View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by OpenGrey Repository JUAN GOYTISOLO AND THE INSTITUTION OF THE HISPANIC CANON by STUART DAVIS A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Hispanic Studies Centre for European Languages and Cultures School of Humanities The University of Birmingham March 2003 2 Abstract This thesis aims to study the ways in which literary canonisation occurs and how the academic institution is an integral part of the canonisation process. It takes as its focus the work of the Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo, who has been publishing since the 1950s and is universally considered an important figure in contemporary Hispanic literature. After contextualising recent debate concerning the literary canon, I discuss the influences and paradigm shifts that have conditioned reception of Goytisolo’s work, bringing him to prominence both inside and outside Spain. The study then addresses the strategies that the author himself uses in his novels to encourage debate and criticism by the institution. Whilst the second and third chapters analyse the distance between reader and novel, focusing on the difficulty of understanding both form and content in Makbara, the following two chapters study Goytisolo’s desire to situate his work in the canon through autobiographical and intertextual references. Analysis is both metacritical, in its examination of critics’ assumptions, and also textual, through its focus on Goytisolo’s novels. To conclude, the thesis demonstrates the symbiotic relationship of the academic institution and the writer, with the literary canon as the key that unlocks their common history. 3 Introduction The study of literature has always, although not consciously, involved the evaluation of literature and its usefulness to society at large. Those texts that are considered useful and important become part of the canon of works to be passed down to the next generation. Writers and texts are included in the canon for varying reasons and the canon itself changes over time as writers fall in and out of favour. For this reason, a study of the canon over time is a study of the relationship of literature to society and the ways in which they reflect each other. This thesis arises from a study that identified two writers as the most important in contemporary, that is post-1936, Spanish literature: Camilo José Cela and Juan Goytisolo.1 Both writers’ outputs span half a century of social changes and shifting literary trends. Yet while Cela became part of the institution of Spanish literature, Goytisolo has always resisted acclaim from the Spanish academy and situates himself on the periphery. Goytisolo’s central status within the Spanish literary canon is perhaps surprising when one considers the fact that he almost always represents the marginalised in his writing. His most studied novels, published between 1966 and 1975, are acclaimed for their attack on the very institution that gives him his identity: Spain and its literary canon. Despite this, Goytisolo has become an important figure in Hispanism and the trajectory of his career illuminates, and is illuminated by, a concurrent reading of the critics and institution that claim him. Brad Epps notes: Goytisolo himself is to all intents and purposes a consecrated writer, appearing to have secured a place in the Spanish pantheon which is elsewhere, in his writing, an object of derision.2 This study will explore this relationship of author, critic and canon. Juan Goytisolo was born in Barcelona in 1931 and has been publishing novels for nearly fifty years. His first novel, Juegos de manos, narrowly missed out on the Nadal prize for the year of publication. He has since published seventeen novels, two autobiographies, three travelogues, several short stories and numerous essays, on both literature and culture, that have been published both in newspapers and as essay collections. His novels and essays have been widely translated. On meeting Goytisolo for an interview in 1982, Milagros Sánchez-Arnosi describes the author thus: Juan Goytisolo, un nombre durante mucho tiempo maldito, hoy, paradójicamente, incorporado en los planes de estudio de COU, lectura obligada de universitarios, psicoanalista nacional, fugitivo en otros tiempos, destructor de instituciones y símbolos caducos, denunciador de 1 Stuart Davis, ‘Is there a Peninsular Spanish Canon in Hispanic Studies?’, Donaire, 16 (2001), 5-11. 2 Bradley S. Epps, Significant Violence: Oppression and Resistance in the Narratives of Juan Goytisolo 1970-1990 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p.311. 4 clisés y prejuicios anti-islámicos, filoarabista total, indagador del lenguaje y las relaciones entre la cultura árabe y española.3 Sánchez-Arnosi points to both the way in which Goytisolo is made a part of the canon through the education system, and also to the peripheral position which has characterised much of his work. Goytisolo’s works engage not only with the tradition that they challenge, but also with the reader, often with a disorientating effect. From 1966 onwards his novels employ experimental punctuation, the use of the tú form of narration, shifting perspectives and a confusion of narrators, leading many critics to consider his work so obfuscatory as to exclude the reader completely. As Julio López notes, ‘Goytisolo escribe, quizá inconscientemente, para la crítica, [y] no para el lector’.4 While it may be debatable whether Goytisolo writes solely for such an audience, it is certainly true when López asserts that ‘Goytisolo es el producto de la crítica, y a causa de ella y gracias a ella es lo que es y escribe lo que escribe’.5 To become canonical, any book must be received by critics and understood within a literary tradition; the author’s name is “made” through this process. We shall see that in the case of Goytisolo, as López suggests, there is a close link between his writing and the institution of literary criticism due to the metafictional aspects of much of his work, where he provides a commentary on his relationship to his critics. This study examines approaches to Goytisolo’s work both from the perspective of the critics who have praised his books, and therefore made them notable in a wider sense, and also from analysis of novels that are paradigmatic of the strategies used by Goytisolo to encourage interest in his work. The first chapter examines the debate surrounding the canon, and how this debate has developed in recent years, both in the Spanish context and in the wider institution. The argument establishes the importance of the teaching institution in canon formation, elucidating statements such as the following by Iris Zavala: En el mercado de los bienes simbólicos sin duda que Juan Goytisolo representa en el mundo hispánico un “best seller de larga duración”, que debe al sistema de enseñanza su amplia y duradera lectura (sobre todo al hispanismo en Norteamérica).6 In response to this claim that the Anglo-American institution has been responsible for Goytisolo’s canonisation, the second chapter will then move to consider some of the ways in which Goytisolo’s career has been read and the vectors that have influenced his reception. In particular, attention will be paid to the perceived stages of his career: the generational approach, his relationship to critics in Barcelona, the connection to the Boom writers, the first academic criticism that appeared in the United States, and the difficulty of defining the overarching themes and structure of his career trajectory. The discussion will point to the processes that underpin the division of the novels into groups 3 Milagros Sánchez-Arnosi, ‘Juan Goytisolo: “La creación como liberación”', Ínsula, 426 (1982), 4. 4 Julio López, ‘La obsesión metalingüistica en Juan Goytisolo’, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 350 (1979), 623. 5 López, ‘La obsesión metalingüistica’, 622. 6 Iris M. Zavala, ‘Apuntes sobre la postmodernidad en la heterogeneidad social española’ in Spanish Literature: Current Debates on Hispanism, ed. by David William Foster, Daniel Altamiranda and Carmen de Urioste (New York and London: Garland, 2000), p.298. 5 corresponding to very different temporal and epistemological periods. Randolph Pope, a prolific and eminent scholar of Goytisolo’s work, claims: Goytisolo, con sus conflictivas señas de identidad, tenazmente aferrado a una tradición y una tierra que en parte rechaza, viajero de mal asiento, cosmopolita parcial, incómodo consigo mismo, aleatorio y difícilmente clasificable, comienza a parecerme cada vez más un tipo de escritor heroico y ejemplar que va quedando históricamente obsoleto, pero a la vez una persona representativa de una importante transición.7 What kind of transition does Pope refer to here and why is Goytisolo difficult to classify? This section of the thesis establishes the characteristics of canon theory which underpin much of this study; the critics that have re-presented Goytisolo’s works in the institution do so through a negotiation of tradition and canon, which the author also negotiates himself. Chapter Two will assess some of the ways in which Goytisolo is understood, which will lead to a closer exploration in later chapters of his position in terms of the canon. The third and fourth chapters of this thesis looks at the question of the accessibility of his work to the reader by focusing on Goytisolo’s strategies of narrative experimentation and the effects they have on the reader. By assessing the ethics of his exclusion of the reader, I demonstrate that paradoxically Goytisolo at the same time invites the reader into the process of producing multiple readings of the novels, thus encouraging debate, dissent and, consequently, publication of criticism by the academic institution. The reading and meaning-making process is reflected in the experimental narratives of Reivindicación del Conde don Julián (1970) and Juan sin tierra (1975), and I examine them as presentations of polysemic language and the use of second person narration.