[In the following essay, Schaefer-Rodríguez analyzes the role of travel in Goytisolo's work. She asserts that “the importance of Campos de Níjar … resides in the fact that it contains the seed of a consumption of the intrinsic beauty and inherent value in the surroundings of the ‘primitive,’ ‘uncontrolled,’ ‘natural,’ and ‘exotic’ attained by means of a real or imagined geographical mobility which will reappear over and over again as the basis for Goytisolo's subsequent texts.”]

In the case of post-Civil War Spain, the passport, rather than being a document impeding free and unrestricted passage across changing national boundaries imposed on European travelers in the period between the two world wars, represented both an acceptance of economic necessity and an opportunity for social mobility. When emigration restrictions were lifted by the Franco government in the 1950s, unemployed and under-employed workers spilled across the border into the rest of Europe in search of temporary or permanent solutions to their economic problems, a movement corresponding to internal rural migration in the developing industrial cities. Then, with the progress of the proclaimed “economic miracle”¹ of capitalism in the 1960s, the movement became two-way: as the young went abroad seeking consumer goods from a broader market, to see movies banned in Spain, to buy books unavailable at home, at the same time tourists began to invade the Costa del Sol and the marketing of the sun and sand, the developing of the picturesque, the “unexplored,” and the “untouched” for the masses, commenced.

When Juan Goytisolo traveled from Spain to Paris in the 1950s² he saw his geographical mobility as a substitute for the physical restrictions and intellectual decay he wanted to “leave behind.” He has the character Alvaro Mendiola express that same feeling of absolute (apocalyptic) freedom from the “orden promiscuo y huero del que habías intentado escapar”³ which he had only dreamed of until then. Mendiola's recollections of the early 1950s are summarized in the form of an atlas: “abrir el libro de geografía y pasar las páginas era, entonces, una evasión, una fuga, un sueño, el vuelo libre y espacioso de algún faquir sobre la codiciada alfombra mágica. En los años de guerra y postguerra el proyecto parecía utópico y trasladarse a cualquiera de los países … equivalía a tropezar con dificultades y obstáculos … solicitaciones denegadas, visados remotos, largas e inútiles colas ante funcionarios pétreos con rostro de inquisidores (SI, 316–17). With each succeeding reference to this atlas a personal geography will be evoked, facilitating an increasing withdrawal from concrete, real contexts to a subjective flux of time (the changing verb tenses ultimately leading to Makbara) and place (in Reivindicación del conde don Julián the character Alvaro removes himself and the narrative from both Spain and Tangier when he establishes the text “fuera del devenir histórico;” the “magic carpet” of the narrator in Juan sin tierra).⁴

Comparing himself to José María Blanco White, self-exiled in England in the early nineteenth century, Goytisolo looked forward to an equal “independencia de juicio y libertad de criterio”⁵ incomprehensible and inaccessible, in his opinion, to those continuing to reside within the borders of Spain. With this “special perspective” Goytisolo decided to journey back to the poverty-stricken provinces of southeastern Spain to give witness and documentation to the points of origin of the victims of urban development and European emigration he was seeing daily in France. His passport permitted his entrance and allowed him to go “de un sitio a otro sin ser esclavo en ninguno, y mirar las cosas desde fuera, como un espectador ajeno al drama.”⁶ The literary result was Campos de Níjar (1960), seen by some as embodying an incipient “critical realism”⁷ given its declared testimonial intention. Upon closer examination, however, this text appears rather to be oriented toward just what the narrator flatly affirms as his status early on: “tenía diez días libres y me he tomado unas vacaciones” (to which one of the unemployed, vacationless campesinos replies incredulously “—Si viviera en Cataluña es que no me asomaría yo por Almería, vamos, ni que me mataran”).⁸ What is the attraction of the particular region for which the narrator claims to have had affection without ever having been there (CN, 9)? To relieve his own social angst—among solitary individuals, unchangeable conditions, dead-ended aspirations all summarized later on in Señas de identidad—perpetuated even in France,⁹ he seeks out the rudimentary simplicity (elsewhere called poverty) of rural life undisturbed by massive tourism where he can “feel alive” again in the face of the aggression of an invading consumer society. (Nine years later, Goytisolo writes of this same phenomenon and describes it as a necessary escape for Europeans, himself included, who go to “darse un baño de humanidad en el desierto de Marruecos” [EE, 141] when Spain no longer affords such a haven.) In the bus terminal in Almería the narrator of Campos de Níjar describes the fair-like atmosphere which he contrasts with the developing cities: “Después del invierno gris del Norte, me sentía bien en medio de aquel bullicio.”¹⁰ Almería is a compensatory image to which his allegiance is temporary (thus his abrupt departure in the end), dictated merely by personal desire and available mobility: he is always “de visita,” always the “extranjero,” as is the narrator of Pueblo en marcha in Cuba (1969).

What gives these (and future) adventures meaning and value is the capacity to measure them against what he is escaping from—tourism, industrialization, mass media, class conflicts—as a permanent and unaltered point of comparison not implying change but rather one from which he has the liberty to distance himself at will (all the while needing and able to assure himself that nothing is different: “buscando ansiosamente una certidumbre … verificación cotidiana y necesaria” [RCJ, 14]). The importance of Campos de Níjar, therefore, resides in the fact that it contains the seed of a consumption of the intrinsic beauty and inherent value in the surroundings of the “primitive,” “uncontrolled,” “natural,” and “exotic” attained by means of a real or imagined geographical mobility which will reappear over and over again as the basis for Goytisolo's subsequent texts. Rather than this movement away from the frontiers of Spain leading to any other objective, it eventually appears as an end in itself—“nomadismo, pastereo, errancia”—¹¹ posing no threat to real social conditions but paradoxically relying on them to continue existing.

The first step for the narrator of Campos de Níjar is the identification of what is perceived as the timeless elements present in the people, natural phenomena, and man-made constructs of pre-tourist provincial Spain. He emphasizes the essential, elemental “nobility” and “dignity” inherent in the rural population, in spite of “la barba de dos días y los vestidos miserables y desgarrados” (CN, 33) of which he takes (brief) note. The more inaccessible the places (the countryside of Almería and Albacete, the desert of Morocco), the better they fulfill the subjective requirements of being “ignorados aún por los turistas” (SI, 108) and “un ambiente de gran inexperiencia social” (EE, 170); that is: naive, innocent, and full of vitality (EE, 169) for the individual seeking refuge from capitalist development. Against the cold industrial image of factories, smokestacks, automobiles, and air pollution of Europe and North America, the sun is presented as an element of nature, stripped of its exploitation to promote tourism. It is the “undeveloped” sun of the “Third World” countries described in correlative terms of being “subdesarrollados o en trance de desarrollo,” possessing “mano de obra abundante e industrialización escasa” but most of all “enardecidos por el sol” (RCJ, 29, 48, 48). This is what first strikes Goytisolo about the towns of the southern Spanish provinces: their “African-ness” not only in architecture but in the “inevitable,” repeatable image of wandering children, poverty, stray dogs, dust, and harsh sun as what he will assume to be an attractive alternative to and antithesis of modern capitalist socio-economic order. The continued quest to evoke and reproduce this paradisiacal place takes him across all borders and national boundaries, alighting especially in the marketplaces which he believes “parody” (note the end of Makbara in the plaza Xemaá-El-Fná) consumer society, guided by the preconceived ideal found therein: “En cualquier lugar—independientemente de grados y latitudes—recorrer el mercado significa para mí una fiesta.”¹² From Almería to Marrakesh to Cuba, the vision of the plaza or zoco is a kaleidoscope of objects, sounds, aromas, and above all accessible human bodies. These are not organized social beings but physical presences brought together in endless combinations of relations in a “neutral space” (M, 204) which offers the wandering observer the essential quality of being “caótico, delirante;” an antidote to the neat, clean pre-packaged production and consumption in the industrialized nations. These supposed escapes from “technology and progress” seek out the plazas of Third World peoples as a priori expressions of permanent, ahistorical exoticism, without ever considering that their cultural expressions arise from concrete, material living conditions (“underdevelopment,” imperialism, poverty, etc.).

Within the openness and “license” (M, 204) of these markets (which belie the association of their name with sales and tourist bargains) lies for the narrator a parenthesis in the social structure based on a liberation of the body from social and historical constraints: censorship and restrictions cease to exist in an atmosphere of irresponsible, unlimited, and “unproductive” relationships “untainted” by any inhibiting roles or models. From Señas de identidad to Makbara there is an increasingly exalted eroticism implicit in geographical freedom. What apparently cannot be experienced “at home” is to be found “on the road” (be it actual or imagined), particularly, as Paul Fussell summarizes, the idea of “making love in novel environments … one of the headiest experiences travel promises.”¹³ Thus it is that in Señas de identidad the atlas which Alvaro consults serves him not as a series of maps having objective historical identity but as fixed images of his personal memories corresponding to an “historial amoroso” (SI, 317): “Montecarlo, Suiza, Venecia, Hamburgo, Holanda … (el encuentro con Europa yuxtapuesto a la mutua revelación de vuestros cuerpos, la fallida inserción en el mundo de la civilización industrial urbana a los altibajos e incidencias de vuestra desmesurada pasión” (SI, 317). If Europe offers the narrator the first stage of this geographical-sexual mobility, North Africa plainly signifies his discovery of the ultimate manifestation and expression of physical freedom. Throwing off the “civilized” high-heeled shoes and feeling the desert sand on bare feet (M, 94) is but the beginning of the removal of the last barrier to the asocial body: restrictive clothing. Instead, in Makbara the virtues of the djellabah—the “tejido alcahuete que adhiere y permite vislumbrar la topografía” (M, 216)—are extolled, oriented obviously toward the objective of sexual enjoyment interpreted by the narrator as the core of this society: “lenguaje de caderas, telegrafía de gestos, semierecciones festivas: incitaciones visuales y acústicas al tanteo y exploración, al ejercicio de la caza furtiva, al magreo de la mano inconexa” (M, 216). The original idea of social mobility has now been stretched to the point of social anonymity in the combination of geographical wandering and a freeing of the human body from social commitment by turning it into only a sensual object available indiscriminately to any and all physical stimuli.

Consequently, the target of Goytisolo's scorn is mass tourism, whose “egalitarain”¹⁴ group travels result from the media publicity (brochures, movies, television, magazines) of capitalism and the increased accessibility of “vacations” to different economic classes. Travel in the sense of individual fulfillment by searching for “the excitement of the unpredictable,”¹⁵ a modern utopian dream reminiscent of bygone eras of exploration and imperial colonization, is seen as threatened by the static, ahistorical, recognizable, isolated, reproducible, and repeatable images of consumable tour places. (This is actually quite ironic given the fact that the Middle East becomes just such a reusable image for the narrator in Juan sin tierra since he no longer even needs to return to it physically but rather just recreate over and over the same personal vision of the geographical places; he does not encounter—or seem to want to—the change or movement connected with real-life situations.) Since, by the decade of the 1970s, even for the Spanish, “foreign travel was no longer a monopoly of the rich or the young,¹⁶ Goytisolo's characters and narrators appear particularly conscious of this invasion of planned activity (a “deadly sin” of North American capitalism in Makbara) into the realm of chance and the unexpected naturally connected with free travel or “lo aleatorio” as Alvaro Mendiola often remarks.

In Campos de Níjar Goytisolo refers with contempt to the French who have come to “des pays pauvres” (Almería—N, 63) in their Peugeot as “turistas” and he comments on the wealthy who, from their yachts, never “adventure beyond”¹⁷ certain points to see the “real life” of the region as he does. This attitude becomes more intense and specific in its reaction in Makbara. The calculated isolation of the tour groups (“protegidos, insonorizados,” guided in their “manso … rebaño” [M, 121 and 67]) and their simultaneous irrational attraction to the “exotic” panoramas (the enjoyable “spectacle” [M, 70]) of the Middle East become the object of attention in a subjective inversion of affairs by the narrator. As the embodiment of the “anti-tourist,” Goytisolo's narrators will define themselves as being the rejection or negation of the tourist whose identity is derived from spending, consumption of sights, souvenirs, photographs, and so on. They will only approach the tourists, as is seen with the extra-terrestrial Mrs. Putiphar and the “marcianos” from the United States in Reivindicación del conde don Julián, “con simultánea (y opuesta) voluntad de exotismo.”¹⁸ From the first step (Campos de Nijar) of merely differentiating between those who travel in luxurious automobiles and those who take the rural bus or hitchhike (enumerating in detail the road descriptions, route numbers, and local scenery to prove an intimate acquaintance with the area in question—see, for example, 17, 23) there is a rapid polarization of the two elements to try and “provoke horror” in these tourists who, in spite of the narrator's desires, do not disappear from the panorama. (In Señas de identidad Mendiola wishes the plazas of Venice emptied of tours in order to appreciate an innate beauty otherwise hidden by these consumers—see 358.) The “meteco” in Makbara is the proposed ideal figure whose presence in European society functions as the opposite of the well-dressed tourist: “intrusión peturbadora,” “brutal desafio,” “mensaje de horror” (M, 13).

A felt necessity to preserve the self-declared independence of these narrators leads them to try, at least temporarily, to give the appearance of being absorbed into the surrounding society by means of adopting its speech (for Goytisolo, Arab dialects and colloquial speech), clothing, activities, and geographical areas. All this is possible, of course, since the Arab countries seem to be permanently fertile ground open to the whim of such individuals who are not really interested in understanding these cultures but whose motives characteristically are, in these texts at least, “self-protection and vanity,”¹⁹ and the need to maintain a certain superiority to the tourist and distance from him. To this end, Goytisolo's characters will “go native” by donning the free-flowing djellabah of North Africa—“holgada envoltura del cuerpo árabe” (M, 208)—which they feel allows the maximum liberation of bodily expression (particularly sexual, as in Juan sin tierra, 149) and concurrently offers a masking of identification with the European or American tourists. With the change in clothing comes a change in social identity: “concepción del vestuario como simbolo, referencia, disfraz … mudar de ropas para mudar de piel: ser, por espacio de horas, nabab, peregrino, rey” (M, 209). In addition, they shun the stereotyped tourist spots and brochure descriptions in favor of frequenting instead local hotels, restaurants, and “forgotten” locations (the tomb of Ibn Turmeda is of particular subjective interest in Juan sin tierra) of a personally significant itinerary: the “cuppos di sacco y callejones angostos” (SI, 360), “hoteluchos” (SI, 340), “escueto nido de amor, el modesto fonduq de Marrakech” (M, 63), the distant “ángulo del pretil” (SI, 410) in Venice, but above all the cafés and zocos. Wandering from place to place, drinking mint tea, and refusing to speak (especially in their own language) to the intruders from “civilized” lands (the Spaniard with “bigotillo alfonsino, gabardina, gafas: quijada borbónica” [RCJ, 56]), there is an express rejection of the guidebook versions of these places in an attempt to question their authority versus the individual's account. For Xemaá-El-Fná in Marrakesh, the “Guide Bleu,” “Fodor,” “Nagel, Baedeker, Pol” are all cited as inadequate and to be distrusted because they make this plaza approachable on a collective level and do not permit it to remain an essentially ungraspable mystery inaccessible and unfathomable—“todas las guías mienten / no hay por dónde cogerla” (M, 203)—except for subjectively felt interpretations of the individuals coming together in that space in what is for Goytisolo temporary, irresponsible groupings which by nature oppose the planned and organized aspects of tourism. Stemming from this point of view comes the possible selection, therefore, of (imagined if not actual) public copulation with the syphilitic beggars in the market as the focal point for a complete absorption into the Oriental culture, “una entrega total, sin reservas” (JT, 63) at least according to the narrator's terms. (The narrator is actually absorbed into his own immutable image of the place, not into real society.)

The logical extreme of this attitude leads Goytisolo's narrators not merely to rely on their personal interpretations and the subjective values of geographical places visited to counteract the “tourist spots,” but to create their own version of places keeping history and reality constantly in retreat as they become the realms of others (Americans, Europeans, tourists, consumers, and the like), and not themselves. They are permitted the ultimate luxury and liberty of substituting isolated individual interpretations in place of historical (changing, adapting, and progressing) societies with real geographies. By Makbara, then, travel has become no longer real but imaginary (one step removed from objective life), likened to the self-preservation of the episodes of the Thousand and One Nights which Jean Franco has described as “the paradigm of the power of story-telling to stave off death”²⁰ (death as the culmination of a life process through and in history; death as objective reality constantly “out there” waiting to overpower the narrator in Reivindicación del conde don Julián if he fails to come up with “one more story” to stay the executioner's guillotine). The narration itself, in “warding off” life outside the text, is seen as removed from social existence as well as being a vehicle for withdrawing individuals from immediate contact with the present physical, historical world, thereby creating a “circle of vacancy,” a “barrier of unreality”²¹ between that realm and the listeners or readers of travels and adventures transported to other, alternative times and places. The reader does not discover, nor do the narrators seem to comprehend, how human social and economic activities have evolved to this present time. Historical processes as the activity of men are not considered and the individual's participation in them is therefore nonexistent; there is no exchange between subjective and objective elements of historical development.²² Nature, “primitive culture,” and imaginary tales are all “spectacles”²³ for the delight of the traveler.

Such alternative pretensions—to be different from all those of the middle classes who take vacations or can now “afford a holiday” from routine working conditions—stand out noticeably in an age dominated by mass tourism, international trade, and consumption of what Paul Fussell has called the “pseudo-places”²⁴ of such tourism. But by coming up with their own repeatable images of “natural” places juxtaposed to the industrialized cities of Spain, France, and the United States, Goytisolo's characters create their own series of stereotyped appearances (“instinctive” Arabs, veiled women, mustached storytellers, hypersexual soldiers, aging prostitutes) and geographies (the slums of Barcelona, Venice, Pittsburgh, Tangiers, and Marrakesh; sand dunes of the desert; sewers; marketplaces; run-down hotels) which can be conjured up and counted on at any time. It is in this aspect of familiarity and permanence that the scenes in Goytisolo's works ironically correspond to the recognizability of tourist sites: the narrators are guaranteed certain types of adventures within these contexts which are deemed to be otherwise impossible. Best of all, for those who feel constrained by the “programming” and “bureaucracy” of objective social realities, no passport is needed for such geographical mobility. The continued attempts to “return to paradise” by Goytisolo's characters²⁵ permit the endurance, for this author, of alternative (subjective, fictional) versions of social reality into which he may venture and be absorbed, and therein find personal (physical and artistic) “freedom” and mobility above and beyond the “negative space” of contemporary society.²⁶ Goytisolo's texts, therefore, seek refuge in the excitation or stimulation (see the prefatory note to Paisajes) of self-created and sustained images of wandering and travel to the realms of natural and “uncivilized” worlds, as well as to pre-adult erotic fantasy “wonderland” worlds of Lewis Carroll's female objects of desire, voluntarily imposing “banishment” from objective participation in the “pestifero muladar de la Historia.”²⁷

Notes

1. Raymond Carr and Jean Pablo Fusi discuss these issues in From Dictatorship to Democracy (London, 1979), 55.

2. Goytisolo's own “Cronología” written, as he says, “por el propio autor en tercera persona” in G. Sobejano et al., Juan Goytisolo (Madrid, 1975), 5, establishes the years 1953 for his first trip to Paris, 1955 for the second, 1956 (September) for his “installing himself” in that city, see 15–17.

3. Juan Goytisolo, Señas de identidad (México, 1966), 11. Hereafter cited in the text as SI.

4. Juan Goytisolo, Reivindicación del conde don Julián (México, 1970), 26. Hereafter cited as RCJ. In Juan sin tierra (Barcelona, 1975), the narrator states: “someterás la geografía a los imperativos y exigencias de tu pasión,” 82. Hereafter cited as JT.

5. Juan Goytisolo, España y los españoles (Barcelona, 1969), 99. Hereafter cited as EE.

6. Juan Goytisolo, Campos de Níjar (Barcelona, 1960), 57. Hereafter cited as CN.

7. See Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, Julio Rodríguez Puértolas, Iris Zavala, eds., Historia social de la literatura española (en lengua castellana) (Madrid, 1979), III, 202. The definition which Georg Lukács gives to “realism”—“a writer's critical understanding of the world he lives in” (Realism in our Time (Literature and the Class Struggle), trans. John and Necke Mander [New York, 1964], 76, my emphasis)—perhaps signals best the element lacking in Campos de Níjar, a narrative leading to no praxis but only to a disarticulated emotional response to an “uncomfortable” situation and a vague feeling of “guilt” (57) for so facile a forgetting of what is really occurring around him while he eats and drinks “local delicacies.”

8. CN, 32. In Señas de identidad Alvaro Mendiola represents his own travel to the south as “inspired” by the poverty of Barcelona's shanty towns (381).

9. Alvaro Mendiola later concludes that in “la nueva y helada religión industrial de los europeos … que contemplaras en el valle del Ruhr durante tus viajes … Bajo una apariencia engañosa de confort las condiciones de vida eran duras, los sentimentos tendían a desaparecer, las relaciones humanas se mercantilizaban. Tu rebeldía tampoco cabía allá,” SI, 342–343.

10. CN, 10. One must take note of the similarity between this reaction and the feeling of “liberation” in the Oriental zoco underscored from Reivindicación del conde don Julián onward (especially the “fauna circense” in JT, 106).

11. Juan Goytisolo, Makbara (Barcelona, 1980), 67. Hereafter cited as M.

12. Goytisolo, Pueblo en marcha, 27. Goytisolo refers to this as his “utopia” in M, 204.

13. Paul Fussell, Abroad (British Literary Traveling Between the Wars) (Oxford, 1980), 113.

14. Fussell, 38. Fussell defines tourism as, in essence, “the industrialization of travel” (71). See also 38–44 for a discussion of the terms “exploration,” “travel,” and “tourism.” Carr and Fusi have written of the broadened class considerations underlying the development of tourism and note the reaction of those engaged in profiting from it: “José Meliá, who has made a fortune out of the hotel business, pleads not for more tourists but for better tourists who can pay high prices,” 58. This seems to amount to an “exclusivizing” of popular mass tourism.

15. Fussell, 39.

16. Carr and Fusi, 97.

17. Ibid., 88. It is with irony, then, that the reader encounters Alvaro Mendiola telling of his own similar experiences—“os habéis demorado varios días en el centro de Francia siguiendo uno de los itinerarios gastronómicos recomendados por la Guía Michelin” (SI, 389)—while at the same time he is repulsed by the “grupos compactos,” ibid., 357, filling the grand canal of Venice with masses of picture-taking tourists.

18. RCJ, 46. While in Juan sin tierra the narrator (with Ebeh) sarcastically comments on the tourists' desires to assuage the syphilitic's situation with coins, in Reivindicación Mendiola also relies on economic means to silence the annoying beggars and in Reivindicación and Makbara the snake charmer and halaiquí, respectively, are seen as deserving of monetary compensation (the “justiciero homenaje, RCJ, 65) from the foreign visitors.

19. Fussell, 47.

20. Jean Franco, “The Utopia of a Tired Man: Jorge Luis Borges,” Social Text, II, No. 1 (Fall 1981), 70.

21. Paul Zweig, The Adventurer: The Fate of Adventure in the Western World (Princeton, 1974), 85. Zweig appropriately enough uses the storytellers of the marketplace of Djemá-el-Fná in Marrakesh as his example of this phenomenon, (84); it is the same one Goytisolo employs to structure Makbara.

22. This speaks to the contrary of Georg Lukács' fundamental premise of “the realization of individual consciousness through the concrete, historical situation,” Realism in our Time, 8. See also Geoge Novack, Understanding History (New York, 1972), especially 5–11 and 29, on the collective process of history in which Goytisolo's narrators are never placed; they instead state their opposition to participating (see RCJ, JT, and particularly M).

23. Néstor García Canclini, Las culturas populares en el capitalismo (México, 1982), 16.

24. Fussell, 43–45.

25. Paisajes después de la batalla (Barcelona, 1982) contains his dream of the utopia of the “Third World” within urban, technological settings such as the immigrant sectors of El Sentier in Paris and Kreuzberg in Berlin which, says the autobiographical narrator, “estimulan … sus dotes creadoras” (165). For that reason, he goes on, “descarta cualquier visita a los distritos serenos y nobles … con el falacioso pretexto de que le dan asma y si se ve en el aprieto de hacerla, se provee de antemano de todo lo necesario—pasaporte, divisas, certificado internacional de vacuna—como si fuese a un safari congoleño o a una expedición cientifica a Groenlandia” (166).

26. Zweig, 210. These ideas correspond to the terms Zweig uses to describe the “rebel” or “criminal” trespasser of Nietzsche who “challenges the claustrophobic ideals of the modern world” (211) to seek “the wilderness, a certain freer and more perilous nature and form of existence” (from Twilight of the Idols, cited in Zweig, 211). For Goytisolo, the mental and fictional images of mobility fulfill this desire.

27. Goytisolo, Paisajes, 81.