[In the following essay, Braun discusses Goytisolo's parodic use of quotations from Unamuno in his Reivindicación del Conde Don Julián.]

Count Julian was the legendary traitor who opened the doors of Spain to the Arab invaders because of the rape of his daughter by Rodrigo, the last of the Spanish Visigothic kings. Goytisolo's novel [Reivindicación del Conde Don Julián] presents a modern-day version of Julian, resident in Tangiers, who in a schizophrenic, oneiric discourse¹ plots a new invasion to destroy the religious-military caste that emerged from the Reconquest, drove out the Moslems and the Jews, and has imposed its values ever since. The cristiano viejo has typically scorned intellectual pursuits, thought to be the province of the Jew, and attempted to suppress sensuality, considered an Arabic vice.² In the twentieth century a Millán Astray can still cry “Abajo la inteligencia,” as he did in Unamuno's presence, and don Miguel himself can display an evident distrust of sexuality.³ Goytisolo would correct these pernicious notions: “Perseguir al sexo es perseguir la inteligencia en la medida en que la auténtica libertad intelectual implica necesariamente la libertad sexual, y viceversa.”⁴ He can easily do so in a novel that makes no pretense of reality and flaunts its arbitrariness. Thus a penitent in a Holy Week procession throws down his cross and, revealing his true identity as Julian, begins the undulating motions of a calypso dancer.⁵ Isabel la Católica, now a nun, caught up in a mystical-masturbatory frenzy, alternates gyrations to rock-and-roll music with self-flagellation and is eventually violated by Julian (pp. 163–65). The narrator is also free to imagine a vast engineering operation to change the face of Castile—the objective correlative of the rigid Spanish mentality. “[A]bajo, montes calcáreos, sierras escuetas y adustas, Meseta infecta!” (p. 147). The hated landscape will be replaced by fertile fields like those of the Low Countries.

For Goytisolo, Spanish literature—with a few magnificent exceptions like La Celestina or the essays of Larra—is a repository of the ideals and attitudes of traditional Spain. Its distortions must be revealed, lest they continue shaping the minds of the nation. The narrator of RCDJ realizes a symbolic destruction of his heritage by collecting dead insects and squashing them between pages of Spanish masterpieces during his visits to a library. (Goytisolo considers that this episode is not unlike the famous scrutiny of the books in Don Quixote.⁶) The novelist himself accomplishes a different sort of defilement by inserting phrases and verses from the so-called classics into his own text. They appear without quotation marks and may or may not be introduced by a lead-in that will help identify them. In any case, the new text invariably asserts its mastery over the borrowed items and they are never the same in a different context. The dialogue of Goytisolo's text with his sources and the changes, often parodic, that the appropriated material undergoes in new surroundings are the essence of the intertextual process.⁷ To a large degree, each quotation we recognize is one more crushed insect that makes it unlikely that we can ever return to the original without being aware of the blot.

Another of Goytisolo's views is that language itself is contaminated by the ruling ideology and that, in turn, the formulas and clichés of a language serve to perpetuate attitudes. When questioned by Julio Ortega about his remark that “en España incluso los choferes de taxi hablan como Unamuno,” Goytisolo replied:

Durante siglos, todo español se ha visto obligado a pensar o cuanto menos a hablar y escribir conforme a ciertas fórmulas y estereotipos, y la consecuencia de dicho sistema … se traduce en un entorpecimiento de las facultades mentales y un miedo continuo a ejercerlas … Pues los esquemas mentales, elipsis y clisés son comunes al señor rector y al chófer de taxi …: ambos emplean, a distintos niveles, claro está, un mismo idioma codificado por varios siglos de estática social y monolitismo ideológico.⁸

Consequently in RCDJ we find not only frequent quotations from Unamuno, to mock his style, but also on Goytisolo's part an effort to write a totally different type of Spanish, to achieve, like Góngora, a “palabra sin historia, orden verbal autónomo, engañoso delirio … palabra liberada de secular servidumbre” (p. 125).

The “Advertencia” at the end of RCDJ lists some 50 authors who participated either posthumously or involuntarily in the creation of the work. Approximately 40 items, ranging from long sentences to snippets, can be attributed to Unamuno, who surpasses all the others in the number of separate citations. For answers as to why Unamuno, of the many possible targets of irony, achieves such prominence, we may turn to Goytisolo's essays and literary criticism. He is open to attack, first of all, as a member of the Generation of 1898. Writing from the perspective of the mid-sixties, Goytisolo emphasizes that, as a consequence of the Civil War, the influence of this generation has been artificially maintained, long past the point at which it should have declined: “[D]etenida en la problemática del Modernismo y del Noventa y Ocho nuestra vida cultural vegeta en el culto baldío y anacrónico de sus dioses, semidioses y santos.” Shortly after the war, to invoke '98 was to react against “la barbarie oficial” by restoring continuity with the intellectual currents of the pre-war period. However, as the years passed, “descubrimos, atónitos, el juego de prestidigitación de algunos de los ‘continuadores’: su obra de continuidad con lo pasado se había transformado imperceptiblemente en ruptura con lo por venir. Les pedíamos un puente para salvar el vacío y nos habían edificado una muralla.” Furthermore, this continuing devotion is fueled by the self-interest of many writers and critics: “Quien más, quien menos dispone de un cadáver glorioso y lo maneja como una arma defensiva.”⁹

By 1972–73 Goytisolo shifts his attack from questions of literary politics to what the writers of '98 stand for:

Yo diría … que las numerosas parodias insertas en el texto del discurso juliano se dirigen menos a los clásicos que a la perspectiva de los mismos a través del prisma mezquino y reductor del 98. Era, entre otras cosas, un modo de protestar contra un curioso fenómeno de apropiación que en el caso de Unamuno, respecto a Cervantes, lleva la deformación a límites increíbles … Aun en el caso de autores por quienes tengo escasa admiración, como Lope, el blanco de la burla … apunta no tanto a ellos como a su utilización interesada y reaccionaria por parte de Unamuno, Ganivet o Azorín.¹⁰

As much as Goytisolo parodies the style of an Azorín or the ideological stance of a Ganivet, he does not criticize the authors personally. Only Unamuno (and Ortega¹¹) seem to inspire actual aversion. Goytisolo's dislike of Unamuno, the man, comes through clearly in the following comment: “El lector unamuniano experimenta a menudo la penosa sensación de asistir a un espectáculo de feria en el que el protagonista se demora a sabiendas en un laberinto de espejos que le aleja paulatinamente de la salida.”¹² Equally scathing is the remark: “ … en Unamuno, la pobreza deviene un valor ético, una virtud: … el misero paisaje de Castilla será el espejo en que, morbosamente, contemplará su propia alma, algo así como una emanación de su religiosidad personal.”¹³

The Unamuno transposed to the pages of RCDJ is not the Unamuno most of us first think of—the Unamuno deeply tormented by a need for personal immortality, the Unamuno of works like Del sentimiento trágico de la vida and Niebla. Nearly all the quotations come either from En torno al casticismo or two collections of travel essays, Por tierras de Portugal y de España (1911) and Andanzas y visiones españolas (1922). Both of the latter volumes contain several articles in which Unamuno celebrates “el sentimiento de la montaña,” the exultation experienced by the climber who feels he makes contact on the peaks with his innermost self and with truths that lie beyond time.¹⁴ [In RCDJ these experiences are subtly degraded by being classified as “apoteosis cimeras” and “estupefacciones alpinas” (p. 192).] The second Unamuno who passes from the essays to RCDJ is the Unamuno who believes the harsh landscape of his country reflects the unchanging Spanish soul.¹⁵ These volumes are full of descriptions such as “aquella austera, noble, huesuda y solemne Castilla” (I, 232) or “ese espíritu severo, desnudo y fuerte habla en las piedras de El Escorial” (I, 375). A third Unamuno appears in the guise of a traveler who scorns the conveniences demanded by other Europeans. On pp. 139–40, Goytisolo combines bits from several articles in a reference to “enemigos viscerales del Baedeker y el sleeping-car, de la almohada y el baño: del ferrocarril, del waterclóset, del teléfono” (I, 282, 285, 353–54). However, this attitude is merely an offshoot of a massive repudiation of the economic, political and scientific advances of the modern world. On p. 140 Goytisolo picks up Unamuno's “debo confesar que siento un invencible recelo platónico hacia las democracias” (I, 301) in the line “de un entrañable recelo platónico frente a la idea de la democracia” and on p. 144 he places Unamuno's famous “¡que inventen ellos!” (VII, 288) side by side with Millán Astray's “¡Abajo la inteligencia!” Although the two men were antagonists during Unamuno's last official appearance as rector of Salamanca, Goytisolo's technique underscores the similarity of their views: “Abajo la inteligencia, que inventen ellos, lejos de nosotros la peligrosa novedad de discurrir!”

The simplest use of quotations from Unamuno occurs in montages that bring together typical descriptions of Castile or the attitudes characteristic of the Generation of 1898. Usually one or two other authors are given almost equal billing.¹⁶ In the passage I will use as an illustration, pp. 110–12 of RCDJ, some readers will recognize parts of the chapter “La casta histórica—Castilla” in En torno al casticismo, but there is also one item each from “En Aguilar de Campóo” and “Ciudad, campo, paisajes y recuerdos.” Unamuno's companions are García Morente in Idea de la hispanidad¹⁷ and Azorín, represented by the essay “Castilla” from El paisaje de España visto por los españoles.¹⁸ The borrowings are often verbatim and show only minor modifications: position of adjectives, slight condensation, an insignificant substitution. I have underlined phrases that are identical in the source and RCDJ and used brackets to indicate both a variant in the source and the author/page references. However, a device that twists the meaning dramatically is the insertion of a new subject—the carpeto¹⁹—as the thinker of these thoughts. And certainly don Miguel, who so feared the loss of personal identity, would be appalled at the ease with which the fragments coalesce, a process facilitated by the use of the colon as the main sign of punctuation. The text reads:

la aceptación estoica del destino histórico es [pues] el primer rasgo saliente de la actitud hispánica ante la vida [G. M., 22]: el carpeto concibe la Historia [de España] como un lento proceso de autodepuración [propia depuración], como un continuo ejercicio ascético de perfeccionamiento [encaminado a perfeccionar] [G. M., 24]: en el fondo del alma ibera hay [Hay en el fondo del alma del caballero] un residuo indestructible de estoicismo [—Séneca era español—] que, hermanado intimamente con el cristianismo, ha enseñado a los hombres de la Meseta [de España] a sufrir y a aguantar [G. M., 69]: ha hecho de ellos una casta de complexión seca, dura y sarmentosa, una casta de hombres sobrios, [producto de una larga selección por las heladas de crudísimos inviernos y una serie de penurias periódicas, hechos] adaptados a la inclemencia del cielo y a la pobreza del clima [de la vida] [U., I, 811]: hasta el paisaje, este entrañable paisaje nuestro, parece empapado de efluvios éticos [U., I, 363] senequistas como observaron agudamente los maestros del 98 y lo plasmaron en inmortales páginas de estilo sedeño, sentencioso, reposado, con una especie de grave ternura que se diría que le sale de los tuétanos

Castilla, Castilla!: minutos de serenidad inefable [,] en que la Historia se conjuga [conjunta] con la radiante Naturaleza [!]: a lo lejos se destacan las torres de la catedral : [;] una campana suena : [;] torna el silencio [A., 55]

ante nosotros, átomos de [en la] eternidad, se abren, arcanos e insondables, los tiempos venideros [A., 55]

el camino se extiende, inacabable, ante la llanura [mirada]: [;] todo es llano, uniforme [A., 58]

pueblos que proclaman su santa alegría de vivir fuera de la Historia [U., I, 489]: soportales, una tiendecilla con mantas en la puerta, un mesón, un viejo palacio con un escudo de piedra, las celosías de un convento de monjas [A., 59]

concierto de badajos, como una sinfonía en el páramo : pinares estáticos al borde del sendero : alguna procesión monótona y grave de pardas encinas [U., I, 808]: unos pocos álamos [,] que, [ ] en la soledad infinita adquieren una vida profunda e intensa [intensa y profunda] [U., I, 808]

estribaciones de huesosas y descarnadas peñas erizadas de riscos : [;] colinas [recortadas que ponen al desnudo las capas del terreno resquebrajado de sed,] cubiertas [cuando más] de pobres hierbas, donde sólo levantan cabeza el cardo rudo y la retama desnuda [y olorosa] [U., I, 809]

campo infinito en que, sin perderse, se achica el hombre, y en que siente en medio de la sequía de los campos sequedades del alma! [.] [U., I, 809]

Note how the quotations from Unamuno pile up toward the end of the section. One reason is to vary the rhythm, now slower and heavier after the staccato phrases from Azorín. Another reason, I suspect, is that Goytisolo, fully conscious of the vividness of Unamuno's style, as well as of the hint of excess in it, knows lines from this author provide a strong conclusion.

Indeed, throughout RCDJ, Goytisolo skillfully calculates the placement of textual elements. Limiting our examples to those that involve Unamuno, we find on p. 159 a case of parallelistic construction. Two successive paragraphs begin with comparable phrases—“por las callejas … hallarás” and “por el macizo portón entrarás”—continue with descriptions in the style of Azorín,²⁰ and conclude with words from Unamuno. The first phrase, “alegría de vivir fuera de la Historia” (I, 489) constitutes an internal repeat, for it was also used in the long collage just analyzed. The second is “en el cogollo de su [del] corazón rocoso” (I, 489). The attentive reader may not always know whose words he is reading, but he will perceive the shift in style, especially in the second paragraph. This practice is not unlike the use of lines from Góngora to introduce three consecutive apartados in Part I.²¹

Another time, Goytisolo takes one of Unamuno's more effusive statements about the spiritual qualities of the landscape—“Oscuros pensamientos de eternidad parecen brotar de la tierra” (I, 481, “En Yuste”)—and places it in the midst of a passage written in the colorless prose of military field orders:

el área designada, el Área H, se extiende desde las pendientes noroccidentales del Moncayo hacia el Guadarrama, Gredos y la sierra Cabrera : comprende zonas de páramo cubierto de berruecos, llanuras áridas, ríos concisos y sobrios : las campanas tañen el Ángelus y oscuros pensamientos de eternidad parecen brotar de la tierra : para los equipos de fumigación y de tala los puntos de aterrizaje serán marcados por balizas de color azul : en el centro de esta área se montará una emisora de Radio Decca para el envío de helicópteros suplementarios (p. 143).

Both discourses are highly codified, but as a result of their clash, Unamuno's rhetoric seems both exaggerated and anachronistic, as anachronistic as Santiago on his white horse, who provides the larger framework in which this section appears. The text of RCDJ has no lead-in to facilitate the identification of Unamuno's remark. However, I do not believe it is mere coincidence that Goytisolo uses it again on p. 139 of España y los españoles with proper credit to don Miguel. The full effect depends on recognition!

Unamuno also makes several anonymous contributions to the characterization of Figurón—an all-encompassing, protean figure who eventually comes to include all the masculine identities in the novel. Early in RCDJ, before Figurón undergoes his many transformations, he appears to be only a bothersome lawyer, member of the Spanish colony in Tangiers, who continually extols the traditions of the mother country. His muletilla—efluvios éticos—is a creation of Unamuno. Normally a reader of Unamuno would barely notice the phrase if he encountered it in context in “Ciudad, campo, paisajes y recuerdos”: “Pues no es lo mismo para aquel que encuentra en el campo un Evangelio y absorbe en la montaña tanto más que efluvios estéticos, efluvios éticos” (I, 363). But out of context the phrase is revealed in all its infelicity. On p. 82 of RCDJ, Goytisolo gleefully seizes the opportunity to defile these spiritual emanations. Figurón, alias don Álvaro, suddenly picks something up from the ground and obliges the narrator to inhale the aroma of the droppings of an authentic capra hispánica while intoning: “efluvios éticos! … esencias metafisicas! : Gredos, Gredos!” Thus the first time Goytisolo uses the phrase it is hopelessly degraded. It will reappear over and over. On p. 111, we find “hasta el paisaje, este entrañable paisaje nuestro, parece empapado de efluvios éticos senequistas como observaron agudamente los maestros del 98. …” Here the undermining is less obvious and depends on the excess implied by empapado and the abuse of alliteration (e and p) that makes the sentence singularly ugly. There are other mentions on pp. 119 and 146. Then, as don Álvaro is dying (p. 180), he calls out: “efluvios éticos, paisajes metafísicos, a mí, a mí!” Lastly, Goytisolo employs a variation on p. 151 when he describes the flatulence caused by eating garbanzos as “dulces efluvios sedantes,” a phrase found in the singular in Unamuno's poem “El Cristo de Cabrera” (VI, 194).

Most authors who “contribute” to the text of RCDJ supply only their words. Unamuno, however, also appears as a personality fragment of the many-sided Figurón in the Seneca section. He is never named anywhere in the text, although the clues in the following description are obvious:

tras la mesa de un rectoral despacho cubierta de papeles y libros y un austero crucifijo Kierkegaardiano que abre los brazos junto a la lámpara de cabecera y proyecta su sombra inmensa en el tapiz : severo y enjuto mientras despliega gravemente la muleta y realiza una serie inigualable de manoletinas y pases de pecho que provocan el sobrecogedor deliquio, el arrobo seráfico de la hispana multitud : acogiendo las delirantes aclamaciones con un rictus estereotipado y llevándose la mano, esa personalísima mano suya que parece pintada por El Greco, al sitio del corazón, ah, me duele España! (pp. 116–17).

The reader easily makes the association with the Rector of the University of Salamanca, recognizes his famous remark, “Me duele España,” and may well know he was strongly influenced by Kierkegaard. Yet the very phrase “crucifijo Kierkegaardiano” can give us pause, for it is none too clear who is really on the cross, Christ or Unamuno-Kierkegaard in his metaphysical anguish. Next, the figure, in an apparently incongruous activity, performs a series of bullfighter's passes. The irony here cuts many ways, anticipating the satire of Ortega y Gasset (pp. 199–201), who attempted a philosophical analysis of bullfighting and who in the novel is another dimension of Séneca-Figurón. It also leads back to Unamuno with the damaging suggestion that all his rhetoric of anguish was merely fancy capework. The reaction of the public to this display is discredited by hyperbole, since the terms deliquio and arrobo are closely linked to the extremes of ecstasy experienced by the mystics in the moment of union with God.

The Unamuno personality then submerges for two pages. I will not comment on the Séneca Jr.-Séneca Sr. dialogue that follows, for this parody of the conversation between General Moscardó and his son during the siege of the Alcázar has been ably studied by Levine and others.²² It might be noted, however, that the short paragraph that introduces this passage—which one might dismiss as mere authorial commentary that damns with excessive praise—consists largely of quotations from García Morente's Idea de la hispanidad (ft. 17). On p. 57 of that work he speaks of “Caballerosidad y cristiandad en fusión perfecta e identificación radical” and on p. 67 he writes “alzar la voz y encumbrarse a formas superiores de la elocuencia y de la retórica.” The other intervening page, 118, also contains long quotations from García Morente (pp. 59 and 72) plus references to “una prudente terapéutica de sangrías y purgas” derived from Ganivet. Here the Séneca-Figurón entity takes on attributes of Franco. [I have digressed to point out the lines from García Morente because thus far all critics have limited the borrowings from this source to the decalogue of the perfecto caballero cristiano on p. 158. They are much more extensive.]

The Unamuno dimension reemerges when “Séneca” ascends to Gredos “a respirar los éticos efluvios.” The description of the locale comes from Unamuno's essay “De vuelta de la cumbre”: “He estado hace pocos días en los altos de la sierra de Gredos, espinazo de Castilla; he acampado dos noches a dos mil quinientos metros de altura, sobre la tierra y bajo el cielo; he trepado al montón de piedras que sustenta al risco de Almanzor; he descansado al pie de un ventisquero contemplando el imponente espectáculo del anfiteatro que ciñe la laguna grande de Gredos” (I, 350). Goytisolo's text reads: “allí, en el espinazo de Castilla, a dos mil metros de altura sobre la Meseta, trepan al montón de piedras que sustenta el risco Almanzor y contemplan el imponente espectáculo del anfiteatro que ciñe la laguna grande de Gredos” (p. 119). Two short phrases “cimas de silencio y de paz y de olvido” (I, 350) and “el eco la repetía dos veces entre las soledades” (I, 351) appear almost unchanged in the Goytisolo text.

Apart from outright quotations, Goytisolo clearly has in mind the general content of the article cited and also “El silencio de la cima.” In the latter, Unamuno recounts how he climbed the Peña de Francia with a group of French friends: “¡Qué sabrosas conversaciones con ellos, allá arriba, en el seno del silencio, tendidos sobre la cumbre!” (I, 355). Later the friends recite Leconte de Lisle's poem to the condor, while Unamuno recalls Obermann (I, 358). Goytisolo adapts the situation to his purpose by having the climbers recite archetypical Spanish works: “el ‘Infante Arnaldos’ y el ‘Romance de Blanca Niña’, sonetos de Lope de Vega y autos sacramentales de Calderón.” And who are the climbers? In the novel's play of shifting identities suddenly they are ex-combatants from Franco's army reminiscing about their exploits in a mountain skirmish. Did not José Antonio, as well as Unamuno, seek the eternal truths of the nation among the peaks when he declared: “Nuestra España estaba entre los riscos y los vericuetos”? Is not much Falangist rhetoric infused with a specious spirituality not too different from Unamuno's? Goytisolo has little taste for the distinctions others might draw and takes pleasure in jumbling them indiscriminately. First he throws in a little idealistic rhetoric a la Falange (“ … la risueña, luminosa época de su bizarra y aguerrida juventud … la empresa Universal de salvación”) only to reveal the brutal reality underlying it when the men begin to speak: “te acuerdas?'/ qué gente!'/ viva el Tercio!'/ entonces, el tío cabrón / sí, tras el mogote / y yo con la ametralladora / los jodimos / ja ja! / los hicimos polvo / como moscas / tac, tac, tac, tac! / ah, qué tiempos aquellos!” (pp. 119–20). [Slashes added to indicate short lines in RCDJ.]

Goytisolo's text then veers off in a new direction as “henchida el alma de aliento de eternidad, de jugo permanente de la Historia, vuestro Séneca regresa a la ciudad y sus cuidados, al tráfago urbano, al mundanal ruido transfigurado como los Beatles después de su retiro espiritual en la India.” Note how the column of very short phrases that concludes the earlier section is followed by a pompous line from Unamuno, “henchida el [mi] alma de aliento de eternidad, de jugo permanente de la Historia” (I, 276, “Ávila de los caballeros”). The juxtaposition and change of rhythms is very deliberate, with the result that Unamuno's remark seems overblown, his exultation of dubious quality. His spiritual experience, already shadowed by the coarseness of the veterans' language, is further subverted by the adjective transfigurado and the comparison with pop singers! I also find in “al tráfago urbano, al mundanal ruido,” along with the allusion to Fray Luis de León, a possible link to Unamuno's advice: “Vives acaso, lector mío, en un tráfago mundano, entre negocios o entre diversiones. Escápate cuando puedas a la cumbre …” (I, 353). The same paragraph in RCDJ contains one final bit from Unamuno, the description “mucilaginosa y desvertebrada,” a reworking of “mucilaginosa, invertebrada” (I, 362). This example can teach us two lessons, first that there is always a strong possibility that a striking formulation may be a cryptic quotation and, second, that one must take great care in making attributions.

The preceding discussion illustrates one way the intertextual process functions in RCDJ. Sufficient clues are given so that the author may be identified and the general outlines of the passage in Goytisolo's text are those of a recognizable scene, article or series of related articles. Many short quotations will be taken almost word for word from the source text(s). In other words, unlike the pastiche and montage, the units involved are much larger. Larra, Cervantes, Perrault, among others, are dealt with in this manner. The authors themselves, depending on their place in Goytisolo's personal canon, may be ignored or satirized, like Unamuno and Ortega, while their texts, recognizable yet different, fuse with Goytisolo's discourse.

There is a second ascent to the peaks in RCDJ and it provides a good example of how the spiraling text of the novel, although it seems to repeat, is never the same. The entire apartado (pp. 186–92) follows the wanderings of “un paradigmático ejemplar de capra hispánica,” soon to be joined by his “complementario mentor el carpeto.” Their climb to Arenas de San Pedro is clearly of Unamunian inspiration and is appropriately introduced by a cluster of cryptic quotations, although this time one finds several close equivalents along with word-for-word borrowings. This portion of Goytisolo's text reads:

… orilla de un mar petrificado, ancho y ajeno como el mundo : Meseta, llanura horizontal, áspera y recia Castilla! : paisaje cenobítico de coloración austera : amplio, severo, grave, reposado : solemnes encinares henchidos de silencio, rocas enhiestas, desnudas : aliento de eternidad, sed del espíritu, ardor seco del alma ibera! : sustraída del febril panorama urbano, la capra hispánica respira de quietud y alivio : el límpido aire serrano ensancha sus oprimidos pulmones : conciencia agraria, descansada vida fuera del mundanal ruido! : apacible, mansueta busca las madroñeras agrestes, las jaras perfumadas y humildes : sus pasos la conducen, por senderos y trochas, a las primeras estribaciones del monte : allí, encaramada en un pintoresco mogote, pace la fresca hierba menuda, bebe del agua purísima de un arroyo (pp. 188–89).

In order, the comparable phrases of Unamuno are: “mar petrificado” (I, 809); “paraje de encantadora soledad y de austero y cenobítico recogimiento” (I, 340, “El sentimiento de la fortaleza”); “amplio, severo, grave” (I, 337); “solemnes encinares, henchidos de reposo” (I, 329, “Trujillo”), with reposo apparently going over to the preceding phrase; “aliento de eternidad” (I, 276, “Ávila de los caballeros”); “sintiendo cómo va ensanchándose y entrenándose el pulmón” (I, 283, “Excursión”); “Corre el Tajo por su abrupta hoz, que unas veces se cierra en riscosa cañada y otras se abre en apacibles vegas. Entre aquellos peñascos crecen las madroñeras que nos brindan su salvaje fruto, y las jaras que perfuman el ambiente” (I, 330, “Trujillo”); “allí encima, encaramado entre tormos y riscos” (I, 330). Further on, Goytisolo's “alturas de silencio y libertad” is also from “Trujillo” (I, 329). The case for the less obvious parallels is strengthened, I believe, by the fact that other exact quotations originate in the same article.

What I find most interesting in terms of literary strategy, however, is that, in the midst of so many indirect allusions to Unamuno, there occurs the complete suppression of the Unamuno personality and all the related personae (Seneca, Franco, etc.) leaving us with only the emblematic capra and carpeto. This reduction to a paradigm (a concept that is repeated on p. 192 with a reference to the “nocivo y semioviente paradigma”) is in itself a symbolic annihilation of the individual(s). Several critics, including José Ortega, Levine and Ramos,²³ have pointed out that an article by ERO, “Capras hispánicas,” n.d., included in the Goytisolo Archive at Boston University, was the source for the following lines in RCDJ:

en la ermita de Arenas de San Pedro, donde los monjes dan la sopa boba a los viandantes, se restaura [la capra] en compañía de su complementario mentor el carpeto : juntos emprenden, tras venturosa siesta, la dura y dificil ascensión : de peña en peña, de berrueco en berrueco : cuesta arriba, por entrañables paisajes de aire teresiano, hasta las perennes alturas de silencio y libertad : romances en Gredos, entre los pastores y las maritornes! : serena música de cascadas, quebradas fragosas, ansias atávicas de inmortalidad! (p. 189)

In addition to the evident links between the newspaper article and RCDJ, one notes in the former a strong desire to place itself in the Unamuno tradition:

Me gustaría estar en Arenas y caminar hasta el cenobio de San Pedro, donde hace años todavía se daba la sopa boba a los caminantes. Es de suponer que la capra hispánica se haya acercado al convento, donde seguramente los frailes la habrán obsequiado con piensos calientes. Baja en la estación el río con aguas cristalinas y por las laderas montañosas suena una música de cascadas. Estos paisajes, de aire teresiano, fueron gozados por Unamuno, quien, en un hotel parisiense, frente a la plaza de la Estrella, tuvo la ocurrencia de decir que al panorama urbano le faltaba algo, y ese algo era Gredos. Unamuno escribió sobre Gredos páginas emotivas … pero no espigué en sus trabajos—o por lo menos no lo recuerdo—ninguna alusión a la capra hispánica.

What we have, in short, is an article that sounds like Unamuno, an article written by someone who had Unamuno very much in mind and which, when incorporated in RCDJ, is indistinguishable from authentic passages by Unamuno. It is easy to say that Goytisolo considers don Miguel's influence both pervasive and pernicious and something to be attacked whenever it occurs. Yet a more subtle subversion is underway. Goytisolo, by giving the imitation equal status with the original and by mixing both in his own version, seriously undercuts the authority of Unamuno's texts, for they are scarcely discernible from the rewrites. With the addition of the third element (the imitation), Goytisolo has further refined a process that, in the opinion of André Topia, is essential to intertextuality:

… un travail en retour de la nouvelle version sur la version originelle qu'elle contamine et met en perspective. D'où une instabilité grandissante de la notion d'original/originel : les discours se mettent à parcourir le texte sans qu'on puisse véritablement distinguer l'original de sa version plus ou moins détournée. La composante parodique est injectée dans la texture de l'écrit de telle manière que le lecteur se trouve confronté à des variations qu'il est tenté de prendre pour la norme, laquelle est inévitablement subvertie par cette hésitation, cette indécidabilité entre les instances. Le texte—qu'on hésite alors à appeler original, ou parodie, ou citation—devient un lieu où l'auteur se contente de faire jouer des discours les uns contre les autres, en les détournant toujours légèrement.²⁴

The capra and the carpeto will not be permitted to descend after seeking spiritual renewal on the heights of Gredos. The ending of this episode thus differs from the earlier one. They are to be destroyed by the fighters of a harka, under the command of Count Julian, that is waiting in a Parador de Turismo. (Again a bit of irony, for Goytisolo has indicated many times that traditional Spain will never be the same after the waves of tourism in the 60s and 70s.²⁵ As his own way of destroying the pair, Goytisolo takes a jump back in time and links them with another “constant” in Spanish history, the faccioso, who from his mountain retreats preyed on the nineteenth-century traveler. This identification is one of the pleasures reserved to the reader of RCDJ who knows his textual sources, for although Larra's pseudonym is mentioned, one only gets back to the title of his article, “La planta nueva, o El faccioso” by recognizing fragments of Fígaro's mock scientific description incorporated into this one: “terrenos … de maravillosa fecundidad”; “puntos donde basta dar una patada en el suelo y, en un volver la cabeza …”; “dotado de sinrazón”; “piernas, brazos y sus correspondientes manojos de dedos” (189–90). At the end of the section, Goytisolo makes Larra's antídoto—“haciendo ahumadas de pólvora”—part of his overall plan of extermination.²⁶

Thus with a variety of techniques Goytisolo degrades the “sentimiento de la montaña,” so closely identified with Unamuno, and gives him what would surely have been unwanted companions—José Antonio, the ex-combatants and the faccioso. A final irony awaits, for in the publicity for a new housing development, idly read by the narrator as he buries himself in a newspaper to avoid talking to Figurón, there is a bastardized version of Unamuno's cherished experiences:

les gusta respirar a pulmón lleno el aire puro, saludable de los bosques? les gusta detenerse a la orilla del silencioso arroyuelo que corre hacia las vastas llanuras y escuchar el zumbido de las abejas? … les gusta contemplar detenidamente el fondo cristalino de los lagos montañeses? les gusta mecer su espíritu con el ritmo gracioso del riachuelo parlanchín? les gusta escalar los altos picados y allí, en la cima de las rocas que se yerguen entre nubes, explayar en una canción alegre la felicidad de su alma? : GUADARRAMA : INVERSIÓN SEGURA : GRANDES FACILIDADES DE PAGO (pp. 56–57).

The final concern of this study will be two quotations that link with the fundamental conception of RCDJ. What was originally a description of Ávila becomes part of the physical and mental constitution of don Álvaro Peranzules. Unamuno writes: “Ciudad, como el alma castellana, dermato-esquelética, crustácea, con la osamenta—coraza—por de fuera, y dentro la carne, ósea también a las veces” (I, 498). The observation appears in altered form on p. 116—“… Alvarito se fabrica cuidadosamente una figura impermeable y hermética : de estructura dermato-esquelética, articulada como una coraza”—and nearly complete on p. 140, “de alma dermato-esquelética, crustácea, con la osamenta por de fuera y, dentro, la carne, ósea también.” The word coraza radiates out toward medieval armor and the caballero cristiano theme whereas crustácea points toward the insect-arthropod motif via the common element of chitin.

Among the important scenes featuring insects are the episode when the protagonist crushes insects between the pages of Spanish classics and the destruction of a grasshopper by a scorpion that traumatizes young Alvarito when he is forced to watch a classroom demonstration. Here the notion of underlying cruelty is introduced, not only in the attack by the scorpion on his prey, but also in the sadistic bent of the teacher who stages the experiment. This priest, an early incarnation of Figurón, is obviously representative of the ruling caste and thus is fittingly described by a line from M. Machado's poem on Felipe II. Don Álvaro, in his final metamorphosis, is like a giant arthropod or the closest human equivalent, a knight in armor nearly immobilized by his accoutrements: “el volumen de sus rasgos es netamente superior al normal y el rigor de la coraza acentúa su apariencia crustácea, de hombre de principios firmes y sólida fe de carbonero …” (p. 174). (Again echoes of Unamuno in his celebrated illustration of the simple man who has never doubted his faith.) Don Álvaro continues expanding to the point of collapse and his destruction is in part geological: “la costra granítica se desprende, la violenta erosión se acelera : la masa rocosa se disgrega, se desmenuza, se desconcha” (p. 179). This sort of disintegration is appropriate, for it is the granitic landscape of Castile that has formed his soul.

The second quotation provides something of a surprise, for usually the process of intertextuality turns the borrowing ironically against its original author. There is, however, a significant phrase that the unwary might attribute to the narrative voice and that indeed reflects its views, but which unexpectedly comes from Unamuno: “… veíamos a la Patria rezumando pus y sangraza por entre agrietadas costras de cicatrices” (I, 489). Goytisolo repeats it on p. 34, “patria rezumando pus y grandeza por entre agrietadas costras de cicatrices” and also on p. 175. Note, however, the shift from the original sangraza to grandeza to emphasize the rot that accompanies Spanish glory. In this statement Unamuno anticipates the negative view of Spanish history and tradition that informs RCDJ, Goytisolo does not actually quote the paragraph that precedes the one in which we find this quotation but he surely read it:

Casi toda la tradición tradicionalista de España, la de los falsos cronicones es superchería; superchería bajo un mítico Santiago—embuste de Compostela—en cuyo día se esperó este año … ¡Otra superchería! Porque se nos quiere hacer vivir de mentiras, señor, de mentiras. Y a lo mejor—que es lo peor—cree en ellas alguien, señor, las cree …, ¡el muy frívolo! Y esto no tiene remedio … (I, 489).

Herman Meyer has written: “In the case of cryptic quotation we are dealing less with simple concealment than with an outright game of hide-and-seek. The point of the game is to discover the quotation, for only by being discovered can it achieve its specific effect.”²⁷ Clearly I have been enticed to join the game that Goytisolo proposes and this article presents my findings about Unamuno's role. The decision to focus on a single author, as Orringer did with Góngora, is due to the realization that anyone who tries to study the entire range of intertextuality in this novel will inevitably fall short, given the vast amount of material to be checked and the time constraints under which we work. We must go back to the original works, for even though the Goytisolo Archive can be very helpful, it is not definitive. And only when the identifications have been made can we really study the dialogue between texts. I suspect that eventually RCDJ will be read in a heavily annotated edition, although, regrettably, that will deprive future readers of the game of discovery.²⁸

Notes

1. Goytisolo stated in an interview with Claude Couffon: “Le livre n'est pas une critique moral ni un roman à thèse, mais une agression aliénée, onirique, schizophrénique.” “Don Julián ou la destruction des mythes,” Le Monde, 12 Sept. 1970.

2. Juan Goytisolo, España y los españoles (Barcelona: Lumen, 1979), pp. 29–33 and 51–54. Goytisolo clearly follows Américo Castro's interpretation of Spanish history.

3. In the Couffon interview, Goytisolo declared that “La haine pour le sexe de la plupart de nos écrivains, de Quevedo à Unamuno, a quelque chose de pathologique.” He elaborated on this view in Libertad, libertad, libertad (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1978), p. 95: “… la aversión al goce sexual, fuera de los cánones estrictamente procreativos, del común de nuestras autoridades literarias, desde Unamuno a Menéndez Pidal, debería ser estudiada con seriedad si queremos comprender las características represivas del pensamiento reaccionario peninsular: encastillados en una presunta superioridad intelectual o moral, dichos escritores fulminan contra el desorden de los instintos, la concupiscencia y el libertinaje.”

4. Goytisolo, España, p. 53.

5. Juan Goytisolo, Reivindicación del Conde don Julián (Mexico: Mortiz, 1970), pp. 182–85. All further references to this work are indicated in the text by the appropriate page number in parentheses.

6. J. G. says in Julio Ortega, “Entrevista con Juan Goytisolo,” Revista de Occidente, No. 133 (1974), p. 19, “el episodio de las moscas ejerce, toutes proportions gardées, una función similar a la del examen de la biblioteca de Don Quijote por el cura y el barbero: la de introducir la discusión literaria en el cuerpo mismo de la novela.”

7. André Topia declares in “Contrepoints joyciens,” Poétique, No. 27 (1976), p. 353: “ … la problématique intertextuelle pourra être envisagée de deux manières différentes. On peut s'attacher d'abord au rapport entre le corpus originel du texte emprunté et la version de ce même texte emprunté telle qu'elle apparaît une fois remodelée au sein d'un nouveau contexte (l'écho n'est pas répétition, la réutilisation n'est pas restitution.) Ou bien on pourra privilégier le rapport entre le texte-support et le fragment réutilisé au sein du nouvel ensemble formé par leur coexistence, en prenant pour hypothèse que cette coexistence est plus qu'une simple juxtaposition, que l'assemblement des deux textes engendre inévitablement une configuration textuelle nouvelle, qualitativement différente de la simple addition de deux unités.”

8. Julio Ortega, “Entrevistas a Juan Goytisolo,” in Juan Goytisolo, Disidencias (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1977), pp. 293–94.

9. Juan Goytisolo, El furgón de cola (Paris: Ruedo lbérico, 1967), pp. 80–81.

10. Goytisolo, Disidencias, p. 313.

11. In RCDJ Goytisolo often alludes indirectly to '98 as “un puñado de hombres ilustres” (p. 138) or “ese puñado de taumaturgos” (p. 140). His roster is somewhat elastic and includes Azorín, Benavente, the two Machados, Juan Ramón, Ortega and Menéndez Pidal, but—in the novel—not Baroja.

12. Juan Goytisolo, “Presentación crítica” in J. M. Blanco White, Obra inglesa (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1974), p. 15.

13. Goytisolo, España, p. 33.

14. (I, 339). As here, all parenthetical references in the text are to Obras completas de Miguel de Unamuno, ed. Manuel García Blanco (Madrid: Escelicer, 1966–71) and include the volume number and page.

15. In the chapter “Unamuno y el paisaje de Castilla,” España, pp. 128–41, Goytisolo develops the idea that “Unamuno y, en menor grado, Azorín valoraban el paisaje en función de los ideales estéticorreligiosos de la vieja casta militar de Castilla” (p. 140).

16. In the very similar collage on pp. 140–42 fewer items from Unamuno appear. One notes the following: “dulce correr de los días iguales [¡Oh, qué dulce el correr días iguales;] : repetición, sustancia de la dicha : [ … ] costumbre santa [santa costumbre]” from the poem “Las estradas de Albia” (VI, 502); “donde la gea domina a la flora y [a] la fauna” (I, 498), “procesión monótona y grave de pardas encinas, de verde severo y perenne” (I, 808), and perhaps the adjective inmoble (I, 360, VI, 503). To be sure, several of the short phrases such as “cerros pelados” and “rebaños trashumantes” can be found in his essays, but they are so typical of '98 as to be unattributable. Collaborating with Unamuno are A. Machado with lines from poems Nos. CXIII, CXXVI and CLVI and Azorín, again on the basis of Paisaje. The passages are “suenan … Angelus,” p. 66, “es mediodía … brillan,” p. 62, “chopos enhiestos [enhiestos chopos],” p. 55 and “pasos ingrávidos [sonoros] en una calleja [callejuela],” p. 55. Two repeats from pp. 110–12 are also present: “el camino … mirada” and “celosías … monjas.” Unexpectedly, since Valle Inclán is not mentioned in the “Advertencia,” there is a quotation from Flor de santidad, probably by way of Azorín who cites it on p. 33 of Paisaje: “da [daba] al yermo y riscoso paisaje entonaciones anacoréticas.” In a later section, p. 162, Goytisolo employs Valle's “campanas de aldea, piadosas, madrugadoras, sencillas”, also quoted on p. 33 of Paisaje.

17. Manuel García Morente, Idea de la hispanidad (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1961).

18. El paisaje de España visto por los españoles, 6th ed., Colección Austral, No. 164 (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1961).

19. In Formalist Elements in the Novels of Juan Goytisolo (Potomac, Md.: Porrúa, 1979), p. 136, Genaro J. Pérez gives a good definition: “The term carpeto refers to the people and contains as well the geographical reference to the Sistema Carpetovetónico Central. Both the term and its significance derive from Cela's El gallego y su cuadrilla y otros apuntes carpetovetónicos. He goes on to quote the explanation of carpetovetónico given by Alonso Zamora Vicente: “Las personas ilustradas que lo usaban en la conversación, aludían siempre a la sequedad … de la Castilla abrasada y polvorienta: se encerraba siempre, de una u otra forma, una idea de brutalidad.” Camilo José Cela (Madrid: Gredos, 1962), p. 144.

20. The source is Juan Carlos Villacorta's “Castilla y Azorín,” an article found in the Goytisolo Archive. For the text see José Ortega, Juan Goytisolo: Alienación y agresión en Señas de identidad y Reivindicación del Conde don Julián (New York: Torres, 1972), p. 148.

21. See Nelson R. Orringer, “El Góngora rebelde del Don Julián de Goytisolo,” Inti, No. 2 (1975), pp. 18–30.

22. Linda Gould Levine, Juan Goytisolo: La destrucción creadora (Mexico: Mortiz), pp. 162–64.

23. Levine, p. 154 as well as José Ortega, Alienación, pp. 148–49 and Alicia Ramos, “Unidad formal y análisis crítico en Reivindicación del Conde don Julián,” Diss. Northwestern 1980, p. 281. All three works are important for the study of intertextuality in Goytisolo. Also of interest, especially the opening chapter on “Juan Goytisolo's Theoretical Milieu,” is Michael Ugarte's Trilogy of Treason: An Intertextual Study of Juan Goytisolo (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1982).

24. Topia, p. 352.

25. He writes, for example, in Furgón, p. 177: “[S]u presencia transforma el país y, si España no es aún Europa, para bien y para mal ha dejado de ser España.”

26. Mariano José de Larra, Artículos completos (Madrid: Aguilar, 1944), pp. 967, 969 and 971.

27. Herman Meyer, The Poetics of Quotation in the European Novel (Stuttgart, 1961; rpt. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), p. 7.

28. Not mentioned elsewhere in this article are the following items from Unamuno: p. 34 “del [el] espíritu unido [se siente atraído] por las [sus] raíces a lo eterno de la casta” (I, 370); “monoteístico paisaje [paisaje monoteístico]” (I, 809); “extensas y peladas soledades” (I, 810). On p. 38 “la llanura inacabable donde verdea el trigo y [o] amarillea el rastrojo” (I, 808) and on p. 162 “tierra [,] serena y reposada” (I, 370) and “grave sueño de piedra” (I, 499). P. 175 contains “páramos trágicos [páramo trágico]” (I, 485). There are also similarities between the description of the statue of the Virgin on p. 108 and Unamuno's description of the Christ of Santa Clara: “un maniquí de madera articulado, vestido con un manto azul y oro … : en sus brazos, el Hijo, un muñeco de pelo rubio natural peinado a lo Shirley Temple, empuña una espada de juguete el rostro de la Muñeca es, a la vez, grueso y demacrado : espesos grumos de almagre fingen regueros de sangre …” Unamuno wrote: “ … parece ser más bien un maniquí de madera articulado, recubierto de piel y pintado. Con pelo natural y grumos de almazarrón, en el que fingen cuajerones de sangre” (I, 485).