SOURCE: "What Kind of Games Are These Anyway?: The Metafictional Play and Politics of Cobra and Juan sin tierra," in Revista Hispanica Moderna, Vol. XLIII, No. 2, December, 1990, pp. 206-17.

[In the following essay, De La Cova examines Sarduy's Cobra and Juan Goytisolo's Juan sin tierra (1975). She contends that, while both works are neo-baroque and "abandon linear narrative for spacial form," Juan sin tierra's "new realism" and Cobra's parody act to disguise and represent a variety of political themes.]

In 1972 and 1975 respectively, the Cuban Severo Sarduy and the Spaniard Juan Goytisolo, expatriate friends in Paris, brought to publication unsettling metafictional works. Cobra and Juan sin tierra are responses to some of the same literary stimuli of cultural opposition: Octavio Paz's Conyunciones y disyunciones, the nouveau nouveau roman, and French Post-Structuralism. The two works are not the same kind of metafiction, however, as Cobra tends toward a fabulous text of language games and extreme decontextualization, whereas Juan sin tierra is an instance of what Patricia Waugh [Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, 1984] calls a "new realism."

As might be expected, there are notable technical similarities between the works. They both abandon linear narrative for spatial form. In both, the dominant devices of travel are changes of scenery and intertext. Moreover, the two works use variations on well-known techniques for exploring fiction: role playing and script writing within a work of fiction.

Dealing with the tricks of the theater, transvestite deceptions, and Oriental transmutations, the story of Cobra helps to heighten perception of the artistic devices of fictional role playing. With narrative discontinuity and verbal play, the characters appear to have shifting identities. The Señora, also called la Madre, la Alcahueta, and so on, of a theatrical troupe of transvestite Dolls, is reputed to be the elderly female impersonator Mei Lan Fang gotten up as a young lady. She has a miniature double, la Señorita, la de Señora, or Sra. The biggest star of the troupe is Cobra, who has a double, Cobrita, the White Dwarf (with astronomical association), or Pup, short for Poupée. Cobra is taken for "el original" by "las muy derridianas" Doils…. Or as explained in a footnote, "Sra. + Cobra (+/=) Pup = (3/2)." No attempt is made to create realistic characters in an imaginary world mimicking the real world.

Cobra's fictional characters are as insubstantial as the illusion of transvestite femaleness or an individual ego in Buddhist thought. Jean Franco writes, "Characters are … signifiers … character, like the verbal pun, becomes a kind of splitting apart of an apparent identity to show the disparate possibilities of the signified." Even the signifiers of gender and ethnicity are unreliable. In Tangiers Cobra's rival la Cadillac plays the sex-change surgeon el Doctor Ktazob, el doctor K., for short, also known as San Ktazob, el Padre, el Alterador or simply A. The members of Cobra's back-up chorus in a Tangerine club are designated by written variants of a name: la Divina, la Adivina, la Di Vina, and Lady Vinah. Two of Cobra's lazarillos in Tangiers are Tariq and the uncertain Visigoth Conde Don Julian, lifted from medieval chronicles and Goytisolo's Reivindicación del conde don Julián (1970). Elsewhere Cobra is a strange woman in Paris, an initiate into a motorcycle gang, a hippy or exiled Tibetan lama in India, and a traveler eager for Tantrisms on whose body the graphs C-O-BR-A are inscribed. Such inventions involve too much manipulation of signifiers and mediation by fiction, theater, and painting to be readily naturalized. All identities are suspect.

More conservative, Goytisolo handles role playing somewhat differently. A fictitious author writes in a Parisian study and doubles himself into a character. One of his motives is to invent a persona as an author-actor. He often rewrites a role from another text and adopts the persona of a known author-actor; then, when it appears not to meet his aspirations sufficiently, he moves on to another, and so on successively. During these changes one signifier provisionally identifies two different author-actors (T. E. Lawrence or Charles de Foucauld and the imaginary author, for example). The process is repeated as he moves from text to text. The imaginary author appears to be an ego in flux. Then in the final chapter, with references to incidents appearing in Goytisolo's earlier texts, he suggests he has drawn the parameters of what was self and not self in an evolution which took place before he began his text.

Juan sin tierra's character shifts are less whimsical than those in Cobra. Apparently different identities are designated by the same signifier or variations of it in order that they may be perceived as analogues, reversing a process that operates in the latter text. For example, Ebeh is the Senussian chief responsible for the murder of Père Foucauld and a beggar in Tangiers. The parodical character Vosk is variously a plantation's chaplain, a prudish colonel, a psychiatrist, Mutter Vosk, a character who claims to be of flesh and blood, the gentleman Bosch, who aspires to be portrayed in a work of art, and a utilitarian literary critic who supports past forms of realism. The critic is based on Goytisolo's aesthetics during his apprenticeship years and the aesthetics of the critic and erstwhile New York University colleague Rafael Bosch, Georg Lukács, who was Goytisolo's "inseparable mentor" for four or five years during his social realist phase, and others. Vosk stands for values the fictitious author opposes, including a belief that a work of art should faithfully represent life in accordance with (familiar) realist conventions. In this text various identities are joined under a single signifier and its variations to show ideological similarities in the contextually plural signified.

In both Sarduy's and Goytisolo's metafictions, problems involved in role playing are magnified by matters of authenticity and freedom connected with script writing. In one sense Cobra mocks the Cuban regime's scripts for dissidents and expatriates. Several versions of the Indian body-painter Eustaquio's history are presented. The first version is ultimately chosen over the others because, it is commented ironically, the Indian "tiene que ser" as he is in that version for the Dolls' show and the story to continue. He is trapped in a script of dubious reliability. The Dolls have like fates to a double degree, as they follow scripts within scripts. As González Echevarría comments about the secondary quality and theatricality of Cobra, "Toda representación … supone un guión, un pre-texto, a script; una presencia anterior no visible en la escena, pero implícita en la noción misma de teatralidad" [Roberto González Echevarría, "Memoria de apariciencias y ensayo de Cobra," Severo Sarduy, edited by Julián Ríos, 1976]. Who writes the scripts? That is left undetermined. They would appear to issue from what Roland Barthes has called a textual Scriptor, who exists in writing the text and in no other context.

Juan sin tierra places script writing and transmitting in the foreground. Scripts being written or rewritten for and by the imaginary author are the most authoritive, but they are often unsatisfying. He wishes to write himself (or his double) a script as son of Changó and Savior of Cuban Blacks. However, in "truth" a "señorito blanco," he is firmly rejected: "usted?/no me haga reír!/con su defecto?" The principal dilemma is whether he can write himself an authentic script. Or are all scripts unauthentic perhaps? Vosk is a script transmitter, who follows the designs of various historical ideologies as a preacher of correspondences between the Mendiola family of a sugar plantation and the Holy Family in heaven or as an agent of reforming the decadent writer into a bard of patermaternidad. Later Vosk is a victim of a script reduction as the fictitious author reduces him to V and threatens to write no more about him. Scripts are repeatedly being created (or replayed) and deconstructed in Juan sin tierra. Formal realism in this work is mimesis of a writer in the process of writing, which allows the deconstructions to be naturalized.

Cobra invites a reader to consider its mode of fictional presentation. Extradiegetic discourse lays bare strategies of plot announcing: "La escritura es el arte de la elipsis," "… es el arte de la digresión," with irony "… es el arte de recrear la realidad. Respetémoslo," and "No…. es el arte de restituir la Historia," or "… es el arte de descomponer un orden y componer un desorden," and "… es el arte del remiendo." The contradictions are not resolved. The discourse proceeds to imply that the narration is a linguistic fiction partially built on the Señora's tall tales (potential metadiegetic narrating), which are marked by "la hipérbole tapageuse, el rococo abracadabrante y la exageración sin coto." But the Señora is not overtly either a writer or narrator of any part of Cobra. Who or where is the center of orientation?

No one is mimetically presented in the text as a writer of its narrative or commentary. The sender of a parodic address to the "Dear Reader," "Estimadas lectoras: sé que a estas alturas …," is not identified. A yo that occasionally appears in Cobra is never given personality, stable temporal or spatial coordinates, or presence in the act of writing. Following the comment "Como les decía hace un párrafo," left in a form ambiguously either first- or third-person, when unambiguous first-person verbal forms or the pronoun yo explicitly appear, they may confound rather than resolve questions of who speaks and from what world. Confusion is the likely result of a comment in the chapter "Teatro Lírico de Muñecas I": "Yo (que estoy en el público): Cállese o la saco del capítulo—no puede continuar este relato." If this yo is an "author," he is both in the audience and working on the chapter. In later chapters of the text, yo is a participant in Tantric Buddhist rites and might as well be the yo of an "author" as of Cobra, or both, or neither. With permeable "worlds" Cobra follows a pattern of the nouveau nouveau roman "designed to dramatize ontological issues" [Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, 1987]. Because they are frequently ignored, traditional mimetic boundaries between diegetic levels tend to dissolve. In a sense, yo is everywhere and nowhere in Cobra. It appears to be a signifier limited to the function of a pure discursive shifter. As Professor Franco notes, Cobra "has been hailed both as a quite new kind of writing as well as a destruction of the concept of authorship itself" [Jean Franco, "The Crisis of the Liberal Imagination and the Utopia of Writing," Ideologies and Literature 1, No. 1, 1976]. Familiar ideas about narration, the primacy of an author, and an author as "person" are undermined.

"Auto sacramental bufo" is González Echevarría's definition of Cobra ["Memoria…."]. It appears to have no metaphysical entity nor ego as its source, and no primary signified. "En Cobra todo el sustrato metafisico derridiano y lacaniano, toda la mitología india absorbida de Conjunciones y disyunciones, es sometida a … un proceso de vaciamiento," he explains. He contrasts it to Calderón's autos, where "los desplazamientos sucesivos conducen a un momento de plenitud … en el signo irreductible de la eucaristía." In Cobra "esa fe que sustenta la unión se convierte en irrisión." Sarduy humorously allegorizes an absent presence, non-logocentrism, the Buddhist ideas that "form is emptiness [sunyata, between affirmation and negation]" and life a "stream of becomings and extinctions," also the physical universe as an "Obra no centrada" (see Sarduy, Barroco), and revolution.

Cobra is not pure surface. Nevertheless, Ana María Barrenechea has described Sarduy's fiction as "un arte plano cuya única profundidad proviene quizás de un constante alusión al vacío" [Ana María Barrenechea, Narradores hispanoamericanos de hoy, 1973], and Barthes had called the mimesis of Cobra the "mimesis of language (language imitating itself)" [Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, translated by Richard Miller, 1975]. This kind of commentary has fostered what Judith A. Weiss has described as "some tendency to overemphasize the surface (signifiers)" resulting in "the underemphasizing of the process of signification." With reason she calls for a symbolic reading, since the figurative symbolism of Cobra "serves as a link between the ideologies of the West (psychoanalysis and structuralism—the Tel Quel group) and the Orient (tantric Buddhism—Octavio Paz et al)." As Paz says of the symbolic languages of primitive cultures, poetry, and the modern novel, in Cobra language becomes as a body, "cobra cuepro." This body doubles the universe and people within it.

Although the commenting discourse of Cobra appears to be produced by a non-personality, an invented author is a definite psychological and physical presence in Juan sin tierra. Sarduy has written of Goytisolo's metafiction, "La voz—las voces, desde la modulación recitativa hasta la tesitura operática,…—no tiene propietario, ningún sujeto centrado … el texto que discurre o recrea no tiene autor" [Severo Sarduy, "La desterritorializacion," Juan Goytisolo, edited by Julián Ríos, 1975]. "Las voces" of Juan sin tierra are pastiches or parodies of other texts or voices from commonplace heteroglossia. In that sense, even when dialogically blended with "la voz" they have no proprietor. However, in contrast to Cobra, to which Sarduy's comment better applies, "la voz" of Juan sin tierra belongs to the fictive person who writes, a transworld Álvaro Mendiola.

Juan sin tierra makes the fundamental epic situation of fiction, imaginary discourse between a sender and a receiver, into a major theme. It appears on multiple levels of diegesis, arranged in the Chinese box technique. In the outer box or frame the extradiegetic fictitious author performs the act of writing for his own personal motives and for an extradiegetic reader. In the first inner frame or on the intradiegetic level appear events he writes about, such as travel or the characters' narrating acts. In the second inner frame or on the metadiegetic narrative level are events told in the characters' narratives. Both narrative and metanarrative functions occur in box after box. How to communicate is a theme in every one.

Goytisolo's text is not a solipsistic exercise. Robert C. Spires considers that as Juan sin tierra shifts the focus "from the level of the product of writing to the level of process" and "the narrative moves in whirlpool fashion toward the creative act, it ultimately deconstructs itself into a void of non-communication." However, an imaginary author's deconstructions and expressions of concern with his medium are not non-communication but a different kind of communication. If the invented author refuses to communicate by means of buen decir, a pure Castilian, and the forms of canonized literature, then by oppositional means, using parodies of older forms and pushing to the foreground the process of working with an alternative kind of language, an irrational, metaphorical lenguaje sensible, a Pan Hispanic Spanish, foreign languages, and a new novel, he both communicates the structure of his defamiliarized medium and writes something [Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, 1972], about politics and ideology. Contradicting Genaro J. Pérez, who to describe Juan sin tierra borrows Beckett's comment on Finnagan's Wake, "His writing is not about something; it is that something itself" [Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, 1972], this reader would say than in a bivalent mode Goytisolo chooses both alternatives.

The invented author is still communicating something and writing (opaquely) when like graphs on a white wall Arabic characters alone are displayed on the final page, signifying that he is with the pariahs sharpening a knife. The cuchillo is, among other things, a Pazian-inspired metaphor for a language of rebellion. Arabic is a cuchillo against the old habits, institutions, and the framework of thought of the Western tradition, and a challenge from the imaginary author to a reader to go further with him than he had thought. One who continues reading in the spaces of Goytisolo's novels finds the narrator of Makbara (1980) already there with the pariahs, over the wall, so to speak. And in Paisajes después de la batalla (1982) Arabic graphs mysteriously appear and multiply on Parisian walls, street and business signs, and many other surfaces usable for communication. For Westerners the graphs are signs of a threat or an invitation from an Other into uncertain domains.

Juan sin tierra gives evidence of a good deal of ontological insecurity with metaleptic transgression against the boundaries between diegetic worlds. The diegetic frames are fragmented intermittently when the fictitious author steps out of his role to speak as if he were the real author. They also fragment when the invented author or a character slips from one diegetic level into another. A singer pictured on a record jacket near the imaginary author becomes, on the intradiegetic level of the sugar plantation, a Yoruba Virgin, who is to give birth to the son with whom the invented author indentifies. Or the imaginary author converses (Unamuno-like) with his character Vosk. There are many instances of fragmentation or slippage from frame to frame.

Cobra prevents naturalization because it tends to dissolve the boundaries between various levels of diegesis. (Where form is "emptiness," there are no logical barriers). Barthes writes: "Cobra is … a paradisiac text, utopian (without site), a heterology by plenitude: all the signifiers are here …: signs and mirages of objects which they represent … verbal pleasure … reels into bliss." As Barthes describes it, it is an example of a blissful text opening itself to the "free-play of the world" (The Pleasure). Frank Lentricchia observes that this happens by "the simple effect of polysemy" and "the calling of ironic attention to the fictiveness of ideological or generic systems" [Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism, 1980], which is a reuse of modernist devices, now pushed to the foreground. "Bliss" is produced by Cobra in a distinctly mannered style.

In contrast to Cobra, Juan sin tierra retards naturalization by transgressing boundaries left in place. The realistic presence of an extradiegetic invented author in the process of writing, whose commentary invades the sometimes unrealistic intradiegetic narrative, creates a strong tension between realism and irrealism, while such tension is weak in Cobra.

Whereas in Cobra the motives for the text being written remain unmentioned, in Juan sin tierra the invented author's affective, moral, and intellectual relationship to his work acquire an important meaning and value. He has things to say not only about "what" and "how" but also about "why" he writes. In the final chapter there appears a literary manifesto initially sounding like the Tel Quel group's and Sarduy's theories on the autonomy of the literary object and pure writing. But it is only partially valid as a statement of the aesthetic theory on which Juan sin tierra is based.

First of all, the affirmation of the "autonomía del objeto literario" is equivocal since it is rare that literature does not interact with other systems. What appears to be meant is that the literary text does not have to imitate life and provide a world that mimics the "real" world. However, this reader would not say of Juan sin tierra what Suzanne J. Levine has written of Cobra, "No hay realidad fuera del texto" [Suzanne Jill Levine, "Borges a Cobra es barroco exégesis: un estudio de la intertextualidad," Severo Sarduy, edited by Julián Riós, 1976]. There is too much overlap between Juan sin tierra's fictional world and both Goytisolo's earlier fictional worlds and history for a careful reading not to shift repeatedly between worlds.

Second, although the imaginary author has progressed from looking for "posibilidades exquisitas de redención" to celebrating the "placer nefando y baldío de la escritura," he does not give himself totally to the pure pleasure of writing. After the manifesto he copies the ex-slave Casilda Mendiola's letter to his great-grandfather, calling in the "fuente secreta del proceso liberador de tu pluma." Based on Casilda Goytisolo's extant letters, kept in Murgar Library at Boston University, this letter originally appeared in Señas de identidad (1966). Subsequently the invented author offer another key to his motives for deviant behavior and writing: his reaction a decade earlier when a bourgeois Spanish couple repulsed a beggar, a scene which also appeared in Señas. Juan sin tierra is tied to society. "The literary act is a social act," as Frank Lentricchia reminds critics [Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change, 1983].

Finally, having exposed various motives for his deviations in writing as in other things, the writer declares that he has reached a point where he can live in peace, but he is too conscious of his transgressions to enjoy much of that peace. Does not the "unproductive manipulation" he claims to practice give him pleasure in part for the reason that it is illegal? If so, his activity is not wholly self-sufficient but social. He is writing not for art's sake alone but "something" for an inscribed reader, a "futuro lector." Although Juan sin tierra is not for easy consumption but rather complicated, highly stylized, and self-consciously artful, its writing is not unproductive.

Cobra and Juan sin tierra are maximalist Neo-Baroque writing. They are loaded with signifiers from diverse fields: painting, sculpture, music, dance, cinema, literature, astronomy, religion, philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and popular and camp cultures. They indulge in an intertextual overkill that heightens perception of artistic artifice. Their titles exemplify how intertextual elements are often "stolen" from diverse contexts.

The sign Cobra pertains to a multitude of contexts. It is a metathesis of baroc. It belongs to Paz's poem "La boca habla," which appears in the "Diario indio" chapter of Cobra: "La cobra / fabla de la obra / en la boca del abra / recobra / el habla: / El Vocablo." Additionally, as González Echevarría remarks, "Cobra is from the verb cobrar, which indicates 'recuperar lo perdido,' in other words 'dar vigencia, actualidad, a una presencia diferida,' and in Western languages c-o-br-a is a 'grado menos zero de la fonología' in which the often repeated phonemes turn back upon themselves and 'se autocancelan'" ["Memoria"]. With its fricatives and progressively open vowels, cobra is also an example of the "vibración fonética … rumor de lengua de fondo" remaining from the Big Bang (see Sarduy, Barroco). Cobra calls to mind the constellation Serpens Caput. A graphic represention of a coiled cobra reveals an empty center, like the non-ego and the unmentioned taboos of the text. It plays upon the polyvalent symbolism of the cobra of India: a poisonous serpent, the sacred serpent of Buddhist and Hindu folklore, a symbol of nature's protectiveness toward all creatures, and the Serpent King. It evokes the yogic kundalini or "serpent power." It is associated with the Latin copula and with the anagram for a group of expressionist painters from COpenhagen, BRussels, and Amsterdam, whose paintings serve, among others, as a source of the scenery and characters of Cobra, as González Echevarría explains. It is linked to cobre, the "metal emblema de Ochúm, la diosa yuruba … y de su equivalencia católica la Caridad del Cobre" according to Sarduy [Emir Rodrigez Monegal, "Conversación con Severo Sarduy," Rensta de Occidente 31, Series 2, 1970], the slang name "snake" given to homosexuals, the phallus, and the symbol of medicine and surgery to which Cobra resorts to be rid of the phallus. In a free-play of signs, the signifier of the title has a great multitude of signifieds repeatedly differed.

Goytisolo's title Juan sin tierra is also polyvalent but to a lesser degree. It calls to mind legends of nomadic wanderers. It reminds one of the "self-banished" Spaniard Blanco White, who used it as a pen name, and it is a tribute to Jean Genet, who, wrote Goytisolo, "predica con el ejemplo las virtudes del exilio" ("El territorio del poeta"). As Pérez explains, it also "refers to 'Jean sans Terre' or John Lackland of England … who was forced … to accept the Magna Carta," and it "suggests parallels" between the novel and its narrator, and historical circumstances [Geraro J. Perez, "Form in Juan Goytisolo's Juan sin tierra," Journal of Spanish Studies: Twentieth Century 5, 1977]. The overtly political title is significant with respect to the situation of the imaginary author, the real author, and his exiled production during the late years of the Franco regime. The signs are engaged in limited play.

In Juan sin tierra the so-called onanistic and poetic writing is not gratuitous nor self-sufficient in the sense of art whose end is itself. The author may be continuing a "búsqueda de la identidad social, literaria y personal", writing as "psychoanalytic therapy," writing for the benefit of others as well as for himself, or, as the invented author says, pleasure seeking. But the writing does not negate a social intention in wedding itself to the pleasure principle. As Norman O. Brown writes in Life Against Death: "Art's contradiction of the reality principle is its social function…. Art, if its object is to undo repressions … is in this sense subversive of civilization". Since the invented author has been counterposing black and white, masters and slaves, respectable bourgeois and pariah, and heterosexual and homosexual behavior, he is clearly mindful of diverse social intentions. If he repeatedly remarks on his unproductive pleasure in writing, it is because, besides a means of communication, writing is also per se a pleasurable activity. As Carmen Martín Gaite puts it, writing can cause one "to forget the destination and enjoy the journey" [Carmen Martin Gaite, "The Virtues of Reading," translated by Marcia L. Wells, PMLA 104, 1989]. Moreover, it is a place for a happy dialogue between what Paz calls cuerpo and no cuerpo: nature and culture, body and soul, the pleasure principle and the reality principle (Conjunciones y disyunciones passim). The purposes of art are heterogenous.

Goytisolo enjoys the journey without forgetting the destination for very long. In the context of his role as a "francotirador," he has discussed the political motives of his playful creative writing in the late Franco years, explaining that to have his say without either giving arguments to the Francoist establishment or fomenting divisiveness in the opposition, he resorted to "una estrategia de la invención" and "un lenguaje metapolítico" [Juan Goytisolo, Libertad, Libertad, Libertad, 1978]. While relevant to some degree to the whole trilogy begun with Señas de identidad, this explanation is most pertinent to the final work of the trilogy, Juan sin tierra. He adds:

Mi obra novelesca adulta … era marginal y minoritaria … porque yo recurría en ella a un discurso nuevo, indirecto,… gracias a ello podía expresar lo que era indecible, en un lenguaje au premier degré: …—crítica de las sociedades burguesa y burocrática …; necesidad de un cambio radical de nuestros valores culturales, sociales, morales, actitud tercermundista y hostil a los criterios … de la civilización judeocristiana, etc.—proyectándolas a un nuevo ámbito: el de los deseos reprimidos, la utopía y la imaginación.

In Juan sin tierra, projecting cultural politics into the field of desires, dreams, and imagination is play.

Sarduy has considered his own Neo-Baroque writing to have cultural political significance. In an interview he told Jean-Michel Fossey: "Ser barroco hoy, creo, significa amenazar, juzgar y parodiar la economía burguesa, basada en la administración … 'racional' de los bienes, en el centro y fundamento de esa administración …: el lenguaje … el lenguage no se encuentra en función de información sino en función de placer" [Jean-Michel Fossey, "Severo Sarduy: maquina barroca revoluciónaria," Severo Sarduy, edited by Julian Riós, 1976]. Referring to his thematics, he claimed a playful body was a "máquina barroca revolucionaria que impide a la sociedad represiva su propósito (apenas) oculto: capitalizar bienes y cuerpos." Nevertheless, Cobra would appear to be subversive rather than revolutionary.

In Cobra play and eroticism are not accompanied by any noticeably revolutionary social vision. It is susceptible to trivialization or neutralization in late capitalist societies since, as Jean Franco points out, in our age the pursuit of pleasure has been absorbed into the dominant ideology. However, if one considers Sarduy's ties to Cuba, Cobra takes on a more serious aspect. The pursuit of pleasure and elitist and "decadent" art are at odds with Cuban ideology. Although against Sarduy's calculations liberal bourgeois societies may absorb Cobra, the utilitarian-minded Cuban establishment cannot.

Goytisolo paraphrases Barthes's comment on Sarduy's De donde son ios cantantes (1967) and hails the "hedonismo revolucionario" of Cobra (Barthes, Severo Sarduy; Goytisolo, Disidencias). But Professor Franco gives Sarduy's hedonism little value. She negatively criticizes Cobra as a "dance of signs" without history and a game of "constant metamorphoses" which "invite enjoyment and not use." The basic problem, as she sees it, is that mobility and "the promotion of gratuitousness" may be Utopian, but they are not revolutionary, and in this day a text based on them reproduces the values of late capitalism. She remarks: "The dominant ideology is now reproduced in … the very pursuit of pleasure. It encourages the setting up of private worlds but sets taboos around politics" [Jean Franco, "The Crisis of the Liberal Imagination and the Utopia of Writing," Ideologies and Literature 1, No. 1, 1976]. Yet metapolitics, cultural metapolitics, is not wanting in Cobra.

A work of oppositional postmodernism, Cobra was written when the Western counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s was beginning a decline. It is dernier-cri counterculture. On both the narrative and linguistic levels of Cobra, there is plenty of play and camp eroticism of the kind that counterculturalists would applaud, and the Cuban regime as well as the "old bourgeois stereotype" (Franco's term) would find condemnable. But it is play with a critical edge, against both the establishment and certain characteristics of the counterculture, particularly its lapses into ethnocentrism, which Sarduy uses against itself, its political naiveté, and machista elements within it.

Cobra shares in a "common enterprise" of many feminist, deconstructionist, and pyschoanalytic projects that in "Mermaids and Minotaurs in Academe" Nancy A. Newton terms "deflating our Western cultural phallus," that is, putting one on guard against "an inherited discourse-system in which impregnable individualism, unilateral logic and reason, specialized mastery and domination hold key defensive positions" [Nancy A. Newton, "Mermaids and Minotaurs in Academe: Notes of a Hispanist on Sexuality, Ideology, and Game Playing," MMLA 22, No. 1, 1989]. Sarduy writes a transvestite discourse transgressing the West's master narratives and the either/or binarism of male/female and work/play. His artistic vision in Cobra is one supported by Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, and the Post-Structuralists, among others, who thought that the idea of freedom, imagination, and art could provoke liberating changes in culture. Since semic signs and the structures of language play a great role in consciousness and culture (according to Barthes, Derrida, and Lacan), they are placed in the foreground of Sardy's work-play, or to use Lentricchia's handy phrase, his "cultural work of words" (Criticism and Social Change). This reader was reminded by Newton's article that the separation of work and play into different spheres is a result of social forces rather than nature. In art, work and play come together again.

Pastiche and parody in Cobra are comic but critical. For example, the excentric, nomadic characters moving from West to East in pursuit of Liberation find celluloid gurus, plastic Buddhas, and a canned nirvana because they do not go below the surface of an India de pacotilla. There is an East-West analogy operating in Cobra. A Che Guevara poster found in India (the poster was a popular wall decoration in Western radical-chic circles) has the effect of suggesting a parallel between the attraction of Latin American revolutions for drugstore and university revolutionaries and that of Eastern religions for Western devotees in India. They appear to have as little comprehension of the histories and communities of the East as foreign supporters of Latin American revolutions often have of Latin American societies. The analogy is re-enforced in the fragment "Las indias" in the chapter "Diario indio," in which the footnoted source of a description of a Caribbean island is reputedly the "Diario de Colón." On the last pages of Cobra, an invocation of an invisible homeland on the other side of the mountains, "[e]l país natal," may suggest: lama: Tibet = cubano: Cuba or lama-cubano exiled from Tibet-Cuba.

Both Sarduy and Goytisolo consider playful art to be successful in undoing repressions and regaining freedoms that some religious and political systems quite strictly ask one to forego. Goytisolo has been enthusiastic about the "crimes" committed by Sarduy's playful will against "el logocentrisimo" of our culture in which "el goce debe ocultarse tras la máscara de la razón" [Juan Goytisolo, Disidencia, 1977]. But Cobra's playfulness and hedonic excesses are not incompatible with purposefulness.

Goytisolo is not to be boxed by a "false alternative" for art between gratuitousness and usefulness, which is challenged in Todorov's "Art According to Artaud." The imaginary author and the hero-writer of Juan sin tierra adopt the roles of onanists opposite the utilitarian critic Vosk to play out a dichotony of aesthetic positions favoring either gratuitousness or utilitarianism. Although the fictitious author celebrates the hedonism of writing and rejects practical norms and rational language for his writing, he is ultimately not an apologist for gratuitous art but a vindicator of an artist's right to practice whatever forms of artistic discourse he chooses. Since Goytisolo felt morally compelled to write about something in the early 1970s, he did so in Juan sin tierra as artfully as he could. What is "useless" may be against society's norms, but "useless" writing in Juan sin tierra is paradoxically a social weapon against repression, metaphorically a knife against the renunciations of instincts into which society presses an individual. If the playfulness with which Goytisolo writes something in Juan sin tierra is at times needlessly explicit, such explicitness is motivated by the author's desire to make a point as strongly as possible: pleasure and the criticism of cultural and political problems can be combined in art. That is one of its great rewards.

Juan sin tierra contains many clear allusions to political realities and issues in the restricted meaning of governmental politics. In Cobra, except for a mordant comment made when the transvestite star Cobra is discovered hanging upside down trying to reduce her feet, "Como a toda revolución, sucedió a ésta un régimen de sinapismos draconianos," and the Che Guevara poster, they are almost nil. But all of Cobra transgresses what Anthony Kerrigan calls "the laws of Cuba" pertaining to the "curbing" and banning of writers. For instance, the "Ley de la Extravagancia," applies "to anything far fetched, extravagant, from homosexuals … and their extravagant dress, to writers of extravagant … prose or verse," among others. In its crimes against such "laws," Cobra is artistic insurgency.

In "Politics, Literature and the Intellectual in Latin America" Enrica Mario Santí astutely maintains that a Latin American writer (or, extending the category, a writer in the Spanish language) may be an intellectual but remain an artistic writer by virtue of his "creative use of language," which "presupposes his undertaking a critique of language," as a result of which he "opens himself and his work to the realm of systematic inquiry … that necessarily binds his writing to his historical and political context." It is worthwhile to consider these contexts in order to appreciate the dimensions of the games Sarduy and Goytisolo play.

Cobra was written at the time of "el caso Padilla" (Castro's jailing of the "decadent" poet Heberto Padilla and the consequent international protest) when, in Goytisolo's words, "el Líder Máximo había resuelto acabar con cualquier forma de disidencia" (En los reinos de taifa). Its baroque complications, hedonic excesses, and superficial gratuitousness form a declaration of rebellion against the puritanical twentieth-century Cuban "Counter-Reformation." Although it may not be banned in Cuba, "no se vende Cobra allí" (Sarduy, letter).

Cobra disguises its politics more radically than Juan sin tierra. The latter text is more concerned with the communicability of its political issues. Although the writing of the Spanish Left was still kept in check by tradition and authoritarian measures during the last years of the Franco regime, certain liberties, such as freedom from prior censorship, were granted. But when Juan sin tierra was published in 1975 in Barcelona, the Ministerio de Información refused to allow its distribution in Spain because, as Goytisolo has recounted, it contained "ataques contra el régimen, sacrilegio, bestialismo, y una larga lista de cosas que impedía su circulación" (Interview). It became available in Spain after Franco's death, when it was re-edited and republished. It was a playful, indirect way for Goytisolo to take a position on difficult ideological issues, criticize the Spanish Right and Left, and suggest the liberalization of cultural hierarchies, an egalitarian social organization, and a happy resolution to the supposed conflict between aesthetics and a writer's moral responsibility.

In the early 1970s Cobra and Juan sin tierra were the oppositional work-play of contentious, dissident expatriates from Castro's Cuba and Franco's Spain. If one is willing to expand the definition of politics to include, as it has in many circles for at least three decades, a vast field of power relationships and cultural issues, including an artist's, critic's, or reader's attitude toward the creative process, then both Juan sin tierra and Cobra are highly (meta)political countercultural works.