, ‘seguirá la pasadera de tablas’ to the ‘umbral de tu choza’ (219). Goytisolo thus emphasizes that it is not the child's naughty departure from the ‘right way’ which leads him into the wolf's clutches, but his natural direction.

Finally, there is an echo of Grimms in the location of the adult's hut. In Perrault, the grandmother lives in a village on the other side of the forest, whereas in Grimms, she lives in the middle of it, isolated from society. It might be argued that the adult self is the counterpart of the wolf and not of the grandmother in Goytisolo's re-working, and therefore, that the grandmother's house in conventional versions should not be compared with the wolf's in Reivindicación. However, the fact remains that the conventional Little Red Riding Hood meets her fate in the grandmother's house. As the place where she is devoured, therefore, they are parallel. Now, the adult self's abode is located in the middle of the no-man's-land of a building-site: ‘grúas, apisonadoras, maquinaria que enmohecen bajo raídas fundas de lona: y junto a las pailas de alquitrán y sacos de cemento, tu choza’ (215–16). The nightmarish implications of such isolation are exploited by the adult tormentor: ‘chilla, chilla, le dices, que aquí nadie te oye’ (220). When the reader remembers that this torment is only being depicted as external, but is really the internal trauma of reaching adulthood, he perceives the significance of Goytisolo's use of the Grimms' version in this detail, for it vividly portrays the psychological isolation of the child in his anguish.

Having discussed the relationship of Goytisolo's treatment of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ with its antecedents, we may now consider the Freudian and initiatory interpretation of the story. As we have seen, Bettelheim interprets ‘The Three Little Pigs’ as a spatial representation of temporal development. In the light of this, it is perhaps of interest to note that far from being a modern literary gimmick, Goytisolo's depiction of the child and adult selves as spatially, rather than temporally distinct entities follows in respected folkloric tradition. Although he uses two, instead of three characters, the essence of the image remains intact; it is as if the first two pigs had been amalgamated to form a single symbol, but in both cases, the more immature nature is destroyed in order to make way for the adult persona.

Yet, although the three generations of women in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ are reminiscent of ‘The Three Little Pigs’, the concept of immaturity yielding to adulthood is absent or reversed in the former story. In Perrault, both old and young are indiscriminately killed and in Grimms, they are both equally indiscriminately saved, whereas in the traditional version, the idea is reversed, for it is the old grandmother who dies and the young girl who survives. This is the antique initiatory pattern, whereby the new generation must take over from the old. Goytisolo ingeniously succeeds in fusing the symbolism typified by ‘The Three Little Pigs’ and its converse, as exemplified by the traditional version of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, for Alvarito is at once destroyed in his immature form and permitted to become an adult through his metamorphosis into Julián following the initiatory instruction in carnal knowledge.

However, in Perrault's version of the story, which of course Goytisolo follows in the ending, the initiation is not completed. There is the separation from the mother, the isolation from the community intended to be with an elder of the same sex, and the death, or return to chaos, through being swallowed by the wolf; but the rebirth as an adult and the return to the community in this new role never take place. This is perhaps one of the reasons for which Goytisolo selects ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ from the extensive range of fairy tales, many others of which also have an initiatory structure, but a completed one. ‘Hop o'My Thumb’ (Perrault's ‘Le Petit Poucet’), for example, also has an initiatory theme, but here it is carried through to a happy ending with the protagonist's safe return home and new-found riches. Goytisolo does in fact allude to this story too, but only to its beginning, that is to say, to the state of separation from the mother.²⁹

The truncated initiation rite of Perrault's ‘Le Petit Chaperon Rouge’ is particularly suited to Goytisolo's needs, for the return to the community of the initiated adolescent is conspicuous by its absence throughout the novels from Señas de identidad onwards. In Juan sin tierra, it is explained thus: ‘el exilio te ha convertido en un ser distinto, que nada tiene que ver con el que conocieron: su ley ya no es tu ley’.³⁰ This would seem to go to the heart of the issue; initiation rites are, after all, a statement of acceptance of the social framework into which one has been born. To participate in an initiation ritual, even though this may begin by being severed from one's community, is to affirm one's desire to return and be accepted by its members. The lapse into chaos in the belly of the beast, or some other symbolic representation of this, must, by definition, be temporary, for it only exists as the prerequisite of rebirth into order, the order of adulthood.

Now, Goytisolo's protagonists want to break away from their native society permanently; they do not want to be accepted back into the Spanish bourgeois community to become an ‘enmedallado paquidermo’.³¹ Moreover, their ideal society is represented by the concept of chaos, so to find themselves in a chaotic environment is not a mercifully short-lived ordeal, but the realization of their ideal. On this level, Perrault's ending of ‘Le Petit Chaperon Rouge’ is indeed paradigmatic, for the eponymous heroine never goes back home. In fact, on the symbolic level, the dénouement is a happy one, as far as the mentality of Goytisolo's protagonists are concerned, for the child manages to cut herself off from ordered society and to be engulfed by chaos, the symbol of freedom and fecundity in the novels from the trilogy onwards.

In the murder of the child by his own adult self in Reivindicación, the same drama is enacted. The child breaks away from his home life and his community's values and then, instead of returning as a socially conforming adult—as in the trajectory of the three little pigs, according to Bettelheim—he is initiated into quite another type of adulthood, namely, that of the wolf: the socially inadmissible, dreaded, rejected symbol of evil.

Putting together Perrault and Grimms, the chain of associations appears thus: from Perrault, we see that the wolf is in some sense also a man, and from Grimms, that he is identified with sin. In other words, the figure of the demoniacal werewolf lurks beneath the quaint talking animal of the nursery tale. The symbolic thread is circular: the wolf/werewolf is a symbol of the devil; chaos is the principle of the devil's domain, Hell; going into the belly of a beast symbolizes the descent into Hell or primordial chaos; Goytisolo's protagonists are apologists for chaos. It follows, therefore, that ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is indeed paradigmatic for them, laden as it is with the components of chaos. On the symbolic level, there is the wolf himself and the fact of being swallowed by an animal. On the broad surface level of the narrative, the just order is flouted with the villain emerging victorious and the heroine defeated. On the analytical level, there is a host of detail which accumulates to produce the undermining of the order principle of differentiation, with boundaries blurred between humans and animals, between male and female. The paradigmatic value of ‘Caperucita y el lobo feroz’, although exploited by Goytisolo in a multitude of different ways, as we have sought to show, is surely in its enactment of a victory of chaos over order.

Notes

1. ‘La paradigmática historia de Caperucita y el lobo feroz’, Juan Goytisolo, Reivindicación del conde don Julián, Biblioteca Breve, second edition (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1982), 95. Page references given in the text of the article relate to this edition.

2. The first allusion appears in the first section of Reivindicación, on p. 13. See also p. 95, for example. On p. 104, in the priest's sermon, one of the images which he uses for vice—‘lobos sanguinarios’—is perhaps prefigurative. Linda Gould Levine analyses the precise effects of these early references to ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in Juan Goytisolo: la destrucción creadora, Confrontaciones: Los Críticos (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1976), 212–15, 221, 228, 230–31. I have nothing to add to her impressive analysis of Goytisolo's intertextual structuring of prefigurative allusions to the fourth section of the novel.

3. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (London: Allen and Unwin, 1964), 201. The adventure to which Eliade is referring in the quotation is the symbolic quest; this is connected with his theory of initiatory symbolism in fairy tales, which will be discussed presently. For examples of other interpretations, see: Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976) (Freudian). Marie Louise von Franz, Interpretation of Fairytales: An Introduction to the Psychology of Fairytales (Zurich: Spring Publications, 1975) (Jungian). Frank Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization (London: Heinemann, 1983) (Socio-historical). All these different approaches shed light on the huge range of potential meanings of fairy tales, but for the purposes of this article we shall find Bettelheim and Zipes particularly useful.

4. For a discussion of the distortion of the classic fairy tales by Disney, see Frank Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk or Fairy Tales (London: Heinemann, 1979), 114 ff.

5. ‘Les contes de Perrault se caractérisent … par une certaine rationalisation du merveilleux, avec une méfiance et une ironie à l'égard de tout ce que … relève des superstitions païennes, et par une superposition manifeste, au niveau de l'écriture, du moraliste, … mais aussi par des omissions … de motifs “crus”, scatologiques ou païens propres aux contes populaires et faisant insulte aux “bienséances”.’ Lilyane Mourey, Introduction aux contes de Grimm et de Perrault: histoire, structure, mise en texte (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1978), 29.

6. See Frank Zipes, The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: Versions of the Tale in Sociocultural Context (London: Heinemann, 1983), 14–19.

7. Reproduced in Mélusine: recueil de mythologie, littérature populaire, traditions et usages, ed. H. Gaidoz and E. Rolland (Paris: Librairie Historique des Provinces, 1886–87), III, columns 428–29.

8. On voit ici que de jeunes enfants,
   Surtout de jeunes filles
   Belles, bien faites, et gentilles,
   Font très mal d'écouter toute sorte de gens,
   Et que ce n'est pas chose étrange,
   S'il en est tant que le loup mange.
   Je dis le loup, car tous les loups
   Ne sont pas de la même sorte;
   Il en est d'une humeur accorte,
   Sans bruit, sans fiel et sans courroux,
   Qui *privés, complaisants et doux
   Suivent les jeunes Demoiselles
   Jusque dans les maisons, jusque dans les *ruelles;
   Mais hélas! qui ne sait que ces Loups doucereux,
   De tous les Loups sont les plus dangereux.

   * privé = fàmiliar

   * ruelle = ‘Se dit des alcôves et des lieux parés où les dames reçoivent leurs visites’ [Furetière].

   ‘Le Petit Chaperon Rouge’, in Perrault, Contes, ed. Gilbert Rouger (Paris: Garnier, 1967), 109–15 (115).

9. The story of ‘The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids’ ends with the mother goat rescuing six of her seven children from the belly of a wolf, alive. The wolf's belly is filled with stones and sewn up again while he is still asleep; when he awakes he goes to a well to drink, but the weight of the stones makes him fall in and drown. For the full story, see The Complete Grimms' Fairy Tales (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 39–42.

10. Marc Soriano, ‘Le Petit Chaperon Rouge’, in La Nouvelle Revue Française, CXC (1968), 429–43, at 433–34. For a discussion of the genre of warning tales for children, see: John Widdowson, ‘The Witch as a Frightening and Threatening Figure’, in The Witch Figure: Folklore Essays by a Group of Scholars in England Honouring the 75th Birthday of Katharine M. Briggs, ed. Venetia Newall (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 200–20. Although many different traditional versions exist, for the sake of brevity, references in this article to ‘the traditional version’ will denote the one summarized on p. 142. Regarding the long-standing popularity of Perrault and the availability of his stories even in far-flung rural communities, see Lilyane Mourey, 16–17.

11. Perrault, 113 and 115, respectively.

12. Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, 26.

13. The Little Tailor convinces the King and everyone else that he is of superhuman strength: sharp-witted and nimble, he outwits one giant, induces another two to kill each other and makes it look as though he did away with them himself, captures a fierce unicorn and savage boar, for which he wins the hand of the King's daughter and half of the kingdom. Finally, he frightens away the King's servants, who have been ordered to take him captive (because his true identity of a mere tailor has been revealed), so keeping his princess and kingdom ever after. (‘The Valiant Little Tailor’, in Complete Grimms’, 112–20.) In Perrault's ‘Le Petit Poucet’, the eponymous hero uses his sharp wits to save himself and his brothers from a cannibalistic ogre and then tricks the ogre's wife into giving him all her husband's riches. (Contes, 187–98).

14. Contes, 113.

15. ‘In Talmud myth, Lilith, the former wife of Adam, became a serpent and gave Eve forbidden knowledge. In ecclesiastical art and architecture this myth was frequently superimposed on the Christian myth, and the serpent ( … ) was often given a woman's face.’ Beryl Rowland, Animals with Human Faces: A Guide to Animal Symbolism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1974), 144. See also Revelation 17:2–6.

16. Cited in Zipes, Trials and Tribulations …, 48.

17. Bettelheim, 44.

18. P. Saintyves, Les Contes de Perrault et les récits parallèles: leurs origines (coutumes primitives et liturgies populaires) (Paris: Librairie Critique, 1923). Mircea Eliade, Birth and Rebirth: The Religious Meanings of Initiation in Human Culture, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper and Bros, 1958), 126.

19. Eliade, Birth and Rebirth, xiii, 4, 36–37.

20. Goytisolo said this when I interviewed him in August 1985 in Paris (unpublished).

21. Gould Levine, 213.

22. A few examples (texts may be consulted in the Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid): La Caperucita Roja: narración infantil seguida de otros cuentos para niños, Biblioteca Escolar Recreativa, 5 (Madrid: Saturnino Calleja Fernández, undated, probably about 1910). A comparatively faithful version of Grimms’. La Caperucita Encarnada (Paris: Laplace Sánchez, [1875]). Perrault ending, but Grimms-style warning by mother which Caperucita disobeys. Caperucita Roja: cuento de Perrault. Cuentos en Colores, 2 (Barcelona: Ramon Sopena, [1930]). Not a direct translation, but follows Perrault in plot. Incidentally, the illustrations in this edition depict Caperucita as a coquettish adolescent, not an innocent child.

23. Perrault: ‘Ma mère-grand, que vous avez de grands bras!—C'est pour mieux t'embrasser, ma fille.—Ma mère-grand, que vous avez de grandes jambes!—C'est pour mieux courir, mon enfant.—Ma mère-grand, que vous avez de grandes oreilles!—C'est pour mieux écouter, mon enfant.—Ma mère-grand, que vous avez de grands yeux!—C'est pour mieux voir, mon enfant.—Ma mère-grand, que vous avez de grandes dents!—C'est pour te manger’; Contes, 115.

    Goytisolo: ‘abuelita, qué brazos tan grandes tienes! / es para abrazarte mejor, rey mío / abuelita, qué piernas tan grandes tienes! / es para correr mejor, rey mío / abuelita, qué grandes tienes las orejas! / es para oírte mejor, cielo mío / abuelita, qué grandes son tus ojos! / es para verte mejor, corazón mío / abuelita, qué bicha tan grande tienes! / es para penetrarte mejor, so imbécil!’ (209).

24. Gould Levine makes clear this connection between Caperucito's mother and the patria in her comments on the manifestations of Isabel la Católica throughout Reivindicación. She states that Isabel represents ‘los valores de la España oficial’ (which are destined to be betrayed by the protagonist) and adds that ‘la figura de este símbolo hispánico aparece tres veces en la novela: como madre de Séneca-don Álvaro-“Tonelete” en la segunda parte, como hija de don Álvaro-caballero cristiano en la tercera, y como madre del niño al final de la obra, tres identidades totalmente intercambiables’; La destrucción creadora, 193.

25. Juan Goytisolo, Makbara (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1983), 48 and 220, respectively.

26. ‘Noche serena’, lines 41–45, in Fray Luis de León, Poesías: poesías originales, traducción de las églogas de Virgilio, traducción de los cantares de Salomón, ed. Ángel Custodio Vega (Barcelona: Planeta, 1980), 30.

27. Juan Goytisolo, Juan sin tierra (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1982), 42.

28. Zipes, Trials and Tribulations …, 18 and 24.

29. See, for example, Reivindicación, 52, and Juan sin tierra, 131. The story of ‘Le Petit Poucet’ begins with the parents abandoning their seven sons in the forest because they can no longer afford to feed them. Poucet guides his brothers home by following a trail of pebbles that he had laid on the way out. The parents succeed in their plan the second time, however, for Poucet uses crumbs instead of pebbles and the birds have eaten the trail when he looks for it (Contes, 183–98 [187–91]). Goytisolo's allusions to the story are limited to this first part of it and the symbolism of trying to retrace one's steps home.

30. Juan sin tierra, 63.

31. Juan sin tierra, 124.