Reading and Alienation in Goytisolo's "Reivindicacion del conde don Julian"

Author(s): Stephanie Sieburth

Source: Anales de la literatura española contemporánea, Vol. 8 (1983), pp. 83-93
Published by: Society of Spanish & Spanish-American Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27741631
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READING AND ALIENATION IN GOYTISOLO'S
REIVINDICACION DEL CONDE DON JULIAN

STEPHANIE SIEBURTH
Princeton University

Criticism of Goytisolo's Reivindicaci6n de/ conde don Julian

has often focussed on the problem of alienation in the protagonist. 1
But the literary nature of his fragmentation has not been explored
in detail. The narrator-protagonist of Reivindicaci6n de/ conde don
Julian is primarily characterized as a reader, an assimilator of texts
which he reproduces both involuntarily and at will. This study will
explore the relationship of his internal disintegration to texts and
reading.
Our first-person narrator is a person on the margin of society.
He has exiled himself from Spain, though he still uses her language.
Despite establishing Tangiers as his new place of residence, he has
not integrated himself into Moslem society either; he spends his
days alone, wandering from cafe to cafe. He lives within sight of
Spain, and can be said both mentally and physically to be between
Spain and Morocco. He suffers from a severe mental illness, a
paranoid schizophrenia which causes him to relate aspects c;,f the
outside world to his own inner obsessions and problems. 2 He is
obsessed with Spain, and with the erotic in all its possible forms; his
madness, liberating him from the strictures of verisimilitude,
enables him to combine these two elements in fantastical adven­
tures. He is an extraordinarily cultured person, whose familiarity
not only with the entire corpus of Spanish literature, but with
mythology, film and foreign languages is in constant evidence.
The protagonist's most striking quality is the profound
fragmentation of his psyche. He is alienated from, and yet at­
tracted to, all aspects of his past and present life. He rejects Spain

83

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84 ALEC, 8 (1983)

with all her customs and history, yet remains obsessed with her. He
deplores Castilian as a fossilized language riddled with cliches, but
cannot avoid using it as his medium of expression. He is attracted
to everything African, and yet is profoundly alienated from
Tangiers and its inhabitants, who serve only as triggers for fan­
tasies; he has no real relationship with other human beings. By
blocking out interaction with the external world, he has retreated
into himself, but inside lies as fertile a ground for alienation as out­
side. The protagonist realizes that his childhood upbringing
represented a saturation in Spanish traditions, customs, beliefs,
and ways of talking. He rejects this large part of his inner being,
and has created alongside it an alter ego, Julian, who represents its
opposite. Julian is the traitor to tradition and morality, the agent of
Moorish invasion, with whom the narrator would like to identify.
As we begin the book, however, he cannot fully identify with either
part, and refers to himself as tu. 1 The «other», then, is not in the
outside world, with which he has no relation, but inside his mind.
Thus the narrator is composed of at least three parts: Alvaro, his
Spanish self; Julian, his «Moorish» self; and the narrating voice
which encompasses the other two, invents their destinies, and is,
significantly, nameless.
The narrator's goal is to purge himself of his Spanish identity,
which he attempts in section IV, as Robert C. Spires has shown, by
identifying simultaneously with Julian and with Alvaro, and having
the latter commit suicide. Julian embraces his corpse: «tu mismo,
unico al fin, en el fondo de tu animalidad herida.»' For Spires, the
narrator has in fact succeeded, by the repetition of motifs and by
this final identification with killer and victim at one and the same
time, in reestablishing his unity and in freeing himself from his
obsession: «logra enfrentarse con la dualidad de su ser y finalmente
establecer su nueva identidad libre.» 5 Linda Levine and Michael
Ugarte see the end as more ambiguous than does Spires.' I myself
believe that because of the way alienation determines the structure
of both the text and the character, it would be impossible for the
character to succeed in eliminating Alvaro and surviving free of the
influence of Spain. This can be demonstrated by considering the
different parts of the narrator's psyche as «texts,» and showing
how these texts interact with one another in a way that precludes in­
ner unity. Let us begin by defining the word «text.»
With the postwar begins the diffusion of mass media which
compete with books for the attention of modern man. The

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STEPHANIE SIEBURTH 85

character-reader in 1970, therefore, does not confine himself to

books as sources of his view of life, and a wider definition of the
word «text» becomes necessary. The structuralists have given us an
extremely open-ended definition, summarized thus by Michael
Ugarte: «In this scheme, the world becomes a series of texts, and
any attempt to write presupposes the borrowing of one or more of
these texts and incorporating them into the script.»'Thus what has
previously been considered «nonliterary» discourse (scientific
discourse, newspaper articles, political propaganda, films, etc.),
falls, along with purely «literary» discourse, into the category of
«texts.» A «text», then, is simply the «already-written» or
«already-uttered» material on which all new writing must feed.
Ideology is inherent in the concept of text; each type of
discourse uses a system of meaning (a code) in order to get a certain
message across, and to present this message as «natural.» Along
with the text, then, go certain keys to its interpretation (cultural
codes) which are eventually taken for granted. Terence Hawkes
relates this notion of text and cultural code to the maintenance of
the status quo in a society in a way that will be extremely il­
luminating for RCDJ:

Barthes' objection to the apparently «innocent» certainties of

the connection between signifier and signified stands
ultimately as an objection to an «individualized» bourgeois
social order which rests on those certainties, which constructs
its «reality» on that basis, and which accordingly finds itself
committed-politically and economically-to its maintenance
and reinforcement. Such a social order's literary
establishment-its critics-and that establishment's raw
material-its texts-become a major tool in the process. The
institutionalizing of a particular vision of reality through the
institutionalizing of a particular series of «classic» texts and
of appropriate «interpretations» of them in an educational
system which processes all the members of the society, can
clearly act as a potent «normalizing» force.'

One of the aims of Goytisolo's protagonist is to make explicit the

naturalizing process which has taken place in the Franco regime, to
«defamiliarize» the Franquist text by juxtaposing it with others
which reveal its limitations and which show that it is the furthest
thing from «natural.»

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86 ALEC, 8 (1983)

Post-structuralists like Derrida adhere to the notion of all texts

as presenting a certain ideological message under the cover of their
flowing syntax. For Derrida, language as it is used in all texts, be
they philosophical, linguistic, etc., affirms, besides its overt con­
tent, the belief in the metaphysics of presence.' It is a similar kind
of suspicion of the power of everyday syntax that leads Goytisolo
to affirm that any text written in the conventional Castilian syntax
is not a rebellion against the Regime, even though its overt content
may denounce injustice on every page. His own text will violate
that syntax and continually surprise us, shaking up what we con­
sidered '«natural» order and revealing it as merely one of many
possibilities. Thus there can be no completely «neutral» language;
any utterance contains underlying assumptions, be they recognized
or not by the speaker.
So far I have spoken mainly of assumptions that underlie any
text, text being used in this wider meaning of «any discourse which
is considered natural.» But Goytisolo is far from incorporating on­
ly one kind of discourse into his text. It is here that Bakhtin's
theory of the novel will be extremely helpful. He shows that the
world-view of a person or group is inseparable from its linguistic
embodiment. Each political group, social class, generation, profes­
sion, has its own «language» (or «text,» in structuralist terms),
which it saturates with its own intentions. u
Goytisolo juxtaposes many different texts within RCDJ, each
has its own distinctive style and preferred vocabulary which makes
it identifiable. But whereas in Seflas de identidad he juxtaposed
fragments, each text lasting several pages, in RCDJ, texts, or
languages, are juxtaposed within a single sentence, and even within
single words. Let us look at some examples.
1. The juxtaposition of texts within a single sentence:

don Alvaro. . . recita con voz pedregosa un soneto crustaceo,

de morfologia 6sea y sintaxis calcarea, extraido de algim
florilegio de f6siles (p. 161)

This fragment juxtaposes philological language with the biological

language used to describe crustaceans.
2. Texts juxtaposed within a single sentence:

sometiendo al imperio de la rectilinea voluntad hispana el

cuadro de mandos del Citroen ultimo modelo. (p. 187)

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STEPHANIE SIEBURTH 87

Here the rhetoric of the Regime is juxtaposed with the language of

advertising/technological advancement, much to the detriment of
the Franquist myth.
3. Languages clash within single words:

crescido, grant e desmesurado. (p. 215)

These words are used here to describe Julian's «sierpe.» This

language belongs to Alfonso el Sabio, who curses Julian in one of
the epigraphs to the novel. It was also used with reference to San­
tiago (p. 142); thus it has been aligned on the «Alvaro» side of the
conflict. Yet here it describes Julian's phallus, precisely the part of
the body to which the Alvaro text would avoid referring. Thus each
word in its context here shows up the limitations of the Alvaro text
while simultaneously fulfilling their descriptive purpose in the
Julian text. All texts are incorporated directly into the narrator's
discourse," and it is in this sense that we can consider the question
of intertextuality (or the relationship of the work with the texts it
feeds on) as being intimately related to the problem of the
narrator's identity.
The narrator's search for identity can be seen as a battle bet­
ween texts, which can be divided into enemies (representing Alvaro,
or official Spain), and allies (representing Julian, or a censorship
and betrayal of Spain). The writers who inspire the narrator are
similarly aligned, Azorin, Lope and others being «Alvaro-texts,»
while G6ngora, Fernando de Rojas and Bufiuel are «Julian-texts.»
The creation of «characters» by the narrator also follows this align­
ment process, as Alvaro and Julian metamorphose into other
characters, each with his own characteristic language; thus Alvaro
becomes Caperucito, Seneca, etc., while Julian becomes Aeneas, a
beggar, a wolf.
The narrator is responsible for creating the two sides out of the
conflict within his being. But the third part of the narrator, the one
which tells the story and invents the adventures of Alvaro and
Julian, provides a voice behind each language, which may parody,
qualify, or affirm it. Some examples will clarify this interaction of
voices.
1. A pure «Alvaro» voice, discredited from behind by the narrator:

esta Castilla eterna y recia, cuna de heroes, forja de martires,

crisol de santos. (p. 175)

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88 ALEC, 8 (1983)

2. A pure Julian text, affirmed from behind by the narrator:

traici6n macha, traici6n marica: hacer almoneda de todo. . . a

mi, guerreros del Islam, beduinos del desierto, arabes instin­
tivos y bruscos! os ofrezco mi pais. . . (p. 135)

3. A mixed text, where the parodic contributions of Julian

(underlined) combine with the invisible presence of the narrator to
discredit the pompous Alvaro text:

obra colectiva de esa preclara generaci6n: la def Filosofo

Primero de Espana y Quinto de Alemania, dispensando su
alto y sideral magisterio desde el encumbrado anaquel de sus
Hors d'Oeuvres completos. (pp. 34-35)

Keeping in mind that the conflict takes place within the nar­
rator's very being, we can begin to appreciate his torment when we
realize that every word is in fact an arena of struggle. But the agony
does not end there. The narrator's predicament is similar to that
which Bakhtin described in Dostoevsky's protagonists. It is com­
mon in Dostoevsky to make two characters out of a contradiction
within a single person, as our narrator does with Alvaro and Julian.
But these characters are, in turn, internally divided; their self­
consciousness is completely directed to the word of the other, to an­
ticipating his responses, angrily answering his objections, and
defending itself against his censure, even when he is not actually
present. Thus each character has so internalized the other's view
that he can never be free; his actions and his word are determined
by the other's word. Let us look at a Julian text determined by
Alvaro:

«abajo, olmos sonoros, castos iilamos, encinas lentas y

graves!: vuestra aureola mistica palidece...cienagas, esteros,
lagunas y charcas aplacaran la nauseabunda sed espiritual del
poeta. . . (pp. 145 and 147)

Julian would not attack these objects, nor would he use these words
to describe them were they not so dear to Alvaro.
The following text shows Alvaro's actions determined by
Julian:

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STEPHANIE SIEBURTH 89

jura y perjura no volver...postr{mdose de hinojos ante el

sagrario y repitiendo entre lagrimas el Yo Pecador: pero todo
es inutil...llegada la hora, a su regreso del colegio, los pasos le
encaminaran inexorablemente hacia la calle desierta en donde
el prudente celador de las obras aguarda. . . (p. 221)

The Regime's many euphemisms for the vagina can also be inter­
preted as being directed specifically against Julian, and are
therefore evidence of a constant awareness of the enemy which
permeates official dogma.
Thus, just as in Dostoevsky's novels, there is scarely a word in
RCDJ that does not take a sideward glance at another person's
word. 11 Polemic permeates Julian's entire enterprise; his emphasis
on sex, for example, is polemically determined by the refusal to
discuss it directly in Franco's Spain; the syntax and neologisms are
polemic in their deliberate violation of Spanish convention.
It should be evident, then, that structurally it would be im­
possible for Julian to succeed in doing away with Alvaro and sur­
viving free of him in a new identity. The self is always constituted
by contrast with the other; one acquires one's own word by strug­
gling with the discourse of another, incorporating some of it, rejec­
ting other parts. And the subversive above all is never self­
sufficient, but always defined in terms of its opposition to the of­
ficial. Julian without Alvaro would have no meaning, for Alvaro,
as we have seen, determines his every word. The parodied word and
the parodying word depend on one another; neither can win the
struggle. It can further be shown that the narrator's very enterprise,
that of destroying once and for all the myths of Spain and the naive
belief in language on which they rested, must necessarily undermine
his efforts to attain inner unity.
The character is engaged in trying to free himself from the
tyranny of the Spanish codes and world-view by making them ex­
plicit and ridiculing them until they lose their authority over him.
The first step in doing this it to objectify the styles of the official
texts, to typify them. Bakhtin tells us that to typify a style, to
transcribe it so that its stylized nature is evident, is already to deny
it as sufficient in itself to describe the world. But the process of ob­
jectifying parts of oneself, of isolating them and making them
«other,» once begun, is interminable. As the narrator begins to
create characters to get a better look at the components of his per­
sonality, he detaches them from the self that contemplates them.

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90 ALEC, 8 (1983)

(Irony, if present, simply intensifies the distancing process). As he

strips off the many textual masks he uses, he himself is left with no
attributes which belong to him so essentially that they cannot be
objectified. 13 The tragedy for the narrator is that this process of ob­
jectifying codes and masks into «otherness» applies as much to
Julian as to Alvaro, so that the narrator will never be able to call
Julian «yo.»
Ugarte has accurately pinpointed two contradictory tendencies
in RCDJ. On the other hand, there is the structuralist concept of in­
tertextuality, the text begins a combination of «already-written»,
often anonymous texts. On the other hand, the character is search­
ing for his identity, and is allying himself not with anonymous
texts, but with specific personalities; he polemicizes not against
anonymous, origin-lost codes, but against specific promoters of the
Spanish text. 11 The protagonist's quest may be seen as a dramatiza­
tion of this dilemma. Through excessive self-reflexivity, through
the agonizing process of searching for one's authentic self, man has
found his own dissolution into a pastiche of already-written texts.
The character does not simply accept this, however, but struggles to
confer a new meaning, somehow «his own,» on the texts which
compose him. But since he does not have his own personal style
with which to do this, he can only imprint new meaning on the old
texts by juxtaposing contradictory texts which mutually illuminate
one another, that is, by causing a war among the elements of his
self. Tragically, the individual retains his romantic role as source of
meaning only at the cost of his own self-destruction.
This dilemma of finding oneself confined to the already­
written is not simply a conflict of «Alvaro-texts» with «Julian­
texts.» First of all, there are texts which can serve either party,
depending on the narrator's intention. The «text» of the consumer
society, which the narrator considers part of the sell-out of official
Spain, can either represent the Regime, or can be used by Julian as
a means of discrediting, for example, the religious text of the
Regime. Thus a simple division into Alvaro and Julian will not suf­
fice to cover the texts found in the narrator's psyche. But as well,
the sequences of RCDJ depend, as many critics have shown, im­
plicitly or explicitly on other texts-the Aeneid, Greek mythology,
Ulysses, the Bible, One Thousand and One Nights, Don Quijote,
and, last but not least, Senas de identidad. This makes it impossible
for the narrator to create a completely «original» sequence for his
alter-ego characters. H He, like his creation don Alvaro Peranzules,

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STEPHANIE SIEBURTH 91

is a mosaic of the already-written, and his attempt to «comenzar a

cero» is doomed to failure. (The crucial difference between the nar­
rator and don Alvaro is that the latter is limited to repeating the
already-written, while the former can at least give it a creative
reworking).
The narrator's destructive self-reflexivity does not stop with
his realization that he is made up of other texts. The work is, as
many critics have noted, composed of segments which repeat with
variations, which rewrite the previous versions and engage in
dialogue with them. The narrator, constantly examining and revis­
ing his own creation, casts doubt on his own discourse by showing
its ephemeral nature, its inability ever to have the last word on
anything. And the fact that he writes in Castilian, despite grave
reservations on its adequacy as a medium, contributes to making
the whole venture still more equivocal.
The narrator is attempting a «deconstruction» of Spain and its
favored texts. By ironically fusing disparate figures such as
Manolete and Seneca, he ridicules the myth of an eternal,
homogeneous Spanish essence. By proving the dependence on
Arabisms, and depicting the latent sensuality of the Spaniards, he
reveals the presence of Moorish elements beneath the all-too­
Christian surface, elements repressed in official histories of Spain.
Julian's mission is to capitalize on these elements to topple the
Catholic hierarchy and create a Moslem Spain.
But even as he reveals the Catholic, Franquist «text» to be a
mythical construct, he casts doubt on the claim of any language to
represent truth. By showing these texts which have passed for truth
as ideologically saturated, he reveals that Julian's language is also
full of ideology and polemical intention. By parodying so many dif­
ferent words, he precludes the possibility of a «direct» word, a
word which only refers to its object. There can be no «straightfor­
ward» language (no histoire), in Benveniste's terms. 16 This has two
effects. One is that it becomes impossible for the narrator to suc­
cessfully create another myth to replace the Spanish one. The myth
of Julian cannot succeed, for language has revealed its contingent
and ideological nature, and no word can be fully believed. Thus the
narrator can never completely identify with Julian. The latter is ef­
ficient as a skeptical shatterer of myths, but allows no erecting of
new
· ones.
The second effect is that the narrator, as the final sign of his
lack of identity, lacks his own word. Our character is so throughly

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92 ALEC, 8 (1983)

dialogized that if he were to encounter something straighforward

about himself he would immediately question it. Bakhtin has stress­
ed the importance of acquiring one's own word in the formation of
an identity.11 But this narrator, in his constant play with the
languages of others, uses no word that is not stylized. Bakhtin has
pointed out that in many novels which exploit the dialogic play of
languages the direct authorial word is absent altogether; the author
remains simply a presence behind other «texts,» adding a new voice
to their words. 11 But in the case of RCDJ, the absence of a direct
word occurs on the level of the character, and bears witness to his
irrevocably divided, other-ridden nature.

NOTES

1. See, for example: Robert C. Spires, «La autodestrucci6n creativa en Reivin­

dicacion de/ conde don Julian,» Journal of Spanish Studies: Twentieth Century, 4
(1975), 191-202; Jose Ortega, Alienacion y agresion en Seflas de identidad y Reivin­
dicacion de/ conde don Julian (New York: Eliseo Torres, 1972); and Hector
Romero, «Los mitos de la Espal!.a sagrada en Reivindicacion de/ conde don Julian,»
1 (1973), 169-85.
2. The protagonist's incessant fabulation may be seen as a means to ward off con­
sciousness of his own nothingness (he refers to himself as Scheherazade, who ward­
ed off death by storytelling). He can be seen as belonging to a tradition of characters
in self-conscious novels who, aware of the meaninglessness of their own lives, at­
tempt to make themselves into texts to give themselves reality. Robert Alter sees the
modern self-conscious novel as a desperate attempt to give coherence, through the
play of consciousness, to a reality crumbling into nothingness. Alter's comment on
Ulysses will hold as well to describe the enterprise of the narrator of RCDJ: «'No­
one is anything unless artful consciousness makes him something, and even that
identity is a moment of coherence suspended between twin eternities of dissolution»
(Robert Alter, Partial Magic [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1975/, p. 144).
3. Spires rightly points out that the 'yo' at the beginning of the text is intended to
affirms the narrator's separation from Spain, but the protagonist realized that Spain
is also inside him, and later addresses himself as «tu» (Spires, p. 193).
4. Juan Goytisolo, Reivindicacion de/ conde don Julian (Barcelona: Seix Barra!,
1976), p. 230. All page references are to this edition.
5. Spires, p. 192.
6. Linda Gould Levine, Juan Goytiso/o: La destruccion creadora (Mexico: Joa-

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STEPHANIE SIEBURTH 93

quin Mortiz, 1976), pp. 248ff. Michael Ugarte, Trilogy of Treason: An lntertextual
Study of Juan Goytisolo (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press,
1982), pp. 148-49.
7. Ugarte, p. 31.
8. Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1977), p. 120.
9. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Positions, translated and annotated by
Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 19ff.
10. Mikhail Bakhtin, «Discourse in the Novel,» in The Dialogic Imagination, ed.
Michael Holquist, translated by Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin and
London: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 259-422. See especially pp. 288ff.
11. Levine, p. 97.
12. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, translated by R. W.
Rotsel (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1973), chapter 5.
13. Paul Ilie, Unamuno: An Existential View of Self and Society (Madison: The
University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), pp. 20ff.
14. Ugarte, p. 50.
15. See, besides Levine and Ugarte, Genaro J. Perez, Formalist Elements in the
Novels of Juan Goytisolo (Madrid: Jose Porrua Turanzas, 1979), pp. 161ff.
16. Emile Benveniste, Problemes de linguistique generate (Paris: Gallimard, 1966),
p. 238.
17. Bakhtin, «Discourse in the Novel,» pp. 342-48.
18. «Discourse in the Novel,» p. 309.

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