Juan Goytisolo
From Philosopedia
Juan Goytisolo (5 January 1931 - )
Arguably Spain's foremost novelist at the start of the 21st century, Goytisolo (pronounced goy-tee-SO-lo) was born in Barcelona but has chosen to live for a time in Paris but mostly in Marrakesh, Morocco.
He grew up as part of Catalonia's ultraconservative haute bourgeoisie. Goytisolo's paternal great-grandfather made his fortune from Cuban sugar. His father had been imprisoned by the Republican government during the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War, and his Catalan mother was killed during one of the first Francoist air raids in 1938. Not until he was a teenager did he realize, for his father had withheld the information, that Franco was responsible for his mother's death. "I am the son not of my mother," he lamented because she was killed when he was seven, "but of the civil war, its messianism, its hatred."
In college he joined the ani-Franco resistance. After receiving a law degree, he turned to writing and teaching. He has been a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego (1969); Boston University (1970); McGill (1972); and New York University (1973-4).
Although at first he supported the revolutionary movements in Cuba, Indochina, and Algeria, he found that freedom-loving guerrillas, once in power, disappointingly brought about dictatorships and secret police. He was one of the first to accuse Fidel Castro of having turned "that ex-paradise of a Caribbean island . . . into a silent and lugubrious floating concentration camp."
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Eberstadt Interview
Goytisolo, as described by Fernanda Eberstadt in the New York Times Magazine (16 April 2006),
- has become a voice for what the West would rather forget about Islam.
He told her, "I am against all fundamentalisms." He likes the popular Islamic traditions of North Africa and Turkey, the rich cultural and religious heritage of Arab civilizaton, but is repelled by the puritanical strains of political Islam, leading him to observe, "The Muslim world needs to do an autocriticism, to take what's good from other cultures, prepare the way for social and economic change, and not merely recall the extinct glories of Al Andalus," the last word a reference to Spain under Moorish rule.
When the French banned students from wearing head scarves in schools, he differed with leftists and libertarians, saying religion belongs strictly at home.
Eberstadt tells of his critiques of the differences between East and West, the differences between Arab and European temperaments, and the differences which have become irreconcilable that were caused by centuries of misunderstanding. She described him as a man - a homosexual who lives with two brothers and the three children of the brotheers - who writes about homosexuality, who has an unfashionable sense of history, and who admires Islamic traditions while finding fault with Spain's culture, its ideology, and its language. He told her,
- I don't like ghettos. For me, sexuality is something fluid. I am against all we's.
Goytisolo admits his taste for working-class Arab men. He has a scholarly interest in Sufi theology He finds pernicious the influence on American foreign policy of Christian evangelism. In the 1990s, according to Eberstadt,
- Goytisolo warns repeatedly that radical Islam is mobilizing a generation that has been impoverished and disenfranchised by the disastrous experiments of Arab governments with nationalism and secular socialism, which merely masked the military dictatorship that underpinned them. As for the more theocratic regimes like Saudi Arabia's, Goytisolo compares it with Spain's in the centuries following Ferdinand and Isabella's Reconquista: a society characterized by "intransigent homogeneity" and "autistic self-absorption and inquisitiorial vigilance," whose New World gold (read oil wealth) is spent not on development or reform but on hounding dissidents and quarantining the nobility and clergy in ever more grandose palaces.
In the 1950s he had married Monique Lange, a novelist who worked for the French publisher Gallimard, and he told one interviewer that their relationship was romantic, not like homosexual sex where "there is friendship but no love." She died in 1996.
Goytisolo in 1963 met an Algerian laborer, Mohamed, and their relationship led to his becoming a scribe who wrote letters for people who needed money to be sent to them or needed help in responding to matters relating to complaints from authorities, exchanging this for sex and Arabic lessons. Lange reluctantly agreed with the open relationship, which pleased him because he didn't want an exclusively gay identity. From his viewpoint, "I sign petitions for gay rights, but it is not my thing. In countries I love, there is no necessity. I have relationships with many men who are married. I have very good relations with ther wives, their children. There are many frontiers in the world. I don't want to put frontiers in my private life."
With the 2004 victory of José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero as Spain's President, Goytisolo is pleased that Spanish troops were withdrawn from Iraq, that negotiations to end the nearly 40-year war with the Basque separatists had commenced, and that Spain had legalized gay marriage. The victory, Goytisolo expects, will lead to a "new Spain," multicultural, nonmilitarist, and sexually diverse.
Goytisolo shares his apartment with two Moroccan brothers, Abdelhadi and Abdelhak Darouzi - who are his cook, driver, and companions - and three of their children, said to be heirs to his estate.
He finds that there are two worlds: one of public storytellers and open-air cinemas, a world born out of an extreme poverty; and the other, a world of development, free elections, and consumerism. Unfortunately, he finds, the gap between the two is dangerously widening.
Critiques
• "What distinguishes Goytisolo from other writers in the ever-widening international confraternity of young protesters is the clinical objectivity of his vision and the vigorous control he displays over his powerful, driving style. His works -- short, violent and frightening -- are like pages torn out of the book of experience." - Helen Cantarella, The New York Times Book Review (18 March 1962)
• "(T)he foremost novelist of contemporary Spain" - Carlos Fuentes, The New York Times Book Review (5 May 1974)
• "The quality of Goytisolo's translations has varied over the years, from the disastrous version of Marks of Identity by Gregory Rabassa to the masterpieces that Helen Lane made of Count Julian and others. Peter Bush [in The Marx Family Saga] does not reach Lane's heights or sink to Rabassa's depths." - Abigail Lee Six, New Statesman (9 August 1996)
• "Now in his late 60s, Goytisolo remains a marginal man, at least in America, because of his nervy depictions of homosexuality, elliptical Modernism, his mordant sense of history, and an unfashionable multiculturalism -- he knows and admires Islamic traditions. A self-exile from Franco's Spain, Goytisolo proffers a ferocious critique of power as oppression: his dialectical standoffs between West and East, European and Arab temperaments, waver between positing irreconcilable differences, the result of centuries of injustice and misunderstanding, and tantalizing intimations of cultural synthesis." - Bill Marx, Boston Globe (29 April 1999)
• "Goytisolo is one the finest masters of the postmodern." - Sophie McClennen, Review of Contemporary Fiction (Fall, 1999)
• "His greatest achievement to date is his trilogy consisting of Masks of Identity, Count Julian and Juan the Landless. These three books can be considered together; though fictional, they are unashamedly autobiographical, and they reflect Goytisolo's sense of alienation experienced both in Spain and in exile. Cumulatively, they provide a debunking of Spanish culture, ideology and language, and a rejection not only of realist fiction but of the very idea of literary genres." - Shomit Dutta, Times Literary Supplement (17 November 2000)
• "Goytisolo's fiction parodies traditions, dwells on solipsistic estrangement, and with coy postmodern irony questions the attempt to represent reality. But his journalism bleeds sincerity, and it uncompromisingly insists that ideals like toleration, respect, and magnanimity be put into political practice." - Thomas Hove, Review of Contemporary Fiction (Fall, 2001)
• "Thoroughly seduced by literary theory, Goytisolo maintains that a fiction writer should respond to movements in poetics and he invokes Russian formalists and French structuralists as patron saints. He tests his readers with punctuation-free interior monologues, citations in Latin and Arabic, dialogues in foreign languages, passages in mock Old Spanish, pastiche, unreliable narrators. The result is at times dazzling, but readability can hardly be counted among its merits. This may be intentional. One is not expected to curl up by the fire with a book by Goytisolo, but rather to be jolted out of any such bourgeois complacency in the first place." - Martin Schifino, Times Literary Supplement (22 November 2002)
• "Juan Goytisolo is a literary philosopher of the highest type -- a writer interested in destroying hypocrisy and its old guard." - Joe Woodward, San Francisco Chronicle (12 February 2006)
Works About and By
• "The Anti-Orientalist," New York Times
• Wikipedia biography Wikipedia biography
• Columbia Encyclopedia biography
Books
- The Young Assassins - novel, 1954 (Juegos de manos, trans. John Rust, 1959)
- Children of Chaos - novel, 1955 (Duelo en el Paraíso, trans. Christine Brooke-Rose, 1958)
- Fiestas - novel, 1958 (Fiestas, trans. Herbert Weinstock, 1960)
- Island of Women - novel, 1961 (La isla, trans. José Yglesias, 1962; UK title: Sands of Torremolinos)
- Marks of Identity - novel, 1966 (rev. 1969) (Señas de identidad, trans. Gregory Rabassa, 1969)
- Count Julian - novel, 1970 (Reivindicación del conde don Julián, trans. Helen Lane, 1974)
- Juan the Landless - novel, 1975 (Juan sin Tierra, trans. Helen Lane, 1977)
- Makbara - novel, 1980 (Makbara, trans. Helen Lane, 1981)
- Landscapes after the Battle - novel, 1982 (Paisajes después de la batalla, trans. Helen Lane, 1987)
- Forbidden Territory - memoir, 1985 (Coto vedado, trans. Peter Bush, 1989)
- Realms of Strife - memoir, 1986 (En los reinos de taifa, trans. Peter Bush, 1990)
- Space in Motion - essays, 1987 (trans. Helen Lane)
- The Virtues of the Solitary Bird - novel, 1988 (Las virtudes del pájaro solitano, trans. Helen Lane, 1993)
- Quarantine - novel, 1991 (La cuarentena, trans. Peter Bush, 1994)
- Saracen Chronicles - essays, 1992
- The Marx Family Saga - novel, 1993 (La saga de los Marx', trans. Peter Bush, 1996)
- State of Siege - novel, 1995 (El sitio de los sitios, trans. Helen Lane, 2002)
- The Garden of Secrets - novel, 1997 (Las semanas del jardín, trans. Peter Bush, 2000)
- Landscapes of War - essays, 2000 (trans. Peter Bush)
- A Cock-Eyed Comedy - novel, 2000 (Carajicomedia, trans. Peter Bush, 2002)
- The Blind Rider - novel, 2002 (Telón de boca, trans. Peter Bush, 2005)
