SOURCE: “The Politics of Ventriloquism: Cava, Revolution and Sexual Discourse in Conde Julián,” in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 107, No. 2, March, 1992, pp. 274-97.

[In the following essay, Epps provides a reading of Goytisolo's Reivindicación del Conde don Julián “that will attempt to reveal at least some of the more troubling points at which Goytisolo's de(con)structive activity unwittingly betrays itself as faithful to the established tradition, in particular the tradition of women's oppression.”]

If metaphor can be misconstrued,
history can also lead to misconstrual
when it obliterates acts of resistance or rebellion

Adrienne Rich

Il est très doux de scandaliser

Sade

As the paradigmatic Spanish morality play, King Rodrigo's violation of Cava and Count Julián's subsequent betrayal of Spain tell a story of lust, honor, and vengeance that intimately links individual action and collective destiny. It is a story told and retold in ballads, chronicles, dramas, and novels, a story that, for all its permutations, appears to remain essentially constant: the violence of sexual desire, irrespective of the power or position of those who yield to it, is of such magnitude that civilization itself is threatened with destruction. Freudian avant la lettre, this eminently Spanish triangle of desire, written and read as moral lesson, represents a space of repression that the narrator of Juan Goytisolo's Reivindicación del Conde don Julián struggles to blow apart.¹ The tools for this de(con)structive project, taken from within the very space of repression and thus dangerously double-edged, are textuality and history. These two terms, brought together under the ægis of political critique, designate a strategic intertextuality that explodes the supposed immutability of (moral) paradigms by repeating them, necessarily with a difference. Exploiting the radical potential of such necessary difference, Conde Julián repeats the story of Cava, Julián, and Rodrigo, and reiterates the moral interpretation that claims to have mastered the story's meaning. Through repetition and reiteration, Conde Julián hollows out the (repressed) space of representation as forever other, as forever traversed by places past, as forever cut by an erratic flow of other texts and other histories.

But in affirming the otherness of representation, Conde Julián necessarily affirms interpretative possibilities that are indeed other than the ones it explicitly endorses. Thus, although the story of Cava's violation and Spain's betrayal enables Goytisolo to reinterpret morality and tradition, and hence to undermine the supposed necessity of the status quo, it is a story that is itself perhaps always other than it seems. Following Goytisolo's lead, my reading of the story of Cava, Rodrigo, and Julián, of the story replayed in and as Conde Julián, takes as its hazardous bases the very destruction of bases the text purports to enact. In other words, mine is a reading that will attempt to reveal at least some of the more troubling points at which Goytisolo's de(con)structive activity unwittingly betrays itself as faithful to the established tradition, in particular the tradition of women's oppression. And for a text that presents itself as a betrayal of all things established, for a text that professes to undermine the bases of power, such a reading is not without its own curious turns. That is to say, such a reading is itself, paradoxically, most faithful to the text by betraying it.

Herein lies the dangerous power of intertextuality: in its limitless reversibility, in its denial of ends and origins, in its confusion of authorial voices, intertextuality is less substance than method and cannot in fact function as the permanent base for any one political project. And yet, in its very mutability, intertextuality is clearly most compelling as a tool against what Conde Julián presents as ideological rigidity and intellectual stagnation, as the powerfully conservative legacy of Seneca, to wit, “la aceptación estoica del destino histórico” (110). Sweeping through boundaries, incessantly absorbing, negating and (re)affirming codes, intertextuality may function as what Vincent Leitch describes as “an abysmal ground and as a strategic instrument” (161). Central to the decentering devices of Julián's de(con)structive project, intertextuality writes a radically different history, one that, discontinuous and dispersive, dreams of wresting a realm of freedom from necessity.² Against the fatal tyranny of codified history, against the relentless teleology of transcendence, of “la Historia como un lento proceso de auto-depuración, como un continuo ejercicio ascético de perfeccionamiento” (111), against all this, the interplay of texts possesses, as Goytisolo knows, immense subversive potential.

Chief among Conde Julián's subversive intertextual plays is the narrator's relation to the mythico-historical figure of Count Julián. Exchanging his former signs of identity for those of Count Julián, the narrator defiantly assumes the role of the traitor and, systematically inverting conventional Spanish values, renders betrayal darkly heroic. Moreover, pondering his plans for the destruction of Spain, the narrator, as Julián, recognizes the power of memory, its rich potential to betray History: “reviviendo el recuerdo de tus humillaciones y agravios, acumulando gota a gota tu odio: sin Rodrigo, ni Frandina, ni Cava: nuevo conde don Julián, fraguando sombrías traiciones” (16). Memory, in Julián's case, has no room for others, no room for Rodrigo and Cava. Instead, self-concentrated and self-absorbed, memory distills an ever more potent hatred: of the past, of history, of memory itself. Personal and private, humiliating and hateful, memory reveals itself here as at once narcissistic and self-destructive, forever reviving an inner strife, forever rewriting an anger whose elusive objective is memory's own forgetting.

In Conde Julián, memory, in order to magnify hatred, in order to counter dominant History, becomes mythic. Reviving the mythic role of Julián, the narrator effectively remembers himself as another, and attains, in the process, an anonymity that masks his personal anger as universal. Where the Alvaro of Señas de identidad finds himself constrained by particular historical circumstances, the un-named narrator of Conde Julián appears to achieve, by means of a legendary re-identification, a demiurgic power that transcends history itself.³ Thus, as a “nuevo conde don Julián,” the narrator, by actualizing the treacherous force of the past, hoodwinks Francoist time, undoes its promise of prosperity and progress, mocks paternalistic power, and becomes master of himself. Or so he claims. Addressing both the reader and himself, the narrator declares his newly found independence from Spain and its tyrannically historical destiny: “dueño proteico de tu destino, sí, y, lo que es mejor, fuera del devenir histórico: del raudo progreso que, según testigos, juvenece la faz, ayer dormida y torva, hoy floreciente y dinámica del vetusto país” (26). Outside the flow of history, the narrator enjoys an imaginary freedom that those who remain enthralled by Franco can never know. As Count Julián, the narrator re-presents the past and in so doing ruptures the confident linearity of history, the necessity of progress, the ineluctability of Francoism. The attack on progress and linearity, by now a trademark of postmodern thought, is here important to the notion of a dispersive, discontinuous history that Julián dreams as liberating. It is important because at the same time that it effectively shatters and un-writes the history of domination and oppression, it vindicates another history, itself shattered and unwritten, of the marginalized and the disenfranchised. This liberating history of the marginalized and the disenfranchised, of Arabs and Blacks, homosexuals and women, is thus a history against the progress of oppression, a counter-history that, like Foucault's counter-memory, remembers history as “a totally different form of time” (160). Indeed, where Francoism justifies itself in the name of progress, where political and sexual repression are deemed necessary for economic growth, Julián can hardly construe his critique in straightforwardly progressive terms. Attacking the material advances, “los menguados beneficios de la arrabalera, peninsular sociedad de consumo: de esa España que engorda sí, pero que sigue muda” (44), Julián reacts against the generalized faith in modernity by reaffirming and “rehistoricizing” the radical potential supposedly inherent in the violent myths of the past. Consequently, in what is one of Conde Julián's many paradoxes, the fight against fascism, indeed the critique of ideology proper, becomes less a progressive than a reactive endeavor.⁴

Reacting against the (im)material prosperity and heavy silences of Francoist Spain, Julián forges a different economy, an economy of violent pleasure whose standard of value—relying as it does on memory and its historical exacerbation—is of mythic proportions. That pleasure is violent, and hence painfully ambiguous, responds to an equally violent tradition of sublimation and spirituality, renunciation and transcendence, that discards the base materiality of the human body only to end up haunting, centuries later, the super-materialism of technology. In the age of corporate idolatry, the spiritual denial of the body has become mechanical. It is, in Julián's eye, an age where bureaucrats bow down to IBM and where television is the medium of holy communion. Fleshing out the ghost in the machine of Spanish capitalism, reaching back to re-member the victims of Empire and Inquisition, Julián brings forth a battered body, a tortured corpus hispanicum that in denying sensual pleasure, in denying what Goytisolo presents as the Oriental principle, has denied life itself. It is, then, this ghastly denial of the body that Julián, in turn, must deny with almost mechanical repetitiveness, “como ayer, como mañana, como todos los días” (239).

The danger in such a reactive denial is, of course, that it remains subject to the object of critique, that it replicates perhaps a bit too closely, a bit too indifferently, the ideological violence that it professes to master. The danger, in short, is that the critique of historical violence may become, as Foucault repeatedly points out, its own worst enemy. In mentioning danger, however, I do not mean to imply that Conde Julián is oblivious to its own involvement in the system of violence and oppression it strives to reject. In fact, in broken sentences and fragmented characters, Goytisolo's text tells the story of violence as always a story of self-violence. But if Goytisolo's text presents its self-violence as Julián's furious desdoblamiento and rape of Alvarito, as a sadomasochistic dialogue with the self, as a rapturous rupture of literary conventions, it does another violence to itself, a violence not so openly acknowledged. This other violence, as we shall see, is one that trips up the Utopian dream of liberation, one that scandalizes the scandal of Goytisolian sexuality.

In Julián's textual world, liberation is the effect of a scandalous repetition. And in calling such repetition “scandalous,” I am not alluding merely to a conventional sense of moral propriety or sexual decency. The sense of “scandal” that I wish here to mine is from the Greek skandalon, meaning “trap” or “stumbling block.” As I read it, Julián's repetition is scandalous insofar as the past is reiterated in order to trip up and impede the inexorable movement of history. Julián's scandalous assault on Spain is thus not merely a semantic inversion or a re-scription of content, not merely a repositioning of negative and positive valences—what was “evil” is now “good” and vice versa—but a powerful formal trap as well. In other words, the very act of repetition, of re-presentation, seizes history and disrupts its supposedly unidirectional unfolding—that is to say, its progress—by foregrounding its dependence on memory, and hence on subjectivity, fleeting and fluctuant. Obviously, to imagine freedom in repetition owes much to Nietzsche and Derrida, to a radical rewriting of necessity that underscores the subversive potential of a willful return of the past.⁵

Willing the past to return, Julián, as we have seen, writes himself as its author. It is in this sense that Julián's authority is actually the effect of an unauthorized, if not unauthoritative, historiography. What is at stake for Julián in such a (re)writing of authority is not simply an escape from Francoism per se, but freedom from the entire monolith of Spanish History. Trapped in the repressive space of Historical representation, Julián struggles against the gravity of cultural grandeur: “el peso ejemplar de su heroísmo, su piedad, su saber, su conducta, su gloria: de tantos y tantos hechos y actitudes distinguidos y nobles: humanas flores de la virtud cimera: guerreros, santos, mártires, conquistadores” (33). Given the weight of Spanish History—“el peso ejemplar de su heroísmo”—Julián's darkly heroic quest for liberation cannot be obsessively oriented towards the future, but must first and foremost be re-oriented towards the past. In Conde Julián, this rigorous re-orientation is, in fact, a re-orientalization, a return to and recuperation of the buried Orient that Spain refuses to unearth and indeed professes to have transcended. To repeat the past of the Spanish nation is thus to re-orient it, to re-present it as a space of scandalous sexuality that blocks the pure progression of History and stumbles against the lessons of the status quo. Blocking the spurious progress of History, re-orienting the Spanish tradition, and re-membering another, buried past of play and possibility, a past that Goytisolo extrapolates from the work of Américo Castro, Conde Julián raises revenge—the willful repetition of crime—to an art.

Yet, seeking revenge—that is to say, narrating—without Cava, Frandina or Rodrigo, Goytisolo's reinvigorated Count Julián only partially betrays the (established) History of Spain. In fact, the story that Julián remembers is one that faithfully reaffirms the silent history of women, one that remains loyal—as the advertencia at the end of the text makes clear—to an entire narrative tradition that is almost exclusively male.⁶ Now, clearly, to the degree that Julián remembers Spanish literary history only to dis-member it all the more efficiently, the “lack” of women in the advertencia may here, if nowhere else, be read as positive. Nevertheless, the fact remains that such a lack is more than filled with the repressively anti-corporeal “presence” of the mystical Saint Teresa, the one woman who does figure among the list of the masters. Although Goytisolo comes to valorize mysticism in his latest novel, Las virtudes del pájaro solitario, in Conde Julián, the concept of spiritual renunciation, of bodily transcendence, is precisely what he repudiates as being most horribly Spanish. Teresa—like Lope and Machado, each for widely divergent reasons—is, with little doubt, one of Conde Julián's many negative influences and one of its most significant targets of satire. Furthermore, while it is true that Saint Teresa does not appear directly in the narrative itself, she is, nonetheless, constantly evoked in the figure of Queen Isabel, her textual counterpart. Like Teresa, Isabel is depicted as at once stoical and mystical. Like her, Isabel signifies the denial of the libidinal body, the very denial that Julián finds so ghastly. Mystical and masochistic, Isabel is the ghost who haunts Julián's dreams of full pleasure, the ghost whose flesh Julián must reaffirm, in order to flay it all the better.

In what may be read as an uncanny reworking of Simone de Beauvoir's dialectic of immanence and transcendence, Goytisolo's text pits the female body against the spirit. To make the assault on the spiritual tradition of Spain all the more virulent, to drive home the notion of the primacy of the sexual body, Conde Julián collapses Isabel's transcendental aspirations back into a world of immanence, a world described as follows: “horrible mundo, rezumante y vis-coso, de canales, vesículas, glándulas, nervios, arterias, secreciones, membranas y vasos, proteico reino de lo blando e informe, de la flora rastrera e inmunda, de la obscena ebullición de lo inorgánico” (171).⁷ This soft, formless, viscous world of oozing female corporeality is, to be sure, strikingly similar to Beauvoir's own representation of the myths of femininity and to the Sartrean nausea she experiences towards menstruation and maternity. For his part, Julián, in what is undoubtedly one of the text's most notorious passages, enters this world of soft horror that Beauvoir wishes to transcend (the “gruta sagrada”), penetrates each of its so-called secrets with the precision of a surgeon, and, after almost losing himself there, comes out more knowledgeable, more ruthless, more violent. Proudly overcoming the limitations of the body, he realizes, mutatis mutandis, Beauvoir's goal of authentic subjectivity. That is to say, he realizes, almost in spite of himself, a fearful form of transcendence. However much Julián may extol the sexual body, when it comes to women, he seems to believe that it is always best to get beyond the body, or in other words, to control. And control, as Beauvoir never tires of repeating, is what authentic existence is all about. For Julián, the control of the body—specifically the female body fantasized as dark and fluid—bears a haunting resemblance to ascetic practice, here rendered even more haunting in its curious, though timely, ties to Sartrean existentialism. By this I mean that in the celebration of self-definition, authenticity, and individual responsibility, in the faith in the human subject's ability to (re)write history from a personal situation, and in the anguished fear of female flesh, of a desire that Beauvoir herself describes as “the soft throbbing of a mollusc” (407), Goytisolo's text adheres to many of the most rigid and anti-corporeal formulations of existentialism.

Now, if the existentialist notion of freedom offers an appealing promise of empowerment, it is not, as Toril Moi explains, without its traps. Insofar as it construes freedom as the hard mastery of the softly fluid body, existentialism, at least in its Sartrean variety, advocates an escape from immanence that, in both Goytisolo and Beauvoir, is ultimately configured as an escape from female sexuality.⁸ In fact, Julián's particular story, like History in general, presents itself as a flight from women, as an erasure of their mark. Describing his self-actualizing betrayal and his violent act of personal liberation, Julián reveals the price of both to be a denial, in body and soul, of women; he reveals the refuge of the Orient to be a treacherous haven of masculinity:

aquí la nefanda traición dulcemente florece: víbora, reptilia o serpiente enconada que, al nacer, rompe los yjares de la madre: tu vientre liso ignora la infamia del ombligo: vida y muerte se confunden en ti con rigurosidad exacta. (126)

Here Julián presents his betrayal of Spain as a matricidal rupture that issues in salvation, in absolute freedom, in transcendence. His belly sleek and unpunctured, Julián is the serpent that defies death and bears no mark of female attachment. Free from what he essentially understands as the voracious immanence of the female body, Julián moves evermore beyond history and into the realm of myth. Striving to realize his demiurgic dreams, Julián, in the opinion of Jerome Bernstein, (re)creates himself “by parthogenesis … as an independent human being truly free of a destructive past” (353).⁹ And yet this ostensibly independent act of self-creation, of liberation from a destructive past, is itself a replication, on a mythic superhuman register, of historical destruction. Remembering the past only to destroy it more completely, and evoking the feminine only to eradicate it more fiercely, Goytisolo's traitor does not quite betray the well-worn lessons of history, the legacy of women's oppression. Memory, it seems, is not only violent, but violently masculine. And what it consistently re-members is, at least in Conde Julián, the powerfully symbolic value of the phallus.

That Conde Julián's standard of mythic value is ultimately phallic conforms strikingly well to the history of Cava's rape. For inasmuch as Cava's is a story told by men, it is a story of brutal silence. Cava, as history will have it, is the least “historical” of the characters involved. Despite the pivotal role she plays, Cava—unlike Julián, Rodrigo, Vitiza, Muça, Tariq, and a host of male personages—is a literary afterthought. Missing from the earliest recorded accounts of the Moorish conquest, “Cava” is merely a name that arises to fill a narrative lack, a structural gap. In the Primera crónica general (circa 1275), Cava, as yet in-significant, as yet absent from the tale's onomasticon, is indeed the dark and empty space her name comes to imply; and her rape—the violation of the enchanted, sacred cave that is one of the principal motifs of Goytisolo's text¹⁰—is in fact the rape of a nameless, albeit jealously guarded, possession. Skirting the unnameable, the Crónica general places the locus of meaning firmly within the symbolic realm of the Father's law by designating the rape as the rape of Julian's daughter or wife: “la fuerça que fué fecha a la fija o a la muger del cuende Julián” (307). Without a proper name, the woman in question is significant only insofar as she is related to Julián, to the man who, having “lawfully” appropriated the body of “la fija o la muger,” will read the rape as his own, as a violation of his sovereignty. Functioning as the proper point of reference, Julián alone gives meaning to the supposed indeterminacy and instability of feminine identity. “Algunos dizen,” the Crónica general informs us, with regard to Rodrigo, “que fué la muger y que ge la forçó [Rodrigo]; mas pero destas dos [fija o muger] qualquier que fuesse, desto se levantó destroimiento de España et de la Galia Góthica” (308). Whoever the rape victim may be, wife or daughter, history still manages to chronicle what is important: the force of kings, the ways of war, the downfall of nations. And yet when history thus chronicles the insignificance of feminine specificity, when history records the woman as indeterminate and replaceable, as nothing in and of herself but the pretext of “historical” meaning—here the “destroimiento de España” that arises out of rape—history speaks in spite of itself; it unwittingly articulates another story that it thought silent.

The other story, the one that Goytisolo, obeying the conventions of history, does not tell, is Cava's story. And if I say that Goytisolo obeys history even as he imagines himself most disobedient, it is because I read his text's obsessive rape of the female body as a suppressed, silenced text of history itself. Strategically shifting ground from Julián to Cava and engaging the power of intertextuality from a different perspective, I hope to show to what degree Julián's “radical” project is actually consistent with dominant culture, to what degree his desire for a “palabra sin historia” (125), for an utterly liberated language, is always self-constrained, and finally to what degree his myths, his legends, his narratives, are always suffused with history. Let me quickly add that I am not ascribing to Goytisolo some deep affinity to Galdós or a realist aesthetic, but rather that I understand his text as attesting to a more extensive impulse, indeed a violently silent and non-narrative impulse, that strives to maintain a certain historical illegibility. By this I mean that narrative history is also, at least where women have been concerned, a narrative against narration, a narrative of restriction and silence, suppression and illiteracy, a narrative where some invariably narrate (for) others.¹¹

Although this narrative of non-narration has, among others, racial and class implications, it is the non-narration of Cava which I, aware of the contradictions implicit in my own narrating position, here find most significant.¹² Having said that Goytisolo's text obediently rapes and silences women, I will now proceed to substantiate my claim that it remains faithful to an extensive tradition of masculinist writing. Now, where the sexual politics of the Spanish tradition are concerned, perhaps no one provides a better example than the prolific, and prolifically amorous, Lope de Vega. Cava's story, faltering in the first Chronicles, is reshaped, indeed re-nationalized, in Lope's El último godo. Here, Florinda, as a reflowered Cava, professes her silent submission to Julián's fatherly law: “Vuestra voluntad es ley, / Y el silencio mi obediencia” (83). Silence is woman's duty, expression, her crime. Hence, for the woman to publicize sexual violence, for her to cry out for justice and expose both crime and criminal, for her to take the law in her own hands, is precisely what honor—so thick in Spanish tradition—most fears. Honor cuts the flow of information, censors content for the sake of form, and underscores the bonds between power and public knowledge. Thus, as long as Cava's rape is not divulged, Rodrigo is able to believe that he has committed no offence, that his royal position remains secure. It is precisely such security in silence that Lope articulates as kingly knowledge. Referring to Cava's rape, Lope's Rodrigo describes it as: “Agravio en duda, / Porque, si no se sabe, no es agravio” (92). It appears that words are often more compelling than the flesh; for if Cava knows Rodrigo's offence intimately, Rodrigo doubts her knowledge as long as it remains private, as long as it is not ac-knowledged by Cava's father. For Rodrigo, king of the Goths and bearer of the law, rape has no meaning outside the public sphere, outside the sphere of men.

Scoffing at the hypocritical silence of the Spanish code of honor and ironically inserting Lope's El castigo sin venganza into Julián's story, Goytisolo appears to publicize the violent secret of the dominant order.¹³ Honor, as the literature of Julián clearly shows, is an eminently male enterprise, female virginity and fidelity being ultimately under the guardianship of father, brother, or husband. It is, after all, for that reason that Julián plays the part he does, the part of the angry avenger, the part of the rapist. Thus, and despite his rebellious claims to the contrary, Goytisolo's Julián may be read as actually carrying out the established work of History. The unestablished history, the counter-history of dispersal and discontinuity, the other history that Julián dreams that he dreams, is not one of male honor and male dishonor, of chastity manfully guarded or revenge phallically gotten. Indeed, truly anti-establishment power lies, I believe, with Cava, with the publication of her story, with the imaginative re-articulation of her voice. In fact, for Cava to publicize her outrage in her terms would be to usurp Julián's power, to play the manly part, to undertake a radical rebellion that Goytisolo writes in the name of Julián. The radical rebellion I am here considering is Cava's rebellion, over-written—that is to say, silenced—with Julián's name. The name “Julián” is hence itself a sign of violence, of a violence that muffles rebellion and thereby silences what it supposedly speaks. Of course, according to Julián, violence is indeed silent: “ha llegado la hora de limpiar la cizaña: el verbo ha muerto y la embriaguez de la acción te solicita: recuérdalo, Ulbán: la violencia es muda: para pillar, destruir, violar, traicionar no necesitarás las palabras” (157). Now, it clearly goes without saying that language, for all its shortcomings, is essential to Julián's endeavor, as he elsewhere makes perfectly patent. But while Julián's language may flay itself in contradiction, there is always one thing, one sign, that does not fail to maintain a powerful bar between Cava and Julián. Because to violate in silence, what is still essential is the force of the phallus: “sexos voladores, esferas viriles, artillería fálica” (58). To put it in somewhat different terms, Goytisolo, vindicating Julián while dismissing Cava, continues to operate within a phallic economy that construes women as the repository of male desire and honor and as the site of male conflict and exchange, as little or nothing, that is, in and of themselves. Women, subjugated and silenced by history, are also subjugated and silenced by Julián's critique of history, by his mythically inspired flight “lejos de vuestras santas mujeres y sus sagrarios bien guardados” (44). As in Florinda's case, silence is Julián's obedience, his paradoxical obedience to the history he finds so hateful, to the honor he finds so contemptible.

Returning to the Chronicles, that of 1344 as well as Pedro del Corral's Crónica sarracina, we return to the dilemma of Cava's representation. Supplemental and inessential, Cava, playing the woman's customary part, appears only to embellish the story of the destruction of Spain. Her appearance, late as it is in the literary and historical tradition, is, however, an appearance that quickly leads to disappearance. By this I mean that, once raped, Cava loses both beauty and value, sexual surface and social substance; once raped, Cava fades away, becoming as insignificant as when she had no name.¹⁴ Cava's loss is Julián's gain, narratively speaking; for when her story expires, Julián's story of treason and revenge, like Rodrigo's story of resistance and repentance, flourishes. Goytisolo, as we have already noted, does not engage Rodrigo any more than Cava in his assault on Spain; but, then again, Rodrigo, although he is the rapist, does not appear to require the fierce vindication that Goytisolo accords Julián. In fact, as Linda Ledford-Miller suggests, Rodrigo can hardly be vindicated when he has yet to be condemned, when rape has yet to be considered as historically “significant” as treason. In her opinion, “the relative anonymity of Julián's daughter is not surprising (her significance is not in her person, but in her loss of honor), but it seems curious that King Rodrigo bears no historical responsibility for the Moorish attack of which he was the primary cause” (26). While it does indeed seem curious that the King is relatively free from responsibility, it is no less curious that, “in her person,” Cava is insignificant. Examining Cava and Rodrigo's place in Goytisolo's text, Ledford-Miller acknowledges Cava's apparent insignificance, but also reiterates it, bracketing off Cava's plight and moving on to the more truly “significant” question of Rodrigo. If the woman's relative anonymity” is not surprising, it is, just possibly, because names, like women themselves, have been historically monopolized by men, circulated and hoarded with the greatest discrimination.¹⁵ Furthermore, the women who do figure prominently in history, who signify more than loss, who break the silence imposed on them, are exposed in Conde Julián to ever-renewed aggression and control.

Presented as models of moral duplicity for both church and state, Saint Teresa and Queen Isabel are, as we have seen, berated, ridiculed and defiled. Self-possessed and spiritual, Isabel, like Teresa, threatens to undermine masculine hegemony by appealing to a power that, outstripping social law, is at once immanent (her body) and transcendent (her spirit). But, as Goytisolo knows, where God is involved, the Father cannot be far away. Recast as the daughter of don Alvaro Peranzules, “perfecto caballero cristiano” (158), Isabel appears at first glance to have learned her father's lessons well: “su padre le ha enseñado el amor a Dios: a tener honor y ser esclava de la palabra” (163). Again, the word subdues the flesh, or so it seems. For here the slavish language of divine love and honor conceals a deeper desire, a desire for sexual knowledge, a desire for penetration. Slipping from prayer to prurience, from white maiden to black Cyprian,¹⁶ Isabel performs a strip-tease to a song by the Rolling Stones and flagellates herself as Julián, partially hidden behind a curtain, watches her. Isabel's pleasure is, in Julián's eyes, a pleasure of mortification, a painful pleasure of insatiable submission. “Invocando masculina ayuda con labios sedientos, convocando afluencia sanguínea con ojos extraviados” (165), Isabel reveals her repressive hypocrisy in her need for Julián and his powerful “sierpe”; she reveals, that is, her true significance in her lack, in her yearning for “masculine assistance,” in her desire for the phallus and its violent authority. Invariably duplicitous, Goytisolo's women couch their desire for phallic assistance in images of God and propriety, virginity and integrity. In Conde Julián, where appearances are—apparently—deceiving, truth seems to lie always beneath the surface, deep inside the body, hidden and hungry for the critical touch. Consequently, it is not surprising that Isabel merely pays lip service to the lessons of established morality, and that she speaks instead a language of violent sexual desire, a language that seems to emanate directly from her belly, a language that Julián understands as his own. Curiously, in Julián's endeavor to overturn Spanish values and to violate the repressive norms of sexual morality, he reveals himself as terribly truthful and magnanimous: for beating and raping Isabel, Julián satisfies what he takes to be her innermost desires as well as his. As with Cava, Isabel's significance lies in her loss of honor; as with Cava, her “truth”—the “truth” Julián locates in her, as hers—lies in rape.

In Conde Julián, what women want, what they truly want beneath their protective purity and guarded closure, is the open violence of masculinity. As a result, in his inverted universe of hatred and revenge, Julián imagines women's liberation in their rape and subjugation: “vírgenes fecundadas por lentos siglos de pudor y recato esperan impacientes vuestra cornada / sus muslos suaves, sus pechos mórbidos, reclaman a gritos la embestida, el mordisco” (173). The slow centuries of modesty and shame are exactly what Goytisolo wishes to trip up, to repeat as forever other than they appear. Realizing that scandal is his most powerful tool, he proceeds to hunt for impropriety, for an oriental seed, in every treasure of Spanish culture: in religion and ethics, government and history, art and literature, in the land and language, especially in language. And yet, rejecting all that is proper, Goytisolo nonetheless misreads the scandalous impropriety, the radical potential, that is Cava's name. He misreads, that is, the revolutionary force of a vindication that calls itself hers as well as Julián's. For if Goytisolo chooses Julián as the standard-bearer of his revolt of the damned, he forgets, as so many men before him, the forgotten history of women.

What he also forgets is the purportedly scandalous or evil truth of Cava herself, and hence the possibility for an act of vindication that makes Julián's vindication pale in comparison. For if Goytisolo's text champions the anti-cause of Julián, traitor par excellence, it fails to do the same for the decidedly more intricate anti-cause of Cava, historically travestied as a victim of herself, and so, like Julián, “juntamente verdugo y víctima” (52). It is here that the traditional lessons of the past, still frighteningly current, display their tireless capacity to throw notions of agency, volition, accountability, and moral responsibility—specifically, the responsibility of rape—into a body whose phantasmal desire becomes the equally phantasmal base for such notions. What I would like to underscore, then, is not only the repressive moralism of a system that attempts to convert the rape victim into a malicious hypocrite responsible for her own situation, but also the critical possibilities that Goytisolo misses in his dismissal of Cava. When the name “Cava” appears, in 1344, the victim of rape is formally designated as the “bad woman.”¹⁷ Indeed, so strong is this semantic link that almost three centuries later, and despite the use of the more florid name “Florinda” (first introduced by Miguel de Luna), Don Quijote itself, in the episode of the cautivo, reiterates the generic sinfulness of “Cava”, the tradition that maintains that “Cava,” in Arabic, means “bad woman.”¹⁸ The ramifications of this tradition of signification are, in my opinion, profoundly political. At first insignificant and indeterminate, the rape victim—Cava—enters the realm of proper meaning as already improper, as in some mysterious way responsible for her situation. The mixed echo of existential and Christian responsibility, the echo that reverberates through Conde Julián, carries, it appears, a frightening message: women are the masochistic arbiters of their own destiny, a perverse destiny of subjugation, silence, rape, and voracious desire. Such, in short, are the women who underwrite Julián's vindication: “mujeres de toda laya que, rehusando el lechugino concepto, invocan en sueños la ar´biga sierpe y su lento caudaloso festín” (149). In Conde Julián, masculine mastery finds its most cunning accomplice in feminine desire.

Responding to the patriarchy's persistent attempts to master women by writing them off as lacking, and yet forever desiring, the phallus, Patricia Klindienst Joplin passionately declares: “we are not less, lack, loss. Yet we feel like thieves and criminals when we speak, because we know that something originally ours has been stolen from us, and that the force used to take it away still threatens us as we struggle to win it back” (29). Without endorsing the notion of an “original” voice that Joplin implicitly advances, I believe that it is possible, ironically enough, to speak of the voice—and in particular the feminine voice—as always stolen. To do so, however, is to recognize my own activity for the theft that it is: for as a man writing about the history of women's speech and silence, employing Joplin's “we” in my re-presentation of Cava's loss, I am involved in an act of critical appropriation that mimics, albeit with a difference, the literary pilferage or intertextual piracy that Goytisolo practices in Conde Julián. The difference, as I see it, lies in a strategic appreciation of what I will call the politics of ventriloquism. In other words, it is my contention that Goytisolo's text, despite its self-professed intertextuality, underestimates the obliquity of discourse, its capacity to conceal its sources by creating the illusion that it emanates from others.

Ventriloquism is an uncannily complex speech act. It refers, that is, to the slipperiness of reference, to the mystifying ability to take one thing for another, one's words for another's. Ventriloquism, in other words, is an act of speech that hides its sources and throws itself, disembodied, into the bodies of others. As such it requires the dumb compliance, the submissive insignificance, of these other bodies. It is, hence, an act of speech that entails a violent silence on the part of another. If I were Harold Bloom, I would say that it is an act of strength, a sign of value, the stuff of greatness. If I were Bakhtin, I would say—much more convincingly I might add—that it is a form of “heteroglossia,” one of a “multiplicity of social voices” (263) that, by virtue of its extreme complexity, tends to obscure such specifics as gender, class, and race. Fortunately I am neither, although both, even in negation, inevitably speak through me. They do not, at any rate, speak from me, as both would surely agree. They, like myself, would say that language is always a function of the living and the unborn, the dying and the dead, that it is always a function of power and historical movement. And whatever their own specific thoughts on gender, class, and race, they would certainly admit that it is impossible to cite every source, to record every word, to avoid the elusive play of plagiarism. Goytisolo's advertencia, his list of acknowledgments, his documented epigraphs, do not therefore account for all the voices, for all the silences, in his text. Goytisolo may lead us to think he has the source, and, in having it, that he may violate it, but the “sources” of discourse have a way of throwing themselves around, of appearing to hide deep in the belly of any given body. What is more, it is just such an appearance of localized depth in Conde Julián that distinguishes it from other dense and difficult texts where, as Leo Bersani puts it, “a certain unreadability … has much less to do with a hidden and profound sense than with the dissolution of sense in a voice which continuously refuses to adhere to its statements” (27). Against the notion of literature as an “unlocatable … performance” (Bersani 25), Goytisolo's text paradoxically locates truth even as, through the play of a multiplicity of voices, it appears to dislocate it. In Conde Julián, the politics of this ventriloquial variety and intertextual play, takes, as the specific site of the interplay between sense and nonsense, the female body. Thus, what begins as the explosion of authoritative voices seems to end up, “hidden and profound,” as the reduction and restriction of femininity.

Attacking the female body, Julián believes that he is attacking the austere morality of the Spanish tradition, that he is assailing the discourse of domination itself.¹⁹ Penetrating the “holy site,” the “sancta sanctorum designado … como la Remota, Fantástica, jamás Explorada por Viajero Alguno Gruta Sagrada” (166), Julián believes that he is penetrating the horrible, corrupt body of Francoism and Christianity, a body that he describes as: “la masa de horror, de ponzoña y de asco” (169). Penetrating woman, that is, Julián believes that he is sounding out the revolting truth of repression. What Julián misses, however, is the fact that Isabel, bound up in a discursive order that denies feminine specificity, mouths a language which is not hers, a language which speaks through her, but not from her. By this I mean that the language of moral authority, which Julián wishes to annihilate, does not reside in the female body (nor for that matter in any particular body), but is in fact vigorously anti-corporeal and, in particular, strongly anti-feminine.²⁰ In Goytisolo's reading of the myths of history, Isabel, muttering the holy word of the Father, is made the mouthpiece of her own oppression; echoing a voice that has always muffled her own, Isabel speaks her own silence, she in effect provokes her own rape.

What I want to stress is that Isabel, whatever her place in history or myth, whatever her royal role in the history of violence, is not the source of repressive discourse. Consequently, the violation of her body is not the violation of moral tyranny, Francoist or otherwise. Instead, Julián's violent exploration of the “gruta sagrada”—specifically located in Isabel and generically distributed to all women—is a masterful negation of the female body and a troubling paean to the folly of women's resistance. For among the many causes Julián professes to champion, that of women is absent. Indeed, against the mesmerizing power of the phallus, submission appears to be the only possible response: “forcejeos inútiles de la doncella … antes de rendirse a discreción a los verdugos y de someterse al fin, con docilidad bestial, a sus cobras tenaces e imperiosas culebras” (172). With “bestial docility,” then, Isabel submits to the torture which, if we are to believe Julián, she both merits and desires. Yet in fusing together what Isabel merits and desires, Conde Julián describes the inescapable connection between morality and sexuality, ideology and desire, that it so desperately wants to break.

The relation between sexuality and morality is not, needless to say, a new discovery. Without it, the story of Cava, Rodrigo and Julián, the story of Conde Julián, the story of civilization itself, at least for Freud, would have no motivation, no meaning. Vindicating the oriental principle, reviving the desiring body of the Moorish past, propounding a renewed ethics of difference and desire, Goytisolo's sardonic commentary on the West's phantasmal fear of Islam provides another commentary, an unwittingly disturbing commentary on men's fear of women. Raped, dissected, and silenced, women constitute the abject Other from which Goytisolo's text flees and yet to which it inevitably returns for meaning. Like Philomela's tapestry that Joplin studies, Conde Julián is at once the silent site of woman's violation and the place from which her voice may be rearticulated, the enactment, and not merely the representation, of censorship and its overcoming. In saying this, I once again speak with Patricia Klindienst Joplin, for whom “dominance can only contain, but never successfully destroy, the woman's voice” (31); I speak, that is, with the voice of another resistance, another optimism.

Not wanting to dismiss Conde Julián as it dismisses Cava, not wanting to pronounce moral judgment based on the text's peculiar representation of the tension between reality and utopia, I do not assume the revolution to be realized, the struggle for liberation to be textually perfected. All of which is to say that, as I examine the cost of freedom in Conde Julián, I do not claim that textual value resides exclusively in a non-oppressive portrayal of society. To do so would be to blind myself to the socio-political circumstances that reinforce the necessity for a critical reading that does not eschew unpleasant sights or uncomfortable situations and that maintains faith in difference even as it only seems to uncover the same old thing. If I have defined this same old thing as women's oppression, if I have begun to narrate part of another story—Cava's story—ironically beneath the violent surface of Conde Julián, if I have attempted to temper the critical enthusiasm attendant on Goytisolo's so-called revolutionary textual project, I have also wavered between languages of accountability and of dissolution by which all stories are perhaps less the imaginary resolution of real conflict, than the sustained conflict of a very real imagination. Revolutionary textuality is in a certain sense always the function of a strategic positioning—on the part of readers, writers and other characters—with respect to conflict. Hence, if Goytisolo is truly revolutionary, it is, at least from my position, in a way decidedly different from what the vast majority of his critics think. His radicalness lies not, as I see it, in the way he violates language, but in the way his language violates itself, in the way his language throws itself into something different. Reiterating the silent history of women's oppression, Conde Julián slips a scandalous truth into the body of the text and trips itself up in the process.

And still, while in the very act of justifying my activity, there is something that remains too scandalous not to repeat. What is perhaps most scandalous is the fact that the scandalous corpus is itself so horribly repetitive that it actually normalizes violence, undercuts its claims to perversity and abnormality. If the scenes of rape and pillage, ecstasy and death, are initially shocking, their very repetitiveness not only lessens their force but also ironically fulfills the reader's expectations: heterosexuality will be rigorously denigrated, homosexuality will be negated even as it is championed, tenderness and love eradicated, and the body violated and destroyed. Or to put it more disturbingly: violation gives way to fulfillment. The reader, shifting his expectations to accommodate the proliferation of textural violence, finds them troublingly fulfilled. (I cannot help but think that the trouble with such textual fulfillment is all the more acute for those readers who are women or gay). In Conde Julián, the act of violence, incessantly replicating itself, reintroduces a standard of reading that violently implicates the reader's knowledge and critical skill. Following the inversion of values to its mercilessly logical end, the reader comes to anticipate rape and destruction, to understand their purpose, to know what they mean. For Carlos Fuentes, such knowledge in and of itself seems more than sufficient: “[t]he final refuge of Spain is the ‘stupid Vagina,’ its national emblem. … Against the Cave, Count Julián wields the serpent capable of raping the Cave and showing Spain to herself as the whore she is” (6–7). In Fuentes's eyes, that is, rape is the way to truth, the means by which to expose the whore that Spain (as woman) always is. Here rape serves as a strategy of reading, as the very activity of signification, as the emblem of knowledge itself. Penetrating Goytisolo's text, getting beneath its surfaces, overcoming its resistance, pinning down its voices, and reading its revolution as politically progressive, Fuentes finds truth as the reward for his audacity. And, as we know, truth, the barbarous truth of culture, the truth of silenced voices and ravaged bodies, is perhaps what is truly most oppressive.

Notes

1. Bersani offers an interesting reading of Freud's “theoretical violence.” According to him, Freud's belief in the inevitable repressiveness of civilization leads to the correlative notion that “destructiveness is constitutive of sexuality,” 20 (Bersani's emphasis). In Goytisolo's textual world of violent passion, sex is destructive and destruction sexual. The similarities between Conde Julián and Freudian theory have also been noted by Vegas González, for whom, “la obra del ‘último’ Goytisolo no es más que una ejemplificación concreta de las tesis generales de Freud,” 210.

2. If I agree with Jameson that history is an unfinished narrative of collective struggle, I do not read this narrative as unified and monothematic; nor do I believe that the claim to “recover” an “original urgency” (19–20) is in any way possible. Instead, I read history as intrinsically inapprehensible in its totality, as an unending interpretative activity that can never apprehend either origin or end. To that effect, I do subscribe to Jameson's claim that “History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force,” 102. This “effective” history is, in my opinion, one of multiplicity and discontinuity, a history not merely of class struggles, but of other struggles as well.

3. It is of course quite licit to assume, as do many critics, that the narrator of Conde Julián is the Alvaro of Señas de identidad, an assumption borne out by the fact that Conde Julián's Alvarito is the fantasized figure of the narrator's boyhood. At the same time I think it is important not to collapse the latter text back into the former as its “natural” or “real” base.

4. Linking revenge and “reactive affects,” Nietzsche proceeds to distinguish between them, privileging the latter over the former (understood as “the senseless raging of ressentiment,” 511). In Conde Julián, however, the distinction is even less tenable than in Nietzsche, revenge being the mode of reaction, the form of power, that the narrator employs.

5. Linda Ledford-Miller also reads Goytisolo through the prism of Nietzsche. According to her, “Goytisolo's Count Julian exemplifies Nietzsche's idea that history can best serve life by becoming a form of art,” 25. Moreover, she persuasively argues for a reading of Conde Julián as an historical novel, “a modern historical novel that unites history and fiction, science and art, to advocate the recovery of a rejected history (the Arabic and Jewish influences in Spain). Goytisolo would add this ‘recovered history’ to the ‘remembered history’ of Spain by ‘inventing’ history.” 29.

6. Goytisolo's roster of writers is, with the exception of Teresa de Avila (herself conflated onto Queen Isabel and raped repeatedly in the text), completely male. Intertextuality is also, it would appear from Conde Julián, a male endeavor bound to what Harold Bloom describes as the anxiety of influence. If Goytisolo's writing fits nicely into a Bloomian scheme, it is in part because the struggle for creative freedom is presented as a macho-literary brawl. For a feminist critique of Bloom's theory, see Doane and Hodges, 81–93. What they say of Bloom is, I believe, germane to Goytisolo as well: “For Bloom … the mother is dangerous,” 87.

7. Even before his exploration of “la gruta sagrada,” Julián makes clear his preference for what he describes as the hard smooth surface of masculinity: “vivo, vivo!: no en el proteico reino de lo blando e informe, de la flora rastrera e immunda, de la obscena ebullición de lo inorgánico: abarcando las tersas superficies pulidas, eludiendo la mórbida carnosidad innecesaria,” 85.

8. According to Moi, “Beauvoir cannot appropriate for feminism the Sartrean notion of free subjectivity and self-defining agency without becoming ‘contaminated’ by the profoundly sexist ideology of objectivity to which this notion is inevitably coupled,” 95. For a less negative reading of Beauvoir's work, see Judith Butler.

9. A number of critics have noted a shift in Goytisolo's work from chronological (or historical) to mythical time. See, for example, Ortega and Ugarte. For Ramos, Conde Julián “no es una novela histórica sino reflexión sobre su mitificación,” 25.

10. According to the Enciclopedia universal ilustrada, “la primera leyenda que encontramos relacionada con la vida de don Rodrigo es la de la cueva encantada de Toledo, llamada también de Hércules. Es el egipcio Aben-Abdelháquen, autor del siglo IX, quien la cita por primera vez,” 1245.

11. If indeed, as Auerbach affirms, “to write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend” (20), the obverse is also true. History permeates legend, suffuses fiction, imbues myth with a sense of time and space that humanizes the divine and secularizes the sacred. But this implied “secular humanism” is not without its own (in)human sacrifices. For what human history narrates is a rather conventional plot to keep women, among others, reserved and silent, outside reading and writing. In speaking of a “plot” I do not have in mind a unified or conscious plotter, let alone a hypermasculine authority behind the scenes of oppression. Instead, I am thinking, somewhat along the lines of Bataille's reading of Sade, that violence is ultimately silent, and that any violent use of language is necessarily contradictory (186–187). Julián himself, for whom “el verbo ha muerto” and “la violencia es muda” (157), articulates the contradiction of violent language as follows: “para pillar, destruir, violar, traicionar no necesitarás las palabras” (157). Needless to say, Julián is not silent, at least not in Bataille's sense of an “utter and inevitably speechless solitude” (186–187), (though by the end of Juan sin tierra the silence of Spanish is suggested). Like Sade's libertines, Goytisolo's narrator would be nothing without the words he at times deems inessential. In fact, so virulently verbose are these master criminals that the silence Bataille notes may actually be the imaginary effect of a surfeit of sound, of a contradiction within the history of narrative itself. Silence is perhaps less the quality of those who do violence than those against whom violence is done, those who are “absented” or “disappeared” from narrative history. In fact, woman, as Virginia Woolf has noted, “pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history” (45). In this, Goytisolo's text, for all its poetic fire, reveals a fidelity to history even greater than that discussed by Woolf: Cava, although seemingly pervasive in poetry and legendary history, certainly does not pervade Conde Julián; she is, to put it simply, as “all but absent” from Goytisolo's text as she is from history. And yet she is also, in my reading, “nothing but present,” forever pointing to a conflict of and in signification, narrative, and history. Despite the text's “elocuente desdén ahistórico” (61), despite its apparent pretensions to a counter-history of the marginalized and disenfranchised, and despite its revolutionary pyrotechnics, it remains on another, more disturbing, level eminently consistent with dominant History.

12. There is an inescapable irony in the story I am attempting to re-tell insofar as I am necessarily in complicity with the dominant story's silences and silencings, with its narration of another's non-narration. It is just this irony, this complicity, this narrative double bind between silence and appropriation (re-telling a male tale with a difference) that I attempt to address as the politics of ventriloquism. For his part, Ugarte finds a similar tale of ideology in Conde Julián: “[t]he parody of historical texts consists primarily of a transformation of history into discourse, that is from truth to ideology,” 96. This is, in my opinion, an accurate assessment of a major transformative process in Goytisolo's text, provided that it does not imply that there is some ultimate, non-transformative (i.e. non-figured or non-ideological), truth.

13. Goytisolo quotes from El castigo sin venganza: “esto disponen las leyes del honor, y que no haya publicidad en mi afrenta con que se dobla mi infamia” (37); and “Quien en público castiga, / dos veces su honor infama, / pues, después que la [sic] ha perdido, / por el mundo le dilata” (178). From the Duque de Ferrara's final soliloquy (Act III, 2850–2857), these lines reflect the importance of the (non)communication of an event (here an adultery that verges on the incestuous) as well as the violent price of secrecy. Here, paternal power rests on the absolute control of language and the body (of wife and son), on a restrictive economy of sexual and linguistic exchange.

14. “Mas Alataba, después que ovo enviado al escudero a su padre, tornóse para las otras donzellas e de tal guisa se trabajava que ninguno non la entendiese su fecho nada; mas todos quantos en la corte eran se fazían mucho maravillados … cómo en tan pequeño tiempo era desçendida de toda su fermosura,” Crónica de 1344, in Menéndez Pidal, 158.

15. For Lévi-Strauss, woman, seen in terms of an exchange and communication essential to society, serves as little more than a variable in a patriarchal equation, a cipher functioning in opposition to, and dependent on meaning from, man. Gayle Rubin reads Lévi-Strauss and finds that, “[a]t the most general level, the social organization of sex rests upon gender, obligatory heterosexuality, and the constraint of female sexuality,” 179. Regarding obligatory heterosexuality, Irigaray, in Ce sexe, comes to the conclusion that the patriarchal exchange of women is actually proof of an underlying homosexual economy. While I have severe problems with Irigaray's reading of a hom(m)osexual (as opposed to a homosocial) economy, sociocultural transformation in Conde Julián does indeed entail a violent homosexual activity that reduces women to the role of objects. It is in this sense that Goytisolo's text risks reinscribing not only a misogynistic, but also a paradoxically homophobic, message.

16. It is important to note how Goytisolo's text colors sexual expression black. Establishing its own antiphonies, Conde Julián links the lascivious Isabel with the black dancer of Thunderball (the James Bond movie Julián refers to in his wanderings through Tangier). The black dancer, like Isabel, is sparsely clothed—“los sostenes recatan apenas la volcánica erupción de los pechos, la triangular isla de raso enuncia, irrefutable, la ubicación del tesoro” (77)—and pleads for “masculine assistance” in the very same terms: “invocando masculina ayuda con labios sedientos, convocando afluencia sanguínea con ojos extraviados” (77). Conflating Isabel and the black dancer, Goytisolo undermines the “whiteness” of sexual purity and honor, but at a troubling price. For in such a conflation it becomes impossible to control the directional flow of meaning. Consequently, Julián's rape of Isabel is also a rape of the black dancer, of the sexually expressive woman, of the woman who has been historically subjugated as sexual slave.

17. According to many critics, it is in Pedro del Corral's Crónica sarracina (c. 1430) that the story of Cava (and perhaps her name itself) is given its “definitive” treatment.

18. I do not mean to imply that Cervantes' text simply reaffirms the negative value historically ascribed to Cava. In fact, as the cautivo states, Caba Rumía, the “evil” cove, is actually a place of (problematic) peace: “aun tienen por mal agüero llegar allí a dar fondo cuando la necesidad les fuerza a ello, porque nunca le dan sin ella; puesto que para nosotros no fue abrigo de mala mujer, sino puerto seguro de nuestro remedio, segün andaba alterada el mar,” 506. Miguel de Luna's text is Historia verdadera del rey don Rodrigo, compuesta por Abulcácin Tarif, published in 1589.

19. Isabel has, in effect, interiorized—incorporated—the discourse of domination, the ideo(theo)logy of Empire: “su padre le ha enseñado el amor a Dios: a tener honor y ser esclava de la palabra: a amparar al desvalido: a ser grave y veraz, casta, continente: a rezar el ángelus tres veces al día y a venerar a san Millán y Santiago, dos santos a caballo, heraldos del imperativo poético de Castilla y de su acrisolada voluntad de Imperio,” 163.

20. As Irigaray maintains in Speculum, the language of the patriarchy entails the censure of women, their interdiction and subjugation, their rape and silence. Hence, for a woman to “speak” is, according to Irigaray, for her to mask herself in masculinity. Masquerade, of course, is not entirely distinct from ventriloquism.

Works Consulted

Alfonso X, el Sabio. Primera crónica general de España. Ed. Ramón Menéndez Pidal. 1. Madrid: Gredos, 1955.

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

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