Juan Goytisolo: The Author as Dissident (review)

In the light of Goytisolo's statement that he will write no more novels, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes addresses in his autobiographical and testimonial writings, essays, journalism, literary criticism and fiction the deployment of shifting strategies to explore tensions between authorial abnegation and authorial responsibility between the publication of Señas de identidad (1966) and Telón de boca (2003). Three sections keep the major themes of 'The Dissident Voice', 'Identity and Alterity' and 'Divergences and Convergences' clear, despite the variety of material examined, while 'Authorship and Dissidence Revisited' finally reveals the author no longer in the position of Derridean 'fixity of the authorial signature' but rather 'dramatizing a continual renewal through reading and re-reading'. The focus on Goytisolo's ceaseless search for an ethical stance beyond mere dissidence begins with a discussion of concepts of authorship from the Renaissance to Nietzsche, in which Ribeiro prioritizes Charles Taylor's emphasis on the need to recognize Good as the basis for ordinary life. Autobiography is seen as a means by which Goytisolo rejects inauthenticity, while critical 'essays', whose incompleteness Teodor Adorno identifies as a mark of subversive thought, allow Goytisolo to foreground literary and historic kindred spirits who serve to 'canonize dissidence'. Discussion of Juan sin tierra alongside Makbara puts forward textual models which depict a further shift from the notion of dissident author within the canon he has constructed to one where diverse voices overlap, creating competing oral narratives. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Ribeiro contrasts the 'rhyzomatic lack of structure to which Goytisolo aspires' with the '"tree" of official culture', which rises from a single root. She then shows precise geographical locations giving way first to 'textual nomadism' and to 'a new spatial metaphor, that of the market square in Marrakesh': the site of de-centred oral storytelling.

What follows is arguably the most uneven but exciting bringing together of less well-known texts to present the author first as voyeur or critical eye turned on contemporary society (Paisajes después de la batalla) and then, more problematically, as mystic. Ribeiro contends that Goytisolo's identification with mystics from the Christian and Islamic traditions allows 'a celebration of dissidence, pluralism, and intercultural dialogue'. Sensitive analysis of the 'pájaro solitario' image within these traditions - drawing primarily on López-Baralt but also Ricoeur and Merleau-Ponty - is followed by what has already proved to be a controversial representation of AIDS as potentially a 'don sagrado' in the context of mystic suffering. Ribeiro judges 'the ethical import' of Las virtudes del pájaro solitario 'ultimately questionable in humanitarian terms', yet perhaps the author's defiance of taboos would dare to question even this. However, when Ribeiro discusses Goytisolo's similarly problematic 'association of homosexual intercourse and violent, innovative, rebellious writing - "seminal" in both senses of the word' when viewing 'The Author as intertextual critic', she argues that 'the parodic tone of Carajicomedia effects a retrospective questioning of the initial depiction of homosexual sex as violent' and concludes that 'the different sets of intertext - those from Goytisolo's own works and those written by other writers - are drawn into a dialogue in which each group influences the way in which the other is interpreted', so that Goytisolo himself problematizes his earlier writings and offers new perspectives on his own work. There is evidence of haste in the production of this ambitious overview - a distracting number of typos and much of the discussion in footnotes. However, it opens many ways into the vast and varied opus of a writer whose incursions into popular media and collections of articles will perhaps make more accessible, and therefore potencially more explosive than his novels, the 'acción energética, transformativa de la palabra escrita'.