Thanks to Borges and Foucault

Epigrams and Apocrypha: Goytisolo’s Trial Before his Countrymen.

There is something about La Reinvindicación that pulls all of us into its machinations. It is 1970 and Goytisolo obviously has a reason not to be living in Spain. Goytisolo is an analytical individual with reason to remember, forget, to fear and profess, to be anxious, to keep things to himself, but in other instances, to reveal. The writer is one identity in a sea of other beings, past and present, high and low, layered one on top of the other. Who is Goytisolo and who does he want to let on that he is?

What does he mean about faith and treason? Could it be that they are distinguishable from one another. What is exile, if indeed it does exist? Is it a projection? A place inside or out of lines and intersections: geopolitical borders? Though the stream-of-consciousness writing style is perhaps the only enduring stylistic feature of La Reinvindicación, there is something out there in Goytisolo’s cosmic space that speaks for itself. There is no accountability to anyone: not the text, not a country or regime, nor even to himself: a real physical being. What are any of us who think and breath, but the sum total of what we eat and breathe? What are we collectively, other than the sum of our arms, legs, thoughts, and perhaps wounded, failing appendages?

To dive into La Reinvindicación, as a work of fiction is to sever the syllogisms, logic and formulae that exert their force behind us (now merely a projectile) and watch us pinball and funnel down through the maze. To bring meaning to his text is to release oneself from meaning-making, the rigid structure that says why is letter x in sequence abc, and why is that one goat on top of the hill? We, the readers are also the writers. To scour the sources and find the origin of every single one of the author’s referents would be to incite madness. The unlettered reader in his insatiable thirst to know why this one is here and that one is there, thinking that in doing so he is becoming lettered is accomplishing nothing more than inwardly thrusting himself into a state of denial.

This is precisely what René Girard is describing in his chapter “Master and Slave,” a pseudo-masochistic reading of text and intertext within Miguel de Cervantes seminal work Don Quijote. His exploration of interpersonal relationships within the text expose the vanity of those who wish to distinguish themselves from the rest for their firm grasp of an abnormal otherness (as a psychological disorder or otherwise). He centers his focus around the figure of the cultured bachiller Carrasco who, contriving to dupe Don Quijote and his sidekick Sancho, succumbs to seduction occupying a limbo like space of futility. If cultural meaning-making is the barometer that a higher court uses to measure the success of an individual to his relative society, and by extension, posterity, Carrasco proves himself to be completely inept. More inept than Sancho Panza, for example, who does in fact succeed in governing momentarily an insular geographic space. He creates, he dictates and he delegates, however short lived this period of his life might be.

What then is it that I, or any other individual for that matter, have to do to distinguish myself from the rest? It is symptomatic of culture as a sociological mechanism. Back to the analogy of the goat above (not the scapegoat of Girard, but a pedigree Alpha male goat), I ask myself (as I am confident that most everyone does), what do I do to reach that apogee of understanding. What do I do to selectively graze, metabolize, synthesize and enrich my body and soul, and to make this shiny coat visible to those around me? What is the recipe of success to acquire, accrue, and ultimately bequeath cultural and economical capital to the other goats spread out below me (both temporally and physically)? What are the chances? Pierre Bourdieu has an answer for all of this in his book Distinctions: the case studies, statistics, names of well-to-do families, educational systems, neighborhoods and infrastructure. To show how this one became a violin virtuoso and that one deteriorated into the role of a footsoldier for an organized crime organization. With the same tact and precision that a geologist would account for what the Himalayan mountain range is and why, why it is always shifting year by year a few meters to the left or right. Bourdieu inserts his chisel into the exact line that separates the bourgeois strata from the petit-bourgeois and so on.

However, my approach to maximizing the cultural profit margin in La Reinvindicación differs on many fundamental levels from Bourdieu’s efforts to catalogue and diffuse even the most minor of details. In my reading of Goytisolo’s second volume of the trilogy of treason. For me, it is less about the names, places, insects and secret agents that orbit around the reader-writer who enters into its cycle. It is the uncertainties or the many times unpleasant affect that it triggers within my own subjectivity and asking why? It is not about tracing back the intertextual referents to their origin, but about letting go and giving way to where they lead. My reading of La Reinvindicación affords space for these referents to accrue feeling, not meaning, and finally stop. To the reader of my reading, this last part might not initially make much sense; however, if I am successful he or she might become aware of its projection on the other side (that is to say, his or her side).
On the Side of Capital Distinction:

Virginia Woolf on pausing before making decisions, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” (Mrs. Dalloway).

On the Side of Capital Regulation:
Agent 007, recalling a previous conversation with operative Mr. M, states: “He said that if I was going to get involved in the diamond business I ought to try and understand what was really at the bottom of it all. Not just the billions of money involved, or the value of diamonds as a hedge against inflation, or the sentimental fashions in diamonds for engagement rings and so forth. He said, one must understand the passion for diamonds. So he just showed me what I’m showing you” (Ian Flemming, Diamonds are Forever).

Interchangeability of Stage and Stimulus:
James Fennimore Cooper on semiotics and the divided self: “He draws metaphors from the clouds, the seasons, the birds, the beasts, and the vegetable world. In this, perhaps, he does no more than any other energetic and imaginative race would do, being compelled to set bounds to fancy by experience; but the North American Indian clothes his ideas in a dress which is different from that of the African, and is Oriental in itself. His language has the richness and sententious fullness of the Chinese. He will express a phrase in a word, and he will qualify the meaning of an entire sentence by a syllable; he will even convey different significations by the simplest inflections of the voice” (“Introduction,” The last of the Mohicans).

Narcissistic Knee-jerk Reflex and the Will of the Phantom Limb:
Plainte de la bergére au publique: “Votre plus haut savoir n’est que pure chimère,/ Vains et peu sages médecins;/ Vous ne pouvez guérir par vos grands mots latins/ La douleur qui me déspère:/ Votre plus haut savoir n’est que pure chimère.” (Molière, La maladie imaginaire).

Porcelain and Purpose:
Frank O’Hara to the Film Industry in Crisis: “Not you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals with your studious incursions toward the pomposity of ants, nor you, experimental theatre in which Emotive Fruition is wedding Poetic Insight perpetually, nor you, promenading Grand Opera, obvious as an ear (though you are close to my heart), but you, Motion Picture Industry, it’s you I love!” (Meditations in an Emergency).

Terminal Velocity:
Camus: Le dernier jour d’un condamné; Apocrypha: the letter X, “Ainsi, avec les heures de sommeil, les souvenirs, la lecture de mon fait divers et l’alternance de al lumière et de l’ombre, le temps a passé. J’avais bien lu qu’on finissait par perdre la notion du temps en prison. Mais cela n’avait pas beaucoup de sens pour moi. Je n’avais pas compris à quel point lês jours pouvaient être à la fois longs et courts. Longs à vivre sans doute, mais tellement distendus qu’ils finissaient par déborder lês uns sur les autres. Ils y perdaeint leur nom. Les mots hier ou demain étaient les seuls qui gardaient un sens pour moi” (L’Étranger, II-2).

The Production of Plot:
Christopher Cade on pedigree and purging: “Something about the tribe of Israel. The wandering in the desert and learning the principles of patience. Waiting without wanting. Wanting to dislodge oneself from any sense of purpose from oneself and be part of something bigger… a collective body of arms and legs and burning hearts…something bigger…something that walks forward without second-guessing that leaves a footprint bigger than insular I can. Walking without noticing how far---how great the expanse behind---and how far forward. No, it is not a question of must. Neither is it a discernable experience. There is nothing that says to us that this day is today and it is put in a category outside of all of the rest. It is day day day, and it is also not a question of remembering or forgetting. We are one with the land and there is sweat and dust on our brows. Some have more wrinkled skin than others. And above all, we have a designated place for antonement, a subjective wilderness named Azazel” (Cloud-seeding, mining, and letting go of the Western frontier).

Authorship and Authenticity:
Nina opens before her a vacuum of articulation: “(forcing a smile) You look frightened Charlie. Do I seem queer? It´s because I’ve suddenly seen the lies in the sounds called words. You know—grief, sorrow, love, father---those sounds our lips make and our hands write. You ought to know what I mean. You work with them. Have you written another novel lately? But, stop to think, you’re just the one who couldn’t know what I mean. With you the lies have become the only truthful things. And I suppose that’s the logical conclusion to the whole evasive mess, isn’t it? Do you understand me Charlie? Say life. L-i-i-f-e! You see! Life is just a long drawn out lie with sniffling sigh at the end! (she laughs)” (Eugene O’Neil, The Interlude).

Closure:
Jacques Derrida (still somewhat veiled in response to Hélène Cixous): “Before the verdict, my verdict, before, befalling me, it drags me down with it in its fall, before it´s too late, stop writing. Full stop, period” (Veils).

On the side of Practicality:
When I was growing up in San Diego, California my Dad had an interesting way of demarcating the limit between our yard and that of the neighbors. He wanted privacy for him and his family, but he had an aversion for chain-link fences. What did he do? He imported a unique strand of Eucalyptus trees from what is now Myanmar (myrtaceae frigilis cans-anagnorisis) that would reach heights in excess of forty feet within a span of two years, effectively spreading their desiccated foliage so far outward that they resembled a broad Torrey Pine (pinus torreyana californiense) that are in fact native to the region. Certainly there is a lot to be said about the postmodern city, especially in the case of the southland in California. Nevertheless, people have always been about quick fixes, shopping lists and propriety. One by one lanes are added to the interstates only to exceed capacity and bottleneck again. There is something liberating about owning one’s vehicle. The value of impulse over things like the eco-system. I want and I get. If the locusts are eating away at my fields of wheat, by all means I’ll introduce a menace like the Colorado River Toad (bufo alvarius) to send them swiftly back to their creator.

Grafting to bear a superior fruit:
The Good and the Bad of Richardson’s Approach to Goytisolo and Spatial Discourse.
I decided to stick with the Good and a Bad, although I might have included an “Ugly” if I wanted to offer even more dimension to this discussion. The “Ugly” would have to be slightly sinister, highly exotic and overtly haphazard to bring the spaghetti western and Sergio Leone into the mix. Nevertheless, the Italian who came to love the mythic rough-riding, North American landscape of the Wild West, but instead trans-culturated the whole project back to Europe, putting voiced-over Italian actors into place within a Spanish (?) cinematographic geography, seems to resonate with Richardson’s approach. I will say that I embrace The Ends of Space for not holding back, sticking to his guns and delivering quite a tour-de-force of performative, spatial, and even referential (sign-signifier) bibliography.

Who is the audience of this largely theatrical representation of Goytisolo’s exilic pleasures? I would say that Richardson is very aware of the challenges that a hispanist faces in reaching a broader audience. Despite the fact that Richardson arguably devotes a little too much of his analysis to anglo-themed intertexts, such as the Little Red Riding Hood and Ian Fleming’s 007 secret agent, it is his world to add in his own personal signature to. Interestingly, these two fictional constructions, however inane or boldly womanizing they might have been in their respective contexts, plunged themselves headlong into unarguably daunting spatial territory. I cannot question Richardson for identifying his target audience, and doing everything he could to spice things up.

That being said, I also identified my own susceptibility to the way Richardson is seduced to such a wide gamut of spatial theorists. In one moment he wants “space” and “place” in the Yi-Fu Tuan framing of things to be interchangeable. Don’t both intersect one another in the metaphysical conception of the human anatomy? He correctly identifies the trialectic of Lefebvre, as delineated in the introductory chapter of The Production of Space: lived, conceived and perceived space. Notwithstanding, the all-encompassing historical odyssey, on which the Marxist philosopher from Bordeaux embarks, is left conveniently aside. Furthermore, Richardson seems to string together the three categorical concepts together in a similar vein to Sancho Panza’s proverbs. When involving Lefebvre in a discussion of a literary text of any sort, the differentiality must be clearly identified. If Álvaro unbridled ruminations are conceived space in the fictive sense, then they cannot very well be emblematic of “spatial practice” (drawn from Michael de Certeau, but more appropriately in this context “lived space” a la Lefebvre).

I would like to take this opportunity to remind the reader that my poking fingers into Richardson’s creative re-configuration of the literary and theoretical threads that are available to him, by no means suggests that I refuse to implicate myself of the same deficiencies. On the contrary, I am making a mental note of the good and a bad here, so that when I set out on a similar project to this, I can avoid the pitfall in which the merit of my analysis has oft been buried. Returning more specifically to the good, I would like to laud Richardson for his open-mindedness in weighing all the material that is available to him interdisciplinary. As hyperbolic as it might be from time to time, I would agree that it is indeed symphonic. It is a pleasure to read and is completely readable, regardless of the previous background of any individual who picks it up. Although he reports linking metaphorically the main character Álvaro to the following description, I see it differently. This is a moment of epiphany, and interestingly the collective use of we brings us all into the fold: “We recall that the final annihilation of the body, though a terrific wedding of the material and the ideological, was ultimately the culmination of personal conceptualizations of space” (25). In closing, I will suggest the following to myself for the future: a selfless and methodological annihilation of [my] body when overtly recognizing the presence of these theoretical concepts within the confines of my analysis.

The Verdict:
“Reinforcement of the community is identical with the strengthening of socio-religious transcendence. But such reinforcement demands a flawless scapegoat mechanism, completely unanimous agreement that the victim is guilty” (René Girard, “A Totalitarian Trial,” The Scapegoat, 111).

Primary Work:
Goytisolo, Juan. Reinvindicación del conde don Julián. México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1970.

Secondary Sources:
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, Mass. :
Harvard University Press, 1984
Girard, René. Deceit, Desire and the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966.
----------------The Scapegoat. Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell Publishing: Malden, Ma; 1991.
Richardson, Nathan. The Ends of Spanish Space in Juan Goytisolo's Reivindicacion del
Conde don Julian. Letras Hispanas. Fall 2008; 5 (2): 15-28 (Electronic).
Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies. Verso Press: London, New York; 1989.
Sources of Mention; Relevant to the Research Process:
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press: Boston; 1969
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley : University of California Press,
1988
McAuley, Gay. Space in Performance. University of Michigan Press: Anne Arbor; 2000.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis; 1977.

***Extended Bibliography, in addition to an exhaustive definition and etymological analysis of
the word “kitsch”---

--- Available Upon Request.

In deference to the constructs of filtering and editing, I confess sins of mine that have already happened or will happen in the future. Remote to me is a geography I authored for a specific purpose: it is the land of atonement and the rest is between me and the wind (Cade, as himself).