From: Chris Jones <ccjones-AT-turboweb.net.au>
Subject: An Interview with Juan Goytisolo
Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2001 15:38:19 +1100


[Excerpts:]

By Julio Ortega, trans. Joseph Schraibman

JG: The narrator in Count Julian has renounced the specific space which 
comprises his homeland (landscape, earth), but he has not renounced its 
discourse (literary, ideological, etc.) in which his actual identity resides, 
his historical evolution. With the total freedom which comes from possessing 
absolutely nothing and having nothing to lose, he wanders like a nomad 
through eight centuries of Spanish culture, stopping at random wherever his 
own inspiration dictates, and he picks his intellectual sustenance wherever 
he pleases. ...


JG: All creative work is indissolubly linked to the exercise of a critical 
faculty. Count Julian is, simultaneously, a work of fiction and a work of 
criticism, which defies deliberately a tyrannical conception of genre. The 
old-fashioned novel (with "round" characters developed psychologically, with 
its verisimilitude and its "realism," etc.) no longer interests me, and I 
don't think that I will write such any more (which does not mean that I 
renounce those I published earlier). The only kind of literature which 
interests me at the moment is that which lies outside the labels of "novel," 
"essay," "poem," etc. ...

A writer who is unaware of the movements in poetics and linguistics seems to 
me an anachronism in today's world. The writer cannot abandon himself simply 
to inspiration, and feign innocence vis a vis language, because language is 
never innocent.

JO: Marks of Identity and Count Julian are independent works of fiction, but 
at the same time they belong to a process which not only presupposes a 
"destruction" of your previous narrative, but also unleashes its own system, 
a system which seeks to destroy the novel as a genre. Where do you think that 
this process might lead you to?

JG: I have for some time now been working on the continuation of Count 
Julian, and, with it, will close the cycle which I began with Marks of 
Identity. I am not dealing, of course, with a continuation of a novelistic 
world of characters, events, actions, and environments, but rather with a 
discourse which in each of the three books operates on different linguistic 
strata. In Marks of Identity I was searching for the integration of different 
narrative techniques within the mold of an eclectic, artistic conception in 
the sense which Broch gives to this term. In Count Julian I tried to create a 
circular work, unified and hermetic, with no loose ends. In the book which I 
am now writing, I aspire to create an open work, radiating in various 
directions as with the slats of a fan, and in which the centrifugal force of 
the various narrative lines will become unified through the use of discursive 
language. Alvaro, the character who used to speak in Marks of Identity, 
became metamorphosed later into the mythic Don Julian and now haunts time and 
space as would a ghost, like the Wandering Jew. Spain no longer plays an 
important role as in Count Julian. The phantasmagoric discourse which the 
text produces no longer has a homeland in a material or spiritual sense. In 
Count Julian, the narrator had renounced Spain, but not yet its history or 
culture. In this new novel, the process of cultural pruning continues; 
sometimes it is embodied in the person of a character who failed in his 
aspirations; other times it adopts the voice of a priest who believes in 
slavery, or it transforms itself into King Kong or Lawrence of Arabia. The 
essential meaning of the work takes no barriers into account: it jumps from 
Cuba to Istanbul, from New York to the Sahara Desert, from the past to the 
present, and then to the future or to Utopia. Everything treated is 
unbelievable or strange but, as Sklovski saw very well, the more remote the 
possibility was of justifying a moral or artistic position "the greater the 
pleasure that the writer takes in developing his examples." The creator of 
"discourse" changes his voice, and in that manner changes his skin, as easily 
as a fregoli; he is a "mere linguistic character," an authentic man without a 
country, and that is why I have entitled the novel "Juan sin tierra." (I must 
explain that when Blanco White seeks refuge in London, and begins the 
publication of his political chronicles in El Espanol, he does it with the 
pseudonym of Juan sin tierra.) As you might suppose, I use the label "novel" 
only out of convenience because, as I have said earlier, the only kind of 
writing that interests me lies outside canonized literary forms. My own 
praxis (and not just my critical reflection) has shown me the wisdom of 
Barthes's suggestion, in Le degre zero de l'ecriture, that every writer can 
potentially add to the process of literature. And it is true that my own 
birth as a writer coincides in fact with the destruction of my literature, of 
the literary molds which in routine fashion I took from tradition. ....

If young writers were to ask me for advice, the first one that I would give 
them is that they renounce living from their writings, that they search for 
parallel activities that might earn them a living. In large measure it is 
these economic reasons which are responsible for that monstrously 
irresponsible and repetitious mass of writing which floods the publishing 
market, converting writers into hens, some of whom lay eggs at an amazing 
speed. The writer, too, ought to have the right to keep quiet and not to 
produce. In this sense the silence of Sanchez Ferlosio after publishing his 
extraordinary work, El Jarama, ought to be a lesson to all. His is a much 
more significant work than the entire "realistic-objective" production of 
those novelists whose works we have read for a long time. I hope that when 
the time comes when I have nothing to say or do not feel like saying 
anything, I will have the good sense and guts to keep quiet. ....

In "Juan sin tierra," the problem is a different one. There is no unity of 
time, nor of place, nor of character, even though at the beginning of the 
text this might not seem to be the case. The reader needs to penetrate the 
novel as if it were a dream, confronting a slippery and ever changing world, 
one which appears and disappears incessantly before his eyes. The personal 
pronouns which appear in the narrative do not express an individual voice, 
but rather all voices or none at all.

This interview originally appeared in English in Texas Quarterly (Spring 1975)

>From "The Review of Contemporary Fiction," Summer 1984, 4.2

http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_goytisolo.html