SOURCE: “Goytisolo's Juan sin tierra: A Dialogue in the Spanish Tradition,” in Modern Language Review, Vol. 84, No. 4, October, 1989, pp. 846-59.

In his study of Juan Goytisolo's ‘exile’ trilogy Michael Ugarte carries out a detailed analysis of the novelist's concepts, and use, of intertextuality. He points out that while the author is certainly conversant with modern textual theories, he does not practise them in a pure sense, but exploits them, together with the use of fictional alter egos in order to achieve a personal goal: that of establishing the author's identity.¹

Although Ugarte observes a number of currents in the trilogy, three principal concerns may be summarized. In Señas de identidad there is an attempt to construct a new identity from different sources and a rejection of contemporary, ‘official’ Spanish texts. Reivindicación del Conde don Julián consists of the destruction of a mythical Spain through the subversion of its most revered texts, by the use of the dissident writings of Góngora and Américo Castro in particular. Castro's importance lies in his emphasis on the Arab contribution to Spanish culture; Góngora is admired as a subjectivist and for the baroque quality of his work. Juan sin tierra explores the writing process, using mainly non-Spanish intertexts, and attempts to subvert the Castilian language. Essentially, what is perceived is a process of liberation from Spain as an ideological entity, and this might be expected in the light of Goytisolo's own attitudes and actions. In many respects Ugarte's analysis is convincing, although it does not account for all the aspects of Juan sin tierra and in particular for Chapter 6, which receives little attention.

Yet there is a contradiction in Ugarte's argument: he traces an evolution in the trilogy, from a search for the author's identity in relation to different Spanish texts to an exploration of the author's function, largely independent of them; but the argument depends on the interpretation of selected remarks made by the author and does not take into account other important aspects of Juan sin tierra. On pages 119 and 120 Ugarte argues that ‘the changing nature of intertextuality is apparent in the diminishing importance that he attaches to the Spanish literary tradition’, and also that ‘the book's title itself testifies to Goytisolo's wish to traverse the Pyrenees’.

The first statement takes as its justification Goytisolo's own observation that other languages and cultures are alluded to in the novel.² While Goytisolo's intertextuality is extended to include non-Hispanic sources, the novelist specifically alludes to the importance of Rojas, Cervantes, Luis de León, and Góngora, and in the same interview draws a clear parallel between himself and earlier Spanish writers:

Todos los caminos de la vanguardia de hoy abocan fatalmente a una especie de suicidio ejemplar, a un harakiri de las posibilidades expresivas. En este aspecto, vivimos una época literaria bastante parecida a la que conocieron escritores españoles de la primera mitad del siglo XVII, como Quevedo y, sobre todo, Góngora.

(Juan Goytisolo, p. 128)

Although it may be true that Spanish literature occupies less space than in the previous novel, it is the dominant element of Chapter 6 of Juan sin tierra. This section, the culmination of the trilogy, includes numerous references to identifiable texts, particularly those of the Golden Age, and a substantial part is based on Don Quijote. The chapter is a crystallization of the contradictions of the whole trilogy; it analyses the novelist's personal development, his views on current literary issues, and his assessment of Spanish literature. But, most crucially, the argument is conducted from within the Spanish tradition.

Ugarte's assertion (p. 119) that the words ‘Juan sin tierra’ express the author's sense of cultural exile is based on a simple parallel between the title of Goytisolo's novel and the collection of poems Jean sans terre by Ivan Goll. (In the preface to the Spanish edition Goll describes Jean as ‘un personaje legendario que representa el hombre moderno y el poeta de hoy que no tiene raíces en ningún país’.)³

An alternative view is that Goytisolo's writing progresses from alienation from Spanish text, through a stage of struggle in which he tries to alter it to fit his own vision, and finally to a kind of reconciliation in which his text becomes identified with ideological conflicts already present within Spanish literature. The three steps of engagement might be summarized as follows. The modern, non-literary Spanish intertexts of Señas are presented in a hostile way, as alien objects. Goytisolo states that at this stage his objective is to dislocate the usual language of narrative in order to escape from the linguistic prison in which he feels that he and his fellow Spanish novelists are trapped (Juan Goytisolo, pp. 112–13). In Reivindicación writings representing the ‘sterile’, dominant post-Isabelline tradition are subverted by emphasis on the Arab ingredient in the Spanish heritage. At the same time the author stresses the similarity of his linguistic project to Góngora's work (Juan Goytisolo, p. 125). The relationship with Golden-Age authors in the penultimate chapter of Juan sin tierra is rich and ambiguous, though one feature is clear: the author conducts his argument from within Golden-Age texts. He seems to be suggesting that subsequent literary and ideological development is an aberration which has been produced by a highly-selective and deluded notion of nationality and foreign influence.

Goytisolo's argument is, essentially, a two-part reply to the originators of the doctrine of casticismo and to those who employ it in order to criticize his work. Although an exile, he understands the currents in Spanish literature and recognizes the importance of foreign influence. He is an insider in that he establishes affinities with great writers of the past and also because he personifies the struggle of his generation of novelists. His critics, on the other hand, because of a narrow, nationalistic attitude, fail to grasp the real issues of the past or present and are thus cultural exiles.

With this broader perspective it might be productive to consider the possible resonances of the title ‘Juan sin tierra’ before discussing Chapter 6 of the novel. ‘John without land’ evokes his opposite: Juan Labrador, the archetypal Spanish peasant, best known in Lope de Vega's play El villano en su rincón. In Reivindicación Goytisolo shows unequivocal hostility towards Lope as a representative of the dominant tradition, and he is doubtless aware that Lope's protagonist is a Frenchman and that the play is set in France. His choice of the title ‘Juan sin tierra’ seems to contain the twin suggestions that his own work as an exile in France is rooted in the Spanish tradition and that at the same time the so-called pure Spanish tradition, which Goytisolo rejects, shares the same external influence. However, although he sees himself as a Spanish novelist, he cannot (as he once thought he could) engage in a creative dialogue with the nation; instead, writing is for him a self-sufficient and pleasurable activity of the imagination, akin to masturbation:

iniciando, tantálico, tu propio y personal proceso al canon novelesco y la radiografía de sus orondos comparsas: mientras buscas a tientas la secreta, guadianesca ecuación que soterradamente aúna sexualidad y escritura: tu empedernido gesto de empuñar la pluma y dejar escurrir su licor filiforme, prolongando indefinidamente el orgasmo:⁴

The other ‘tierra’ association in Juan sin tierra is the opposition of the body, sex, and excrement to religion and repression. The heterosexual, procreational aspect of sexuality—the analogue of the realists' alleged relationship with the people—is portrayed as an activity which is culturally circumscribed to such an extent that it no longer functions. The ‘parejita reproductora’ (the nation) is reduced to impotence, because the manual, or text, is alien and does not have the desired stimulating effect (pp. 71–73). The process of repression is illustrated by the parodic representation of the idea of sanctity, the conversion of bodily excretions to perfume (Alvarito's ordeal, pp. 203–08).

In his essay ‘Quevedo: La obsesión excremental’,⁵ Goytisolo suggests that Quevedo's scatological preoccupation is a sign of health: the author's expression of the neurosis of a culture that denies and represses the physical. In Juan sin tierra the numerous references to the need for the people to return to using the communal trench are intended to function in a similar manner, and at the same time constitute another root linking Goytisolo to something quintessentially Spanish: one of the great authors of the Golden Age.

This essay raises the question of the author's view of the relevance of his writing to the mass of the people. It is a servant who first tells Goytisolo the anecdote of Quevedo at the communal trench and this, as well as other anecdotes recounted in En los reinos de taifa,⁶ suggests that the novelist considers ordinary people to have a healthy attitude to the body, whereas official élites, whether Spanish, Russian, or Cuban, show by their language that they do not. However, although Goytisolo's language coincides with the servant's at the level of the anecdote about Quevedo, it also diverges, since he does not expect her to have read the Buscón. But he does not evade the question of élitism. The official writers of what he sees as repressive régimes claim to produce work which is accessible to a wide audience, and Goytisolo's earlier work is in a similar category: committed realism. In 1959 he had roundly condemned two tendencies in the contemporary Spanish novel: nationalism and modernism, both of which he considered to be alien to the Spanish people. He proposed in their stead a genre, national popular literature, which would reflect the ‘revolutionary truth’.⁷ In his later work he chooses the supremacy of art, and hence individualism, rather than adherence to a programme. His concern is to transgress ideological taboo, and the allusions to masturbation, excrement, and copulation—particularly of a perverse kind—are analogies of the processes that take place at the syntactic level. In Juan sin tierra the narrator comments: ‘paraíso, el tuyo, con culo y con falo, donde un lenguaje-metáfora subyugue el objeto al verbo y, liberadas de sus mazmorras y grillos, las palabras al fin, las traidoras, esquivas palabras, vibren, dancen, copulen, se encueren y cobren cuerpo’ (p. 218).

Chapter 6 of Juan sin tierra is a debate between realism and subjectivist literature, in which the exponents of realism (whether of the Spanish-Catholic or socialist kind) claim to have a monopoly of representational fidelity. The subjectivist side, on the other hand, makes no explicit claim to authority, establishing itself within the Spanish Golden-Age tradition and proceeding to call realism into question by demonstrating that it is not a direct reflection of the world but is, like subjectivism, a convention of codes. I have already referred to the ambiguous but strong links with certain Golden-Age writers. The strongest connection is, perhaps not surprisingly, with Cervantes: Goytisolo feels an affinity for a text such as Don Quijote, which explores subjectivism and the nature of fiction, and which also openly manipulates a vast array of elements from outside texts.

Two principal voices are present in Chapter 6. A voice identified as ‘tú’ is combined with an impersonal third-person narrator and represents subjectivism. (The ‘tú’ voice represents the central writing-consciousness addressing itself.) The voice of realism is Vosk, a metamorphosing character who also appears in the guise of a priest in those sections of other chapters which deal with nineteenth-century Cuba. Vosk combines the voice of Goytisolo's Marxist and Catholic realist critics with the author's own previous, realist voice. ‘Vosk’ is a transcription of the Russian word ‘Bosk’ (wax), and combines the notions of objectivity and solidity (which the author associates with theorists of socialist realism) with malleability and impermanence. It is worth noting the word's similarity to ‘voz’: textual voice.

Metamorphosing characters are used extensively in Reivindicación and Juan sin tierra. However, in Chapter 6 they cease to be simply a fictional technique but are used to explore and explain the process through which texts assimilate each other, rather like a film being projected at high speed. This kaleidoscopic transformation is undergone by the realist authoritarian voice whilst it maintains its dogmatic tone. The voice is trapped in two ways. First, realism is ridiculed by being made to speak while clothed in the pastoral: that is, through Vosk dressed as a shepherdess. Pastoral of course not only is an idealized and conventional form but is also foreign in origin. However, it is not simply pastoral, but one subverted by the intrusion of different Golden-Age voices. The notion of the faithful transcription of the world attempts to maintain itself against the invasion of idealized elements from Góngora, Cervantine self-deception, and, perhaps worst of all, the corrosive Quevedan notion of appearances: Vosk, like a pícaro, is always in disguise.

As well as the mutability and ambiguity of the model (world) which the voice inhabits, the question arises of the degree to which the voice is removed from being a representation of a human being. In the shepherdess disguise Vosk is far removed from the realist notion of character, since the voice is combined with at least three characters from Don Quijote (Cardenio, Dorotea, and the curate). The constituent characters in their turn call into play more levels of fiction because they were incorporated into Don Quijote from existing literature, and within the work they may have one or more secondary fictional roles. Dorotea is perhaps the best example: drawn from peregrination fiction, she initially plays a (transvestite) pastoral role as a defensive strategy before taking over from the curate the role of a princess from Chivalric Romance. In this latter role, Micomicona, she enters Quijote's fictional world in order to lure him into the power of the curate and the barber.

In Juan sin tierra there is a third voice, ‘él’, which represents the author's past. The voice migrates a good deal, although its most common form is young Alvarito. An additional complication is the merging of voices. For example, Vosk-the-critic and ‘tú’ use the same words to describe post-realist novelists: one voice identifies with the statement and the other is hostile.

In his interview with Julio Ortega, Goytisolo likens the reading (and presumably writing) of Juan sin tierra to travelling through a dream world, a ‘universo móvil y escurridizo, que se forma y deshace sin cesar ante sus [the reader's] propios ojos’ (Juan Goytisolo, p. 126). This is an apt description of Chapter 6: after the introductory remarks upon settling down to write, the statement of the author's objectives, and a reminder of some of the external texts to be entered, the text leads into a mutable fantasy world. The first step in the fantasy is a confrontation with, and rejection of, a literary type: the popular novelist. Goytisolo gives the character the name of a nineteenth-century French novelist, Pierre Loti. Loti, like don Álvaro Peranzules in Reivindicación, perhaps represents a possible future self of Alvarito, an alter ego of the author throughout the trilogy. More importantly, the character acquires significance if it is seen as a development of the novelist Fernández (Cela) in Señas de identidad, whose passport is destroyed in Paris and whose future could consequently be that of a French-speaking exile—an outcome desired by the narrator of Señas. The importance of the association is that it reinforces Loti's suspect literary opinions with a second, similar set voiced by Fernández, which invokes Cervantes as a defence for ignorance of modern literature and theory.⁸ The combined Loti-Fernández represents a supposedly innocent realism which Goytisolo rejects. Since the scene takes place in Turkey, and Loti speaks of peppering his narrative with the local vernacular, it seems likely that Goytisolo is drawing a comparison between the real Pierre Loti's exoticist books about Turkey and Cela's (and Goytisolo's) travel books.

From the interview with Loti the narrator moves back in time and into a desert landscape where a voice is heard lamenting the forthcoming demise of realism. The cause of the tragedy is cultismo and the remedy, readers and fame. With the reference to cultismo and to a scythe, the author invokes Góngora as an ally and suggests the inevitability of the triumph of subjectivism. In the reference to readers as the defenders of realism he makes the debate more personal: he seems to refer both to Cela's success and to the attacks on himself, which are parodied in the later scene of trial by readers.

The poem itself is an ovillejo, and is a close parody of one found in Don Quijote. Cervantes's version which, not surprisingly, is about love, uses uncomplicated syntax:

De ese modo, en mi dolencia
ningún remedio se alcanza.(9)

The corresponding lines in Goytisolo's poem use hyperbaton, and thus realism's language not only is contaminated by the association with a love poem but is syntactically infected by gongorismo:

De este modo, tal dolencia
tardo remedio te alcanza.

(p. 244)

In both Cervantes's and Goytisolo's narratives the indication is that the character will be male, and in Don Quijote he is revealed as Cardenio. Goytisolo, however, discovers what appears to be a female figure in a landscape, now transformed into a woodland glade, and proceeds with a stylized description of the maiden's beauty: her eyes are ‘dos milagrosas joyas que harían palidecer al mismísimo Febo’ (p. 246), her tears ‘preciosísimas perlas [which rolled down] sus mejillas de alabastro’ (p. 247). The description is foreign to the scene on which the episode is based (the discovery of Dorotea in Don Quijote, Part I, Chapter 28), although there is reference in terms of imagery to Dorotea's beauty which, interestingly, is presented through the eyes of Cardenio. Cervantes is content with an indirect allusion to culteranismo by making Cardenio compare Dorotea's legs to alabaster. Goytisolo's narrator, in its impersonal form, initially uses more developed simile: ‘sus manos esbeltas y ágiles parecen esculpidas en nieve: la garganta de sus pies pudiera competir en blancura con los mármoles más finos de Italia’ (p. 246). When Vosk's tears are described as pearls and his cheeks as alabaster (p. 247), the allusions appear to be concrete rather than metaphorical, an effect due to the intrusion of the ‘tú’ voice and to the adjacent use of language from a more naturalistic register. A double effect is thus produced: language has forced Vosk to acquire culterano attributes but, because of the non-metaphorical context, the attributes seem ridiculous, appropriate more to a doll or statue than to a person. This sense of the phoney rather than the idealized or the imaginary suggests that the author is combining Gongoran and Quevedan visions, thus making the character's position untenable from both sides. Quevedo makes the following remarks about the emulators of Góngora, although they fit equally well with Goytisolo's vision of poverty-stricken, Catholic, twentieth-century Spain: ‘Y por cuanto el siglo está pobre y necesitado, mandamos quemar las coplas de los poetas, como franjas viejas, para sacar el oro, plata y perlas, pues en los más versos hacen sus damas de todos metales, como estatuas de Nabuco.’¹⁰

The following section of Juan sin tierra, the history and defence of realism, is presented as Vosk's life-story. His first definition of the realist novel is a mixture of Golden-Age and Romantic views: the novel is a ‘reflejo veraz y sincero de las sociedades’ because it combines the notion of ‘instrucción con deleite’ with characters ‘capaces de elevarse a las alturas de un heroísmo sublime o descender a los abismos de la degradación y miseria’ (p. 248). He continues with the nineteenth-century idea of the novel as a means of diagnosing and correcting social ills, alluding to the social panorama recorded by Balzac and Galdós, before concluding with what he calls the uncompromising theoretical consistency which is acquired through the study of Lukács. By referring to Lukács's writing as the ‘Gospel according to Luke’, Goytisolo links the socialist and Spanish orthodoxies: the one the revelation of Marx, the other of Christ.

The process of the development of realism is described as a purging of myths and allegories: of the heterodox, in other words. Orthodoxies by their nature regard themselves as encompassing the whole of truth, and the post-realist developments in literature are duly condemned as deviance, sickness, and subjectivity. However, the reasons for the rise of a new kind of writing also need to be found and here Vosk resorts to the self-same allegories and myths which the rise of realism has supposedly purged: a caprice of nature in the form of the wind changing direction; a whim of Fortune.

The second element of Vosk's story is a parody of a critical attack on Goytisolo's later writing. The ridiculous plight of the critic, trapped in ‘drag’ within the very work he is attacking, is amusing, and perhaps his words may be taken lightly. However, they could equally well be interpreted as the author's own statement about his work: ‘autores entregados al cultivo de una escritura formal y abstracta, mera expresión enajenada, a menudo esquizofrénica, de obsesiones y complejos personales que, en lugar de ser reflejo objetivo del mundo, postulan tan sólo el intento de liberación, desesperado y parcial, de una mentalidad enferma’ (p. 250). Vosk is thus made to speak for the author: the development and overthrow of realism can be seen as representing Goytisolo's own earlier, committed realism—and its abandonment.

Thus far, Goytisolo has exploited to good effect the Golden-Age motif of the demoiselle in rustic disguise. However, the associations of exile and transvestism imply a number of additional dimensions. Usually the young woman disguises herself as a man to protect her virtue. Vosk, in his exile, has adopted a female disguise for a similar reason: to avoid the homosexual assaults of Bedouins. It is doubtful whether travellers to North Africa would believe the female form to be repugnant to the male inhabitants and, in homosexual circles, transvestism is not usually considered a deterrent strategy.¹¹ Vosk's explanation for the disguise suggests that the critic is dépaysé and that his predicament, unlike that of some disguised young women who appear in Don Quijote, is a result of reading too much fiction. Dorotea, on whom the shepherdess Vosk is largely based, fled in disguise for the very practical reason that she had been subject to two attempts to rape or seduce her. Also, although she is not a critic, Dorotea's knowledge of Chivalric Romance is considerable and, far from being influenced by the world of fiction, she is prepared to use her knowledge of it in the plot to lure Quijote home. Vosk, on the other hand, is in disguise because his ideas of the real world derive from literature: he believes that Bedouins behave as he thinks they do because they are ‘enfebrecidos por la rudeza del clima’ (p. 251). This is the environmental determinism put forward by writers such as Baroja and Azorín, and its inclusion in this context reduces a major part of Spanish twentieth-century ideology to a ridiculous and dangerous fiction. Goytisolo is, in other words, restating one of the major themes of Reivindicación.

Another Cervantine character who shares the transvestite disguise, although for a different reason, is the curate. He is certainly present in Vosk: the curate was present, dressed as a lady, at Dorotea's first appearance in the narrative (Don Quijote, Part I, Chapter 28), and he too is an authoritarian literary critic. Whatever appearance the critic assumes, and whether he bases his authority on the Gospels or on Lukács, his historical role is, in Goytisolo's view, invariable.

Vosk claims that the Bedouin, ‘sin los frenos morales de nuestra civilización cristiana, se entregan descaradamente al vicio nefando y a otros y muy negros pecados’ (p. 251). As much as an ironic reference to the debt that Christian Europe owes to the Arabs, this appears to be a reference to biographical detail: in En los reinos de taifa Goytisolo writes about his gradual acceptance of his homosexual inclinations, and of his subsequent stay in Morocco. At the same time the reference epitomizes the author's view of his art: that personal and artistic freedoms require that rigid orthodoxy be overthrown, that creation be a pleasurable and imaginative process, and that any conjunction of ideas is permissible and possible. The contrast with Loti's naive notion of productive intercourse with the virgin page could not be greater, and equally vast is the gulf separating such views from the author's utilitarian and utopian manifesto of 1959.

With the introduction of a second locus amoenus a relation of mutual parody develops between realism and the pastoral. Here Cervantes's and Goytisolo's voices move closer together. Where previously Goytisolo had simply combined and distorted identifiable elements from Don Quijote, now he amplifies Cervantes's good-humoured parody by the inclusion of sordid elements. The authors use similar forms of locus amoenus, which are described in naturalistic rather than idealized language, although Goytisolo's trees (palms) are ragged, and the carved slogans are a defacement (p. 251). (It is of course difficult to imagine carvings being strikingly visible on a palm trunk.) However, the effect suggests that the realists are misusing the locus (art?) literarily as well as literally: the carving and sentiments of the eclogues are reduced by them to the equivalent of the casual defacement by youth of the trees in a modern city park (compare Don Quijote, Part I, Chapter 12).

The sonnet on literature has internal and external parodic relationships with the pastoral. Externally it draws the rapt attention of the woodland wildlife (this feature is absent from Cervantes's version), so it evokes directly the idea of the harmony of nature expressed in a scene in Garcilaso's Eclogue I. The evocation has a double sense: Goytisolo is mocking, but the realists are made to look doubly ridiculous because even in the original text the harmony is an illusion, the product of Salicio's disordered mind.

The sonnet alludes to a ‘true’, ‘ideal’ realism that is untainted by formalism or costumbrismo. Once again the subversion is double: even socialist realism cannot have an ideal form since it is supposed to be touched by reality, and hence can have no relation to the sonnet form, or to the ideal of love that is often its subject. The ideal neo-Platonic love, expressed as ‘amistad’ in Cervantes's poem, is in its turn destroyed, since it is based on the exclusion of realities such as lust and turbulent emotions. In the broader context of Goytisolo's work this second idea is probably more important, since it would be classed as part of the ideological structure of Spain, whose ultimate manifestation is the ‘parejita reproductora’.

The singer of the sonnet turns out to be a shepherdess reminiscent of Marcela, from Don Quijote, and her description is a further subversion of the pastoral. The narrator observes that the voluptuous figure has the minimum of clothing consistent with decency, and the destructive effect is once again more powerful than in Cervantes's version; the pastoral is not simply another game for the idle, taken from literature, but is explicitly sexual: the narrator expresses admiration for the scantily-clad shepherdess's ‘partes’ before proceeding to a conventional description of less provocative parts of her anatomy. Although imagery of gold and precious stones is used, as it was in the initial description of shepherdess Vosk, the tone is quite different: idealization is identified as a diversion from sexuality.

The scene of the dead realist parodies the burial of Grisóstomo (who died for love of Marcela) in the Quijote. Elements from outside the Quijote are, however, incorporated. The epitaph on Grisóstomo's tombstone (Don Quijote, Part I, Chapter 14) is, conventionally, a poem attributing the character's death to cruelly unrequited love. The rock which towers above the corpse of realism is by contrast covered with slogans proclaiming the realist, anti-subjectivist message:

el personaje no morirá
la novela es el reflejo objetivo de la realidad
socio-histórica
abajo los mitos ocultativos!
las obsesiones del escritor mistifican
no a las experiencias formales y oníricas!
el realismo es la cumbre del arte

(p. 255)

The hyperbolic image of animals drinking from a stream created by the realist's tears is not in Don Quijote, but can be traced to the character Albanio in Garcilaso's Eclogue II. Perhaps the image is intended to evoke Quevedo's scathing remarks on the pastoral:

Advirtiendo que después que dejaron de ser moros—aunque todavía conservan algunas reliquias—se han metido a pastores, por lo cual andan los ganados flacos de beber sus lágrimas, chamuscados con sus ánimas encendidas, y tan embebecidos en su música, que no pacen, mandamos que dejen el tal oficio, señalando ermitas a los amigos de soledad. Y a los demás, por ser oficio alegre y de pullas, que se acomoden en mozos de mulas.

(El Buscón, Book II, Chapter 3, p. 165)

The principal interest of the Grisóstomo parody is in the treatment of the dead author's writing. In Cervantes's version the text is rescued from the flames against the known wishes of the deceased. Goytisolo's text is more ambiguous: ‘pasad unas hojas a vuestros camaradas a fin de que las lean y gusten de ellas, que bien os dará lugar a ello el que se tardare en cubrir la sepultura’ (p. 256). The dead realist, like the killing of Alvarito in Reivindicación, represents a laying to rest of Goytisolo's past, in this case his past as a realist writer. However, it is by no means clear that he wishes the product of his past labours to be consigned to oblivion. His use of the word ‘camaradas’ is striking and evokes his ex-collaborators in the PCE. What the author seems to be saying is that he is quite happy for readers of whatever tendency to read his realism—and in so doing give the author money to support himself, especially since he does not intend to die for quite some time. In addition, the words seem to be a bitter acknowledgement of the fact that realism will not disappear, just because it is dead, any more than (from the perspective of 1974–75) Francoism will.

The realist's text is an extract from ‘Capítulo XVII’ of a novel, and carries the title: ‘donde se describe el puerto de toledo con otros pormenores necesarios a la comprensión de ests verídica historia.’ Both in its typographical presentation and in its function—which is to move the narrative to a new plane, or genre—it is a typical Cervantine device. Vosk-the-realist-character's arguments about the innocence of modern realism are defeated even before they are presented, since the character is shown to be the product of a clearly-visible narrative trick which comes from an earlier, but by no means innocent, literary age.

The text is the link-section between Golden-Age and modern planes: Vosk metamorphoses from a shepherdess to a Galdosian character as ‘he/tú’ reads it. The explicit ideas contained in the text claim to be those of an innocent realism: the narrator of the extract states that although the events in his work may appear far-fetched, they are the inevitable result of certain social and environmental factors. What the narrator is really saying is that he assumes the reader's idea of verisimilitude to be different from his own. His intervention, which is in the style of an apology, and the references to low-life figures, ‘contrabandistas y ganapanes’, suggest that the work is in fact closer to the picaresque than to realism, and this is reinforced by the reference to Toledo, a city strongly associated with the picaresque through Lazarillo and the Buscón. Vosk's assertion, that the existence or otherwise of a seaport in Toledo is a minor detail, irrelevant to the psychological realism of the piece—a psychological realism rejected by the narrator of the Toledo passage—underlines the spurious objectivity of realism, as well as the mutability of its dogma.

In the Toledo passage and the succeeding exposition of realism, Goytisolo seems to have three main objectives. First, he demonstrates that realism, and in particular modern Spanish realism, is the product of other texts: the ‘Galdosian’ Vosk cites the fact that he has some leather gaiters sent by his cousin Bette, a Balzacian character, as an example to prove his reality. As the new Vosk is constructed, the narration places emphasis on the character's physical appearance: clothing, and particularly facial features. By emphasizing these characteristics Goytisolo draws attention to the textual influence, or ideology, which in its turn shaped Balzac's work: the French novelist was greatly influenced by the Swiss philosopher Lavater's theory of physiognomy.¹²

Second, the allusions to the picaresque in the realist's text, together with Vosk's approbation, not only make the point that the picaresque is an important element in the development of the novel, but suggest that the realist critic himself is a pícaro: a don Pablos because of his metamorphosing appearance, and a Lazarillo because of the false innocence of his words.

The third important element is a restatement of Goytisolo's own writing process. He constructs the new Vosk from ‘una conocida novela que por puro azar se encuentra entre los libros apilados junto a la mesa’ (p. 258). It is not important whether he incorporates an existing text unchanged, whether he alters it for some purpose, or even whether he is aware of using a specific text: his activity, like that of all novelists and critics, is a reworking of texts. He contrasts this vision with supposed innocence, in the form of the child Alvarito, whose saintly aspirations are shown to be the result of others' ideas. Ambiguity is retained, however. The words spoken by the adults when they believe the child to be asleep (p. 262) gratify his fantasy of becoming a missionary. Yet the whispered conversation is unlikely to be unique; the child's fantasy has perhaps been implanted subliminally as a result of a series of similar conversations. At the same time the missionary dream is a power fantasy, and is compared with two assessments of the activity of writing novels: pleasurable exercise of the imagination, which is likened to masturbation, and god-like creation, which is associated (ironically) with procreation.

The importance of the passage on pages 261–63 is that it focuses attention on the author himself. In the same way as he shows that post-Isabelline Spain is both determined by a particular kind of ideology and not determined by it, since external texts have been influential, so the author's development is likewise ambiguous. The almost constant theme of the immolation of Alvarito is, for Goytisolo, the attempt to destroy a false self, the product of a Spanish Catholic origin. However, it is at the point of origin that the nature of the false self becomes obscure. The precise relationship between the inner self and the text is deliberately blurred: the ‘innocent’ child is both receiving text and emitting it. The implication is that we do not know whether the Catholic ideology is influencing a tendency already present in the child, or whether the child is adapting the ideology to express his pre-existing urges. We can only conclude that the child's consciousness is neither a free agent nor totally determined.

Goytisolo's view of his own mature work becomes clearer in the light of this ambiguity. He seems to be expressing the view that literature is ludic and self-justifying. He is aware that although it may be subjected to analyses, it cannot be determined by them. An analysis cannot become an all-encompassing orthodoxy because in order to do so it would need to solve, not merely pronounce on, the problem of origin: the original dilemma of inner and outer.

The section containing the criticism, confession, and re-education of the post-realist writer raises the issue of persecution at the hands of different orthodoxies. The television panel represents the criticism of Goytisolo in modern Spain: the readers alluded to in the ovillejo at the beginning of the chapter are in fact the critics. The list of nine reproaches (p. 271) is enunciated by Vosk ‘como si [sus labios] desgranaran un espinoso rosario’, suggesting a parallel with the denunciation of Góngora to the ecclesiastical authorities. Vosk retains his ecclesiastical guise to hear the writer's confession, which is initially the boy Alvarito making his confession in church before it develops into the writer's confession of impurities. The post-realist writer's sins are sexual acts of various kinds and the confession a metaphor for Goytisolo's ‘linguistic copulation’. Vosk gives the final six acts Latin names—expressions which would be condemned under more than one of the nine reproaches.

The third part of the condemnation of the post-realist writer is set in a secure psychiatric institution. Although ostensibly the setting is modern Spain, the psychiatrist Vosk's terminology is not diagnostic: the subject must declare all his illnesses, and cooperate, or be certified as officially incurable. The coercive language is evocative more of the Inquisition than of a hospital, but Goytisolo's allusions are to the modern world. In the essay ‘Escribir en España’, he calls official censorship ‘silence therapy’, and the concerted press campaigns against writers ‘electric shock treatment’.¹³ He later alluded to the phenomenon of the re-education of dissidents, and in particular to the case of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla. He describes Padilla's public confession in these terms: ‘El montaje teatral del esperpéntico mea culpa de Padilla en la UNEAC era un grotesco reflejo de las célebres purgas de Moscú’ (En los reinos de taifa, p. 184).

The final section of the chapter, the confessed post-realist's re-education in the orthodoxy of innocent realism, has affinities with the scene in Reivindicación of the parody of Sancho Panza's meal, in which the pure Castilian tradition starves because it is deprived of all elements of foreign etymology. Now realism is destroyed because its substance—language—is shown to be not an objective reflection of the world but a structure. Goytisolo incorporates two modern texts as the basis for the assault: a polemical piece condemning the view that literature is not the direct reflection of the world, and a section of a travel book, which seems faithfully to record a landscape, but which explains its structure by reference to maps and geological terminology.

The first explosion of the myth is produced by a dialogue in which the realist voice as re-educator makes a number of accusations against the subjectivist voice, always in the form of common idiomatic expressions (metaphors). The subjective voice treats each expression literally, exasperating the realist voice until it feels its head will burst—which is what happens.

The second part is the dissolution of the character Vosk. Modern writing has dissolved the illusion of character as representation of a human being, and Vosk is now reduced to the letter V, voice, ‘al murmullo de un vago e inidentificable discurso’ (p. 290). Curiously, although the character is no more than a voice or discourse which is bereft of substance or autonomy, it is in no doubt that it still has a director: the author. Goytisolo does not dispense with the notion of a subject: ‘V’ still exists, rather like Kafka's ‘K’ who, although he is not presented with the descriptive detail usually associated with a character, nevertheless is a clearly-identified consciousness.

The author's attitude to Cela provides the clearest illustration of the textual merging which takes place as the trilogy progresses. The chapter's opening scene, the interview with the novelist Loti, is a simple, hostile parody of Cela's views, and is similar to the conversation in Señas de identidad with the novelist Fernández. Knowledge of twentieth-century literary thought is assumed on the part of both narrator and reader.

The travel book text about the Cerros de Úbeda (p. 285) is also a hostile parody of Cela, but in this case the assumed perspective is Cervantine, although it also seems likely that here Goytisolo means to draw a comparison between Cela and Juan Benet's ironic use of scientific terminology to create an imaginary landscape.¹⁴ Perhaps one cannot be certain of Goytisolo's analysis of Cela's travel books, although the indications are that he would classify some elements as misuse of foreign words, would be aware of mythical features, and would have noticed the abundance of metaphor. (All these are accusations levelled at the post-realists.) I think he would classify them in the exotic-journey genre with extensive, largely unacknowledged, incorporation of external texts and costumbrista detail.

Primer viaje andaluz (which has a glossary of Andalusian terms) makes a number of references to the cerros, and includes a description of the town of Úbeda. Part II of Don Quijote also contains several references, with two different though closely-related senses. ‘Por los cerros de Úbeda’ was a sixteenth-century colloquial expression applied to narratives which were far-fetched, or impossible to follow. The second reference is to Úbeda's most famous inhabitant: Orbaneja, the painter from folk-tale. Don Quijote explains: ‘Tal vez pintaba un gallo, de tal suerte y tan mal parecido, que era menester que con letras góticas escribiese junto a él: “Éste es gallo”’ (Don Quijote, Part II, Chapter 3, p. 562).

Cela pretends to enter the world of his text by assuming the disguise of a traveller, a character who perceives echoes of Cervantine characters as well as of mythical events from Spanish history. However, the author in reality remains detached and in control, manipulating his fictional world according to a preconceived notion of the hierarchy of reality and imagination. Structuralism, of course, maintains that in reality authors do not have such a power, and Goytisolo's propelling of the realist or traditionalist voice into a textual world where there is no hierarchy of author, language, and world, makes exactly the same point. His journey through Golden-Age texts is a rewriting of those texts which suggests a great many further connections, or copulations, to use a word more in harmony with his concepts. However, his textual world is not absolutely without hierarchy, since his rewritings are generally intended either to establish the ever-elusive identity of the author or as quite specific acts of criticism. In his criticism, Goytisolo is prevented from dissecting realism by his philosophy of language, which does not allow decomposition into object-text and metalanguage, but is based on the concepts of metaphor and metamorphosis. However, his attachment of the realist voice to the central consciousness for the journey through, or rewriting of, Spanish text is a metaphor for Barthes's approach. Stripping away the protection of comfortable certainty (disguise) from the authorial voice, Goytisolo forces it to make one of many possible real journeys through a world where ultimately there is nothing but metaphor.

He does not regard the metaphorical explosion of the realist myth as definitive, however. He may have subjected the authorial or critical voice to a journey of metamorphosis through metaphor, but he seems to have curiously little confidence in the reality of the linguistic process he proclaims. Perhaps after all he believes that, like Góngora, he belongs not to his age but to later generations.

As the narrative switches to Paris, and exile, the potboiler portraitists of the Sacré Cœur continue to find customers; Vosk-the-character is reincarnated in the form of the portrait of a sitter whose jacket has the word ‘Bosch’ embroidered on it. The author notes wryly the coincidence of name with that of the visionary artist of Hell: Hieronymus Bosch.

In the penultimate page of the novel the ‘tú’ narrator witnesses a disintegration of the Castilian language, and identifies the process as his own deliberate self-exile from his linguistic roots, and perhaps as the failure of his attempt to defeat realism. By the last page, which is in Arabic script, the process is complete, Alvarito is dead and the writer is cut off from Spain.

The conclusion is an illusion, however. Goytisolo's project is to establish his identity as a Spanish writer (perhaps even as the personification of modern Spanish writing) and his writing demonstrates a progression from alienation to assimilation. His allusions to foreign texts are used either to force recognition of their importance in Spanish literary development or to suggest that the notion of Spanishness should be extended by the incorporation of new texts. In this respect Goytisolo is still in accord with his 1959 statement in Ínsula in which he suggested that literature could acquire universal significance only if it addressed national concerns. Also, the autobiographical volume En los reinos de laifa, published more than a decade after Juan sin tierra, confirms that he is interested less in the dilemma or possibilities of the modern novelist than in the problems of writing in Spain, and in the literary-political controversies of the Spanish-speaking world.¹⁵

The argument that Goytisolo conducts in Chapter 6 of Juan sin tierra is an old Spanish controversy. The charges laid against Góngora were that his work ran counter to the Castilian didactic tradition, that he was subject to foreign influences, and that he was too devoted to the purely formal aspects of language. Góngora was, in other words, a subjectivist. However, the attack was a seventeenth-century phenomenon and its causes were social and political, not literary. In the sixteenth century Spanish literature had assimilated many foreign models and influences. Goytisolo sees history repeating itself and draws a parallel between Galdós and himself, on the one hand, and Garcilaso and Góngora on the other. However, he sees an argument with three terms instead of two: the enemy is dogma and it is to be combated by a combination of the oneiric and the scatological. The conjunction of the two sides is expressed linguistically as ‘onanistic’, a hybrid link which functions both phonetically and semantically.

On the evidence of Chapter 6 of Juan sin tierra it is as difficult to accept the author's assertion of his exile from Spanish culture as it is to agree with Ugarte's view that in the third part of the trilogy Spanish literature plays a less important role. Goytisolo does have an individual notion of intertextuality. It is an important aspect of the trilogy, but it does not seem to function in the classic sense of textual dialogue. As the words of the dissolving Vosk indicate, Goytisolo's view of the interaction of text is author-centred; the distance between a perceived authorial discourse and the host text is always visible, even if at times it is ambiguous. To this extent Goytisolo's intertextuality does not admit an autonomy of language and thus is not dialogue but parody.

A characteristic of parody is that the parodying text falls increasingly under the influence of the host, and this is precisely what occurs with Goytisolo. It is the capture and merging of voices which causes the disintegration of Castilian in the final pages of Juan sin tierra. The author is not so much exiled from his language as imprisoned by it. The opening phrases of Chapter 6 confirm that this is Goytisolo's intuition:

en el silencio denso del escritorio-cocina la mariposa nocturna ronda en torno a la lámpara: gira, planea, describe círculos obsesivos, se aleja cuando la espantas pero vuelve en seguida, una vez y otra y otra, hacia el fulgor que la fascina y atrae, absorta en su alucinada tarea. (p. 239)

The moth and the flame. The inevitability of fate is the basis of the image, but in his Gongoran way Goytisolo meditates on the nature of a man's thought and an insect's nocturnal flight.

Notes

1. Michael Ugarte, Trilogy of Treason: An Intertextual Study of Juan Goytisolo (Columbia, Missouri, 1982).

2. Juan Goytisolo, edited by Julián Ríos (Madrid, 1975), p. 125.

3. Francis J. Carmody, Yvan Goll: Jean sans terre (Berkeley, California, 1962), p. 6.

4. Juan Goytisolo, Juan sin tierra, second edition (Barcelona, 1977), p. 239. All further page references to Juan sin tierra are to this edition.

5. Juan Goytisolo, Disidencias (Barcelona, 1977), pp. 117–35. In this curious essay Quevedo is at first viewed positively: his obsession is the healthy expression of the neurosis of a society that suppresses the physical (Islamic). By means of an argument involving Jonathan Swift, and an even greater (although unexplained) Anglo-Saxon suppression of the physical, Quevedo is compared to Hitler, and the conclusion is drawn that Quevedo's obsession is due to a suppressed desire for sodomy. The evidence for this is a poem in which Quevedo accuses Góngora of homosexuality.

6. Juan Goytisolo, En los reinos de taifa (Barcelona, 1986).

7. Juan Goytisolo, ‘Para una literatura nacional popular’, Ínsula, 146 (January 1959), 6, 11. Reprinted in Ínsula, 499–500 (June/July/August 1988), 39–40.

8. Loti's views are given on pages 241–42. The dominant metaphor is that of cooking; his philosophy of writing consists of a number of unrelated ‘ingredients’. Also, the author makes it clear that Loti is not French: ‘ … j'écoute ce qui racontent les gens: … je mets de phrases en turc: … qué virtuosidad de palabra! el acento francés es perfecto.’ Fernández represents Cela. For Fernández's visit to Paris, see Señ as de identidad, second edition (Barcelona, 1979), pp. 307–09. Fernández's view of literature is that ‘la teoría es otro camelo. Cervantes no sabía de teorías y escribió el Quijote’ (p. 307). Cela's visit to Paris is mentioned in En los reinos de taifa, pp. 109–10.

9. Don Quijote de la Mancha, edited by Martín de Riquer, ninth edition (Barcelona, 1979), Part I, Chapter 27, p. 261.

10. La vida del Buscón, edited by Domingo Ynduráin (Madrid, 1981), Book II, Chapter 3, p. 164.

11. En los reinos de taifa contains references to Goytisolo's exotic night-life with Monique Lange, Violette Leduc, and Jean Genet (pp. 208–12).

12. See Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London, 1983), p. 65.

13. Juan Goytisolo, El furgón de cola, second edition (Barcelona, 1976), pp. 39–49.

14. Interviewed by Julio Ortega while in the process of writing Juan sin tierra. Goytisolo comments on the profound impression that Volverás a Región, particularly the first part, has made on him (Juan Goytisolo, p. 132).

15. In En los reinos de taifa the main issues are: the persecution of some writers (including the Goytisolo brothers) by the Franco régime; the author's attitude to Cela; the conflict within the PCE (over attitudes to Stalinism); the disintegration of the solidarity between Spanish-language writers over Cuba, with Cortázar and García Márquez dividing from the others.