Exile's Revenge
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers &Writing EXILE'S REVENGE BY PEARL K. BELL Although he has lived in exile for most of the past two decades, Juan Goytisolo, at the age of 43, is generally considered to be the foremost...
...In a series of remarkable tirades, Goytisolo searingly imprecates the arid Spanish centuries with their stinking rhetorical pollution, the counterfeit linguistic coinage of tyranny...
...Especially in the last third of Count Julian, the images become increasingly inaccessible and shrouded in shadowy opacity, despite the burning heat of Goytisolo's contempt for the lies of authoritarian orthodoxy...
...In this way, Julian commits a vengeful act of vandalism against the hollow Spanish cult of the word...
...goytisolo's Julian is an impoverished emigre living in modern Tangier, a convenient outpost for observing and ruminating upon his homeland with an inflamed, malicious eye...
...to offend and mock and jeer as a majestically subversive means of eliciting new ways of seeing, hearing, thinking, feeling...
...To Goyti-solo, Franco's victory in 1939 was only a further tragic and irreversible extension of the centuries-old rule of decadent "purity...
...But because Goytisolo limits the scope of his assault so narrowly to abuses of the word, he finally defeats himself...
...From the library he goes to see his Arab friend Tariq, with whom he smokes kep, the magic hemp that releases Julian's savage hallucinations of a newly invaded Spain, its fraudulent sexual proprieties sodomized, raped, surrealistically violated to death...
...Their readers, in turn, have perforce learned the art of "decoding allusions and reading between the lines...
...Those who have been unable or unwilling to cope with the rigors of exile must do their work within the swaddling clothes of "self-censorship, elliptical prose, allegory, vague allusions...
...But he shudders convulsively in the grip of his atrocious, murderous dream of Spain sinking beneath the sea in "blessed relief...
...The actual Count was a traitor to his country...
...In revulsion against the garbage heap of this consumer-oriented, tourist-ridden nation...
...To Goytisolo, these desperate stratagems represent the poisonous victory of a Spanish authoritarian mentality that can maintain its domination only through the constant mutilation of the Spanish language...
...A writer of Goytisolo's fiery, intractable temperament can scarcely be expected to make shifty compromises with the rotting literary carcass of an occupied language, and in 1957 he abandoned Spain for France...
...But there are more subtle literary and intellectual reasons why Goytisolo is anathema to the Spanish inquisition of the mind...
...The attitude of a writer in the former must be that of a patriot in the latter: resistance and revolt through a process of rupture with the cliches and stereotypes of language, a constant battle against the myths and mental prisons to which the writer sometimes unconsciously falls victim...
...Julian's destination is the national library, where, each morning, he crushes a carefully gathered hoard of dead insects between the leather-bound pages of the Spanish classics-desecrating the heroic dramas and patriotic sonnets, obliterating the empty perorations by a smear of insects "squashed flat, their guts spattered all over...
...In a recent essay, he discussed his "illegal" point of view in contrast to that insidious Spanish literary phenomenon known as posibilismo...
...The book is really an anti-epic, a brutally untraditional meditation-now apoplectically enraged, now cruelly and deceptively playful-on the barren wastes of Spanish history and the putrescent stench of 20th-century Spanish "progress...
...As a result, Goytisolo points out, "we can speak of occupied languages as we speak of occupied countries...
...As the Spanish governor of the North African city of Ceuta, he incited the Arab viceroy in Morocco to attack the Spanish peninsula in 711, thereby opening the Straits of Gibraltar to the Moorish conquest of Iberia...
...Thus Goytisolo's assault on the hypocrisy and cant of contemporary Spain takes the form of an assault on its language that must paradoxically use language itself as a weapon...
...Presumably we are meant to infer, though Goytisolo does not say it, that the "occupied" writer is nevertheless doomed to defeat, since the lifeblood of his work-his rhetorical tools-are being persistently debased and blunted by an enemy who has the upper hand...
...That Goytisolo faces the defiling realities with totally agonized despair, disbelieving in the possibility of change, he makes appallingly clear by casting the entire work in the form of a single sentence, which uses many types of punctuation but never the period...
...The standard device of modernism is the wrenching of conventional forms out of their placid, familiar alignments, in order to explode the desiccated habits of inherited response...
...And yet for all the venomous and powerful literary genius that Goytisolo brings to his disturbing book, this non-Hispanic reader, at least, was too often left with a frustrating sense of confused mystification...
...In the centuries that followed Julian's "treason," Spain, with its large and flourishing Moorish and Jewish populations, was, as one historian has described it, "the only multiracial and multireligious country in Western Europe, and much of the individual development of Spanish civilization, in religion, literature, art and architecture, during the later Middle Ages, was due to this fact...
...The word "novel," it should be pointed out, is simply a label of convenience for Count Julian...
...Count Julian is literally a drama of vicious continuity that has no end...
...Julian sardonically congratulates himself for opting out of the march of history...
...When his own language becomes a vehicle of incomprehensibility, Goytisolo seems as much the victim of the word as he is the enemy of its abuse...
...Because this triumph coincided with Columbus' discovery of America, it was, as the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes has written, "fatal to Spain and its colonies in the New World...
...His new novel, Count Julian (Viking, 204 pp., $7.95), is a violent, irresolvable quarrel between the severed halves of a Spanish exile's nature, one part exultantly free of a world that "compels us, against our wills, to be spokesmen for something," the other inescapably bewitched by a man's unbreakable ties to his homeland...
...In 1492, that cataclysmic year of Spanish history, the extraordinarily fertile diversity of Iberia was abruptly eradicated when the Catholic Kings Ferdinand and Isabella, riding their triumphant wave of monolithic orthodoxy, expelled the Jews and drove the Moors from their last Iberian stronghold in Granada...
...From Mexico to the River Plate we [Latin Americans] were . . . during the next 300 years . . . [also] cut off from modernity...
...As Julian walks through Tangier, Goytisolo fixes the alien city for us in an unforgettable, slowly moving progression of emblematic details: the queues waiting to see the James Bond movie Thunderball, the howling beat of a Rolling Stones record, the bubble-topped air-conditioned buses spewing out their loads of Martian-like tourists...
...For in the 1970s Julian has no conquering army, only erotic fantasies and visions of rhetorical treason-crossing the Straits "to besiege language, to snap off roots, to violate syntax, to wreak havoc on every hand...
...the art of writers adapting themselves to censorship," which accounts for the bizarre literary climate of Spain throughout the last 35 years...
...Devoured by hate and stimulated by hashish, he treasonously fantasizes a new invasion of the detestable country Spain has become, grimly imagining the destruction of its tyrannical rulers and bland technocrats...
...Writers &Writing EXILE'S REVENGE BY PEARL K. BELL Although he has lived in exile for most of the past two decades, Juan Goytisolo, at the age of 43, is generally considered to be the foremost novelist of contemporary Spain...
...an enviable, envious oasis of peace, harmony and prosperity: seas of automobiles, arteries teeming with neon signs, skyscrapers 30 stories high whose towering bulk dwarfs the minuscule statue of Cervantes...
...Within his own country all of Goytisolo's work-six novels, two books of essays-is on the swollen blacklist of "outlawed writers," mainly, of course, because the author is an intransigently outspoken enemy of the Franco regime...
...But like that Irish exile James Joyce, with whom he is often, perhaps extravagantly, compared by European critics, Goytisolo has become more and more passionately obsessed with his despised and beloved country the longer he lives beyond its suffocating reach...
...The past, Julian reflects during his morning stroll through the Casbah, has made of his country "a badly infected open wound," and because this history has been embalmed in the orotund, puritanical pomposity of the Castilian tongue-a lifeless, sexless, orthodox strait jacket of order-the classic writers of Spain all suffer from spiritual drought, and have bred "a profound intellectual absolutism," a deadening intolerance of originality or dissent...
...In Count Julian every literary rule is broken, every academic piety is blasphemed, mocked and trampled on...
...For he knows only too well that language is a deadly form of politics...
Vol. 57 • June 1974 • No. 12
