If you think of Spanish writing in pseudo-primitivistic Hemingwayan
terms, the Parisian exile Goytisolo comes as a shock. Along with
his co-linguist, the European cause celebre Jose Lezama Lima
(Paradiso, KR, p. 138), Goytisolo belongs firmly to the continental
tradition of decadence. Like Baudelaire railing against the
Belgians, he hates the bourgeois spirit; like Mishima slicing at
the Japanese upper class, he detests all impure pretensions to love
of the past. Goytisolo's hero, Count Julian, descends from an
apocryphal Moslem-fighter whose "rage was boundless. . . his mad.
ness precocious." Julian wanders the streets of Tangier with
nothing so crass as a plot to distract from his ravings against his
"Christian gentleman" compatriots across the Mediterranean. Like
Lezama Lima, his prose exudes what Goytisolo calls "baroque,
hyperbolic cruelty." Goytisolo has a maniacal self-irony and
turbulent, over-stitched surrealist streak that make Celine look
like Sir Walter Scott. His themes, apart from the decay of the
Iberian soul and the lost, vast stillness of Spain, are erotic and
sadistic - Lezama Lima's serpent-penis reappears; the genitalia of
women are even more elaborately "hideous, poisonous, nauseating";
and the rape and torture of children more extensive, by way of a
Red Riding Hood fantasy. The style reflects a Lezamaesque obsession
with the externals of physical science and the internals of
derangement. The same imagery abounds of "vertebrate," "carapace,"
and "crustacean," along with swollen, excrescent, viperous and
flagellant metaphors, and a lot of sardonic reflections on language
itself. The parallels with writers like Lezama Lima are important:
something is going on with these haut roman Spaniards! It demands
clinical attention - Goytisolo, after all, is tagged as Spain's
greatest living novelist. (Kirkus Reviews)
Legend has it that Count Julian opened the gates of Spain to the
Moorish invaders and introduced eight hundred years of Islamic
influence. The narrator dreams of another invasion of his
fatherland. Destruction will be total - myths central to the
Hispanic psyche will crumble: the myth of the Christian knight
always ready to do battle to defend the faith, the myth of the
macho male and its inverse the virgin female, and the myth of the
heroic Spanish personality forged in the rout of Islam. The hatred
of Spain is intense but it is a hatred that recognizes the debt the
exile owes to his homeland.
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