[In the following essay, Squires traces Goytisolo's evolution through his first five novels, specifically his relationship to myth.]

Critical interest in Juan Goytisolo has focused most intently on his period of ideological realism, beginning with Señàs de identidad (1966) and characterized by a zeal for aggressive demythification, in which the task of demythifying Spain goes hand in hand with that of demythifying the part of the author that remains a prey to myth.¹ This approach he has termed ‘autenticidad subjetiva’.² The purpose of the present article is to suggest that the desire to erase all mythical illusions is ambiguously present in the early, relatively sparsely studied, novels.³ Myth (or mystification) is a paradoxical entity in Goytisolo's work, and a consideration of the early fiction might add nuance to the general view that Goytisolo is simply anti-myth.⁴ In the course of the first five works there is a developing appreciation of the subversive capabilities of mystification and betrayal, an evolution which leads away from a conventionally Sartrean inspiration for the first novel, Juegos de manos, towards a less self-censored embrace of cultural treason in La resaca. Throughout Goytisolo's work myth is the purveyor of oppression. The myth-maker controls those who are taken in: he can betray without fear of being betrayed, and in these first works this power relationship is most often configured, metaphorically or literally, as that which exists between parent and child. Children are bemythed, easily abused, malleable, powerless to act. Betrayal is the means by which the adult may repudiate childish mythification, and, as Linda Gould Levine points out, the cultural traitor becomes a central figure in Goytisolo's later work: she notes that his ‘lenta gravitación hacia el traidor’ can be seen as a ‘proceso bien vinculado con su exaltación de los marginales y desposeídos’ (p. 124). Through an examination of the first five novels my contention is that Goytisolo's traitor-figure does not banish myth altogether; on the contrary, he harnesses it for his own ends, enchanting the dupes of mythology in order to effect his own release. This dark strategy, resisted initially by Goytisolo in his first novel in favour of a more orthodox left-oriented morality, is explored in the course of his following work, and, in La resaca, finally appropriated. The non-Nationalist illusionists, or mixtificadores, are of two main types.⁵ Some are evasive, others are self-possessed, and in the span of the first five novels there is an evolution from the former to the latter.⁶

Since Existentialist ethics oppose authentic and inauthentic rather than good and evil, Goytisolo had considerable scope for inquiring into the effects that the deceiver may have upon others in his quest for personal fulfillment.⁷ Yet, in Juegos de manos (1954), the author seems to set greater store by Sartre's earlier emphasis on the commonality of ends, the notion that the pursuit of individual freedom will necessarily respect and enhance the freedom of others.⁸ In this novel, play-acting is construed as a means of evading personal and social responsibility, and the betrayal of one's peers is shown to have destructive consequences. A rigged poker-hand selects the innocent David to be the assassin of a Francoist politician; unable to carry it through, David suffers a punishment-killing at the hands of Agustín, the leader of his own gang. Long, introspective reminiscences of childhood experiences on the part of several characters persuade the reader that their present activities are spurred by smouldering Freudian conflicts. Barry Jordan has rightly highlighted the absence of truly politically inspired strife within the middle-class gang of would-be revolutionaries that this novel portrays, yet it is still possible to place it squarely within the domain of orthodox committed literature.⁹ It is a text imbued with Sartrean philosophy, albeit of an emphasis more akin to La Nausée than to Les Chemins de la liberté, and might be read as a cautionary tale on the pitfalls of political action before knowing thyself adequately.¹⁰ Despite the infighting and eventual dissolution of the gang, the initial ideal of collective salvation does survive intact: when an unspecified person says at the end of the novel ‘Es como si al matar a David nos hubiésemos matado a nosotros, y como si al negar a Agustín hubiésemos negado nuestra vida’ (Goytisolo's italics),¹¹ the effect is to affirm solidarity and fidelity as values worth cultivating, since the anonymity of these words lends them an air of detached authority. Certainly, however, as in the subsequent novels, oppression is seen to be the handmaiden of intimacy. Emotional (as distinct from intellectual) communion between people is ‘pegajoso’ (p. 146), a word that recalls Sartre's notion of le visqueux; to be good is to acquiesce in the views of others and is therefore dangerous. But here, in Juegos de manos, this loving tyranny is meted out by the gang's moral enemies: that is to say, by their right-wing parents, from whom they are striving to dissociate themselves. The act of breaking a myth, that of perfect parenthood, serves to bring the group members closer together. In the first novel, then, demythification does not impair solidarity, it enhances it.

Eduardo ‘Tánger’ Uribe is the first of the mixtificadores, but unlike later exemplars in Goytisolo's fiction, his behaviour appears cowardly and inauthentic. A descendant of Sartre's poseur barman in L'Etre et le néant, he is an embodiment of mauvaise foi, an unmistakable lâche.¹² He dislikes being touched physically (he is uncomradely), he likes to mislead with disguises and costumes (though he craves an audience), he is drawn to mirrors (but he smashes his own image), he loves to invent cocktails (but he will not drink them), he is the innocent whose dextrous trickery delivers a bad hand of cards to David (though he genuinely believes it to be but a harmless prank), he is the man-child who picks a quarrel and then leaves it for his protector, Raúl, to fight on his behalf. Although, in some respects, Uribe is portrayed sympathetically (he is sensitive to others; it is he who has the key insight that David's failure to assassinate Francisco Guarner means that the gang will instead execute David), at several points, the narrator's characterization of him is critical. It is implied that his love of dressing up (‘su amor a los disfraces’ [p. 152]) derives from an inability to come to terms with life, a desire to escape his inadequacies. Despite creating the effect of dynamism, his constant self-reinvention is narcissistic in origin. He wishes to be comforted like a child (‘ser acunado lo mismo que un niño’ [p. 164]); he is described as a doll or dummy, a ‘muñeco’ (p. 165). His evasiveness, stemming from the acute sensibility of a child who is wary of others and desperate to avoid their judgement, is static and impotent. Uribe, furthermore, resembles Sartre's Baudelaire, jealously nurturing his own liberty, yet shunning responsibility.¹³ Indeed, he wears his affectation like a suit of armour, not to deceive others so much as to protect himself.

In Uribe, then, the encounter with ‘el vértigo de lo desconocido’ (p. 154) entails angst, yet ends badly in flight and caprice rather than in commitment and solidarity. Goytisolo's portrayal of this process is at odds with his more positive attitude towards the illusionist in later novels. When Uribe does attempt to communicate honestly with another person, he begins to ‘descaracterizarse’ (p. 156); his make-up begins to run, his masks to slip out of place. Whenever the opportunity arises to talk candidly, he senses that he has become the prisoner of the very masks he has created in order to safeguard his freedom, and so clings to these masks all the more tenaciously. When Uribe comes to warn David that the gang leaders are on their way to kill him, he tries to confess by explaining to David that it was he who perpetrated the card trick, not suspecting the consequences of his action. Yet, as ever, sincerity eludes him. He suspects, like the boy who too often cried wolf, that David believes he is bluffing. Helplessly, Uribe begins playing to his own reflection in the mirror, and finally, with a bow to this looking-glass audience, abandons David to his killers (p. 238). In Uribe, Goytisolo presents a man who lacks courage, who sacrifices authenticity to freedom, and whose Existential evasiveness destroys the solidarity of his gang and, with it, any possibility of resisting the régime.

Though less obviously identifiable as a mixtificador, it is Agustín who is the true forerunner of later illusionists such as Pablo Márquez and Metralla, yet in Juegos de manos this embryonic archetype is characterized as a hero with a distinctly fatal flaw. That Agustín is at a more advanced stage of Existential awareness than Uribe is evidenced by their respective approaches to acting. Uribe's prime aim is to insulate himself from others, and the paradox in this ploy is his constant craving for the limelight. Certainly, when Agustín was a child he bore a marked resemblance to Uribe. Flattered by his indulgent mother into thinking that he would one day be a great actor, Agustín remembers himself as a spoilt child who loved dressing up, wearing disguises, and winning the applause of his elders. Oblivious of any irony, he would recite for his parents Rimbaud's jubilant evocation of childhood unrestrained, Le Bateau ivre, simply to gratify them (p. 143). The beginnings of Agustín's awakening into rebellious self-awareness are signalled by a turning-point in his relationship to his own performances. As he explains:

Comenzó mientras lucía uno de los disfraces que acababan de regalarme y entre cuyos pliegues me sentía un ser distinto, altivo e insolente. Ataviado de negro recitaba ‘Une saison en l'Enfer’ [sic] ante el armario de luna de mi habitación. Y al llegar a la invocación de los antepasados hice mía la cólera del poeta, me sentí despegado de mí mismo y olvidé el lugar en que me hallaba.

Confieso sin humildad que recitaba bastante bien el texto y me compenetraba fácilmente con su intención. Algunas de las frases parecían brotar espontáneamente de mí mismo. Me asombraba casi de verlas escritas, tal era la identidad que nos ligaba. (pp. 144–45).

The crucial step is to be one's role rather than simply play it: to become identical with one's disguise and so take command of one's destiny. This is the turning-point that is never reached either by Uribe or by Agustín's eventual victim. For David, a model pupil, strives masochistically to star in the roles that the authority-figures in his life create for him. Agustín can progress; David will become an hombre-niño.

What causes this model Existentialist to fall at the final hurdle, however, is his faulty insight into his own political motivation. A self-delusion remains. By sleight of hand his unconscious had eluded him, and though Goytisolo allows him to perform a tardy self-analysis once David has been murdered, the consequences of this act, for him and for the gang, are irreparable. For Agustín finally perceives that the project to kill Guarner, carried out by David (who, like Uribe, is an image of Agustín's own pre-Rimbaud self), was in reality fuelled by an unconscious desire to re-encounter a primal scene and resolve it once and for all. (Guarner is above all a symbolic father.) Hence, Agustín does not kill David for having set back the political cause of the group. Rather he must murder the angelic child he himself once was, and David epitomizes that child. For want of self-knowledge, then, politics itself is the ultimate juego de manos. Indeed, Agustín understands that the attempted political assassination was only the ‘pretexto’ that would allow him to confront his alter ego: ‘He necesitado todos esos rodeos para darle muerte [a David]’ (p. 253). When Agustín learns from Luis that David had been set up by himself and Uribe, he reacts with indifference: it is an irrelevance. And, having killed David, he voluntarily gives himself up to the authorities. The political dimension has vanished. Agustín's allegiance to the good of the cause has been a form of sincere pretence. But Goytisolo, in this prototype of an encounter that recurs in later writings, implies that here the attempted showdown between the liberated and repressed components of Agustín's personality is a misguided enterprise, wholly negative in its effects. Neither Agustín nor David will survive the confrontation: David has been denied the chance to grow up, and, in surrendering himself to the police, Agustín surrenders to an image that authority figures may choose to have of him, rather as he did as a small boy. The gang disintegrates and society is quite unaltered. Agustín's inner-illumination, contrived, perhaps, to allow the author his say, represents a new way forward, but degenerates finally into fatalism, the very antithesis of Sartre's prise de conscience. As Gemma Robert's article illustrates, Uribe, David, and Agustín all succumb to ‘auto-engaño’. Nevertheless, although Juegos de manos castigates radical middle-class youth in its totality for its feeble powers of self-appraisal, the novel is saved from political nihilism through being underpinned by a conventional left-wing morality that suggests that solidarity amongst the oppressed is required in order to countermand the mythifying propensities of the oppressors. Its effect is to qualify this orthodoxy by warning its readership that nurtured values are not easily transcended, and that naive forms of engagement can express rather than destroy one's past.

In subsequent novels, however, Goytisolo's sanctioning of the nosotros of Juegos de manos undergoes modifications, as does his critical attitude towards the mystifier. In Duelo en El Paraíso (1955) the bipartite personality constituted by Agustín–David in Juegos de manos is distributed across a class divide, so that now a Marxist justification may be given for Pablo Márquez's betrayal of the upper-middle-class Abel. The relationship between these two parallels Agustín's enthrallment of David, but, unlike Agustín, Pablo is a knowing dissembler, free from the inconveniences of guilt. Since the bourgeoisie in its entirety, enlightened or otherwise, seems destined never to overcome its own limitations, solidarity with one of its members is dispensable. Abel, whose fate stands for that of his class, may try to escape the childhood paradise that his great-aunt, Doña Estanislaa, insists that he inhabit in perpetuity, and he may, in offering himself up for sacrifice to the evacuee children, make a last attempt to participate meaningfully in the process of history, but he may never survive into adulthood.

As Jo Labanyi has observed, the excesses of the refugee children indicate that corruption is preferable to innocence.¹⁴ The novel celebrates anarchy as maturation, the means by which society's underdogs can capture the weapons of dominion, and it associates this anarchic process with the politics of the Second Republic. There is nothing utopian in this vision. The refugee children may enjoy new-found freedoms, but they govern themselves in an extremely hierarchical and authoritarian manner. Gone is the free-associating solidarity of the student rebels in Juegos de manos. With the escape and disappearance of Pablo Márquez, the only character in the novel who succeeds in withstanding the pull of Estanislaa's fairy-tale, Goytisolo implies that deception by enthralment (which, and this cannot be ignored, is an adaptation of Estanislaa's own behaviour) affords a real way out of the Nationalist paradise that is about to be instated. Growing up bad is preferable to not growing up at all, and to this effect the mythoclast may sacrifice solidarity: unlike Agustín, Pablo is not himself destroyed by destroying his ward. Only the dimension of class conflict, absent in Juegos de manos, rescues this dénouement for enlightened political (and therefore moral) orthodoxy.

The status of Duelo en El Paraíso as polemical allegory makes it difficult to assess the overlap between the then Goytisolo and the implied author of the text. My own view is that Goytisolo was playing aggressive devil's advocate, and that his own hopes for social change were, at this stage, more consensual. A truer reflection of his views might be provided by the figure of Ortega, a schoolmaster in Goytisolo's next novel, Fiestas (1955). Ortega takes exception to Don Paco's description of the Second Republic as ‘aquel desorden’:

—Desorden—repitió Ortega con amargura—. Era el de un niño que tiene necesidad de correr, de desahogarse …

—Reconozca usted al menos que sus desahogos eran bastante brutales—dijo don Paco.

—Brutales o no, no podían durar mucho. Con el tiempo habrían desaparecido.¹⁵

Tactics of the kind used by Pablo Márquez might thus have been envisaged by Goytisolo, at this period at least, as a necessary, but passing phase only.

Indeed, in Fiestas the role of treacherous mystifier is assumed by a minor character, González, the policeman who tricks Pipo into betrayal. Instead, Goytisolo reintroduces centre-stage a benign, Uribe-like poseur in the shape of El Gorila, a fisherman living in La Barceloneta, whom young Pipo reveres as more than a father. El Gorila's performances, like those of Uribe, are presented as harmless enough to those who know him. Rather than a practitioner of conscious deceit, he is an exhibitionist, an ‘actor de teatro’ (p. 97), a free spirit who openly scorns politics of any colour, and likes to read comics. Uribe's fate is left hanging in the balance at the end of Juegos de manos: El Gorila, however, unquestionably becomes a victim of his capacity for evasion. Though his antics allow him to elude the traps that ensnare most other members of Francoist society, he eventually comes to grief through placing his confidence in a child. The mythical highground in Fiestas belongs firmly to the establishment, and it goes unchallenged: the Eucharistic Congress will win Pipo to its ranks; Pira's fantasy of going to Rome to be reunited with her absent father will end in her being murdered by a mendicant pilgrim; the lottery on which the poor pin their hopes will be won by the middle-class Don Melchor. As in Duelo en El Paraíso, therefore, beguilement is seen as one class's weapon against another. But this time, even without the polemicism of the preceding novel, darker tones obscure the text's more obvious denunciations. In Fiestas all friendships, including sincerely held ones, prove to be relentlessly self-deceiving. The confession El Gorila makes to Pipo that in the past he has murdered a policeman is taken by Pipo to be an irrevocable pledge of friendship. Despite this pledge, however, or rather because of it, both Pipo and El Gorila are diminished by each other, for Pipo is beguiled by the policeman's offers of friendship into revealing El Gorila's secret crime. Pipo reverts to class type and El Gorila, González explains, is content to submit to being punished for his crime. Mutuality may not necessarily, then, be capable of bringing fulfilment to the lives of those who are thwarted by the régime's mythmaking: in Fiestas it proves to be a dead-end, since it magnifies solitude.¹⁶ (It is still possible to retrieve a Marxist reading, however: in historical terms, the relationship between Pipo and El Gorila must fail, since it attempts to build a bridge across a social faultline.)

In El circo, the least successful of the early novels, Goytisolo further considers the fate of a non-committal, Uribe-like escape artist.¹⁷ This time the archetype meets a different fate. Utah similarly lives his life as if he were on stage before an admiring audience, and, in order to keep one step ahead of his creditors, he deftly juggles identities. However, as the novel progresses, reality crowds in upon him and he begins to lose control. The dénouement to this vertiginous crescendo of falsehood is again suggestive of Sartre's philosophy. In the end, Utah remedies his inauthenticity by making his predicament concrete with an act of self-commitment. For when he discovers that Don Julio, the wealthy patrician he eventually visits in the hope of acquiring money, has been murdered, Utah assumes responsibility for the crime himself, thus allowing the real assassin, the Pablo Márquez-like Atila, to go free. Thus, this final piece of play-acting (a substitute parricide) is what will define his fickle personality. It is reminiscent of the transformation undergone by Agustín in Juegos de manos when he becomes the Rimbaud of Une Saison en enfer. It is an act, in both senses of the word, that is real; one that slams the door on evasion. This resolution, by means of which Goytisolo rehabilitates the Baudelairean poseurs of Juegos de manos and Fiestas, is prompted by a Nietzschean act of will, by the need for self-therapy, rather than by any sense of solidarity or political expediency.

In conjunction, then, with the critique of Nationalist ideology, Goytisolo's first four novels scrutinize how Franco's children, so that they might become the parents of their own destiny, use mystification for their own ends. The initial denunciation, in Juegos de manos, of Uribe's useless dilettantism and Agustín's hubristic self-conviction works itself out in intriguing ways in succeeding texts. Each of these two archetypes comes to moral grief in the first novel. Uribe delivers David into the hands of his killer, and Agustín destroys himself by murdering his infant self. The relationship between Agustín and David is reproduced in Duelo en El Paraíso with that between Pablo Márquez and Abel. This time, however, the introduction of a class division permits the captivator to betray his follower successfully and with impunity. The text is a provocative thought experiment. In El circo we are no longer in fantasia, and Utah takes the first step towards becoming a Pablo Márquez, a righteous deceiver.

La resaca (1958) is the final part of the trilogy (following Fiestas and El circo), and is epigraphed by Antonio Machado's campaigning poem ‘El mañana efimero’, the last eight lines of which appear at the end of the text.¹⁸ With this in mind, the reader might have expected the novel to show the birth of a new rebellious and vengeful spirit amongst Spain's youth. Instead, the reader is introduced to a world of political apathy, working-class sycophancy, of near universal mauvaise foi. The novel has been seen as a turning-point in Goytisolo's fiction precisely because it initiates a concentration on objective social conditions.¹⁹ On a subjective level, however, the author himself has explained that the novel represents a psychological resolution of an abiding obsession:

Con La risacca ho liquidato un problema che mi ossessionava e che avevo trattato in tutti i miei libri precedenti: il problema dell'infanzia. Dopo La risacca non scriveró piú su questo tema. Quel que volevo dire l'ho detto in questo libro.²⁰

The liquidation of the problem of childhood is also the liquidation of the problem of what strategy to adopt in the face of myth, and the nature of this new strategy is grounds for seeing La resaca as a fresh departure of a different kind: a herald not so much of the period of documentary realism that immediately follows it as of the novels of aggressive demythification from Señas de identidad onwards. For the constant theme in La resaca is the perversion of every means of human deliverance, save one: in this, the most socially plausible of Goytisolo's early works, the act of mystifying and betraying the bemythed will provide the mixtificador (Metralla) with his solution.

The archetypal credulous but sensitive child in this novel, Antonio, is the eldest son of the drunkard Cinco Duros, and seems to have found a way to avoid following in his father's footsteps when he becomes the protégé of Metralla, a violent gangleader who awes him with his ruthless self-assurance. Antonio's relationship with Metralla takes the form of a criminal apprenticeship and affords a respite from the psychological orphanhood which so often afflicts Goytisolo's male characters. The impressionable Antonio has his exit blocked, however, when his guirlochero mentor encourages him to act the toy-child to an icon-maker's wife, explaining that, once they have milked her of sufficient money, they can stowaway to South America where they will begin a new life together as revolutionaries. Having in effect pimped his ward, Metralla takes all the cash for himself, embarks alone, and abandons Antonio to an Oedipal liaison with his bogus mother and lover. This failure of Antonio is especially disturbing, since he has the same Christian name as Machado. Moreover, this outcome seems to undermine the title of the novel: it is the exact reverse of the process of sobering up after a bout of (mythical) intoxication.

A more politically complex understanding of mythification emerges in this novel. The ruling and the ruled are engaged in a game of mutual deception, but the ruses perpetrated by the proletariat against their masters are depicted as a form of collusion that works to maintain the political status quo. Their interests are limited to social and economic advancement. One of the few ways in which the workers can prosper is through collaborating with state Catholicism. Several religious orders compete amongst themselves to administer first communion to the slum children, but the exploitation is two way, since the children, encouraged by their parents, are quick to accept the material incentives they offer. El Hombre-Gato, the son of Cien Gramos, plays his part to perfection and enlists for confirmation classes for a third time. Saturio, or ‘chupacirios’ (p. 118), permits the clergy to use his house as a canvassing base, and by ingratiating himself with Padre Bueno earns the promise of a flat outside the slum district. However, crafty manipulation by the have-nots is shown up to be a still more subtle form of self-delusion. El Hombre-Gato is a miniature Metralla, but he is not trying to transcend the establishment that maintains him, and Saturio's less than honourable escape route is barred by the sudden death of his small daughter during the ‘Fiesta de San Juan’ when, thinking it is a kind of sweet, she eats the gunpowder from a firework. In so doing, she becomes one of several eternal doll-children who inhabit Goytisolo's early novels, for sweet-eating, as at the beginning of Fiestas, is an index of political malleability. In succumbing to Franco's fiesta, fulfilment, for parent and child, is arrested.

The fiesta in all its forms (the church, bulls, flamenco, football, the circus, radio broadcasts, lotteries, alcohol) is a beacon of false promise in these early works. As a means of potentially anarchic self-expression it must be sanctioned and policed by the authorities, and provides instead an appealing illusion of release. In this guise the fiesta becomes a potent weapon in the armoury of the oppressor. Naive children are its main victims. Like Estanislaa's over-protected son, David, who in Duelo en El Paraíso dies mysteriously during a carnival in Panama, Saturio's daughter is a martyr to her own ingenuousness. In a sense her death predicts the fate of her parents. The aftermath of the accident reveals Saturio to be, like his daughter, an innocent. In his grief, he turns not to the Church nor to others for consolation but to the bottle, for in La resaca alcohol is used to symbolize illusion as the art of evasion par excellence, a way of falling victim to myth rather than learning to exploit it. Saturio quarrels with Padre Bueno, loses his promised flat, and ends the novel a broken man.

Antonio's superior impressibility to that of his exploiter, then, is that of his class: despite Machado's poem, Goytisolo's depiction of La Barceloneta, the one-time heartland of Anarchism, does not in any way suggest a pre-revolutionary situation. Rather it depicts the eclipse of a once fiery political conscience. Now the battle for the hearts and minds of the ‘hombres de las afueras’ is being fought on the one hand by the Church, and, on the other, in a more modest way, by a garage worker named Giner, a former Republican soldier who, having spent four years in prison after the Civil War, is now trying to drum up support for a union. In part, Giner is inspired by news from Emilio, a friend who has recently emigrated to France and now enthuses him with accounts of the very favourable conditions enjoyed by the workers there. Giner can see, as others cannot, that his associates are crippled by a lack of solidarity. The precarious sense of fellow-feeling they exhibit is exemplified by the on-off friendship between Cinco Duros and Cien Gramos. Their continual quarrels and reconciliations are wholly self-serving, for they use one another merely to excuse private inadequacies.

The illusions used by those above them in the social hierarchy to rule and divide are disturbingly like the pressures the murcianos exert upon one another, pressures which similarly work against class solidarity. Almost every relationship in the novel is exploitative in some way, even when not intentionally so. Cinco Duros is lucid enough to condemn Cien Gramos for making his son, El Hombre-Gato, spout Latin and attend Communion classes for the sole purpose of obtaining a free suit of clothes for him, a suit that Cien Gramos afterwards steals in order to finance a bout of drinking and whoring (‘Vergüenza debería darte, vergüenza, exhibir así a tu propio hijo’ [p. 98]). Yet later on in the novel he is unaware that he does something similar in selling his own son, Antonio, into the service of the icon-maker's wife. Cinco Duros uses the money from this transaction to lay on, for himself and his family, a feast of cakes; he then, perversely, feeds some of the food to Antonio as a means of persuading him to accept his new appointment, an unwitting mimesis of the régime's exploitation of the fiesta. As Cien Gramos exploits his son, so Metralla exploits Antonio by persuading him to turn the tables on the Church by impersonating a virtuous youth. Metralla dresses him up as a señorito, douses him in eau de cologne, and induces him to play the part of a collector on behalf of the ‘Cruzada Cordimariana’. This highly lucrative scam is nevertheless felt by Antonio to be a threat to his virility, and he agrees to it only because, to feel mature, he needs money and the gang's esteem. Suffering the indignity of being dressed up by another in a doll-like fashion is a concrete manifestation of Sartrean pour-autrui, and, in Goytisolo's early fiction, a sure prelude to death and eternal childhood. Similarly, the first act of the icon-maker's wife upon taking Antonio into her care is to measure him for a new suit of clothes. The reader is left to ponder the similarities between Metralla and this smothering pseudo-parent. Both rob Antonio of his identity while ostensibly working to affirm it.

A more distant equivalent to the above pairings is suggested in the relationship between Giner, the most politically aware character in the novel, and Emilio, the emigrant worker whose brief return to Spain galvanizes Giner's hopes of unionizing the workers, and whose departure, conversely, signals their decay. Despite Emilio's indications to the contrary, it is apparent, after the disastrous initial meeting with some jittery dockers, that this time he is going to leave Spain for good and will not keep in touch with Giner. The political isolation of Giner, which this abandonment represents, parallels the emotional abandonment suffered by Antonio at the hands of Metralla. Unlike his namesake, the poet whose work serves as reference point for the novel, Antonio never crosses paths with a man named Giner; they are ships that pass in the night. Yet their lives are complementary. Giner, whose own offspring have given themselves over entirely to ‘La España de charanga y de pandereta’ and who, bored with politics, are left cold by their father's tales of life in prison after the Civil War, is someone who lacks a son, and Antonio is, in turn, someone in need of a father. Both are thwarted. If it is feasible to see a committed message in La resaca, one could say that it is configured by this absent centre, a potential relationship founded upon loyalty, which might embrace inequality without the tainting threat of deception.

Such a message is undermined, however, by darker, more anguished thematizations. With the working classes corrupted and co-opted by their oppressors, as well as divided amongst themselves, fraternity begins to look like a false grail. It is alcohol, the purveyor of illusion, that more frequently induces a sense of fellow-feeling in the murcianos. At Maño's inn three strangers drink heavily before breaking into an old Republican war song. Maño's sense of recognition (he suddenly realizes that these same men were his comrades-in-arms at the battle of the Ebro) is overwhelming:

Había millares, centenares de miles, esparcidos por todo el país, faltos de aire como baja una campana de vidrio, solitarios sin norte y sin guía, ignorantes de su fuerza secreta … Bastaba un gesto, una mirada, el aire de una canción, para que estos solitarios dejaran de serlo, se descubrieran, entraran en contacto … Todo no estaba perdido, tal vez. Inmóvil desde hacía largo tiempo, el cuerpo palpitaba … (p. 79)

This rousing vision of a mighty dormant brotherhood is in free indirect style, thus mingling the minds of narrator and character. The narrator builds a stylistic bridge between himself and Maño at the very moment that Maño is experiencing a forgotten sense of togetherness. However, the instant before the three strangers begin their song, the narrator observes: ‘El vino les había dado una rigidez casi solemne y se mantenían tiesos, lo mismo que muñecos’ (p. 78). The word muñeco, used with great frequency in these early writings, is always a mark of damnation.

The episode is rendered still more ambiguous when it recurs later in the novel in a tragically distorted form. The meeting with the dockers convened by Giner and Emilio is rudely curtailed by the arrival of Cinco Duros and Cien Gramos. The drunken duo, having had yet another of their quarrels and reconciliations, sing a socialist anthem and declare themselves revolutionaries, though in fact they are celebrating their own self-indulgence. Giner himself is appalled and the meeting breaks up having achieved nothing. The fraternity of the bottle proves to be that of the man who uses his brother as a crutch to make good his own frailty: ‘Ninguno de los dos se aguantaba de pie y se abrazaban para no caer’ (p. 154). Here solidarity is an intoxicating consolation, a means of perpetuating self-delusion. This, the only enduring relationship in the novel, is a conspiracy whose purpose is to hold reality at bay. As with Saturio's children, who ‘ante la amenaza de quedarse sin fiesta, dejaron de pelear’ (p. 125), the falsifying fiesta and the ideal of union become interdependent. In a culture that sustains itself on contagious myth it seems therefore that any mutual feeling may be bedevilled by an impaired appreciation of real circumstances, and any dream, though it may create a sense of fellow-feeling, is easily corrupted. In part, this puzzle is explained by Giner's assertion during his meeting that the régime's abuse of the language of idealism has had the effect of debilitating and corrupting any form of idealism. Giner's theory is truer than he suspects, for his contributions to the union meeting are interspersed with snippets from a radio propaganda broadcast playing in the background, directed at members of the régime's verticalist unions. There is a disconcerting similarity between the Voz's paean to self-sacrifice, its appeal to the memory of the hardships undergone by working men during the war, its call for peace and social justice, and Giner's own well-meaning rhetoric. His privileging of the deed over the word cannot easily be distinguished here from the same creed as it appears in Falangist culture, even if it springs, in his case, from an appreciation of how officialese has robbed his class of its self-possession:

— … Los hombres del Centro habían absorbido su vocabulario para estilizarlo [ … ]. Y los hombres de las afueras debían callar. No podían servirse del habla … (p. 148)

The result of splicing the speeches of the propaganda broadcast with the words of Giner is to insinuate that the process of decay in language, communication, and idealism has gone further even than Giner might appreciate. The counterpoint turns out to be a duet that intones a single, decadent melody.

La resaca, then, contains a thematic hesitancy between solidarity and self-preservation. These tensions are resolved by the coming of age of the mixtificador. Antonio, the illusionee, admires Metralla, since he believes that, by knowing him, he too is learning to appreciate the benefits of deceit. If, he reflects, the world is a ‘gigantesca empresa de explotación’ (p. 91), then crime, which is a kind of social deceit, is preferable to honest drudgery. Indeed, his impersonation of a ‘chiquito con cara de inocente’ who collects alms for the ‘Cruzada Cordimariana’ is so remunerative that it allows him to feel superior even to his father: ‘Sin trabajar ganaba en un solo día lo que su padre obtenía en una semana, partiéndose el espinazo’ (p. 90). Thus, his new-found duplicity, in allowing him to feel grown up, permits him to supplant his father's authority and to escape childhood credulity. Unfortunately, he entrusts his earnings to Metralla, who, having taken him in (while Antonio had been busy taking other people in), fulfils his own dreams by robbing him and then abandoning him, appropriately enough, to the wife of a maker of graven images.

The result for Antonio is a bittersweet regression to childhood. He rejects the imperative to grow that is constantly sounding in the ear of the true child, to become instead an hombre-niño, a willing underling. By creating the illusion of comradeship and then exploiting it, Metralla, at least, does manage to escape, and in the closing pages of the novel Metralla's dubious strategy gains in authenticity for two reasons. First, in consummating his childhood in a relationship with the ever nameless mujer, the implication is that once his hopes have been dashed, Antonio's self-abnegation is quite voluntary. And second, when, in the novel's closing episode, one of Saturio's sons is selected to read the welcoming address to the visiting Delegate, and the boy, Carlitos, falters, the entrapment of Franco's children is shown to require more than an appeal for fellow-feeling. Affected by the tragedy unfolding within his family, Carlitos makes the most heartfelt attempt at sincere communication by any character in the novel besides Giner. His words are equally ineffectual:

Sólo acertó a balbucir:

—Delegado … Somos probres … Mi padre … (p. 184)

The pomp and circumstance of the occasion swiftly drown out his silence. In a society in which it is futile to be open and in earnest, in which the emperor's new clothes are vouchsafed by small boys, it becomes a creditable strategy to beat the authorities at their own game, by turning oneself, like Metralla, into a master of ceremonies; by deluding the illusionist as well as his victims. In the land of make-believe, communion is a false fiesta. Betrayal, criminality, deception, illusion: only arms such as these can enable the bemythed to break the spell. The means of deliverance, the guarantee against being written into someone else's script and so putting oneself at that person's mercy, entail becoming the active creator of illusion. In Fiestas Pira's ill-fated fantasy of visiting her father in Rome is taken from a film. She is duped. In La resaca the plan to escape to America is also taken from a film, but the fantasy becomes real because Metralla knows how to transform himself into the author of his own fiction. It is possible to see the self-possessed mixtificadores as the truest manifestation of the Existentialist hero in Goytisolo's works, since, having had criminality thrust upon them by circumstances, they assume fully the consequences of their adversity, and become consummate con-artists. One is reminded of Sartre's approval of Jean Genet, whom Goytisolo himself came to know and admire greatly, on similar grounds.²¹

The career of the counter-illusionist has advanced thus far. To be a mythoclast one must usurp myth rather than destroy it outright. Pablo Márquez escapes, as does Metralla in La resaca. In Juegos de manos the killing of David by Agustín is internecine and the outcome of this sacrifice is negative for all concerned. In the polemical fantasy, Duelo en El Paraiso, the abuse of Abel by Pablo Márquez is beneficial to the latter and could be justified as retribution against a representátive of the ruling caste. In La resaca Metralla prospers at the expense of Antonio, but in this novel betrayal is internecine, as it had been in the first. La resaca is thus a rerun of Juegos de manos, but this time there is a winner. In a sense this later novel redeems Agustín and discredits David. The échec of Agustín is transformed into the success of Metralla. Moreover, in later texts the figure of Uribe is assimilated to that of Agustín: Pablo Márquez is a mountebank; Metralla is a brilliant actor-manager, and his gang hero-worships Sabater, who is anarchist, arch-villain, and master of disguises all rolled into one. The moment of assimilation occurs, perhaps, in El circo when the blameless Utah takes on the role of a lifetime, and, in the eyes of society, becomes a criminal. At this instant Uribe ceases to be a minor.

In a society in which the politics of oppression have corrupted the politics of opposition, authentic action involves calling the bluff of all those who are too easily enchanted. The importance of orthodox political activity thus fades. Unlike the youngsters of Juegos de manos, those of La resaca are apolitical. Metralla and his gang are the children of anarchist activists, but these are now long dead, and are remembered for their criminal prowess rather than for their ideals. Political renewal proves useless if it is not preceded by an internal renewal which exorcises all susceptibility to the comforts of mythification.

Linda Gould Levine has argued that the conflicts embodied by different characters in the early works are internalized as warring fragments of a divided psyche in the later ones. The need to denounce the conservative child within himself (from Señas de identidad and Reivindicación del conde don Julián onwards) and, with him, the stultifying myths which beset Spain, begins, I have argued, in the early fiction with a continuing revaluation of the mixtificador to the point that he metamorphoses finally from a lâche into the symbolic slayer of childish myths. Paradoxically, however, he slays myths by engendering myths. The conservative child who is deluded by mythical relationships is also an enemy, since, to the betrayer, he personifies the threat of regression to childish gullibility, and therefore must be transgressed in order that he might be transcended. The very facility with which the sensitive children of the early novels are mystified by those they admire is a sign of their menacing corruptibility. Liberation thus comes through control and a high degree of intentionality. The mythophile child must be subjugated, not conjugated.

To read these novels in the 1950s must have been a cruel experience for individuals from either side of the civil divide in Spain. Those characters deceived are beguilingly attractive, and, with Abel and Antonio, Goytisolo uses an internal focus that invites the reader to sympathize especially with well-meaning children who are trying to break free. In inviting the reader to witness (in fictional form, merely) the death, through beguilement, of the knowingly beguiled child, Goytisolo invites those in opposition to the régime to put away childish things. Yet, to this end, in these early novels, there is by no means a straight choice between authenticity and myth.

Notes

1. I understand myth here in the Barthesian sense as mystification or delusion capable of governing unconscious assent: see Roland Barthes, Mythologies: Le Mythe aujourd'hui (Paris: Seuil, 1957).

2. Juan Goytisolo, Coto vedado (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1985), p. 234.

3. The main surveys of the early fiction can be found in Ramón Buckley, Problemas formales en la novela española contemporánea (Barcelona: Peninsula, 1968), pp. 145–82; Gonzalo Sobejano, Novela española de nuestro tiempo: En busca del pueblo perdido (Madrid: Prensa Española, 1970), pp. 261–96; Kessel Schwartz, Juan Goytisolo (New York: Twayne, 1970); Linda Gould Levine, Juan Goytisolo: La destrucción creadora (Mexico City: Mortiz, 1976), pp. 13–47, in particular; Santos Sanz Villanueva, Lectura de Juan Goytisolo (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1977); José Carlos Pérez, La trayectoria novelistica de Juan Goytisolo: El autor y sus obsesiones (Zaragoza: Oroel, 1984). In Writing and Politics in Franco's Spain (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) Barry Jordan analyses Juegos de manos and Duelo en El Paraíso.

4. For example, in his Trilogy of Treason: An Intertextual Study of Juan Goytisolo (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982) Michael Ugarte catalogues Goytisolo's destruction of mythical Spain. Gould Levine remarks that ‘Goytisolo niega el mito del paraíso infantil’ (p. 16). In his La novela desde 1936 (Madrid: Alhambra, 1980) Ignacio Soldevila Durante notes the mitoclastia of Reivindicación del conde don Julián (p. 248). In her Juan Goytisolo: The Case for Chaos (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1990) Abigail Lee Six considers Goytisolo's textual transgressions of myth in the later novels, and notes, with Gould Levine, the recurrent pairing of victim and executioner in the early novels, without, however, discussing the nature of the relationship which mythification has with each of these two archetypes. In an interview with Emir Rodríguez Monegal (Emir Rodríguez Monegal, El arte de narrar [Caracas: Monte Avila, 1968]) Goytisolo said of Señas de identidad: ’En mi novela he propuesto una destrucción de todos los mitos que envuelven el término España’ (p. 188). In his Disidencias (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1977) Goytisolo states, before writing Reivindicación del conde don Julián, that ‘la interpretación mítica, justificativa de la historia de España, me obsesionaba desde años’, and that ‘el único problema que se me planteaba era el del lenguaje mediante el cual debía llevar a cabo mi traición (p. 292). In Myth and History in the Contemporary Spanish Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) Jo Labanyi argues that in transgressing cultural myths, Goytisolo perpetuates the very myths that he wishes to eradicate. In the present article I argue that in the course of the first five novels Goytisolo's traitors learn to extemporize their own myths and, moreover, that history and myth in these novels are not antithetical concepts.

5. J. F. Cirre coins the term ‘mixtificador’ in his ‘Novela e ideologia en J. Goytisolo’, Insula, no. 230 (January 1966), pp. 1, 12.

6. Buckley says: ‘También la figura del mixtificador se ve afectado a través de la evolución goytisoliana: mientras que en la primera época [that is, the first two novels] se ve aliada a la figura del lider (Duelo en el paraíso) [El Arquero], o por lo menos no inmersa en la tragedia (Juego de niños [sic]) [Uribe], en la segunda [that is, Fiestas, El circo, La resaca] el mixtificador se convierte en víctima o por lo menos en una de las víctimas [that is, Utah, El Gorila, Pira, Coral]’ (p. 160). The thrust of the present article, however, is to argue the contrary: the mystifier ceases to be a victim and becomes instead a leader-figure.

7. For Goytisolo's voracious consumption of Sartre (and Marx) around the time of writing Juegos de manos, see Coto vedado, p. 196.

8. In L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Nagel, 1946) Sartre writes: ‘Certes, la liberté comme définition de l'homme ne dépend pas d'autrui, mais dès qu'il y a engagement, je suis obligé de vouloir, en même temps que ma liberté, la liberté des autres; je ne puis prendre ma liberté pour but que si je prends également celle des autres pour but’ (p. 83).

9. See Jordan, pp. 131–36.

10. For an examination of Sartrean influences in this novel, see Gemma Roberts, ‘El auto-engaño en Juegos de manos de Juan Goytisolo’, Hispanic Review, 43 (1975), 393–405.

11. Juan Goytisolo, Juegos de manos (Barcelona: Destino, 1954), p. 263. All page references are to this edition.

12. See Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Etre et le néant: Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), pp. 83–111 (p. 98).

13. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1947).

14. Jo Labanyi, ‘The Ambiguous Implications of the Mythical References in Juan Goytisolo's Duelo en El Paraíso’, MLR, 80 (1985), 845–57.

15. Juan Goytisolo, Fiestas (Barcelona: Destino, 1981), p. 186. Although the novel was published in 1958 it was written in 1955, before El circo. All page references are to the 1981 edition.

16. In his article ‘¿Evasion o rebelión?: Lectura de Fiestas de Juan Goytisolo’, Kentucky Romance Quarterly, 28 (1981), 309–22, Carlos Feal Deibe argues, more optimistically, that ‘la amenaza de rebelión [ … ] sólo será eficaz cuando deje de ser un gesto aislado para comunicarse a más individuos. Sólo un grupo podrá oponerse con fuerza al grupo opresor dominante’ (p. 320).

17. Juan Goytisolo, El circo (Barcelona: Destino, 1957).

18. Juan Goytisolo, La resaca (Mexico City: Mortiz, 1977). All page references are to this edition.

19. Gonzalo Sobejano summarizes thus: ‘Basándose en declaraciones del propio autor, los críticos J. F. Cirre, J. M. Martínez Cachero y Ramón Buckley vienen a coincidir poco más o menos en señalar tres períodos: el primero, subjetivista (Juegos, Duelo), el segundo, de transición político-revolucionaria (la trilogía) y el último, de realismo objetivo predominante’ (p. 265). See also Sanz Villanueva, p. 56.

20. From the jacket of the second Italian edition of La risacca (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961). Quotation and reference from Sanz Villanueva, p. 26.

21. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (Paris: Gallimard, 1952).