Ellen Mayock is Associate Professor of Spanish at Washington and Lee University in Virginia. Professor Mayock's book, titled The 'Strange Girl' in Twentieth- Century Spanish Novels Written by Women, came out in 2004 (University Press of the South). In addition, Mayock has published numerous articles on the twentieth- century Spanish novel, literary naturalism, and Latin American and Latina writers. |
How to cite this article: Mayock, Ellen. "Alienation, Anarchy, and Masculinity in Juan Goytisolo’s Count Julian". Dissidences. Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism. On line. Internet: 15/09/06 (http://www.dissidences/ CountJulian.html) |
| "Most critics evaluate the trilogy from the perspective of Castile-as-Spain set up against Morocco-as-Africa. I, however, put forth that the complicated nuances of metamorphosis and transformation in the trilogy, and particularly in Count Julian, arise also from an authorial position of alienation in a micronation struggling to define itself against its macroholder (Cataluña versus Castile/Spain)" |
| "Although feminist critics would likely applaud the attempt to destruct the tendency to define identity via sex, Goytisolo’s protagonist successfully eludes labels, for while giving some type of voice and legitimacy to homosexual and bisexual paradigms, he also steals voice from the female, represented in Count Julian as whorish object (the loud tourist, Mrs. Putifar; Queen Isabella as vagina; the protagonist’s mother)" |
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Introduction and Rationale
The mechanic yells into the wind, “You’re not your name.”
(Palahniuk, Fight Club, 143)
where are you going? you inquire
look at my back, he says
who in the world did that to you? you ask him
I have to go, he says: I’m in a hurry
wait a minute, you say
I can’t, he answers
please, you say: I think I know you: your name is
so long
(Goytisolo, Count Julian, 59) [1]
Literature whose protagonists “walk forward and point out their masks” (Barthes 34, 40)
asks its reader to distance herself or himself from the work while at the same time inevitably
attracting the reader to the “strangeness” or “otherness” of the work itself [2]. Literature
that effectively alienates requires the attentive reader to begin to question the fabric of reality
or realities, the nature of identity and alterity, and the relationships between and among
history, culture, and politics. In effect, the reader must shift her or his own reading position,
exist as many pronouns at once, accept a lack of absolutes, and delve into the “allergen”
contained in the writing. J. Hillis Miller, for example, says that “De Man’s work as allergen
is something alien, something other, that works to bring about a reaction of resistance to that
otherness” (Others 220), a phenomenon that manifests itself as well in Count Julian. Various
questions present themselves in Count Julian: how does language both construct and
deconstruct identity?; how does language become art?; how does language as art confront
tradition, culture, and politics? I will attempt to respond to these questions by examining the
roles of alienation, anarchy, and masculinity in Goytisolo’s Count Julian.
Juan Goytisolo speaks often in interviews and his memoirs of his own sense of alienation,
both within himself and from Spain (see, for example, Gazarian Gautier’s interview with
Goytisolo, pages 139 and 142, and Forbidden Territory). Juan Goytisolo’s trilogy that
contains the novels Señas de identidad (1966 / Marks of Identity [1969]), Reivindicación del
Conde don Julián (1970 / Count Julian [1974]), and Juan sin tierra (1975 / Juan the Landless
[1977]) is precisely the type of literature that attempts to distance its reader from
preconceived notions of a monolithic Spain by rendering senseless the nation’s literary
production, religious iconography, and sexual repression. The first novel establishes the
“Spanishness” of the shifting protagonist as a boy (a simplified term for the way in which the
“boyhood” is described and socially gendered). The second novel, the focus of this study,
undoes, destroys, and, in a way, reconstructs each of the concepts of identity set forth in the
first novel, while the third novel definitively takes the “Spanish” out of the Spaniard by taking
from him that which most makes him Spanish—his Castilian language—and giving him in
its place only words in Arabic. It is worthwhile to note, at least to the extent that Alvaro
Peranzules, the protagonist, shares several biographical details with his creator, that in this
trilogy Goytisolo creates a Castilian/Arabic dichotomy rather than a Castilian/Catalan
dichotomy because he feels more alien among Catalan speakers than among Arabic
speakers. Abigail Lee Six summarizes the point:
In sum, he [Goytisolo] confirms that when he left the country, he was ‘fleeing…from a world where I felt
alien and marginal’ (CV, p.251; FT, p.213). It would seem, indeed, that this period prior to his
departure from Spain and from Catalonia ‘where I had always lived as a foreigner’(CV, p.234; FT, p.199)
provides the least contentious example of living in exile to be found in Goytisolo’s life. ("Portable
Patria" 82)
Although Goytisolo’s protagonist also may equate the Barcelona/Cataluña of his childhood
with the rest of Spain, consistent with the Francoist rhetoric of unity in the fatherland, the
real linguistic distinction between Castile and Cataluña, the spatial antithesis of Barcelona
and Tangier, and the dark and vague references to the Barcelona of Alvaro’s youth supply
more complicated shades of meaning to the already omnipresent theme of cultural
difference.
Goytisolo publishes his three novels in the ten years immediately preceding the death of
Francisco Franco. The timing is significant for several reasons. First, the author had by
1966 lived in exile from Spain for a decade and therefore had the distance of time and space
to evaluate a culture both overly familiar and strangely foreign to him. Second, this artist,
opposed to the fascist regime, boldly experiments with literary techniques in order to present
a narrative that not only questions the worthiness of monolithic Spanish culture, as
propagated by the regime, but actually denigrates that very culture and promotes its
proposed opposite, the labyrinthine culture of the north of Africa, where much of the novel
takes place. Finally, the student protests of the late 1960’s in France (Goytisolo’s primary
home) helped to promote a similar, if muted, spirit of rebellion in Spain, and particularly in
Cataluña, and therefore created a terrain more open to avid and critical reading of Goytisolo’
s trilogy.
Count Julian (Reivindicación del Conde don Julián) is based on the intertext of the popular
legend of Florinda la Cava, a young and beautiful woman and daughter (perhaps wife; see
Epps’ “The Politics of Ventriloquism” 283) of Count Julian, who is in possession of the keys
to the Iberian Peninsula. Florinda is raped by Julian’s countryman, Rodrigo, and Julian
exacts his revenge by giving the keys of the nation to the Moorish troops anxiously awaiting
the initiation of their invasion of the Peninsula. The Spanish nobleman Julian therefore
privileges his individual honor over national loyalty in his betrayal of Spain, a theme common
to much of Golden Age Spanish literature. The events of Count Julian serve to glorify this
type of betrayal of fatherland (or madre patria, a term whose significance I will return to later
in this essay) and rejection of all things Spanish, such as order and unity, the Stoic nature of
its people dating back to Spain’s philosopher king (Seneca), sexual repression, prohibitions
on linguistic expression, and single-minded insistence on Catholicism and its heroes. The
Moorish conquest of 711 actually brings to fruition the “convivencia,” or “living together,” of
religions and the sharing of their cultures that Goytisolo finds truly laudable in Spain’s
Middle Ages and deplorably absent in the Spain built by Ferdinand and Isabella. The plot
balances the criticism of Catholic Spain with a celebration of what Goytisolo interprets as
Arabic cultural norms, such as the chaos and confusion of the streets and markets of
Tangier, the hedonism of its hashish cafés, the multiple meanings of its peoples’ glances and
words, the acceptance of many definitions of sexuality, and the relatively peaceful
coexistence of religions.
Alienation
¡Y la locura, que me trae loco, se llama…el otro!
(Unamuno, El otro, 72)
Goytisolo, in his interview with Gazarian Gautier, speaks of his characters as “purely
linguistic creations: they are constantly transformed, they die, they are reborn, and they
change age and sex according to the rhythm of the narration” (143). It is no coincidence
that insects and snakes appear often in the novel to remind the reader of the constant
metamorphosis and molting of action, narration, and characters. [3] The action of Count
Julian is carried out by variably named protagonists and is narrated in many voices, thus
heightening the sense of alterity that imbues the work, as well as the reader’s need to be
attentive to subtle transformations in narrative voice. [4] Julian is one of the narrator-
protagonists, and he has many different names in the narration. Julian is related to the
celebration of the Arabic, but Julian as child is called Alvarito (the child version of the Alvaro
narrator of the first novel), and this child represents all the tradition and Stoicism of the
Spaniards. Luis de Góngora, a Spanish Golden Age poet celebrated for the plurality of
meanings that come from his work, serves as a counter-narrator who revives or changes the
direction of the plot.
The term “ventriloquism” that Epps uses in his discussion of multiple characters and sexual
discourse in Count Julian relates to my view of the shifting protagonists in Count Julian. I
refer more to metonymical shifts that give rise to horizontal multiple voices (others, in the
sense that J. Hillis Miller uses the term in his work Others, based largely on a Derridean,
deconstructionist definition) but that sporadically emerge vertically as a dichotomous
framework of that which is either Spanish or Arabic (i.e. a raced, gendered, ethnic Other, in
the sense of what Miller sees as the “Other” of cultural studies [1]). [5] It is essential to note
that the plural “others” flow into and out of the dichotomous “Other” in this complicated
work. It is precisely this point which gives rise to the immense bibliography on the novel and
its transcendent ability to relate to other works of literature and other cultures. [6]
J. Hillis Miller derives from Derrida and Lévinas two ways of looking at alterity:
On the one hand, the other may be another version of the same, in one way or another assimilable,
comprehensible, able to be appropriated and understood. On the other hand, the other may be truly
and radically other. In the latter case, the other cannot be turned into some version of the same. It
cannot be made transparent to the understanding, thereby dominated and controlled. It remains,
whatever effort we make to deal with it, irreducibly other. As Jacques Derrida puts this: “Tout autre est
tout autre. (Every other is completely other.)” (2)
For the average Spanish reader, Goytisolo’s text and characters might well be simply
“assimilable, comprehensible, able to be appropriated and understood” in the
Spanish/Arabic dichotomy. That is to say, the Arabic convert Julian attempts to negate
everything his Spanish self, Alvarito, used to be and likely still is. Nevertheless, abundant
critical readings of the text show that its content, narrative style, characters, and circular
movement cannot be forced only into a dual cultural reading but rather must be examined
from a shifting, moving perspective that transforms itself so many times so as to become
“tout autre.” [7] Miller sees chaos, which I interpret here as a chaos within the text and its
meanings, as the “wholly other, beyond consciousness and beyond any literal naming” (17;
also mentioned in relation to alterity on p.73) and adds later that chaos can be related to
“that absent center” (21). This chaos, this shifting from one element to the next and the
next, forces the reader into a space in which she or he can no longer pin down a character,
place, or time. That is to say, the reader has effectively been introduced to the
uncomfortable, itchy zone of the “Other.” The reader is experiencing what Miller terms the
“roar on the other side of silence” (74). That itchiness, that “allergic” reaction to the text in
Count Julian is precisely what Miller sees as “generating otherness” (220) in Paul de Man.
Adam Smith’s concept of the impartial spectator, as defined in Section III of The Theory of
Moral Sentiments, also finds itself at the intersection of “others” and the “Other.” The first
quote (III.1.6) from Smith will bring to mind the ways in which all of us already exist as
“others” to ourselves, while the second quote (III.1.3) will place our others in the context of
society’s others:
When I endeavour to examine my own conduct, when I endeavour to pass sentence upon it, and either
to approve or condemn it, it is evident that, in all such cases, I divide myself, as it were, into two
persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from that other I, the person
whose conduct is examined into and judged of. (113)
Bring him into society, and he is immediately provided with the mirror which he wanted before. It is
placed in the countenance and behavior of those he lives with, which always mark when they enter into,
and when they disapprove of his sentiments; and it is here that he first views the propriety and
impropriety of his own passions, the beauty and deformity of his own mind. (110)
Charles Griswold, Jr. elucidates these points by stating that “we do not have a moral self
outside of the human community” (105). Goytisolo successfully creates characters who
share these universal qualities, thus establishing the relevance of Smith’s “impartial
spectator” (internal), and places them in a specific sociopolitical context (external), thereby
providing the necessary mirror for the celebration or condemnation of the anarchic events of
the plot. Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator” serves both as individual observer, witness, and
conscience and as communal filter and censor. Griswold summarizes this effect (citing text
from Smith, III.2.32): “Conscience, which is the internalized impartial and well-informed
spectator,’ ‘the man within the breast, the great judge and arbiter’ of our conduct, is like ‘the
demigods of the poets, though partly of immortal, yet partly too of mortal extraction” (133).
In a 1975 article, Janet Díaz carefully delineates the narrative techniques used by several
Spanish authors to create a sense of alienation in their novels. Goytisolo’s Count Julian is
included in Díaz’ list, and her article gives rise to the closer look at alienation in Goytisolo
taken up subsequently by numerous critics. Díaz establishes the fluid identity of the
protagonist of Count Julian and then sets that horizontal identity within a spatial framework
to evaluate its effectiveness as a cultural (raced, gendered, ethnic) “Other”:
This geographical and cultural separation from the visible object of his obsession, aggression and
murderous desire constitutes a powerful metaphor of near-total alienation. His lack of a definitive name
parallels the absence of a clearly defined personality or identity, and certain hallucinatory or fantastic
episodes in the novel may well be schizophrenic interludes. (9)
Díaz insists on the “geographical and cultural separation” as conditioning the sense of
alienation in Count Julian. These realms of geography and culture that pertain so intimately
to the realms of identity and alterity are examined carefully by Daniele Conversi in his The
Basques, the Catalans, and Spain. In this extensive study of nationalisms, language, and
culture, Conversi characterizes three concepts of identity and nationhood, with the last
having diminished importance in today’s world (215-6): (1) territory (physical space), (2)
voluntary efforts towards national unity, with an emphasis on language, and (3) origin and
descent. Basing themselves on Goytisolo’s memoirs and his professed feelings of alienation
from his Catalan homeland, most critics evaluate the trilogy from the perspective of Castile-
as-Spain set up against Morocco-as-Africa. I, however, put forth that the complicated
nuances of metamorphosis and transformation in the trilogy, and particularly in Count
Julian, arise also from an authorial position of alienation in a micronation struggling to
define itself against its macroholder (Cataluña versus Castile/Spain). Alvarito is born in the
capital of Cataluña, Barcelona, but speaks Castilian and not Catalan. Alvaro as youth must
feel the double repression of Spanish monolith and micronational marginalization. The
multiple transformations of character and the chaos and anarchy in the text may well
respond in part to Goytisolo’s estranged relationship with Cataluña and Cataluña’s confused
relationship with Spain.
Conversi discusses parallels between Catalans and Jews in some Catalan literature
(specifically that by the great poet Espriu) and foregrounds the fact that pre-1492 Spain is
praised in much of Catalan literature for its acceptance of religious coexistence (122). These
impulses are precisely what Goytisolo discusses in interviews and nuances in Count Julian.
Conversi also cites numerous reasons for which inhabitants of Cataluña have “a remarkable
capacity to absorb external cultural elements” (220), a skill and tendency that is certainly
salient and significant in Alvaro’s development as shifting character in the trilogy.
Furthermore, Conversi examines the possibility that Catalanism is “a pure bourgeois
product” (219), and Goytisolo may well carry this realization into his scathing criticism of
bourgeois mores via Julian and his textual cohorts. Although the Catalan language may be
the single most defining element of Catalan culture, these extralinguistic elements that arise
from territory, or location, are echoed in the persona/personae of Alvaro in Count Julian.
Abigail Lee Six uses similar terminology to evaluate, in a sense, the existence of the cultural
“Other” in Goytisolo’s Count Julian, and she emphasizes Conversi’s second determining
factor of national identity, that of language. Lee Six writes: “…the notion of the Spanish
language and by extension, its cultural—and especially literary—heritage, emerges as
Goytisolo’s redefinition of patria, replacing the more usual territorial idea of the homeland”
(“Portable Patria” 85). [8] Certainly, Count Julian privileges Spanish language over all other
considerations. The Castilian language becomes the principal tool of both acceptance and
rejection, construction and destruction, pride and shame, violence and peace, cacophony
and silence. The spaces created within the narration become exactly that space of “others”
to which Miller aludes. The space is all-encompassing and escapes definition. The struggle
towards some understanding of textual meaning is contained in the “insólito encuentro”
(284, Spanish edition) between self and selves, in this case the violent encounter between the
invading rapist Julian (and his multiple narrative counterparts) and his unwitting childhood
alter ego, Alvarito. [9] The two, after a flood of assaulting words that constitute part of an
ontological search, meet face to face and, significantly, face to back, to confuse characters
and readers even further. In essence, the Arabophile is violently confronting his younger
Castilian counterpart in a territorial, linguistic, religious, and sexual war.
As I look at the “raced, gendered, and ethnic other” or, in the case of Count Julian, “others,”
I now turn in particular to Goytisolo’s use of anarchy as political and linguistic weapon of
destruction and his questioning of traditional definitions of masculinity as he places a many-
voiced, multifarious male character (or characters) in the space between order and disorder,
government and anarchy, and one culture and others.
Anarchy
violence, inescapable violence: crossing your path
at regular intervals: suddenly and unexpectedly: thus
instantly destroying the illusion of order, revealing the
truth hidden beneath the mask, catalyzing your scattered
forces and your donjulianesque plans for invasion:
a grandiose act of treason, the collapse of entire centuries:
the cruel army of Tariq, the destruction of Sacred Spain:
as you enter the Calle Chemaa Djedid, then Chorfa,
heading for the Calle de Baño.
(Goytisolo, Count Julian, 39-40)
Critics agree that Count Julian is a novel of violence and destruction. The chaos established
within the form and meaning of the text becomes a leitmotif of the text, and, by extension, of
language itself. Violent use of language, in effect, “obliterates” identity (Lee Six, “Portable
Patria” 93), an identity that I am defining here both as an internal search for plurality and a
national label that is often attached solely as a stereotype. Evaluating again a possible
Catalan influence in Goytisolo, I turn to Conversi, who cites many examples of Catalan
violence throughout its history leading up to the Spanish Civil War (222-3). Conversi (basing
himself on John Hooper) also mentions an internal Catalan dichotomy between the tendency
towards rauxa (“passionate extremism”) and towards seny (“common sense”) (223). These
two elements and the tension created between them are certainly present in Goytisolo’s
Count Julian. The rational, methodical evaluation and destruction of Spanish culture waged
by the protagonists of the work contain elements of both poles of stereotyped Catalan
behavior. Conversi believes that nationalism is “the most powerful contemporary ideology”
(267) and sees border creation and maintenance as fundamental to the understanding of
nationalism(s). Again, Goytisolo recognizes conflicts among nations and cultures by
establishing stern borders (set up right from the start of Count Julian, when the protagonist
looks out his window in Tangier and across the strait towards Spain) and by throwing them
into a disorder that questions the very fabric of nationalism. The author also breaks through
linguistic borders by surprising the reader at every turn with his constantly creative,
innovative use of the Spanish language and by using as well phrases in Arabic, French, and
English.
As has already been displayed to some degree, violence and self-destruction inform the
evolution of plot, language, and imagery in the novel. Each part of the narration plays upon
images presented before (Part I can simply be read circularly from Part IV). The images
are reestablished and transformed and, ultimately, destroyed. In Part I, the narration sets
up the basis for destruction as the protagonist regards Spain from across the strait and plans
to attack canonized Spanish literature by smashing insects within the covers of the books at
the local library and as he considers infecting the Spanish people with syphilis (an obvious
reference to the Spanish decimation of vanquished lands by the spread of syphilis in the New
World). The protagonist has daily anti-syphilis treatments during which he reads signs
around the clinic that say “GIVE BLOOD. SAVE A LIFE.” He mocks this health care
propaganda as he considers “giving blood” in order to infect the Spanish nation with his
already infected blood (e.g. 19-21). This, combined in the same sequence with a flashback to
Alvarito in his Natural Science class in Barcelona, plays into Foucault’s comments in The
History of Sexuality about the imposition of dysfunction on sex and disease:
Imbedded in bodies, becoming deeply characteristic of individuals, the oddities of sex relied on a
technology of health and pathology. And conversely, since sexuality was a medical and medicalizable
object, one had to try to detect it—as a lesion, a dysfunction, or a symptom—in the depths of the
organism, or on the surface of the skin, or among all the signs of behavior. (44)
It has become obvious that it is impossible to speak of Goytisolo’s textual anarchy without
treading on the ground of sexuality, a theme that will be treated more fully in the next
section.
Part II is more oneirically driven as the reader accompanies the narrator on his hashish-
induced visions of the destruction of Spanish culture, represented alternately by its literature,
its philosopher Seneca, Queen Isabella (paragon of virtue and religiosity), and the little
scared boy (the protagonist’s alter ego), who will be unable to live up to the standards of
masculinity upheld in his nation. Part III circles back upon the images presented in Parts I
and II and contains the metaphorical brutal invasion of Isabella’s vagina, represented as a
large and strange ride at an amusement park. This section of the novel also contains an
amusing and revealing parody of a “purified” Spanish language stripped of its Arabic
lexicon. Finally, Part IV picks up the trope of anal rape alluded to throughout the narration.
In this part, the grown narrator rapes and destroys (suicide? homicide?) his childhood
counterpart from Barcelona.
While focusing on the disorder and destruction within the text, the reader must realize, too,
that the continuous, repetitive, and circular nature of the narrative implies necessarily a
constructive bent to the work (that is to say, a truly self-annihilating text would have to end).
Velásquez summarizes the phenomenon with respect to Fight Club: “In order to identify
what to destroy we must first remember. This novel [Fight Club] is as much about
remembering as it is about forgetting” (587). The same is certainly true of Count Julian.
The protagonist of Goytisolo’s novel is truly its language, which enthusiastically and
ironically places its characters on a hyper-conscious theatrum mundi. [10] This thread of
the actor is augmented by the ironic play with theater and television lexicon presented early
in the narration (“silence, please, ladies and gentlemen, the curtain is about to go up: the
play is beginning” [5]). Brad Epps says of language in Count Julian:
Revolutionary textuality is in a certain sense always the function of a strategic positioning—on the part
of the readers, writers and other characters—with respect to conflict. Hence, if Goytisolo is truly
revolutionary, it is, at least from my position, in a way decidedly different from what the vast majority of
his critics think. His radicalness lies not, as I see it, in the way he violates language, but in the way his
language violates itself, in the way his language throws itself into something different. Reiterating the
silent history of women’s oppression, Conde Julián slips a scandalous truth in the body of the text and
trips itself up in the process. (“The Politics of Ventriloquism” 295) [11]
Count Julian’s shifting protagonist keeps the reader in an ever-necessary bind of attempting
to derive fixed nomenclature for characters, places, and concepts, while knowing the textual
transformations to be infinite and undefinable. For example, on one page alone, the narrator
addresses his narratee and leads him (himself?) along the streets of Tangier, where he
meets the Spanish attorney (and alter ego of the traitor Julian), is led to a hashish café,
smokes a pipeful of hashish, and then is open to meeting the Arabic “Ulyan, Urban, or
Julian” (30), “friend and crony of good old dependable Tariq” (30). This movement from
narrator into narratee and through other characters continues and becomes ever more
dramatic several pages later:
tracing with your footsteps as you walk (rather than dropping little pebbles or crumbs to make the way
back) a complicated pattern that no one (not even yourself) will ever be able to interpret: finally
splitting in two to tail yourself better, as though you were another person: a guardian angel, a jealous
lover, a private eye: knowing that the labyrinth lies within: that you are the labyrinth: the famished
minotaur, the edible martyr: at once the executioner and the victim: (40)
This quote very obviously foregrounds both the “complicated pattern” or labyrinth, which I
associate with the plurality of others, and the “Other,” dichotomous definition of
minotaur/martyr, executioner/victim, Spanish/Arabic (with all positions capable of logically
being inverted).
Furthermore, the quote displays many of the narrative techniques so important to the
anarchic nature of Goytisolo’s writing: fragmented phrases closed off by colons; lack of
capital letters; numerous parenthetical remarks that are at once meandering and pointed;
repetition and variations on a theme; nonmarked segments of dialogue; white spaces; real
and metaphorical insistence on the mirror; use of epigraphs to augment the already rich
intertextual nature of the narrative; omnipresent tone of parody, particularly in the imitations
of insipid conversations shared among Spaniards (e.g. pp. 78-80 [Little Boy Red Riding
Hood goes to visit his grandmother]). [12] In addition, Goytisolo creates and enriches
linguistic meaning at every turn by means of word play, a fact that complicates significantly
the task of translation of his work. In the aforementioned textual quote, Helen Lane does an
admirable job of capturing Goytisolo’s ludic style by adopting the translation “finally splitting
in two to tail yourself better” (40). The brilliant play on words of “tail yourself” alludes both
to the enlivened sense of alterity in the text and the final scene of self-anal rape.
Andrew Sobiesuo is one of the few critics to examine the positive ramifications of “fraternal”
discourse in Goytisolo’s trilogy. He states:
…this trilogy is also primordially non-violent to the extent that it has to do with the convergence of
different cultures and souls, of the self-marginalizing narrators on the one hand and, on the other, the
marginalized Africans, a convergence that stands in ironic contraposition with the hostile divergence
brought to bear on the Spanish population at the behest of a false Pax Hispana. Furthermore, it would
appear that the force underlining each of these novels is, insofar as Africa is concerned, fraternizing
rather than paternalizing. It therefore seems to represent an intuitive understanding of the Other. (185)
The strength of Goytisolo’s anarchy is its plural base and its innovative presentation of
cultural others. Barthes summarizes the workings of textual construction and
reconstruction:
Thus we find, in the Novel too, this machinery directed towards both destruction and resurrection, and
typical of the whole of modern art. What must be destroyed is duration, that is, the ineffable binding
force running through existence: for order, whether it be that of poetic flow or of narrative signs, that of
Terror or plausibility, is always a murder in intention. But what reconquers the writer is again duration,
for it is impossible to develop a negative within time, without elaborating a positive art, an order which
must be destroyed anew. So that the greater modern works linger as long as possible, in a sort of
miraculous stasis, on the threshold of Literature, in this anticipatory state in which the breadth of life is
given, stretched but not yet destroyed by this crowning phase, an order of signs. (38-39)
Therefore, in a sense, Goytisolo in Count Julian has achieved the phenomenon of “writing
degree zero.”
In the next section I examine how the author again uses notions of nations to undo
traditional societal definitions of the masculine.
Masculinity
nobody knows who the father is, I tell you
oh, I see!
yesterday afternoon
that same man?
at her place
no, she wasn’t home
do you know what he did?
come on, tell me everything
he walked straight over to the kid and pissed on him
what!
yes, that’s precisely what he did
he pissed on the kid?
they were right there and they say that
did he cry?
no, he has no idea what’s going on around him
well, it’s a good thing he doesn’t
did they see him?
yes, with his pecker right out where everyone could see, and then he
buttoned up his pants and went away, as calmly as you please
(Goytisolo, Count Julian, 80)
Judith Butler examines Wittig and Foucault in their claim “that the category of sex would
itself disappear and, indeed, dissipate through the disruption and displacement of
heterosexual hegemony” (18). The disorder natural to the anarchy adopted by Goytisolo’s
protagonist helps him to undo cultural expectations based on gender. As the protagonist
attempts to discard labels in his movement towards violent destruction, he also calls into
question heterosexual norms so entrenched in Spanish culture, particularly the culture
firmly imposed by the Franco regime.
Although feminist critics would likely applaud the attempt to destruct the tendency to define
identity via sex, Goytisolo’s protagonist successfully eludes labels, for while giving some type
of voice and legitimacy to homosexual and bisexual paradigms, he also steals voice from the
female, represented in Count Julian as whorish object (the loud tourist, Mrs. Putifar; Queen
Isabella as vagina; the protagonist’s mother). The parodic flavor of the narration might ask
the reader to question the validity of objectifying women, but the fact remains that women in
Count Julian represent little more than symbols of consumer culture, outdated religious
codes, and overly protective mothers. Epps states that “homosexuality may be read in
Goytisolo’s text as merely disrupting the straight movement of such authority without
actually disengaging it from phallocentric logic” (“Space” 82). A fundamental part of this
“phallocentric logic” is the intricate masculine imagery centered around the invading
serpent and the seductive instrument of the flute player of the plaza, two images that recur
throughout the narration, but often contextualized in the realm of the “limbo del ser o no
ser” (Spanish edition, 177). [13] While the protagonist leaves behind and plans the
destruction of the centuries-old traditions of masculinity in Spain—Golden Age “honor”
dramas, bullfighting, Stoicism, military strength, male public debate—he discovers and
rejoices in the homosocial spaces of his Arabic surroundings—the hashish cafés, the library,
the public baths. The “embodiment” of the male as cultural entity allows the protagonist to
question gender-based stereotypes and to explore fantasies other than those proscribed by
the monolithic, heterosexual Spanish nation. The transgression essential to the narrative,
that is, the celebration of an Hispanocidic traitor, is contained as well within the male body,
his imagination, and his desire (physical and metaphorical) for something other
(homosexuality) and yet the same (another male).
Count Julian’s alter ego, Alvarito, is the product of what many Spaniards might have
considered a broken home. There is no father in the household, and the mother exerts an
influence that is considered too powerful. The absent father of the mother’s house is found in
the overly present father of the homeland, the ubiquitous (a term used constantly by
Goytisolo to mock Franco’s image) figure of Francisco Franco. Alvarito simply does not
belong in his body, home, region, or nation. His not belonging makes him other to himself, a
condition which will foment the frantic search for the identity of the Arabic other and a
nihilistic destruction of the seminal Spanish identity. The gendered and sexed nature of both
of his selves escapes easy categorization, as the protagonist slips from mask to mask and
from repressed desire to expressed desire.
The term madre patria (more or less, “Mother Fatherland”) is often used to describe Mother
Spain. I see the term as a simple means to look at the confused relationship between family
home, or domestic, maternal space, and national “Fatherland,” or patria. [14] The
necessary and innovative tension established between mother/father and homeland are
easily observed early in Count Julian:
at other times, the fog seems to shorten distances: the sea, having turned into a lake, links you to the
other shore, as the fetus is tied to the mother’s blood-engorged womb, the umbilical cord between them
coiling like a long, sinuous strip of serpentin: you are overcome with anxiety: (4)
This space between mother (blood-engorged womb) and mother/father (long, sinous strip of
serpentin) creates the anxiety that drives the plot of the novel and the ontological and
destructive search of its protagonist.
This birth sequence is followed by the introduction of Count Julian as Little Red Riding
Hood, a name which in Spanish (Caperucito Rojo) with its masculine ending allows again for
language to rupture trained modes of thought surrounding ingrained stories such as fairy
tales. “Caperucito Rojo” works linguistically and metaphorically like the term “madre
patria”: instead of annulling any externally defined sense of gender or sexuality, the lexicon
adopts and almost caresses both the feminine and the masculine. The presence of both and
the tension between them are what motivates the violent rape and destruction of Isabella’s
vagina and the peeing-upon and anal rape of Alvarito, or Little Red Riding Hood. All marks
of identity, both the feminine and the masculine, the intimate and the national, must be
destroyed in order to reconstruct and redefine a plural set of identities that can peacefully
coexist in one body.
Despite my firm declarations about gender and sexuality in the text, nothing about the text
is firm. Goytisolo is constantly creating variations upon a theme, exemplified by this quote
that appears in the final pages of the novel: “…the major theme will be heard again, played
each time by fewer and fewer instruments, until finally the movement, and with it the entire
symphony, fades away into a hauntingly sad flute solo” (203). And Count Julian ends and
recommences his textual invasion and invasive text with: “sleep weighs heavily on your
eyelids and you close your eyes: as you know, all too well: tomorrow will be another day, the
invasion will begin all over again [no period or colon used at end of novel]” (204).
Notes
[1] This article was originally prepared for presentation at the 2002 Conference of the
International Society for the Study of European Ideas at the University of Wales in
Aberystwyth. Funding for this research was provided by the Glenn Grant and Robert E. Lee
Scholars programs of Washington and Lee University. I am indebted to Professor Eduardo
Velásquez for making me acutely aware, via Adam Smith and Charles Griswold, of the
importance of the themes of the impartial spectator and theatrum mundi. In addition,
Professor Velásquez’ magisterial probing of the multiple meanings of self and other in Fight
Club (“Where the Wild Things Are: Re-Creation, Re- and In-surrection in Chuck
Palahniuk’s Fight Club) has helped to shape the beginnings of this essay.
[2] Brad Epps signals the significant relationship between “masquerade” and ventriloquism
in his 1992 article, “The Politics of Ventriloquism: Cava, Revolution and Sexual Discourse in
Count Julian” (293). Epps defines ventriloquism thus: “Ventriloquism is an uncannily
complex speech act. It refers, that is, to the slipperiness of reference, to the mystifying
ability to take one thing for another, one’s words for another’s. Ventriloquism, in other
words, is an act of speech that hides its sources and throws itself, disembodied, into the
bodies of others” (292).
[3] In her article “Juan Goytisolo’s Portable Patria: Staying on Home Ground Abroad,”
Abigail Lee Six addresses this imagery: “The same imagery of metamorphosis and reptilian
skin-sloughing that is so powerful in the fiction also appears in the memoirs” (93).
[4] See Velásquez’ discussion of multiple voices, fragmentation, and alienation in Fight Club.
[5] Several critics, among them Brad Epps, see the flow of the text and repetition in the text
as a Derridean influence in Goytisolo. See, briefly, “The Politics of Ventriloquism” (279).
[6] Much of what I say about Count Julian can be related quite closely to the content and
style of Palahniuk’s Fight Club. This essay originates from a comparison of the two works.
[7] Estrella Cibreiro emphasizes the dual nature of Marks of Identity and the plural base of
Reivindicación: “Alvaro se convierte y transforma en el Otro, lo cual implica que sólo a
través del estudio de la otredad podremos llegar a su conciencia. Pero lo que en Señas
constituía una dialéctica entre dos entidades bien delimitadas—el ser y el mundo (el
Otro)—en Reivindicación se convierte en un todo inseparable ya que ambos componentes
aparecen indisolublemente ligados. Alvaro ES el Otro; su identidad es una combinación de
todo ese pasado mítico-histórico que conforma su país, y su existencia se convierte en una
lucha diaria contra los fantasmas y espectros de dicho pasado” (11).
[8] Lee Six distinguishes other shades of meaning for patria following a partial quotation from
Goytisolo’s Reinos de Taifa: “’When I renounced the underlying values of my former
‘engagé’ literature, I of course did so aware of belonging not to a weak or persecuted culture
but to one as strong, vast, rich, and dynamic as the Castilian is with its double edge of Spain
and Latin America. The act of detaching myself from oppressive, sterile marks of identity,
opened the way to a plural literary space without frontiers: banned by Francoism, my books
could find asylum in Mexico or Buenos Aires. Henceforth the language and only the
language would be my real patria (Reinos de Taifa, pp. 71-72).’ But as this quotation
highlights, the distinction between patria-equals-territory and patria-equals-language is far
from clear-cut. The implication seems to be that the two definitions are causally linked: it is
because Goytisolo lost interest in the country that he transferred his affection to the language
and by extension, the literary tradition of his native country. Since he remained close to
these through reading and writing, the danger of losing touch and then romanticizing the
patria (construed as language) could not arise” (90).
[9] I use Helen Lane’s translation of Reivindicación del Conde don Julián for textual quotes
given in English. In some few cases, I have kept the original Spanish in order to maintain
the sense of the language that is so powerful in this novel.
[10] Griswold examines Smith on this point: “From Smith’s spectating standpoint in the
philosophical critic’s balcony of the theatrum mundi, the (so to speak) non-natural nature of
moral standards is inseparable from the fact that all of morality, and indeed all of the human
‘world,’ is a complex whole that we communally impose on ourselves” (146).
[11] Brad Epps has done substantial and important work on Goytisolo. I cite his examination
of anarchy in Count Julian here: “As a result, the violence of Goytisolo’s text, ostensibly
contained in an intricate masochistic and narcissistic cycle, can never be fully situated or
represented within the narrative, but instead moves openly through the reader, as product
and producer of ethics and epistemology, of ideology: ‘un desorden sin fin, una corrupción
general, una epidemia fulmínea, devastadora’ (137). Anarchic, terroristic, hateful, and
destructive, this text written under the sign of Sade paradoxically invokes a fusion more
discursively furious, and perhaps for that reason more fast, than that of El cuarto de atrás.
Through the shattered, hopelessly self-contained dialogic act of Conde Julián, there is an
intimacy that ‘transcends’ the confines of the familiar and the homey, a frightening, ironic
intimacy that ‘liberates’ the self in(to) revolution” (“Space” 78).
[12] Sobiesuo cites Leonilda Ambrozio, who “has perceptively noted that parody in its
modern usage is intended to ridicule and destroy” (178-79). This is a fundamental technique
in Goytisolo’s work.
[13] Of course, the recurrent imagery of male genitalia is, in itself, objectifying. Goytisolo
deals with sex and gender by parodying stereotypes of both genders. Nevertheless, it is
certainly the case that images of the female in Goytisolo are portrayed as powerless, weak,
even repugnant, and images of the male are vital, strong, and desirable.
[14] Char Prieto’s 1997 article entitled “El complejo de Edipo: Elemento transgresor en
Reivindicación del Conde don Julián” nuances effectively the relationship between madre
patria and the Oedipal theme running through Count Julian.
Works Cited
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Routledge, 1990.
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dialéctica entre el individuo, la historia y el discurso literario.” Hispanic Journal 15:1
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Clark, Suzanne. “Fight Club: Historicizing the Rhetoric of Masculinity, Violence, and
Sentimentality.” JAC 21:2 (2001): 411-20.
Conversi, Daniele. The Basques, the Catalans, and Spain. Alternative Routes to Nationalist
Mobilisation. Reno: U of Nevada P, 1997.
Díaz, Janet W. “Techniques of Alienation in Recent Spanish Novels.” Journal of Spanish
Studies 3:1 (Spring 1975): 5-16.
Epps, Brad. “The Politics of Ventriloquism: Cava, Revolution and Sexual Discourse in
Conde Julián.” MLN 107:2 (1992): 274-97.
----. “The Space of Sexual History: Reading Positions in El cuarto de atrás and Reivindicación
del Conde don Julián.” Critical Essays on the Literatures of Spain and Spanish America. Eds.
Luis T. González-del-Valle and Julio Baena. Boulder, CO: Society of Spanish and Spanish-
American Studies, 1991. 75-87.
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Goytisolo, Juan. Count Julian. Trans. Helen Lane. London: Serpent’s Tail, 1990.
---- Forbidden Territory. The Memoirs of Juan Goytisolo. Trans. Peter Bush. San Francisco:
North Point Press, 1989.
----. Reivindicación del Conde don Julián. Madrid: Cátedra, 1995.
Griswold Jr., Charles L. Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1999.
Hispanisms and Homosexualities. Eds. Sylvia Molloy and Robert McKee Irwin. Durham:
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Hooper, John. The New Spaniards. London: Penguin, 1995.
Lee Six, Abigail. “Juan Goytisolo’s Portable Patria: Staying on Home Ground Abroad.”
Renaissance and Modern Studies 34 (1991): 78-96.
----. Juan Goytisolo. The Case for Chaos. New Haven: Yale UP, 1990.
McNay, Lois. Foucault and Feminism. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1993.
Miller, J. Hillis. Black Holes. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.
----. Others. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: Henry Holt, 1997.
Prieto, Char. “El complejo de Edipo: Elemento transgresor en Reivindicación del Conde
don Julián.” Romance Languages Annual 8 (1997): 644-47.
Pope, Randolph D. Understanding Juan Goytisolo. U of South Carolina P, 1995.
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The mechanic yells into the wind, “You’re not your name.”
(Palahniuk, Fight Club, 143)
where are you going? you inquire
look at my back, he says
who in the world did that to you? you ask him
I have to go, he says: I’m in a hurry
wait a minute, you say
I can’t, he answers
please, you say: I think I know you: your name is
so long
(Goytisolo, Count Julian, 59) [1]
Literature whose protagonists “walk forward and point out their masks” (Barthes 34, 40)
asks its reader to distance herself or himself from the work while at the same time inevitably
attracting the reader to the “strangeness” or “otherness” of the work itself [2]. Literature
that effectively alienates requires the attentive reader to begin to question the fabric of reality
or realities, the nature of identity and alterity, and the relationships between and among
history, culture, and politics. In effect, the reader must shift her or his own reading position,
exist as many pronouns at once, accept a lack of absolutes, and delve into the “allergen”
contained in the writing. J. Hillis Miller, for example, says that “De Man’s work as allergen
is something alien, something other, that works to bring about a reaction of resistance to that
otherness” (Others 220), a phenomenon that manifests itself as well in Count Julian. Various
questions present themselves in Count Julian: how does language both construct and
deconstruct identity?; how does language become art?; how does language as art confront
tradition, culture, and politics? I will attempt to respond to these questions by examining the
roles of alienation, anarchy, and masculinity in Goytisolo’s Count Julian.
Juan Goytisolo speaks often in interviews and his memoirs of his own sense of alienation,
both within himself and from Spain (see, for example, Gazarian Gautier’s interview with
Goytisolo, pages 139 and 142, and Forbidden Territory). Juan Goytisolo’s trilogy that
contains the novels Señas de identidad (1966 / Marks of Identity [1969]), Reivindicación del
Conde don Julián (1970 / Count Julian [1974]), and Juan sin tierra (1975 / Juan the Landless
[1977]) is precisely the type of literature that attempts to distance its reader from
preconceived notions of a monolithic Spain by rendering senseless the nation’s literary
production, religious iconography, and sexual repression. The first novel establishes the
“Spanishness” of the shifting protagonist as a boy (a simplified term for the way in which the
“boyhood” is described and socially gendered). The second novel, the focus of this study,
undoes, destroys, and, in a way, reconstructs each of the concepts of identity set forth in the
first novel, while the third novel definitively takes the “Spanish” out of the Spaniard by taking
from him that which most makes him Spanish—his Castilian language—and giving him in
its place only words in Arabic. It is worthwhile to note, at least to the extent that Alvaro
Peranzules, the protagonist, shares several biographical details with his creator, that in this
trilogy Goytisolo creates a Castilian/Arabic dichotomy rather than a Castilian/Catalan
dichotomy because he feels more alien among Catalan speakers than among Arabic
speakers. Abigail Lee Six summarizes the point:
In sum, he [Goytisolo] confirms that when he left the country, he was ‘fleeing…from a world where I felt
alien and marginal’ (CV, p.251; FT, p.213). It would seem, indeed, that this period prior to his
departure from Spain and from Catalonia ‘where I had always lived as a foreigner’(CV, p.234; FT, p.199)
provides the least contentious example of living in exile to be found in Goytisolo’s life. ("Portable
Patria" 82)
Although Goytisolo’s protagonist also may equate the Barcelona/Cataluña of his childhood
with the rest of Spain, consistent with the Francoist rhetoric of unity in the fatherland, the
real linguistic distinction between Castile and Cataluña, the spatial antithesis of Barcelona
and Tangier, and the dark and vague references to the Barcelona of Alvaro’s youth supply
more complicated shades of meaning to the already omnipresent theme of cultural
difference.
Goytisolo publishes his three novels in the ten years immediately preceding the death of
Francisco Franco. The timing is significant for several reasons. First, the author had by
1966 lived in exile from Spain for a decade and therefore had the distance of time and space
to evaluate a culture both overly familiar and strangely foreign to him. Second, this artist,
opposed to the fascist regime, boldly experiments with literary techniques in order to present
a narrative that not only questions the worthiness of monolithic Spanish culture, as
propagated by the regime, but actually denigrates that very culture and promotes its
proposed opposite, the labyrinthine culture of the north of Africa, where much of the novel
takes place. Finally, the student protests of the late 1960’s in France (Goytisolo’s primary
home) helped to promote a similar, if muted, spirit of rebellion in Spain, and particularly in
Cataluña, and therefore created a terrain more open to avid and critical reading of Goytisolo’
s trilogy.
Count Julian (Reivindicación del Conde don Julián) is based on the intertext of the popular
legend of Florinda la Cava, a young and beautiful woman and daughter (perhaps wife; see
Epps’ “The Politics of Ventriloquism” 283) of Count Julian, who is in possession of the keys
to the Iberian Peninsula. Florinda is raped by Julian’s countryman, Rodrigo, and Julian
exacts his revenge by giving the keys of the nation to the Moorish troops anxiously awaiting
the initiation of their invasion of the Peninsula. The Spanish nobleman Julian therefore
privileges his individual honor over national loyalty in his betrayal of Spain, a theme common
to much of Golden Age Spanish literature. The events of Count Julian serve to glorify this
type of betrayal of fatherland (or madre patria, a term whose significance I will return to later
in this essay) and rejection of all things Spanish, such as order and unity, the Stoic nature of
its people dating back to Spain’s philosopher king (Seneca), sexual repression, prohibitions
on linguistic expression, and single-minded insistence on Catholicism and its heroes. The
Moorish conquest of 711 actually brings to fruition the “convivencia,” or “living together,” of
religions and the sharing of their cultures that Goytisolo finds truly laudable in Spain’s
Middle Ages and deplorably absent in the Spain built by Ferdinand and Isabella. The plot
balances the criticism of Catholic Spain with a celebration of what Goytisolo interprets as
Arabic cultural norms, such as the chaos and confusion of the streets and markets of
Tangier, the hedonism of its hashish cafés, the multiple meanings of its peoples’ glances and
words, the acceptance of many definitions of sexuality, and the relatively peaceful
coexistence of religions.
Alienation
¡Y la locura, que me trae loco, se llama…el otro!
(Unamuno, El otro, 72)
Goytisolo, in his interview with Gazarian Gautier, speaks of his characters as “purely
linguistic creations: they are constantly transformed, they die, they are reborn, and they
change age and sex according to the rhythm of the narration” (143). It is no coincidence
that insects and snakes appear often in the novel to remind the reader of the constant
metamorphosis and molting of action, narration, and characters. [3] The action of Count
Julian is carried out by variably named protagonists and is narrated in many voices, thus
heightening the sense of alterity that imbues the work, as well as the reader’s need to be
attentive to subtle transformations in narrative voice. [4] Julian is one of the narrator-
protagonists, and he has many different names in the narration. Julian is related to the
celebration of the Arabic, but Julian as child is called Alvarito (the child version of the Alvaro
narrator of the first novel), and this child represents all the tradition and Stoicism of the
Spaniards. Luis de Góngora, a Spanish Golden Age poet celebrated for the plurality of
meanings that come from his work, serves as a counter-narrator who revives or changes the
direction of the plot.
The term “ventriloquism” that Epps uses in his discussion of multiple characters and sexual
discourse in Count Julian relates to my view of the shifting protagonists in Count Julian. I
refer more to metonymical shifts that give rise to horizontal multiple voices (others, in the
sense that J. Hillis Miller uses the term in his work Others, based largely on a Derridean,
deconstructionist definition) but that sporadically emerge vertically as a dichotomous
framework of that which is either Spanish or Arabic (i.e. a raced, gendered, ethnic Other, in
the sense of what Miller sees as the “Other” of cultural studies [1]). [5] It is essential to note
that the plural “others” flow into and out of the dichotomous “Other” in this complicated
work. It is precisely this point which gives rise to the immense bibliography on the novel and
its transcendent ability to relate to other works of literature and other cultures. [6]
J. Hillis Miller derives from Derrida and Lévinas two ways of looking at alterity:
On the one hand, the other may be another version of the same, in one way or another assimilable,
comprehensible, able to be appropriated and understood. On the other hand, the other may be truly
and radically other. In the latter case, the other cannot be turned into some version of the same. It
cannot be made transparent to the understanding, thereby dominated and controlled. It remains,
whatever effort we make to deal with it, irreducibly other. As Jacques Derrida puts this: “Tout autre est
tout autre. (Every other is completely other.)” (2)
For the average Spanish reader, Goytisolo’s text and characters might well be simply
“assimilable, comprehensible, able to be appropriated and understood” in the
Spanish/Arabic dichotomy. That is to say, the Arabic convert Julian attempts to negate
everything his Spanish self, Alvarito, used to be and likely still is. Nevertheless, abundant
critical readings of the text show that its content, narrative style, characters, and circular
movement cannot be forced only into a dual cultural reading but rather must be examined
from a shifting, moving perspective that transforms itself so many times so as to become
“tout autre.” [7] Miller sees chaos, which I interpret here as a chaos within the text and its
meanings, as the “wholly other, beyond consciousness and beyond any literal naming” (17;
also mentioned in relation to alterity on p.73) and adds later that chaos can be related to
“that absent center” (21). This chaos, this shifting from one element to the next and the
next, forces the reader into a space in which she or he can no longer pin down a character,
place, or time. That is to say, the reader has effectively been introduced to the
uncomfortable, itchy zone of the “Other.” The reader is experiencing what Miller terms the
“roar on the other side of silence” (74). That itchiness, that “allergic” reaction to the text in
Count Julian is precisely what Miller sees as “generating otherness” (220) in Paul de Man.
Adam Smith’s concept of the impartial spectator, as defined in Section III of The Theory of
Moral Sentiments, also finds itself at the intersection of “others” and the “Other.” The first
quote (III.1.6) from Smith will bring to mind the ways in which all of us already exist as
“others” to ourselves, while the second quote (III.1.3) will place our others in the context of
society’s others:
When I endeavour to examine my own conduct, when I endeavour to pass sentence upon it, and either
to approve or condemn it, it is evident that, in all such cases, I divide myself, as it were, into two
persons; and that I, the examiner and judge, represent a different character from that other I, the person
whose conduct is examined into and judged of. (113)
Bring him into society, and he is immediately provided with the mirror which he wanted before. It is
placed in the countenance and behavior of those he lives with, which always mark when they enter into,
and when they disapprove of his sentiments; and it is here that he first views the propriety and
impropriety of his own passions, the beauty and deformity of his own mind. (110)
Charles Griswold, Jr. elucidates these points by stating that “we do not have a moral self
outside of the human community” (105). Goytisolo successfully creates characters who
share these universal qualities, thus establishing the relevance of Smith’s “impartial
spectator” (internal), and places them in a specific sociopolitical context (external), thereby
providing the necessary mirror for the celebration or condemnation of the anarchic events of
the plot. Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator” serves both as individual observer, witness, and
conscience and as communal filter and censor. Griswold summarizes this effect (citing text
from Smith, III.2.32): “Conscience, which is the internalized impartial and well-informed
spectator,’ ‘the man within the breast, the great judge and arbiter’ of our conduct, is like ‘the
demigods of the poets, though partly of immortal, yet partly too of mortal extraction” (133).
In a 1975 article, Janet Díaz carefully delineates the narrative techniques used by several
Spanish authors to create a sense of alienation in their novels. Goytisolo’s Count Julian is
included in Díaz’ list, and her article gives rise to the closer look at alienation in Goytisolo
taken up subsequently by numerous critics. Díaz establishes the fluid identity of the
protagonist of Count Julian and then sets that horizontal identity within a spatial framework
to evaluate its effectiveness as a cultural (raced, gendered, ethnic) “Other”:
This geographical and cultural separation from the visible object of his obsession, aggression and
murderous desire constitutes a powerful metaphor of near-total alienation. His lack of a definitive name
parallels the absence of a clearly defined personality or identity, and certain hallucinatory or fantastic
episodes in the novel may well be schizophrenic interludes. (9)
Díaz insists on the “geographical and cultural separation” as conditioning the sense of
alienation in Count Julian. These realms of geography and culture that pertain so intimately
to the realms of identity and alterity are examined carefully by Daniele Conversi in his The
Basques, the Catalans, and Spain. In this extensive study of nationalisms, language, and
culture, Conversi characterizes three concepts of identity and nationhood, with the last
having diminished importance in today’s world (215-6): (1) territory (physical space), (2)
voluntary efforts towards national unity, with an emphasis on language, and (3) origin and
descent. Basing themselves on Goytisolo’s memoirs and his professed feelings of alienation
from his Catalan homeland, most critics evaluate the trilogy from the perspective of Castile-
as-Spain set up against Morocco-as-Africa. I, however, put forth that the complicated
nuances of metamorphosis and transformation in the trilogy, and particularly in Count
Julian, arise also from an authorial position of alienation in a micronation struggling to
define itself against its macroholder (Cataluña versus Castile/Spain). Alvarito is born in the
capital of Cataluña, Barcelona, but speaks Castilian and not Catalan. Alvaro as youth must
feel the double repression of Spanish monolith and micronational marginalization. The
multiple transformations of character and the chaos and anarchy in the text may well
respond in part to Goytisolo’s estranged relationship with Cataluña and Cataluña’s confused
relationship with Spain.
Conversi discusses parallels between Catalans and Jews in some Catalan literature
(specifically that by the great poet Espriu) and foregrounds the fact that pre-1492 Spain is
praised in much of Catalan literature for its acceptance of religious coexistence (122). These
impulses are precisely what Goytisolo discusses in interviews and nuances in Count Julian.
Conversi also cites numerous reasons for which inhabitants of Cataluña have “a remarkable
capacity to absorb external cultural elements” (220), a skill and tendency that is certainly
salient and significant in Alvaro’s development as shifting character in the trilogy.
Furthermore, Conversi examines the possibility that Catalanism is “a pure bourgeois
product” (219), and Goytisolo may well carry this realization into his scathing criticism of
bourgeois mores via Julian and his textual cohorts. Although the Catalan language may be
the single most defining element of Catalan culture, these extralinguistic elements that arise
from territory, or location, are echoed in the persona/personae of Alvaro in Count Julian.
Abigail Lee Six uses similar terminology to evaluate, in a sense, the existence of the cultural
“Other” in Goytisolo’s Count Julian, and she emphasizes Conversi’s second determining
factor of national identity, that of language. Lee Six writes: “…the notion of the Spanish
language and by extension, its cultural—and especially literary—heritage, emerges as
Goytisolo’s redefinition of patria, replacing the more usual territorial idea of the homeland”
(“Portable Patria” 85). [8] Certainly, Count Julian privileges Spanish language over all other
considerations. The Castilian language becomes the principal tool of both acceptance and
rejection, construction and destruction, pride and shame, violence and peace, cacophony
and silence. The spaces created within the narration become exactly that space of “others”
to which Miller aludes. The space is all-encompassing and escapes definition. The struggle
towards some understanding of textual meaning is contained in the “insólito encuentro”
(284, Spanish edition) between self and selves, in this case the violent encounter between the
invading rapist Julian (and his multiple narrative counterparts) and his unwitting childhood
alter ego, Alvarito. [9] The two, after a flood of assaulting words that constitute part of an
ontological search, meet face to face and, significantly, face to back, to confuse characters
and readers even further. In essence, the Arabophile is violently confronting his younger
Castilian counterpart in a territorial, linguistic, religious, and sexual war.
As I look at the “raced, gendered, and ethnic other” or, in the case of Count Julian, “others,”
I now turn in particular to Goytisolo’s use of anarchy as political and linguistic weapon of
destruction and his questioning of traditional definitions of masculinity as he places a many-
voiced, multifarious male character (or characters) in the space between order and disorder,
government and anarchy, and one culture and others.
Anarchy
violence, inescapable violence: crossing your path
at regular intervals: suddenly and unexpectedly: thus
instantly destroying the illusion of order, revealing the
truth hidden beneath the mask, catalyzing your scattered
forces and your donjulianesque plans for invasion:
a grandiose act of treason, the collapse of entire centuries:
the cruel army of Tariq, the destruction of Sacred Spain:
as you enter the Calle Chemaa Djedid, then Chorfa,
heading for the Calle de Baño.
(Goytisolo, Count Julian, 39-40)
Critics agree that Count Julian is a novel of violence and destruction. The chaos established
within the form and meaning of the text becomes a leitmotif of the text, and, by extension, of
language itself. Violent use of language, in effect, “obliterates” identity (Lee Six, “Portable
Patria” 93), an identity that I am defining here both as an internal search for plurality and a
national label that is often attached solely as a stereotype. Evaluating again a possible
Catalan influence in Goytisolo, I turn to Conversi, who cites many examples of Catalan
violence throughout its history leading up to the Spanish Civil War (222-3). Conversi (basing
himself on John Hooper) also mentions an internal Catalan dichotomy between the tendency
towards rauxa (“passionate extremism”) and towards seny (“common sense”) (223). These
two elements and the tension created between them are certainly present in Goytisolo’s
Count Julian. The rational, methodical evaluation and destruction of Spanish culture waged
by the protagonists of the work contain elements of both poles of stereotyped Catalan
behavior. Conversi believes that nationalism is “the most powerful contemporary ideology”
(267) and sees border creation and maintenance as fundamental to the understanding of
nationalism(s). Again, Goytisolo recognizes conflicts among nations and cultures by
establishing stern borders (set up right from the start of Count Julian, when the protagonist
looks out his window in Tangier and across the strait towards Spain) and by throwing them
into a disorder that questions the very fabric of nationalism. The author also breaks through
linguistic borders by surprising the reader at every turn with his constantly creative,
innovative use of the Spanish language and by using as well phrases in Arabic, French, and
English.
As has already been displayed to some degree, violence and self-destruction inform the
evolution of plot, language, and imagery in the novel. Each part of the narration plays upon
images presented before (Part I can simply be read circularly from Part IV). The images
are reestablished and transformed and, ultimately, destroyed. In Part I, the narration sets
up the basis for destruction as the protagonist regards Spain from across the strait and plans
to attack canonized Spanish literature by smashing insects within the covers of the books at
the local library and as he considers infecting the Spanish people with syphilis (an obvious
reference to the Spanish decimation of vanquished lands by the spread of syphilis in the New
World). The protagonist has daily anti-syphilis treatments during which he reads signs
around the clinic that say “GIVE BLOOD. SAVE A LIFE.” He mocks this health care
propaganda as he considers “giving blood” in order to infect the Spanish nation with his
already infected blood (e.g. 19-21). This, combined in the same sequence with a flashback to
Alvarito in his Natural Science class in Barcelona, plays into Foucault’s comments in The
History of Sexuality about the imposition of dysfunction on sex and disease:
Imbedded in bodies, becoming deeply characteristic of individuals, the oddities of sex relied on a
technology of health and pathology. And conversely, since sexuality was a medical and medicalizable
object, one had to try to detect it—as a lesion, a dysfunction, or a symptom—in the depths of the
organism, or on the surface of the skin, or among all the signs of behavior. (44)
It has become obvious that it is impossible to speak of Goytisolo’s textual anarchy without
treading on the ground of sexuality, a theme that will be treated more fully in the next
section.
Part II is more oneirically driven as the reader accompanies the narrator on his hashish-
induced visions of the destruction of Spanish culture, represented alternately by its literature,
its philosopher Seneca, Queen Isabella (paragon of virtue and religiosity), and the little
scared boy (the protagonist’s alter ego), who will be unable to live up to the standards of
masculinity upheld in his nation. Part III circles back upon the images presented in Parts I
and II and contains the metaphorical brutal invasion of Isabella’s vagina, represented as a
large and strange ride at an amusement park. This section of the novel also contains an
amusing and revealing parody of a “purified” Spanish language stripped of its Arabic
lexicon. Finally, Part IV picks up the trope of anal rape alluded to throughout the narration.
In this part, the grown narrator rapes and destroys (suicide? homicide?) his childhood
counterpart from Barcelona.
While focusing on the disorder and destruction within the text, the reader must realize, too,
that the continuous, repetitive, and circular nature of the narrative implies necessarily a
constructive bent to the work (that is to say, a truly self-annihilating text would have to end).
Velásquez summarizes the phenomenon with respect to Fight Club: “In order to identify
what to destroy we must first remember. This novel [Fight Club] is as much about
remembering as it is about forgetting” (587). The same is certainly true of Count Julian.
The protagonist of Goytisolo’s novel is truly its language, which enthusiastically and
ironically places its characters on a hyper-conscious theatrum mundi. [10] This thread of
the actor is augmented by the ironic play with theater and television lexicon presented early
in the narration (“silence, please, ladies and gentlemen, the curtain is about to go up: the
play is beginning” [5]). Brad Epps says of language in Count Julian:
Revolutionary textuality is in a certain sense always the function of a strategic positioning—on the part
of the readers, writers and other characters—with respect to conflict. Hence, if Goytisolo is truly
revolutionary, it is, at least from my position, in a way decidedly different from what the vast majority of
his critics think. His radicalness lies not, as I see it, in the way he violates language, but in the way his
language violates itself, in the way his language throws itself into something different. Reiterating the
silent history of women’s oppression, Conde Julián slips a scandalous truth in the body of the text and
trips itself up in the process. (“The Politics of Ventriloquism” 295) [11]
Count Julian’s shifting protagonist keeps the reader in an ever-necessary bind of attempting
to derive fixed nomenclature for characters, places, and concepts, while knowing the textual
transformations to be infinite and undefinable. For example, on one page alone, the narrator
addresses his narratee and leads him (himself?) along the streets of Tangier, where he
meets the Spanish attorney (and alter ego of the traitor Julian), is led to a hashish café,
smokes a pipeful of hashish, and then is open to meeting the Arabic “Ulyan, Urban, or
Julian” (30), “friend and crony of good old dependable Tariq” (30). This movement from
narrator into narratee and through other characters continues and becomes ever more
dramatic several pages later:
tracing with your footsteps as you walk (rather than dropping little pebbles or crumbs to make the way
back) a complicated pattern that no one (not even yourself) will ever be able to interpret: finally
splitting in two to tail yourself better, as though you were another person: a guardian angel, a jealous
lover, a private eye: knowing that the labyrinth lies within: that you are the labyrinth: the famished
minotaur, the edible martyr: at once the executioner and the victim: (40)
This quote very obviously foregrounds both the “complicated pattern” or labyrinth, which I
associate with the plurality of others, and the “Other,” dichotomous definition of
minotaur/martyr, executioner/victim, Spanish/Arabic (with all positions capable of logically
being inverted).
Furthermore, the quote displays many of the narrative techniques so important to the
anarchic nature of Goytisolo’s writing: fragmented phrases closed off by colons; lack of
capital letters; numerous parenthetical remarks that are at once meandering and pointed;
repetition and variations on a theme; nonmarked segments of dialogue; white spaces; real
and metaphorical insistence on the mirror; use of epigraphs to augment the already rich
intertextual nature of the narrative; omnipresent tone of parody, particularly in the imitations
of insipid conversations shared among Spaniards (e.g. pp. 78-80 [Little Boy Red Riding
Hood goes to visit his grandmother]). [12] In addition, Goytisolo creates and enriches
linguistic meaning at every turn by means of word play, a fact that complicates significantly
the task of translation of his work. In the aforementioned textual quote, Helen Lane does an
admirable job of capturing Goytisolo’s ludic style by adopting the translation “finally splitting
in two to tail yourself better” (40). The brilliant play on words of “tail yourself” alludes both
to the enlivened sense of alterity in the text and the final scene of self-anal rape.
Andrew Sobiesuo is one of the few critics to examine the positive ramifications of “fraternal”
discourse in Goytisolo’s trilogy. He states:
…this trilogy is also primordially non-violent to the extent that it has to do with the convergence of
different cultures and souls, of the self-marginalizing narrators on the one hand and, on the other, the
marginalized Africans, a convergence that stands in ironic contraposition with the hostile divergence
brought to bear on the Spanish population at the behest of a false Pax Hispana. Furthermore, it would
appear that the force underlining each of these novels is, insofar as Africa is concerned, fraternizing
rather than paternalizing. It therefore seems to represent an intuitive understanding of the Other. (185)
The strength of Goytisolo’s anarchy is its plural base and its innovative presentation of
cultural others. Barthes summarizes the workings of textual construction and
reconstruction:
Thus we find, in the Novel too, this machinery directed towards both destruction and resurrection, and
typical of the whole of modern art. What must be destroyed is duration, that is, the ineffable binding
force running through existence: for order, whether it be that of poetic flow or of narrative signs, that of
Terror or plausibility, is always a murder in intention. But what reconquers the writer is again duration,
for it is impossible to develop a negative within time, without elaborating a positive art, an order which
must be destroyed anew. So that the greater modern works linger as long as possible, in a sort of
miraculous stasis, on the threshold of Literature, in this anticipatory state in which the breadth of life is
given, stretched but not yet destroyed by this crowning phase, an order of signs. (38-39)
Therefore, in a sense, Goytisolo in Count Julian has achieved the phenomenon of “writing
degree zero.”
In the next section I examine how the author again uses notions of nations to undo
traditional societal definitions of the masculine.
Masculinity
nobody knows who the father is, I tell you
oh, I see!
yesterday afternoon
that same man?
at her place
no, she wasn’t home
do you know what he did?
come on, tell me everything
he walked straight over to the kid and pissed on him
what!
yes, that’s precisely what he did
he pissed on the kid?
they were right there and they say that
did he cry?
no, he has no idea what’s going on around him
well, it’s a good thing he doesn’t
did they see him?
yes, with his pecker right out where everyone could see, and then he
buttoned up his pants and went away, as calmly as you please
(Goytisolo, Count Julian, 80)
Judith Butler examines Wittig and Foucault in their claim “that the category of sex would
itself disappear and, indeed, dissipate through the disruption and displacement of
heterosexual hegemony” (18). The disorder natural to the anarchy adopted by Goytisolo’s
protagonist helps him to undo cultural expectations based on gender. As the protagonist
attempts to discard labels in his movement towards violent destruction, he also calls into
question heterosexual norms so entrenched in Spanish culture, particularly the culture
firmly imposed by the Franco regime.
Although feminist critics would likely applaud the attempt to destruct the tendency to define
identity via sex, Goytisolo’s protagonist successfully eludes labels, for while giving some type
of voice and legitimacy to homosexual and bisexual paradigms, he also steals voice from the
female, represented in Count Julian as whorish object (the loud tourist, Mrs. Putifar; Queen
Isabella as vagina; the protagonist’s mother). The parodic flavor of the narration might ask
the reader to question the validity of objectifying women, but the fact remains that women in
Count Julian represent little more than symbols of consumer culture, outdated religious
codes, and overly protective mothers. Epps states that “homosexuality may be read in
Goytisolo’s text as merely disrupting the straight movement of such authority without
actually disengaging it from phallocentric logic” (“Space” 82). A fundamental part of this
“phallocentric logic” is the intricate masculine imagery centered around the invading
serpent and the seductive instrument of the flute player of the plaza, two images that recur
throughout the narration, but often contextualized in the realm of the “limbo del ser o no
ser” (Spanish edition, 177). [13] While the protagonist leaves behind and plans the
destruction of the centuries-old traditions of masculinity in Spain—Golden Age “honor”
dramas, bullfighting, Stoicism, military strength, male public debate—he discovers and
rejoices in the homosocial spaces of his Arabic surroundings—the hashish cafés, the library,
the public baths. The “embodiment” of the male as cultural entity allows the protagonist to
question gender-based stereotypes and to explore fantasies other than those proscribed by
the monolithic, heterosexual Spanish nation. The transgression essential to the narrative,
that is, the celebration of an Hispanocidic traitor, is contained as well within the male body,
his imagination, and his desire (physical and metaphorical) for something other
(homosexuality) and yet the same (another male).
Count Julian’s alter ego, Alvarito, is the product of what many Spaniards might have
considered a broken home. There is no father in the household, and the mother exerts an
influence that is considered too powerful. The absent father of the mother’s house is found in
the overly present father of the homeland, the ubiquitous (a term used constantly by
Goytisolo to mock Franco’s image) figure of Francisco Franco. Alvarito simply does not
belong in his body, home, region, or nation. His not belonging makes him other to himself, a
condition which will foment the frantic search for the identity of the Arabic other and a
nihilistic destruction of the seminal Spanish identity. The gendered and sexed nature of both
of his selves escapes easy categorization, as the protagonist slips from mask to mask and
from repressed desire to expressed desire.
The term madre patria (more or less, “Mother Fatherland”) is often used to describe Mother
Spain. I see the term as a simple means to look at the confused relationship between family
home, or domestic, maternal space, and national “Fatherland,” or patria. [14] The
necessary and innovative tension established between mother/father and homeland are
easily observed early in Count Julian:
at other times, the fog seems to shorten distances: the sea, having turned into a lake, links you to the
other shore, as the fetus is tied to the mother’s blood-engorged womb, the umbilical cord between them
coiling like a long, sinuous strip of serpentin: you are overcome with anxiety: (4)
This space between mother (blood-engorged womb) and mother/father (long, sinous strip of
serpentin) creates the anxiety that drives the plot of the novel and the ontological and
destructive search of its protagonist.
This birth sequence is followed by the introduction of Count Julian as Little Red Riding
Hood, a name which in Spanish (Caperucito Rojo) with its masculine ending allows again for
language to rupture trained modes of thought surrounding ingrained stories such as fairy
tales. “Caperucito Rojo” works linguistically and metaphorically like the term “madre
patria”: instead of annulling any externally defined sense of gender or sexuality, the lexicon
adopts and almost caresses both the feminine and the masculine. The presence of both and
the tension between them are what motivates the violent rape and destruction of Isabella’s
vagina and the peeing-upon and anal rape of Alvarito, or Little Red Riding Hood. All marks
of identity, both the feminine and the masculine, the intimate and the national, must be
destroyed in order to reconstruct and redefine a plural set of identities that can peacefully
coexist in one body.
Despite my firm declarations about gender and sexuality in the text, nothing about the text
is firm. Goytisolo is constantly creating variations upon a theme, exemplified by this quote
that appears in the final pages of the novel: “…the major theme will be heard again, played
each time by fewer and fewer instruments, until finally the movement, and with it the entire
symphony, fades away into a hauntingly sad flute solo” (203). And Count Julian ends and
recommences his textual invasion and invasive text with: “sleep weighs heavily on your
eyelids and you close your eyes: as you know, all too well: tomorrow will be another day, the
invasion will begin all over again [no period or colon used at end of novel]” (204).
Notes
[1] This article was originally prepared for presentation at the 2002 Conference of the
International Society for the Study of European Ideas at the University of Wales in
Aberystwyth. Funding for this research was provided by the Glenn Grant and Robert E. Lee
Scholars programs of Washington and Lee University. I am indebted to Professor Eduardo
Velásquez for making me acutely aware, via Adam Smith and Charles Griswold, of the
importance of the themes of the impartial spectator and theatrum mundi. In addition,
Professor Velásquez’ magisterial probing of the multiple meanings of self and other in Fight
Club (“Where the Wild Things Are: Re-Creation, Re- and In-surrection in Chuck
Palahniuk’s Fight Club) has helped to shape the beginnings of this essay.
[2] Brad Epps signals the significant relationship between “masquerade” and ventriloquism
in his 1992 article, “The Politics of Ventriloquism: Cava, Revolution and Sexual Discourse in
Count Julian” (293). Epps defines ventriloquism thus: “Ventriloquism is an uncannily
complex speech act. It refers, that is, to the slipperiness of reference, to the mystifying
ability to take one thing for another, one’s words for another’s. Ventriloquism, in other
words, is an act of speech that hides its sources and throws itself, disembodied, into the
bodies of others” (292).
[3] In her article “Juan Goytisolo’s Portable Patria: Staying on Home Ground Abroad,”
Abigail Lee Six addresses this imagery: “The same imagery of metamorphosis and reptilian
skin-sloughing that is so powerful in the fiction also appears in the memoirs” (93).
[4] See Velásquez’ discussion of multiple voices, fragmentation, and alienation in Fight Club.
[5] Several critics, among them Brad Epps, see the flow of the text and repetition in the text
as a Derridean influence in Goytisolo. See, briefly, “The Politics of Ventriloquism” (279).
[6] Much of what I say about Count Julian can be related quite closely to the content and
style of Palahniuk’s Fight Club. This essay originates from a comparison of the two works.
[7] Estrella Cibreiro emphasizes the dual nature of Marks of Identity and the plural base of
Reivindicación: “Alvaro se convierte y transforma en el Otro, lo cual implica que sólo a
través del estudio de la otredad podremos llegar a su conciencia. Pero lo que en Señas
constituía una dialéctica entre dos entidades bien delimitadas—el ser y el mundo (el
Otro)—en Reivindicación se convierte en un todo inseparable ya que ambos componentes
aparecen indisolublemente ligados. Alvaro ES el Otro; su identidad es una combinación de
todo ese pasado mítico-histórico que conforma su país, y su existencia se convierte en una
lucha diaria contra los fantasmas y espectros de dicho pasado” (11).
[8] Lee Six distinguishes other shades of meaning for patria following a partial quotation from
Goytisolo’s Reinos de Taifa: “’When I renounced the underlying values of my former
‘engagé’ literature, I of course did so aware of belonging not to a weak or persecuted culture
but to one as strong, vast, rich, and dynamic as the Castilian is with its double edge of Spain
and Latin America. The act of detaching myself from oppressive, sterile marks of identity,
opened the way to a plural literary space without frontiers: banned by Francoism, my books
could find asylum in Mexico or Buenos Aires. Henceforth the language and only the
language would be my real patria (Reinos de Taifa, pp. 71-72).’ But as this quotation
highlights, the distinction between patria-equals-territory and patria-equals-language is far
from clear-cut. The implication seems to be that the two definitions are causally linked: it is
because Goytisolo lost interest in the country that he transferred his affection to the language
and by extension, the literary tradition of his native country. Since he remained close to
these through reading and writing, the danger of losing touch and then romanticizing the
patria (construed as language) could not arise” (90).
[9] I use Helen Lane’s translation of Reivindicación del Conde don Julián for textual quotes
given in English. In some few cases, I have kept the original Spanish in order to maintain
the sense of the language that is so powerful in this novel.
[10] Griswold examines Smith on this point: “From Smith’s spectating standpoint in the
philosophical critic’s balcony of the theatrum mundi, the (so to speak) non-natural nature of
moral standards is inseparable from the fact that all of morality, and indeed all of the human
‘world,’ is a complex whole that we communally impose on ourselves” (146).
[11] Brad Epps has done substantial and important work on Goytisolo. I cite his examination
of anarchy in Count Julian here: “As a result, the violence of Goytisolo’s text, ostensibly
contained in an intricate masochistic and narcissistic cycle, can never be fully situated or
represented within the narrative, but instead moves openly through the reader, as product
and producer of ethics and epistemology, of ideology: ‘un desorden sin fin, una corrupción
general, una epidemia fulmínea, devastadora’ (137). Anarchic, terroristic, hateful, and
destructive, this text written under the sign of Sade paradoxically invokes a fusion more
discursively furious, and perhaps for that reason more fast, than that of El cuarto de atrás.
Through the shattered, hopelessly self-contained dialogic act of Conde Julián, there is an
intimacy that ‘transcends’ the confines of the familiar and the homey, a frightening, ironic
intimacy that ‘liberates’ the self in(to) revolution” (“Space” 78).
[12] Sobiesuo cites Leonilda Ambrozio, who “has perceptively noted that parody in its
modern usage is intended to ridicule and destroy” (178-79). This is a fundamental technique
in Goytisolo’s work.
[13] Of course, the recurrent imagery of male genitalia is, in itself, objectifying. Goytisolo
deals with sex and gender by parodying stereotypes of both genders. Nevertheless, it is
certainly the case that images of the female in Goytisolo are portrayed as powerless, weak,
even repugnant, and images of the male are vital, strong, and desirable.
[14] Char Prieto’s 1997 article entitled “El complejo de Edipo: Elemento transgresor en
Reivindicación del Conde don Julián” nuances effectively the relationship between madre
patria and the Oedipal theme running through Count Julian.
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| Ellen Mayock, Washington and Lee University |
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| Alienation, Anarchy, and Masculinity in Juan Goytisolo’s Count Julian |