Abstract
Juan Goytisolo (1931–2017) was a Spanish novelist who went into voluntary exile in the 1950s, living first in Paris and later Morocco, in a mark of opposition to the Catholic, nationalist ideology embodied by the Franco regime. Contrasting Western cultures and cities with those of the Islamic world, especially Marrakech and Istanbul, Goytisolo’s ideal city spaces are depicted in multilingual terms, as emblems of a temporally and geographically fluid, utopian modernity. Yet though he describes his idealised modernity in specifically multilingual terms, he also depicts the repetitious, consuming spread of Western capitalism in the inane polyglot forms of tourism. It is to this satirical end that multilingual techniques are most often put in the novels, generating a tension in the conceptual relationship between multilingualism and modernity in his work. This chapter explores this tension in a range of novels, concluding that the utopian possibilities of the multilingual remain uppermost in Goytisolo’s vision of modernity.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
As he tells us in Diàlegs sense fronteres [Dialogues without Borders], like other Catalans of his generation Goytisolo was educated exclusively in Spanish: ‘el catalán había sido barrido a escobazos tras la victoria de Franco’, leading to an ‘ocultación del idioma que nos correspondía por herencia’ (2007, 24–25) [‘Catalan had been swept away after Franco’s victory’ leading to an ‘obscuring of the language that was our birthright’]. It was not until he was writing Señas in Paris that, he tells us, he began to read such major authors as Foix, Palau i Fabre and Espriu in Catalan. He was also instrumental in the publication in France of Joan Sales and Mercè Rodoreda (2007, 26).
- 3.
Published as Reivindicación del conde Don Julián in 1970, the text was revised, abridged and republished under the shorter title Don Julián in 2004.
- 4.
It is worth remembering in this context that Don Quixote is supposedly a text written by an Arab, mediated by a bilingual morisco, and narrated by a Castilian, while Quixote himself, Cervantes slyly suggests, may be of Jewish converso origin.
- 5.
As Andrew Hussey tells us, ‘between 1956 and 1956, Goytisolo was for a short time a follower of Guy Debord, who would later become famous as the author of La Société du spectacle (1967) [The Society of the Spectacle]. Goytisolo was particularly close to Debord during the late 1950s, when the latter was developing his theories of ‘psychogeography’ as expounded first in the journals Les Lèvres nues, Potlatch and, later, the journal Internationale situationniste. Goytisolo was also a participant in the ‘psychogeographical’ experiments conducted by the members of the group around Debord, who were first named the Lettriste internationale (1953–1957) and who would become the Internationale situationniste (1957–1972)’ (2006, 78).
- 6.
In terms that have become familiar in thinking about the limitations of realism , but which are worth reiterating precisely because they identify the development of Goytisolo’s mature style as a kind of modernism, Goytisolo explained his move away from realism in relation to both novelistic language—the need to find a mode of expression that neither parrots previous generations nor mimics the structures of power (1975, 137)—and the limitations of verisimilitude, conceived as a form of ‘conformidad a las leyes del género y a la ideología de la época’ (1978, 18) [‘conformity to the norms of the genre and ideology of the era’].
- 7.
The need to work against two systems simultaneously—systems apparently opposed and yet increasingly complicit, as Franco’s technocratic apertura made plain—is a mark not only of the way historical processes were concentrated and juxtaposed during phases of Spain’s juddering advance towards modernity from the nineteenth century, but of the literary telescoping of modes that evolved sequentially in France or Britain but coincided in Spain, as is evident for example in the realist-naturalist novel of the 1870s and 1880s, and again in the modernist-postmodernist novel of the 1960s and 1970s. Goytisolo’s trilogy is, as I have observed, a good example of a rapid shift in the Spanish novel from realism to postmodernism , from testimonial observation to free-floating de-signification.
- 8.
In the trilogy this is very specifically a Spanish problem; but as Francoism died away and Spain settled into modernity, in both his fiction and non-fiction the author’s perspective shifted away from the nation and national concerns towards a more generalised critique of Western culture, articulated from the position of an emigrant in Morocco. In his essays and journalism, though not in his fiction, Goytisolo’s concern with the modernising process itself has also shifted away from Spain to North Africa and the Muslim world more broadly, as he observes the simultaneous effect of competing forces on people’s lives and traditional practices (see for example his essay on the popular worship of saints in North Africa, 2003b, 38). Goytisolo considers Islamism and capitalist modernity to be ironically complicit in destroying popular forms of belief and inclusive, eclectic practices that pragmatically combine the spiritual and the commercial, the real and the imaginary. In a sense, then, the twin forces of totalitarianism and market forces that shaped his worldview in the 1960s are paralleled and magnified on the world stage by Islamism and globalisation, as history stubbornly refuses to end.
- 9.
Referring to the Cordoban philosopher Seneca, Don Julián considers the stoicism of senequismo to underlie all subsequent Spanish thought: the word in this context seems to imply senectud, old age or senility.
- 10.
Though in his journalism Goytisolo espouses an explicitly progressive politics concerned with women’s rights, socio-economic development and the like, his novels are characterised by a destructive playfulness in which not only those ideologies he perceives as bankrupt, but also the progressive values he espouses elsewhere, appear to go by the board. Critics have noted the tendency of his novels to turn their destructive impulses both on themselves and on the very people whose interests we might expect the author to defend: Jo Labanyi (1989) and Brad Epps (1996) have both offered persuasive accounts of the often self-defeating nature of the liberatory impulses of Goytisolo’s fiction, while Linda Levine expresses doubts, in her introduction to Don Julián, about the novel’s racial and gender politics, doubts that remained unresolved in the approximately thirty years that elapsed between the publication of the novel in its original and revised editions (2009, 46). For his part, Goytisolo berates ‘los críticos jíbaros, reductores de cabezas’ [‘peasant-savage head-shrinking critics’] who refuse to understand the ‘verdad poética’ [‘poetic truth’] of his novels (Levine 2009, 46), claiming that the political correctness of his civic life has no place in ‘el ámbito literario [donde] no cabe corrección alguna’ (Goytisolo 2007, 30) [‘the literary realm [where] correctness has no place’].
- 11.
In his reading of the novel, Stanley Black very persuasively argues that Makbara marks a significant development in Goytisolo’s fiction. Noting that the trilogy had been accused of ‘perpetuating, rather than dispelling, myths’, he observes that ‘Curiously, such accusations were repeated with even more vigour by critics of Makbara, and yet this novel goes a long way to overcoming the deficiencies in this regard detected in the earlier novels. […] Uncertainty and ambiguity were important elements of both Don Julián and Juan sin tierra’s critique of the Western mentality, yet […] those novels’ critique of the West showed an inverted logic and rationalism which undermined to a large extent their subversive intent. Makbara, on the other hand, creates to much greater effect a world in flux, in which the narrator seeks to undermine all positions, even his own’ (2001, 161).
- 12.
Goytisolo has said however that his interest in linguistic theory ceased around 1975, around the same time that he discovered Bakhtin: ‘The exhaustion of this linguistic and textual contesting of conventional Western attitudes to language and literature leads in Makbara to a recourse to the possibilities offered by the primitive oral tradition’ (Black 2001, 161). As Black goes on to explain, however, ‘The oral tradition does not constitute a model for the novel. The novel both incorporates elements of the oral tradition and adapts them to the peculiar needs and characteristics of the text’ (177); ‘The late introduction of the figure of the oral narrator means that the contemporary reader can be forgiven for approaching the text as a radical break with conventional narrative form and as postmodernist in nature. The discovery of the halaiquí [storyteller] at the end of the penultimate chapter does not change that. At most, what is prompts is a reflection on the part of the reader on the relationship between the halaiquí and the contemporary Western writer’ (180).
- 13.
The expression in Spanish also implies dirtiness.
- 14.
As Malika Jdidi Embarec makes clear, however, shared linguistic knowledge can create a strong feeling of intimacy and complicity in the reader: ‘Conocimiento de una lengua. Si originalmente esas frasecillas y vocablos en dialectal marroquí esparcidos por el texto cumplen la función poética de distanciamiento y misterio para el lector español, para el marroquí, por el contrario, adquieren un matiz opuesto. Es el pueblo que habla […]’ (1982, 85) [‘Knowing a language. If in the first place these phrases and words in Moroccan dialect scattered throughout the text fulfil a poetic function of distancing and creating mystery for the Spanish reader, for the Moroccan, on the contrary, they take on a different hue. It is the people who speak […]’].
- 15.
As Goytisolo has explained, the pariah’s enormous penis is the debilitating manifestation of the West’s fantasy of over-sexed Africans, and it is for him ‘una maldición’ (2013a, loc. 510) [‘a curse’].
- 16.
As a young boy the pariah had large donkey ears for which he was teased; later he loses his ears altogether. In the market ‘dos payasos escenifican un número bufo de ambiciones modestas y rudimentario disfraz: orejas de burro, diálogo a gritos en razón de presunta sordera, bastonazos al peto defensor de las partes traseras, alusiones e injurias gratuitas, de índole excrementicia o sexual’ (1980, 217) [‘two clowns do a modest comic turn in rudimentary disguises: donkey’s ears, dialogue bellowed at the top of their lungs, both pretending that the other is stone deaf, blows aimed at each other’s padded behinds, withering comments and gratuitous insults having to do with each other’s sexual or excretory habits’] (1993, 261–262].
- 17.
In 1981 Goytisolo explained that he had chosen to live in Paris because ‘lenta, insidiosamente, París se tercermundiza: los emigrantes y sus familias traen con ellos sus costumbres, trajes, peinados, música, adornos , hábitos culinarios. Los barrios modestos de la ciudad se vuelven más alegres y coloridos […] y con un poco de suerte los veremos en los Campos Eliseos. La cultura hoy no puede ser francesa ni española, ni siquiera europea, sino meteca, bastarda, fecundada por las civilizaciones que han sido victimas de nuestro etnocentrismo autocastrador y aberrante. Pero si, hasta ahora, hemos exportado el modelo occidental con todos sus accesorios […] asistimos a un proceso inverso que personalmente me cautiva y encanta: la disolución paulatina de la cultura “blanca” por todos los pueblos que, sometidos a ella, han asimilado los trucos e instrumentos necesarios para contaminarla’ (Goytisolo 1982, 10–11) [‘slowly, insidiously, Paris is being “third-worlded”, as immigrants and their families introduce their customs, outfits, hairstyles, music, adornments, and cooking habits. The modest neighbourhoods of the city are becoming more vibrant and colourful […] and with a bit of luck we will see them on the Champs Elysées. Culture today cannot be French nor Spanish, not even European, but rather migrant, bastard, fertilised by the civilisations that have been victims of our self-castrating and aberrant ethnocentrism. But if, until now, we have exported the Western model with all its attributes […] we are now witnessing a reverse process which, personally, I find captivating and enchanting: the gradual dissolution of “white” culture by the many peoples that, subjected to it, have assimilated the necessary tricks and instruments to contaminate it’].
- 18.
The narrator describes the novel as a ‘minuciosa exposición de las ideas clisé de la época que configuran poco a poco el mapa universal de la idiotez’ (loc. 1876) [‘meticulous exposition of the clichés of the age that gradually configure the universal map of idiocy’]. This process is evident throughout his work, and is not limited to political rhetoric but extends to a pastiche of everything from the lonely hearts column to canonical literature.
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Lonsdale, L. (2018). Multilingualism and Utopia in Goytisolo. In: Multilingualism and Modernity. New Comparisons in World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67328-8_6
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