SOURCE: “Goytisolo Through the Looking Glass: Paisajes después de la batalla, Autobiography and Parody,” in Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 19, No. 2, Fall, 1986, pp. 13-29.

[In the following essay, Schaefer-Rodríguez asserts that Goytisolo's Paisajes después de la batalla represents a parody of the autobiographical genre.]

With the memory of these brief moments, I could describe to you walks, breathless flights, pursuits, in countries of the world where I shall never go.

Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

The Sufi's book does not consist of ink and letters: it is naught but a heart white as snow.

The Mathnawi of Jalal-ud-Din Rumi

… the pornographer has it in his power to become a terrorist of the imagination, a sexual guerrilla whose purpose is to overturn our most basic notions of these relations.

Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman

It seems to be fairly evident that the study of “autobiography” precipitates a variety of discussions as to what are or should be the “conventional” expectations of the genre. One only has to open, for example, Paul Jay's study entitled Being in the Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes¹ or the volume of essays on this subject collected by James Olney, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical,² to witness the differing points of view toward the writing, classification, and analysis of certain works. On the one hand, Paul Jay cites a quite traditional definition of what type of code or paradigm is to be expected: “an autobiography is a factual and more or less objective life-history of its author that includes details about personality and emotional, spiritual, and social development.”³ The elements to underline here are the “factual,” “objective,” and “historical” aspects of the life being recreated in the text. This perspective suggests the chronological study of past to present (the former time being fixed with the help of the current, and an emphasis on data or objective details; that is, a familiar self-portrait. On the other hand, following Paul de Man, the limits of autobiography may be opened to include, in his words, “any text in which the author declares himself the subject of his own understanding.”⁴ It is in this self-conscious sense that Juan Goytisolo's Paisajes después de la batalla (1982) may be considered to contribute to these discussions: as a parodic commentary on the cultural construct fixed in the first definition, and as a metafictional (self-referential) narrative foregrounding primarily, if not exclusively, the narrator's (and “text author's”⁵ awareness of himself in the process of telling the reader his own evolving story of self-generation. Paisajes is the attempt of the writer to free himself from the fixed forms of autobiographical discourse in order to obtain a liberation from the history (“life-history”) and society (“social development”) that produce (or recognize or demand) such discourse. In other words, Goytisolo's text seems to exemplify what Frank Kermode describes as the basic characteristic of the novel by definition; that is, “[the history of the novel is] the history of forms rejected or modified, [especially] by parody.⁶

The parody of the popularity and consumption of autobiography as an ordering of experiences for the reader, who must in turn cope with ordering his own life experience,⁷ is what one encounters in Goytisolo's text. In the change of orientation from biography to autobiography that Georges Gusdorf has called the turn “from public to private history,”⁸ the text of Paisajes concentrates on the psychological self, in particular this subjective self as a metaphor for the perception of external reality. The autobiographical mode, therefore, is a metaphor of the objective world: how the writer sees that world and himself in it. In the process, the reader is called on to supply the connections between the pieces, as shall be discussed later. As the writer asks himself toward the end of the novel, in a section called “A Ella” which refers to his “real” wife, “Su extrañamiento artificioso de la narración, correspondería de forma simbólica a un extrañamiento real de su propia vida?”⁹ The answer will be seen to be most likely the affirmative. There is a series of identifications in Paisajes established between the narrator/text author and the world exemplifying this: from “él” (and his “relativismo” or decentralization, see 168) to Sentier (a multi-layered cake) to the contemporary world. His voice describes “el complejo, prodigioso microcosmos celular, [en que] su barrio abrevia el caos universal … La porosidad y trasiego permanentes del vecindario han fragmentado su visión [de sí mismo, también], descentralizado sus sentimientos” (168, 170). There follows a disruption of assumptions and a shifting of perspectives to establish a “battleground” for the creation of a life/text and not the restraints of a recreation of the past.

Consequently, what form of “autobiography” is found in the narrative? Under the threat of imminent extinction (in 24 hours), the narrator surveys his inner “landscapes” and (like Scheherezade) tells his story in order not to disappear—albeit not to “unite,” but to “disperse” himself. He declares his literary model to be the following which describes both the motivation behind his writing as well as the form it will take and the goal it pursues in the model of

el derviche errante sufí. Un hombre que rehúye la vanidad, desprecia las reglas y formas exteriores de conveniencia … Sus cualidades son recatadas y ocultas y, para velarlas y volverlas aún más secretas, se refocila en la práctica de lo despreciable e indigno … Tras las máscaras y celajes de la escritura, la meta es el desdén … la alquimia anterior operada bajo el disfraz de una crónica burlona y sarcástica … una autobiografía deliberadamente grotesca (183–84).

This literary ideal both parodies the concept of a real personal confession (the reader is told repeatedly that it has been “deliberately” made absurd in its insistence on fantasies, abominations, vices, and imagination) and clarifies its existence as a piece of fiction with the disguises of “máscaras” and “disfraces.”

The paradox arises, however, when one reads of the desire to provoke the social reaction of “ostracismo y condena” (183), while at the same time it needs a public of readers to be able to be “disdained” by someone. Rather than the proposed isolation, it seems that this text reflects more closely what Baudelaire stated as his own aims: “When I have inspired universal disgust and horror, then I will have conquered solitude.”¹⁰ The culturally proscribed images making up the narrative (pedophilia, bestiality, etc.) are used consciously to create a text full of what might be called seductive horror, repelling and attracting at the same time as a result of its proscription. Here one is reminded of Jean Genet's self-affirmation in socially unacceptable and repellent activity. In The Thief's Journal, for instance, the narrator speaks of the positive subjective value of an abject life: “I wanted to affirm it in its exact sordidness, and the most sordid signs became for me signs of grandeur … It is by a long, long road that I choose to go back to primitive life. What I need first is condemnation by my race.”¹¹

The narrator of Paisajes seems to be interested in leaving no doubts about the unlimited “evil” of his (textual) identity, as in the section entitled “Tras las huellas de Charles Lutwidge Dodgson” when he extends to the grotesque his identification with the “Reverendo” and his “suspicious” activities: “[como si] no contento con escudriñarla [a la niña espiada] con sus ojos de sátiro, [él] fuera además ladrón de juguetes” (34). It is proposed that in Paisajes the narrator is in the process of self-reflexive analysis and criticism with a similar sense of presence as has been commented on in the poetry of Ovid who it has been said “gives the impression of composing poetry as if he were an impresario on a stage: his eye is on the effect which his words have on the audience.”¹² This acute awareness of both self and audience in the creation of parody (self-parody as well) in the text-plus-commentary on its formation is used by the narrator to manipulate the reader, lead him on, entrap him in his own preconceived ideas at times, and tease with appearances that end with distrust, as in the following: “Cuidado, lector: el narrador no es fiable. Bajo una apariencia desgarrada de franqueza y honradez … no deja de engañarte un instante. Su estrategia defensiva, destinada a envolverte en una nube de tinta, multiplica las presuntas confesiones para ocultar lo esencial … Cada revelación sobre su vida es una invención derrotada” (177–78). In short, what Linda Hutcheon has clearly seen as an attempt in metafiction to “tantalize” the reader into the fictional world and being conscious of it (the “lo esencial” of the quote) is also considered to liberate his mind from traditional structures (and objective circumstances),¹³ although it be a “phantom liberty” within the text. The elements of autobiography, such as the storytelling voice, the details of reality, and the documents (the “trap” of the use of Lewis Carroll's letters and photographs shows these to belong to as fictional a persona of the real person as is the text now in the reader's hands),¹⁴ are criticized, the parody going beyond “comic imitation” in spite of Goytisolo's statement that Paisajes is his first essentially humorous novel,¹⁵ to commentary on the basic relationship between writer/book/reader and between book content/objective world.

The dependence of Paisajes on dialogues with itself (a second level to the metaphorical mode of autobiography), other texts, and cultural artifacts in general creates a foundation, from the beginning, for the questioning and dethroning of authorship and the authority of the textual voice as originator or creator as well as historical being outside the artistic creation. Michael Sprinker has shown the superseding of the concepts to be the “end of autobiography” as such, since “Autobiography and the concept of the author as sovereign subject over a discourse are products of the same episteme.”¹⁶

What has happened to the author in Goytisolo's text? The acknowledgment page serves as a disclaimer from the start, establishing the “rules” of the text, and distancing as well as fragmenting the authorial voice, just as one supposes the writer himself perceives his distance—an epistemological split—from control of, understanding, and belonging to the real world. The author of the text identifies those who have participated (anonymously and “involuntarily”)¹⁷ in the composition of the book through their letters of sexual fantasy to his magazines; his presumed (taken for granted by the traditional reader, added as a separate voice here) “homonymous collaborator” who is the author of newspaper articles filled with, of course, “dudosas fantasías” [emphasis added]; and the endowment permitting the completion of the manuscript in the Kreuzberg section of Berlin. The judgment of “doubtfulness” on the part of the text author toward the ecological writings of “Juan Goytisolo” [the quotes are his] should be a red flag (a “garrapata en la oreja,” 178) for the reader, one that the narrator will wave again toward the end of the book when the separate identities of the “héroe” and narrator are put into question as is the possible establishment of an absolute univocal author for the text. The narrating voice asks itself: “será él o yo quien se expresa? Su vocación de amanuense le ha llevado a asumir la paternidad de la copia e, insidiosamente, confundirse con el autor … al final, ya no sabe si es el remoto individuo que usurpa su nombre o ese goytisola lo está creando a él” (181–82). The generating of the text is therefore an ongoing process in which no one member of the dialogue (author, narrator, character, reader, other texts) may be given nor assume singular responsibility. The amanuensis or scribe normally is considered a copyist of written signs, but the remark in Paisajes that he cunningly and deceitfully takes on the title of their creator is a commentary on and validation of this meta-text itself as a creation process composed of the interplay between old forms and new uses;¹⁸ the progenitor is removed, unknown, or unwilling to be identified as such given the proposal that all these voices as well as each act of reading create the text(s). The instigator of the “hecatombes” in this text is presented as disinterested in the effects as well as the product—this narrative—of his activity: he is presented as acting “con una indiferencia rayana a la perversidad” (16). In the end the “héroe/narrador” is totally disoriented and asks whether he is the author or is himself a creation of “that goytisolo,” the one we all know as a living individual. (This questioning may strongly remind the reader of Augusto Pérez's discussions with Unamuno in Niebla.) Going back to Paul de Man's definition of autobiography, we note that the writer here certainly has become the central subject of his own textual preoccupations.

The cultural aspects of the modern world used in Paisajes as points of departure for the narrator's psychological meanderings, commentaries, and criticisms are varied and all-inclusive; that is to say, they do not omit either the right or the left, politically speaking, nor do they exclude “high” culture nor “popular” culture. The results of both camps of the “First World,” socialism and capitalism, end up here as exaggerated mockeries and failures alien to the imaginings of the character whose guerrilla training manual pits one side against the other, then circulates propaganda for both (173). The projects proposed by the student protest of May 1968 in Paris—now seen, one expects, as implemented by the socialist government in France, Mitterand presiding at the time this novel is written—are presented sarcastically as hollow, fantasy utopias where “real” liberation has not been achieved (for the “Reverendo,” at least). The “Llamamiento a la opinión” letter calling for the vindication of the rights of those whose sexual expressions fit into none of the organized progressive or radical causes parallels quite interestingly the desires of the “fallen angel” in Makbara. Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin are all parodied in the language of tourist attractions as future “ruinas ideológicas” (153) whose value, if any, has disappeared with them. Stalin, Trujillo, and Pol Pot are implicitly compared to Bela Lugosi, Frankenstein, and Dracula, whose artistic images of horror are infinitely less powerful in their effect, although imaginatively more seductive, than reality (note the comparative judgment on the two spheres). The meetings of the “left,” their supposed language and procedures, are parodied in “Teologismo dialéctico,” a title that itself comments on what is taken to be an inflexible, dogmatic point of view whose twentieth-century revolutions, says the text, have all wiped out the possibility of the “única revolución victoriosa” (43), presented since Juan sin tierra as that of the body.¹⁹ In one instance, we read sarcastic passages about the necessity of having the “mérito personal o pedigrí ideológico … [la] sensibilidad literaria” (150) to participate in meetings run like exclusive clubs, and the absurdly theatrical sighs and sobs of these fellow-traveler “vedettes y notables” (152) juxtaposed to the tank-surrounded Polish miners (groups fighting against the Eastern European governments); in another a cigarette becomes the object of ridicule in a linguistic parody of views on production: “la mujer chupa pausadamente un cigarrillo que, a diferencia de los producidos por las multinacionales yanquis diseminadoras de cánceres, ha sido elaborado por un pueblo sano y sencillo, que ignora los estragos de la enfermedad” (45).

Other targets of the text include the social theories of Herbert Marcuse. The discourse of his explanation of the repression of the pleasure principle into cultural institutions such as monogamy,²⁰ are changed in Paisajes by the narrator to the existence of “una relación exclusivamente monocanina” (38) versus the expression of free love—toward all dogs. Marcuse is later parodied, in addition, in the provocation of a revolution by the characters of Disneyland (100–102) whose strategies of infiltration, propagandizing, and control of mass psychology, then division into “donaldistas,” “dumbistas,” or followers of Fritz the Cat and Bambi leave no doubt as to the negative treatment of the original text, especially when we read the warning to the reader: “Interpreten correctamente a Marcuse” (100) [emphasis added].

The consumer culture of capitalism and its recognizable sales propaganda, commercials, and market tactics are used here also to comment on their daily acceptance and the absurdity of this system. When the white mice overrun the district (in the “hero's” mind, at least) some young Third World entrepreneurs, eager to please tourists, string them like beads; still others roast them on skewers like shish kabab, cruelly parodying the “exoticism” sought by travelers in the markets of poor nations such as in “Calcuta” (163). In another case, the arms race and the prospects of nuclear war are seen in commercialized terms as if the situation were excellent for the promotion of household commodities: “El nuevo despliegue de misiles de largo alcance por las dos superpotencias rivales y las perspectivas cada vez más claras de una inminente guerra nuclear plantean la dura necesidad de discurrir soluciones radicales, destinadas a garantizar para usted y su familia un máximo de confort y seguridad” (129). In all of these cases it is the language of the system that is parodied, a commentary on the persuasive use of words to convince.

A crucial element in the intertextual basis of Paisajes resides in its citational use of other literary texts, including Goytisolo's own, most often to portray another facet of the character's psychological puzzle. For example, Borges's story title “El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan” is the referential point for “En el París de los trayectos que se bifurcan” referring to the map of the Paris metro and its infinite possibilities of evasion through stimulating mental images; Calderón's play lends “Su vida es sueño” to a section on the repudiation of the identity of the character's wife as real and his own doubtful individuality in regard to the author. Moreover, the reader finds at least two passages of self-analytical commentary that take the shape of references to presumed author Goytisolo's other texts: one a novel, one a book on literary theory. In the first passage (117) the narrator/Reverendo follows his desires to pursue little girls to the “panteón del deseo”—the National Library—and exhorts the mummified scholars there to wake up and seek life outside their books and manuscripts. At this point he indicates that this does not imply the necessity of going to the lengths of “cierto oscuro y maligno escritor en una modesta biblioteca de Tánger” (Alvaro Mendiola of Reivindicación del conde don Julián), giving that image a life beyond Reivindicación and tying it up with the ideas in this text. The description that follows is another piece of the fantasy of the text author, perhaps most understood in terms of its intimate connection to the insect incident in Reivindicación since both are creations of the writer's imagination and do not objectively take place. The second mention of another text belonging to the writer of Paisajes is a scene in which loudspeakers expound on the “ruins” of socialist ideology for the benefit of visiting tourists. Among the manifestos read to the crowd is one containing a defense of the “uso de la literatura y el arte como arma o instrumento de combate” (154–55) and the outline of a theory of “realism” in literature. The reaction by the narrator is one of familiarity yet surprise since he says “[yo] descubro, con asombro y perplejidad primero, bochorno y consternación después, que su padre soy yo” (155). This time his own early writings (Problemas de la novela, for example) return to haunt him as author (creator, progenitor, “father”)—a “mistake” it appears that he is unwilling to be caught in again. The current text is a shifting set of ideas and voices that no longer reflects the “realist” tendencies propounded earlier.²¹ To orient the readers of Paisajes now, and in order that in the future this identification with a text not happen again, the metafictional text withdraws from “combat” (the “batallas” of the title, perhaps) and at once from the realist mode. The question that follows ultimately is one of the necessity or function of literary criticism, too, given that in metafiction the distinction between the “literary” and the “critical” (of other texts, of the same text) is blurred.²²Paisajes again answers the question suggesting the superfluousness of the categories of literary criticism in favor of multiple and varied readings of the text: “Por favor, nada de ‘experimentación,’ ‘sintagma verbal,’ ‘niveles de lectura,’ ‘propósito lúdico’” (193). Just read in any order you please, the narrator tells us, since the points of view in the text are constantly changing, creating new possibilities in the reader's eyes.²³

Paisajes, then, is composed of a narrative whose process of composition is undertaken as if it were an act of self-revelation and self-creation: both text and the writer are coming into being in the present, generated by “a confrontation between the writer and his ideas.”²⁴ To live is to narrate, to speak, to tell a story, or, as we read at the end of the narrator's comments about his activity as well as his identity: “escribir escribirme … yo:el escritor/yo:lo escrito” (193). These “ideas” and acceptance of or resistance to them are formed into the character (“Reverendo,” “héroe,” “nuestro personaje,” “él,” “tú,” “yo”) and the narrator both of whom end up being alter egos or personas of each other, much as Lewis Carroll is for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson or “juan goytisolo” is for Juan Goytisolo. The “self” that is presented by the writer of this text is shown in the psychological “scenes” (“paisajes”) of this portrait²⁵ to be open-ended, a process or series of transformations with gaps or lacunae that it itself cannot completely comprehend or explain. (Michael Sprinker cites the fact that “Vico, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche all contend that the self is constituted by a discourse that it never completely masters.”²⁶ The oscillation from first to second to third person allows writing to create an emergent personage, not an “I” that has been previously created but changing angles of vision to be explored. Goytisolo himself has written elsewhere of the use of the first person as implying “la identificación del lector y narrador, la participación del que lee en los sentimientos y juicios del que cuenta … suprime la distancia entre el lector y el objeto, nos exige una especie de complicidad.”²⁷ This would logically involve the reader in the composition and development of the text and is complemented by the use of a suggested complicity between reader and writer in the “nosotros” (“Nuestro protagonista,” “nuestro misántropo,” “nuestro excéntrico personaje,” “nuestro héroe”). He adds to this his view of the third person in the narrative as if the reader were looking at himself at a distance; it is the possibility of observation almost as a voyeur of the self projected into fantasied scenarios, also allowing us (the readers) to “contemplarnos con cierto despego”²⁸ [emphasis added]. In the use of the participatory form (“yo”) Paisajes attempts to reveal the speaker's own explanations of and connections between thoughts. We are told how and why the text is created: “La idea me vino al contemplar …” (71) or “Mi ideal literario [es] …” (183); but at times the “yo” is the Reverendo (“He recibido un mensaje de Agnès!” [133]), other times it is the narrator, and it even signals a voice where the two are one and the same, just two parts of the same self consciousness.²⁹ The appearances of the third-person self-contemplating form—“él,” “un hombre de aspecto hirsuto,” “el solitario,” “el solapado fisgón,” “el del impermeable”—is a counterpoint to the same psychological self, as we see on page 181, where we find one case of juxtaposition of both points of reference. But the real “encounters” of the pieces of consciousness in metacritical dialogue occur in the “tú” where the “yo” steps out to look at itself and examine what it finds: “Estás en Barbés … Dos jóvenes con túnicas africanas … distribuyen tarjetas a los viajeros, excluyendo tan solo a aquellos que, como tú, presentan un aspecto inconfundiblemente doméstico” (51–52), “Has recibido una convocatoria de la Prefectura de Policía: un impreso rectangular en el que figuran tu nombre y tus señas” (119). In order to understand this connection, the reader is given a parallel with the relationship between the Sufi master and dervish Chams Tabrizi and his faithful disciple Yalaluddin Rumi (alongside a second correspondence between the narrator/character and his wife). Of the master it is said that Yalaluddin Rumi “identified himself so intimately [with Tabrizi] that the very existence of his alter ego has been doubted.”³⁰ Whether they both had a historical, objective existence or not, the important fact is their use in this text as the model for the character's relationship with his wife, who he tells us does not exist except as a figment of his creative imagination, “carece simplemente de cuerpo” (145), “es un personaje ficticio” (179) or, as the reader begins to suspect, with himself (having internalized the opinions he has her express about his leisure time, wanderings, etc.).

In both the Sufi example and in Paisajes there are two aspects of identities but “only one soul” (“una sola alma”) in which the narrator tells us that all aspects and voices of his identity will be gathered: “nos fundiremos … no seremos ya seres individuales” up to the miracle of the final moment when “sentados acá, en el mismo escondrijo, vivamos simultáneamente en el Irak y en Jorastán” (87). This is obviously not possible except in the artistic creation of the self in the text, including all narrative voices and grammatical persons, the husband-wife, the exhibitionist Reverendo, the newspaper editorialist, the perpetrator of the plague in Sentier, the inventor of sexual fantasies, and so on. All of these fragments are the writer/author/character commenting upon himself. Take for example Agnés who tells the Reverendo's part of the personality why she has been included—to send the photographs to the character's wife and thereby reveal his imagined scenes. “Me has inventado expresamente para ello” (137), she says to him almost as if she were his own doubts or codes of conduct to curb, restrain, or check his desires. She is also, however, a critic of his writing and extends her power over him to that level as well: “No sirves absolutamente para nada. Ni siquiera sabes componer tu novela” (138), she tells him. She is at once the created image of his fantasies and the imposing voice of control, order, and obedience.

Considering all of the aforementioned psychological complexities of the writer's intentions in this narrative, what can the exigencies be for the reader? Because we have seen that there is an emphasis on the process of writing, the same is true for reading by means of which an individual creates his own self/life in his reactions to the text (the other self) and therefore his confrontation with his own ideas and categories for looking at and dealing with this act of reading, not consuming the book but instead creating it as he builds the relationships between the parts of the text. The writer of Paisajes seems to be saying that the book is not meant to satisfy the readers but to challenge them. There is a certain amount of irony in the reader being strung along or seduced by the narrator into a trap that will undermine his attempts to read the text, along traditional lines at least. Nevertheless, the narrator offers this literal and figurative “exploding” of trust as a message of warning to those who approach the work of literature with what we shall call a literal or “naïve”³¹ expectation toward the act of reading.

The works of Yalaluddin Rumi once again yield a clue to this attitude, since access to a comprehension of their meaning demands a certain “initiation” into the code of rules by which they were composed. These works are “writings … which … seldom impart their real significance except to those who possess the key to the cipher, while the uninitiated will either understand them literally or not at all.”³² The already “initiated,” or those developing their dexterity, can find in Paisajes a good number of opportunities to grasp these guidelines for reading. The composer of the text speaks directly to the reader—manipulates the standardly accepted concept of reader, in essence—at every turn, parodying his supposed concerns and expectations. For the reader who seeks coherent, objective details of the lives of the characters, the narrator includes the sarcastic aside “—anota bien ese detalle biográfico, curioso lector!—” (46); for those wanting personal testimonials by the character's wife in this era of women's liberation there are these words: “El lector reclama el derecho de verla de una vez, de conocer su versión de los hechos …, de meter su coriosa nariz … !” (146); for readers exasperated by the character's wanderings in marginal eras and cultures, there is the comment that: “Desde hace años, para contrariedad y desespero de nuestros lectores, descarta cualquier visita a los distritos serenos y nobles” (165–66). Concerning any pretension to facile answers to references and identifications there is no doubt as to the task required of the reader: “—dejamos a ustedes la tarea de adivinar quién es—” (46); and as refers to the form of the totality of this text, the reader is told what he will have to do to sort out the pieces: “El sufrido lector de esta narración confusa y alambicada tiene perfecta razón en plantearse una serie de preguntas sobre sus silencios, ambigüedades y escamoteos y, según nos tememos, se las está planteando ya” (145), and “componer un libro abierto al conjunto de sus voces y experiencias, construido como un rompecabezas que sólo un lector paciente, con gustos de aventurero y etnólogo, sería capaz de armar” (188). Finally, there is the crushing blow only seventeen pages from the end: “Cuidado, lector: el narrador no es fiable” (177).

What would happen should a “naïve” reader try to maintain his categories of reliable narrator, objective references, chronologically ordered chapters, plot, etc. through to the end? Paisajes offers a parody of the seduced and entrapped reader left naked and humiliated at the feet of Agnés, just as the Reverendo is when he does not comply with the “rules” for fulfillment of his desires. It represents, it appears to suggest, a baring of the reader as a trusting fool, then Agnés and the narrator both open the trap door and leave. Instead of being lead innocently by the hand, the reader is being baited into taking the plunge into his own imagination in a world of language created by the writer and reader just as Lewis Carroll's Alice “presides in sleep over a magic creation [of personalities and worlds] which is also a self-creation.”³³ The real question then becomes what occurs to this role when the reader goes beyond his and the author's dream/fictional worlds?³⁴ Nina Auerbach analyzes the limiting parameters of Alice's reign of power and this argues persuasively, I feel, for a similar restraint of the reader: “At the last minute each [of the powerful women in Victorian literature] is prevented from extending her reign beyond the looking-glass into the reader's reality.”³⁵ In Paisajes the reader is “prevented” from looking beyond the text by the narrator/character/author: he is continually told he is reading an artistic creation and only that, he is told that the narrator's voice is unreliable, and the writer of the story is blown up in the end leaving the last chapter to refer back only to a repetition of the beginning.

Paisajes is a palimpsest in its layers of meaning and shifting levels, one not quite completely erasing or covering the other but leaving vestiges that the reader-archeologist has the task of tracing. It is a palimpsest of writing in two senses: the use or suggestion of other texts in new contexts, and the self-reflective comments on its own coming-/writing-into-being. The immigrant quarter of Sentier is the model for this structure, the “palimpsesto urbano” being a spontaneous piecing together—supposedly improvised without a plan (56)—and mutation of lives, faces, and relationships (like the narrator's description of his life as being “Mi caza obsesiva y afán de coleccionista de aventuras y cuerpos,” (183). It is a puzzle to work out, just as the message in an unidentified language left under the door is for the narrator—the message to decipher is referred to as “el palimpsesto o negativo a medio revelar” (185)—who is challenged to make sense of it. The seemingly incomprehensible fragments of the text, what the narrator calls the “mal hilvanada y dispersa narración” (107), reflect the diffusion or dispersion of the psychological pieces of the writer which he seeks to leave thus, given that in this manner he finds identifications with numerous lives—in the urban ghettos of Brixton, the Bronx, or Kreuzberg. The “yo” tells itself that “desmembrado y hecho trizas como tu propio relato alcanzas al fin el don de la ubicuidad te dispersas de país en país de ciudad en ciudad de barrio en barrio” (192).

No possible search is proposed for a “harmonious union” of a single self, just as there is no signal for a single limiting reading of the text: as soon as the work is written, the voice present in it is removed from an actual, living body/voice by the public's appropriation of it in each reading, “immediately [effecting] … an erasure of that presence.”³⁶ What the writer wishes to find in the “infinite combinations” of Paisajes is a liberation from the time and space of history that limit the gratification of his desires (Marcuse) in any lasting and enduring (timeless) way. As he is attracted by the Paris metro map for its possibilities of stimulating in his mind the opening of doors to “la utopía, la ficción y la fábula” (110), so he invents a book wherein he can “esparcir la materia narrada al azar de sorpresas e imponderables por toda la rosa de los vientos: textos-vilano a merced del aire vehículos de leve polinación” (192). Without the limitations of historical time, the self no longer feels pressured by its “tiranía” (192) or “rigor avaricioso” (97) thus becoming “free” to express the unending satisfaction of its desires.

Therefore, if we were to bring up the question of mimesis in relation to Paisajes as a text reflecting its own composition, it would have to be judged on its suggestion of a shift from objective (“naïve”) reality to inner processes and the text seen as a world in and of itself,³⁷ the rules having been laid down in the acknowledgments. As Linda Hutcheon has remarked, the text must be judged: “not [as] anti-mimetic” but “[only] in terms of its own internal validity: ‘truth’ has no significance in art.”³⁸ The reality of the text isn't meant to represent the unmediated real world “familiar” to the reader; the emphasis is on the “possible” or what “might happen”³⁹ in the mental processes of the storyteller where fantasies are a truly integral part of his self-portrait. When, at the crucial moment of having to write his life's confession under pressure, the writer of Paisajes reminds himself that he should do the following: “Escribe cuanto sepas y, si no sabes nada, inventa. Recuérdalo: un buen relato ficticio vale por cien verdaderos si respeta mejor que ellos las leyes de la verosimilitud” (123), he is at the same time commenting on his perception of incomprehensible objective reality and explicitly defending the world of fiction (and metafiction) which Juan Goytisolo himself has defined as “those literary works that call for vision rather than recognition on the part of the reader.”⁴⁰ The only conceivable correspondence to mimetic norms relates to the detail visual and pictorial elements in the descriptions of the fantasies, a certain “accuracy” of treatment in the recounting of mental adventures. But in this case I must agree with Bernardo González, who has seen this aspect of Goytisolo's work as again essentially parody: “One might envision parody … in Goytisolo's realistic treatment of ‘unreal’ subject matter.”⁴¹ The only faithful reproduction in Paisajes for the writer, consequently, has to be of the processes of the imagination: how to create in art a story that could quite naturally be told in life. The answer in part lies in the last segment entitled “El orden de los factores no altera el producto,” since psychological states—of writer and reader alike—can repeat, reverse, etc. in accordance with “rules” or “codes” not belonging to conscious objective activity.

What one encounters in Paisajes in regard to the relationships between the writer and the written (product), the public and the private, the body of the text and the human body, is the classic confrontation of Dr. Jekyll with Mr. Hyde.⁴² That is to say, his text is the discourse of the split that the writer feels between life in repressive society (the domination and paternalism of both capitalism and socialism) and the less readily admitted (“menos confesable” [35]) desires of internal life (sexual fantasies, pornography, literary fantasies); these may also be the “yo”/“él” as he passes from one aspect of himself to another. Because this text is fundamentally a confession by the writer, he as well as we are being permitted to confront his attempts to recover in the mental images of the character/narrator the private body with its veiled pleasures, exhibitionism, the liberation of libido, relegating the acceptable public appearance as neighbor, husband, client to the “real” world of limitations. As Marcuse has stated about the unconscious retaining the “pleasure principle” while faced with defeat in the real world, “Only one mode of thought-activity is ‘split-off’ from the new organization of the mental apparatus [engaged in productivity] and remains free from the rule of the reality principle: phantasy is ‘protected from cultural alterations’ and stays committed to the pleasure principle.”⁴³ In the so-called “sicalíptica colección” (67) of the character are the images—written and imagined—of his hidden, secret body, covered up in clandestine diaries, clippings, letters; they are the functions done in the realm of the imagination only, not in public (“de puertas afuera” [23]).⁴⁴

In this context, the function of pornography appears to be considered as an art-producing form of the imagination wherein an individual fills in fantasies with as much “interiority”⁴⁵ as desired (recovering the real “power” of children, stifled by adult “monsters,” 59). Moreover, the pornographic imagination is also a literature consciously not realist in its mode of presentation since it reduces its characters to a few select functions. It depersonalizes machine-like activities of stereotypes with no past nor will to understand; it systematically repeats generic fantasies of what is forbidden: pleasure without responsibility, regressive desires toward Agnès/Alice without the proscriptions of society or chronological time; bestiality; the capricious inversion of female over male domination⁴⁶ in spite of the male character's control and command over the conjuring up of images in these scenes.

The act of writing itself in Paisajes is based on and defined by a series of identifications that at the same time create the body of a text as well as comment on what is being written and how it relates to the writer. Writing appears as illegible, scribbled, unreadable messages or graffiti, lacking its communicative aspect to all but the original writer who describes himself as “un contumaz y emperdernido onanista,” receiving pleasure from his physical and psychological self (132) and at the same time bothering to carry on a written dialogue with various personas of himself. It alternately takes the form of aggression, toward the reader and writer alike (“El templo de las musas” equates, in parody, the liberating function of writing with a physically liberating function of the “we,” see 88 ff.); of offering an alternative reality; of challenging the reader to break a code or decipher a puzzle; of belonging to the sales market of commodities (like the formulas for success such as “el realismo mágico,” 179, which one supposes he rejects; see “Captives of our ‘Classics’”); of being nothing but lies to throw the reader off the track, creating a hiding place to take on a disguise. The written text is also seen as autonomous from its author—“Como si no fuera obra de él” (17)—and as a mode of survival, salvation, or possible escape from disappearance, extinction, death (the sense end of the road of the psychological self?). This self-preservation is like the function of tales from the Thousand and One Nights, or the preservation of the most fundamental aspects of contemporary culture: our dreams, fantasies, and inner desires. The category of literature is broadened by the narrator/character/author in Paisajes to include texts created by cut-outs, rearrangements, compilations, scribes, annotators, and parodies (all comments on and inner reactions to others). It also admits sensationalist journalism (23–24) and letters to pornographic magazines, both appealing to the true, pure objects of hidden pleasures and created by the inspiration of a “muse” (36).

The beginning is/of the end: the only way that the tension between the inner recondite sexual/literary self and the body as objective material seems to be able to be resolved⁴⁷ in Paisajes is by apocalypse, a definitive breaking apart and dispersion into voices beyond history. The wish for finality and plenitude, a healing of some type in global and self-destruction, seeks to “find in a general catastrophe … the end of all desire, of every discourse and narration.”⁴⁸ The idea of the apocalypse in this text is formed around several images—and levels—of imminent annihilation by both traditional and modern versions of the “Antichrist.” The end of the narrator, which is also the starting point of the text's self-commentary, the end of the experience of writing/reading as victim of the written message (a telegram, 191) is also a parody of terrorists' mail bombs written by a narrator who claims to be compiling a manual of urban terrorist tactics; it parallels the exploding of the narrator's reliability in the text: we are told “no es fiable,” after 177 pages. The “Reverendo” wreaks destruction on Sentier by his white mice; the Arabs in Paris invade and “destroy” the city through “plague,” “catastrophe,” “toma de poder” (11 ff). The terrorists give 24 hours notice before the apocalypse; the “wife” is destroyer of dream worlds as is Agnès. The “First World” is provoker of a “hecatombe” in its development of atomic bomb technology (called “un azar de la historia,” 127), creator of ecological disasters such as the greenhouse effect (“la helada irrevocabilidad del diluvio que se avecina,” 83), and object of the millenium whose essential characteristic is endless series of coups d'état (141).

The two levels, one caused in the text by the writer of the narrative and one projected onto the present⁴⁹ that is viewed as inexorably leading to disaster via “la modernidad incontrolada” (82) are referred to as “el apocalípsis, tu apocalípsis” (129) by the writer who sees his own symptoms in the “outside.” Then what is the “revelation” of the apocalyptic moment in this instance? If the traditional sense of apocalypse carries with it the concept that in the crisis of the end of history one is judged and separated from the world, Paisajes can be understood as a work of personal crisis projected outward and effecting an ultimate separation: the “exilio interior” (168). The book's apocalypse ends the time and history which the writer feels have been pursuing him relentlessly, in favor of a timeless, “liberated” series of identities. This is the reason that the “battlefield” of the title is the text itself and the “scenes” are the psychological self-portraits after the judgment and separation from “standard” rules of authorship, narration, and so on. It appears that the narrator has decided that things cannot be resolved, that discrepancies will coexist, and that the demise of the “Super Cultures” as pretenders to the future—just as the demise of the author/narrator—is inevitable. Writing is only to be generated above and beyond (at the end of) history.

How does this structure answer the needs of the narrator/writer? It proves to him that his body's personal gratification has no place in the objective world, only in the aftermath of a “hecatombe” that creates the subjective atmosphere of expression and fulfillment. In addition, it breaks up once and for all the reader's counting on reliability and collusion with a narrator. For this writer, the apocalypse also leads to the promise of a future, ongoing, unlimited “bios” of the self; as long as the imagination exists, any number of voices concerned with themselves, and no longer limited by traditional mimetic considerations, can appear. And these voices, as Paul de Man stated in his definition of autobiography, are intimately concerned with themselves as the “subject of [their] own understanding.”

Notes

1. Paul Jay, Being in the Text (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984).

2. James Olney, Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980).

3. Paul Jay, 15.

4. Paul Jay, 17.

5. The term is taken from Robert C. Spires, Beyond the Metafictional Mode: Directions in the Modern Spanish Novel (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1984). See especially chapter 4 on Juan sin tierra.

6. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (London: Oxford UP, 1968), 129–30. Margaret A. Rose adds that “As a form of metafiction parody has also served to expand the corpus of fiction, contributing to progress in literary history, while also presenting critiques of the epistemological processes, structural problems, and social assumptions involved in the writing and reception of literary texts” (Parody/Meta-Fiction [London: Croom Helm, 1979], 13–14).

7. James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981), vii.

8. George Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” in Olney, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, 31 (trans. Olney).

9. Juan Goytisolo, Paisajes después de la batalla (Barcelona: Montesinos, 1982), 182. All future references to this edition will appear in parentheses in the text.

10. In Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (New York: Harper, 1980), 33.

11. Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove, 1973), 19, 31.

12. Gordon Williams, The Nature of Roman Poetry (London: Oxford UP, 1983), 102.

13. Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox (New York: Methuen, 1984), 33, 133. The “paradox” of the title reflects the paradoxes of what the reader is asked to do and the motivation behind it.

14. The narrator of Paisajes clarifies the shifting identities of the work on page 178, calling this an “artilugio literario” or “dirty trick,” one supposes on the reader.

15. See Julián Ríos, “The Apocalypse According to Juan Goytisolo,” in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol. IV, No. 2 (Summer 1984), 129.

16. Michael Sprinker, “Fictions of the Self: The End of Autobiography,” in James Olney (ed.), Autobiography, p. 325.

17. This statement should remind the reader of a similar one at the end of Reivindicación del conde don Julián (México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1973), although the “contributors” there are not anonymous but identified.

18. Gerard Genette, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and others referred to this as “bricolage” in the 1960s and 1970s; Linda Hutcheon speaks of “littérature citationelle” (Narcissistic Narrative, 24) in her discussion of the generative qualities of metafictional parody.

19. For a discussion of this subject in Juan sin tierra, see “La paradoja del cuerpo rescatado en Juan sin tierra de Juan Goytisolo: ¿rebelión erótica o revolución?” in my book Juan Goytisolo: del ‘realismo crítico’ a la utopía (Madrid: José Porraúa Turanzas, 1984). The narrator of Paisajes is clear on his own place in his vision of European society after the advent of the “New Left”: “Los revolucionarios de mayo han instaurado el modelo de sociedad de sus sueños … el futuro ha sido amansado y el idílico cuadro en que vives es el de una felicidad sin complejos … Un solo detalle superfluo: tu puñetera picha” (118–19).

20. See Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston: Beacon, 1955), 41.

21. As in other works such as Reivindicación, Juan sin tierra or Makbara, there are signals in the narrative of Paisajes to indicate the moments of disconnection between imagination and reality, and the reader is left with no doubts as to the proposed maintenance of this separation: “al volcar la lámpara de la mesilla contigua al sofá cama y hacerla caer estrepitosamente al suelo, devolverá de golpe a nuestro acongojado héroe a una inmisericorde y feroz realidad” (139).

22. See Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, 15 ff.

23. Writing about the Amores of Ovid, Gordon Williams calls this feature “chameleon-like” (The Nature of Roman Poetry, 112) in regard to the presentation of imagined erotic situations with Corinna; one could apply the same phrase to Alice/Agnès in Paisajes.

24. Paul Jay, Being in the Text, 182.

25. This fact may explain why the terrorist invasion imagined at the end of Paisajes is psychological, led by “la militante histérica, lacaniana y teñida que parecía la jefa [y] emitía dictámenes sicoanalíticos” (176).

26. Michael Sprinker, “Fictions of the Self …,” 342.

27. Juan Goytisolo, Problemas de la Novela (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1959), 11.

28. Juan Goytisolo, Problemas de la Novela, 10.

29. Harry Levin refers to the similar case of “Faustus and Mephostophilis [sic], [when] the second self becomes a projection of the ego, a daimon” (The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1952]).

30. Tales of Mystic Meaning, Being Selections from the Mathnawi of Jalal-ud Din Rumi, trans. R. A. Nicholson (London: Chapman and Hall, 1931), xvi.

31. Linda Hutcheon discusses the “naïve realist who, like Don Quijote, believes that words in books refer directly to reality” (Narcissistic Narrative, 38).

32. Tales of Mystic Meaning …, xxi-xxii. Here, one is reminded of the admonition to all at the end of Juan sin tierra (follow the rules or don't play the game).

33. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982), 41.

34. It is evident in Paisajes that the writer sees the imagined worlds as both an escape from and a revenge on “reality.” He writes of Tejero and his “bandits” as a coming to life of the monstrosities invented by Goya, a real historical event from which only he (the writer) is saved (by his mental life in another realm): “Caprichos y desastres de Goya cobrarán súbita y brutal realidad. Unico farallón indemne en el mar de barbarie, chulería y desdén: el bunker-refugio de la Rue Poissoniére” (104).

35. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon, 36.

36. Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London and New York: Methuen, 1984), 107. Michael Sprinker sees this phenomenon as “a pervasive and unsettling feature in modern culture, the gradual metamorphosis of an individual with a distinct, personal identity into a sign, a cipher, an image no longer clearly and positively identifiable as ‘this one person’” (322).

37. In spite of this declared separation, the text does exist in the world and even if the writer chooses not to acknowledge this fact, it is incumbent on the readers to remember it.

38. Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, 25, 19.

39. The terms are from Aristotle, “Poetic Truth and Historical Truth,” in Classical Literary Criticism: Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, trans. T. S. Dorsch (Great Britain: Penguin, 1983), 43–44.

40. Juan Goytisolo, “Captives of our ‘Classics,’” in The New York Times Book Review, May 26, 1985, 24. He is referring to his own works here.

41. Bernardo A. González, “Mimesis and Narrative Discourse: Juan Goytisolo's Search for Immediacy,” in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. IV, No. 2 (Summer 1984), 86.

42. It is noteworthy that Goytisolo has written of the division between the two aspects or personas of himself—novelist/literary theorist—in the same terms: see “Novela, crítica y creación,” Revista Iberoamericana, 116–17 (julio—dic. 1981), 29.

43. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 14.

44. I hasten to add, though, that Peter Gay finds a relationship between the mere biological urges of sexual desire and their orientation into certain directions via environmental stimuli: “The sexual fantasies that prompt amorous researches or accompany masturbation elaborate or, far more often, distort provocative scenes one has witnessed, noises one has heard, stories one has read” [emphasis added]. (The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Vol. I: Education of the Senses [New York: Oxford UP, 1984]. 328).

45. Murray S. Davis, SMUT: Erotic Reality/Obscene Ideology (Chicago: U Chicago, 1983), 137.

46. Angela Carter underlines the fact that this unequal relation need not necessarily be the male gender over female gender but the male role as “tyrannous” and the female as “martyrised, no matter what the official genders of the … beings are” (The Sadeian Woman, 24).

47. Lacan sees this “aggressivity” toward the fragmented body in the repetition of “punishment” that comes with pleasure: here, it is repeated in the humiliations with Agnès, in the prostration of the self before the object of unfulfilled desire (see Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body, 89).

48. Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body, 111.

49. Frank Kermode believes that in modern times “we project our existential anxieties on to history” (The Sense of an Ending, 97).