Sometime during the 1960s, the mirror breaks for Spanish narrative. Such works as Luis Martín Santos’s Tiempo de silencio (Time of Silence, 1962), Juan Goytisolo’s Señas de identidad (Marks of Identity, 1966), Miguel Delibes’s Cinco horas con Mario (‘Five Hours with Mario’, 1966), José María Guelbenzu’s El mercurio (‘Mercury’, 1968), Camilo José Cela’s Vísperas, festividad y octava de San Camilo del año 1936 en Madrid (San Camilo in 1936: The Eve, Feast, and Octave of St. Camillus of the Year 1936 in Madrid, 1969) and, most radically, Juan Benet’s Volverás a Región (Return to Region, 1967) wreak havoc on the reality, idea, and ideal of realism. To different degrees, and from often considerably different ideological positions, each of these works twists, blurs, stretches, smashes, or scoffs at mimetic representation, communicability, and referentiality. Language, turned into its own object, becomes opaque, restive, polyvalent, and at times even purposeless. The trend is solidified in the early 1970s with the publication of Goytisolo’s Reivindicación del conde don Julián (Count Julián, 1970), Benet’s Una meditación (A Meditation, 1970) and Un viaje de invierno (‘A Winter’s Journey’, 1972), Gonzalo Torrente Ballester’s La saga/fuga de J. B. (‘The Saga/Fugue of J. B.’, 1972), Juan Marsé’s Si te dicen que caí (The Fallen, 1973), Luis Goytisolo’s Recuento (‘Recount’, 1973), and Juan Goytisolo’s Juan sin tierra (Juan the Landless, 1975).
Accordingly, the death of the dictator Franciso Franco in 1975 occurs after a generalized break with social realism, an influential doctrine of representation that – from the perspective of both its critics and many of its former practitioners – tended to limit creativity and to place few intellectual demands on its reader. While the demand placed by post- or anti-realist writers on themselves and their readers recalls one of the more select postures of José Ortega y Gasset, it also arises out of disillusionment with the transformative potential of the realist project itself. Once at the vanguard of the critique of Francoism, social realism, for all its worthy intentions, had revealed itself to be politically ineffective and artistically stagnant; most critically, it had underestimated the mediating role of language. As Juan Goytisolo put it in El furgón de cola (‘Caboose’, 1967), “the negation of an intellectually oppressive system necessarily begins with the negation of its semantic structure.”1 The critique of the establishment entailed, then, the critique of established forms of language and literature. That said, Goytisolo’s idea of oppression is hardly the same as Cela’s, for example, and his assessment must be nuanced. For there are other, less overtly political motives for the mirror’s breakage, from Benet’s grand defense of style to Torrente’s recovery of play to a general refashioning of the literary market. To understand the breakage and the textual questioning of which it is a part, one needs to look back to when the mirror seemed whole.
By the 1950s, social realism, a more somber, less confident mode of socialist realism, had come to dominate virtually any narrative fiction in Spain that was critical of the status quo. While socialist realism – adopted as doctrine by the first Soviet Writers’ Congress in the fall of 1934 – tended to present a positive picture of the heroic triumph of the proletariat, social realism (and neorealism) presented a decidedly less triumphant picture of oppression and resistance under capitalism. “Picture” is a crucial term, but only if it is taken as signifying an ostensibly faithful, even fastidious, reproduction of reality – more akin to photography or film than to painting – in which figuration and description continue to hold sway. Whatever its ties to the Spanish realist tradition, ostensibly running from the picaresque novel through nineteenth-century Realism and Naturalism, social realism is most closely associated with Marxism. Social realism has been called a realism of critical intention because it intends to criticize and denounce Francoist Spain by means of a seemingly transparent representation of it. Against art for art’s sake, social realism advances art for society’s sake, an art that strives to eschew artistry and artificiality, or at least to keep them in check, and to let the facts speak for themselves.
Such a doctrine requires, however, vigilance on the part of the author, who must take pains to keep from intruding, let alone interpreting. Social realism, like mid-twentieth-century Marxism, has scientific pretensions, and objectivity is again the order of the day. Subjectivity, in contrast, is saddled with suspicion, associated as it is with the ideology of individualism. This is not to say that subjectivity is discredited in its entirety, for its collective variants, still profoundly inflected by humanism, are fundamental to the critique of alienation and the promotion of solidarity. Indeed, it is in the reaction to, and rejection of, social realism that subjectivity, including that of the author, is most seriously questioned. For the author in social realism is not so much “dead” as self-effacing, a figure who eludes the mirror in order to turn it elsewhere – as if its self-reflective glare were too troubling, or too inconsequential, to bear.
Jesús López Pacheco’s Central eléctrica (‘Power Plant’, 1958), Armando López Salinas’s La mina (‘The Mine’, 1960), and Alfonso Grosso’s La zanja (‘The Trench’, 1961) chart the course of social realism, with places of labor explicitly identified in the titles. Like the society they relate, these texts are not generally rich in form, and if they play with language, it is typically in its colloquial, “degraded,” serialized mode. There is more than a touch of the ethno-linguist or even neo-costumbrista in, for instance, Juan Goytisolo’s use of argot in La resaca (‘Undertow’ or ‘Hangover’, 1958). Here, and elsewhere, the attempt to give an accurate account of the proletariat, including the lumpen proletariat, must deal with the bourgeois drag of the author and, realistically speaking, of most readers. Like a number of texts by other writers, La resaca, well-intentioned though it may be, can give the impression of “slumming,” a pilfering of the lower depths for the edification and motivation, if not entertainment, of the less adventurous. Of course, almost any literary endeavor must contend with such problems. If La resaca recalls Goytisolo’s earlier Juegos de manos (‘Sleights of Hand’, 1954), a text centered on the dangerous little games of privileged youth, it is perhaps because denouncing the bourgeoisie and laying bare the plight of the proletariat are two sides of the same critical coin. Goytisolo was not alone. Antonio Ferres focused on the working class in La piqueta (‘The Pickaxe’, 1959) and Juan García Hortelano on the bourgeoisie in Tormenta de verano (Summer Storm, 1962); together they attested to the complementary bipolarity of social realism. The denunciation of the power of one class goes hand in hand with the denunciation of the disenfranchisement of another. And yet, denunciation and critical intention, indeed any intention, fly in the face of neutrality, transparency, and objectivity. Social realism is thus caught in a double bind that helps bring about its dissolution but that makes it, almost despite itself, compelling.
The political bent of these texts produced in an era of scarcity and censorship derives from, and contributes to, contemporary debates on the role of the intellectual, so important and prevalent after Antonio Gramsci and Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartrean existentialism, especially as it bears on engagement (the idea that writing should strive to engage and transform reality), has an impact on Spanish narrative that is not limited to readings of so-called tremendista literature such as Cela’s La familia de Pascual Duarte (The Family of Pascual Duarte, 1942). Indeed, Sartrean thought, with its emphasis on individual responsibility, freedom, and anguish, continues to have an impact, albeit weakened, on social realism itself, where the role of the engaged intellectual translates into an apparently disengaged author – disengaged, that is, from an intrusive, even dictatorial, telling of the tale. The avatars of the author tend to oscillate between extremes of presence (or omnipresence) and absence. The fact that “omniabsence” is a lexical curiosity gives a measure of what is at stake. For if it is generally accepted that the author can be everywhere, perhaps especially in a realist text, it is not generally accepted that the author, even in an anonymous or collective work, can be nowhere, absolutely nowhere. After all, the absence of the author by no means destroys the author’s power. In fact, the author’s absence can be one of the slyest exercises of authority, a ruse by which an illusion of freedom is at once generated and gainsaid. Absent from one space, the author yet lurks in another, out of sight but not out of work. The attempt to undo authority was often, however, an attempt to do it anew, to recast it in a more equitable and objective manner, to embody it not in a single man but collectively, in the people.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the authority of the author is disparaged, though not always in the manner suggested by the French critic Roland Barthes in his highly influential essay “The Death of the Author,” first published in 1968. In Spain and Latin America, the authority of authoritarian regimes was not as metaphorical or academic as in the Western democracies. Objectivism, as a problem of authorship, was similarly implicated; the French nouveau roman of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor had little in common, despite certain attempts at reconciliation, with Spanish social realism. Indeed, the promotion of interest in Spanish social realism and neorealism outside of Spain – pursued, for instance, by Goytisolo at the prestigious Parisian publishing house of Gallimard – is likely an effect of significant differences in the objective reality of authority on either side of the Pyrenees. Needless to say, objective reality has its subjective investments, its share of dreams and desires. Mario Santana cites the desire on the part of Western leftist intellectuals “to find a new historical hero in every Third-World country in turmoil, a role for which Franco’s ‘exotic’ Spain easily qualified.”2 Santana further notes that once Spain attained a degree of economic success in the 1960s and became more fully integrated into a Western capitalist order, the interest of leftist intellectuals shifted to Latin America, with Castro’s Cuba in the forefront. The questioning of authority entails the maintenance of a relatively unquestioning celebration of whatever resists authority.
In the historical period under consideration, such questioning and celebration typically assume the form of a quest: for authenticity, identity, and a true appreciation of reality, for familiarity with the “other.” The quest can have, however, some uncanny effects. Spanish society, presumably represented by the social realists in its most down-to-earth form, at times appears almost too stilted and strange to be believed. Years later, Juan Goytisolo, in the significantly titled La saga de los Marx (The Marx Family Saga, 1993), struggles still with the specter of social realism and satirizes the editorial demand for “a novel as real as life itself” (p. 83). Goytisolo rather humorously holds Karl Marx and his followers “responsible” for the propagation of the realism that he judges to be so restrictive and unrealistic. What Goytisolo relates in the 1990s is not just his disenchanted recollection of social realism but also the persistence of its codes, if not its critical intention, in an age of multinational capitalism. Today, as Goytisolo suggests, the quest for transparency and accessibility sustains works that are quite at home in the established order. Others, including Torrente Ballester, Marsé, and Benet, also criticize the project of social realism by signaling its unreality, if not its absurdity. What they underscore is that the social realist texts, for all their documentary pretensions, are fictional, part of literature – even though Benet would classify them as part of sociology. Literary language, which the social realists understood and typically strove to reject as artificial, can become even more artificial the more artificiality is negated. In short, the quest for authenticity may take some very inauthentic turns.
The questioning of subjectivity, authority, and authorship that flecks social realism is accompanied by a questioning – or suspicion – of style, form, and literary language. The poverty of post-war Spain conditions the poverty, or economy, of verbal expression. Even Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio’s El Jarama (The One Day of the Week, 1956), the one text affiliated with the social realist movement that has entered the canon, is laconic in its very garrulousness: in page after page of anodyne conversation, nothing “really” happens until one of the characters drowns. The accidental death is jolting because it issues from, and turns back to, a stream of petty, daily intercourse. Sánchez Ferlosio pens a powerful lesson in history and fiction. For the event that so marks El Jarama that it makes the page number of the first edition – 272 – memorable for some is bound to become as obscure as the bloody events of the Spanish Civil War that mark the river Jarama, also memorable for some. After all, the anodyne conversations take place by a river once, and not that long ago, bloodied by battle. The relation between the book and the world, textuality and topography, is fraught with oblivion. If a battle can be forgotten, so can a drowning, and one of the text’s most devastating accomplishments is that it depicts reality as flowing beyond any firm and final recollection. One cannot go to the same river twice, and the Heraclitean message, in a country where tradition has been all but monumentalized, can be deeply upsetting. Then again, it can also be upsetting for any project that would recover, let alone monumentalize, the memory or counter-memory of the oppressed. What Sánchez Ferlosio signals is thus the spuriousness of simple reflections, the ways the seemingly faithful rendering of everyday life can turn on itself and become unfaithful. Without the drowning, the story would sink into the anonymity of daily life. But with the drowning, literariness is retained, or rescued. Put bluntly, literature is purchased at the price of an imaginary sacrifice.
The preceding formulation is in line with what Darío Villanueva has called “the poetic and transcendent enrichment of daily reality.”3 For Villanueva, the dialogic objectivism of El Jarama actually preserves an authorial power that “is not bereft of those prerogatives of nineteenth-century omniscience, with the exception of access to the characters’ thoughts, that may contribute to the expressive and poetic enrichment of the novel” (Estructura y tiempo reducido, p. 194). The insistence on the poetry of prose contributes decisively to the canonization of El Jarama and to the general eclipse of social realism and neorealism from literary studies. For if El Jarama is canonical, it is in large measure because it is not as transparent, straightforward, or prosaic as it may seem. Its status as a realist text is accordingly disturbed, maybe even set at naught, by the notion that prose, if it is to merit serious attention or praise, must be shot through with symbols and second meanings, and slip into poetry.
Such a bias, deeply entrenched in literary studies, “salvages” El Jarama from oblivion and brings it into contact with more openly “creative” texts that follow (and precede) it. Other texts, by Ferres, López Pacheco, Grosso, and López Salinas, do not fare so well. This may be because, as Gonzalo Navajas remarks, they “reflect [not just] the unyielding pressure of an external repressive force, but also a process of self-induced internal repression, whereby the free creativity of the author is arrested and subordinated to his political function.”4 Navajas’s assessment is in line with that of such authors as Juan Goytisolo (from Señas de identidad on) and Benet, for whom “free creativity” is, in a sense, next to godliness. The coincidences are telling: despite all the twists and turns of the canon, Sánchez Ferlosio is brought into line with the “ambiguous” Goytisolo, the “playful” Torrente Ballester, the “enigmatic” Benet, and, for that matter, the “imaginative” Sánchez Ferlosio of Industrias y andanzas de Alfanhuí (The Adventures of the Ingenious Alfanhuí, 1951). It is clear that clarity is not generally valued, and that something else and extra is required, something that will keep readers busy, if not entertained. Mirroring Spanish society in the ever-receding wake of the Civil War, Sánchez Ferlosio shows how partial and inadequate the mirror is – and how poetic, and critically appealing, partiality and inadequacy can be. If there were no trouble with the mirror, there might be very little really to see.
As an image of realist representation, the mirror had been in trouble for some time, maybe ever since Stendhal, in Le rouge et le noir (Part II, Chapter 19), had it parade down a road, reflecting both blue sky and mud. In Spain, Valle-Inclán had deployed the mirror to grotesque effect in Luces de Bohemia (Bohemian Lights, 1920). The concave mirror that he locates in “el callejón del Gato” (‘Cat’s Alley’) in Madrid returns a reflection whose adequacy is measured in terms of inadequacy. That is to say, a grotesque, distorted reality is reflected in a grotesque, distorted mirror. A principle of mimesis is still operative, but it disturbs rather than reassures. In a not-unrelated vein, Ortega y Gasset, in La deshumanización del arte (‘The Dehumanization of Art’, 1925), had questioned not just the reflective pretensions of the mirror but the transparent pretensions of the window as well. For Ortega, the tained glass of a mirror is as deceptive as the tainless glass of a window: both seduce the seer into turning a blind eye to the materiality of the glass itself. Ortega, in good avant-garde fashion, would turn our sights to the glass as glass, not to the human being reflected in the mirror or to the garden that lies beyond the window. In Ortega, however, the glass conserves a smooth integrity that is increasingly put to the test as the avant-garde lurches to an end. Marcel Duchamp’s Broken Glass may be a felicitous accident, but in the realm of letters, the breakage of the (metaphorical) mirror appears a bit more deliberate. Mercè Rodoreda brings to the foreground the broken mirror in her epic of the rise and fall of a bourgeois family in Mirall trencat (‘Broken Mirror’, 1974). The title is appropriate because the modern doctrine of realist reflection has been wedded to the bourgeoisie. The point is important, for the turn away from the mirror, if not its distortion and breakage, is generally perceived as a turn away from bourgeois ideology.
Rodoreda’s novel, published at the end of Francoism, closes with a rat’s eye view of an empty, littered, destitute place of privilege and power: the house of an upper bourgeois family. The critique of the bourgeoisie in Mirall trencat is more fantastic and ambiguous than in Goytisolo’s La isla (‘The Island’) or Marsé’s Últimas tardes con Teresa (‘Last Evenings with Teresa’, 1966). A decade can make a difference, and a better indicator of the crisis of the mirror is Martín Santos’s Tiempo de silencio, the text that initiates the break with social realism – its forms, if not its themes. The backwardness of scientific research; the provinciality of Madrid; the endurance of fanaticism, superstition, and illiteracy; the vacuity of thought (represented in a scathing parody of Ortega); police control, militarism, poverty, injustice, sordidness, resignation, frivolity, and alienation: the perceived reality of Spain is basically the same as in social realism. But the form in which it is rendered could scarcely be more different. Martín Santos employs virtually all of the tricks of classical rhetoric and modernist experimentation (stream of consciousness, defamiliarization, and demythification), of existential psychoanalysis and literary history, to represent reality as bound up in representation. The representational project, emphasizing form, has, however, its thematic anchor. The protagonist’s attempt to prove that a certain kind of cancer is not hereditary but viral, and hence that it is susceptible to treatment and eradication, dovetails the novel’s attempt to call into question literature as nothing but a reflection of reality. Without being beyond essentialism, particularly in its presentation of gender and race, Tiempo de silencio advances a sort of constructivist ethic; that is to say, it presents reality as made, or constructed, and not just as given. It is a quasi-subjectivist, formally experimental rendition of the “problem of Spain” that is also a heterogeneous collocation of elements from various genres, periods, languages, disciplines, and national traditions.
If in the 1960s the mirror breaks, it is also then, as Mario Santana remarks, “that the national conception of Spanish literature collapsed.”5 The “collapse” occurs under the combined pressure of “a reemergent pluricultural conception of the Spanish state” articulated primarily in Galicia, Euskadi, and Catalunya, and the extraordinary success of the aptly designated Latin American Boom (Foreigners in the Homeland, p. 18). While the terms “collapse” and indeed “breakage” may be too strong, they nonetheless point to a penchant for strong signifiers associated with modernism. The shock of the new, the rupture with the past, the cult of originality: so many modernist truisms are revamped in what can only with some temerity be called post-modernism. The term of preference was, of course, “magical realism,” which, linked most notably to Gabriel García Márquez, proved eminently more enjoyable, entertaining, and profitable than social realism. Striking as the difference may be, the persistence of something realist is striking too. For what differs in the transatlantic passage is an adjective, “social” as opposed to “magical.” From social realism to magical realism there is a shift of accent and form, though the critical intention and the commitment to society remain largely intact. There is also a shift from one “natural” reality to another. Much ink has been spilt over the exuberance of the Latin American landscape, the richness of its flora and fauna, its rhythms and music, the vibrant intensity of its people. Stereotypes abound here as they do about Iberia (austere and obscurantist), and many a person has fallen prey to the dubious pleasure of divisive evaluations. One thing is certain, however: Tiempo de silencio appears at practically the same time as Mario Vargas Llosa’s La ciudad y los perros (Time of the Hero, 1963), and the novel in Spain is, in general, altered by both.
Along with something realist, there also persists in the Boom a quest for authenticity, truth, and justice, albeit with a more acute sense of irony and paradox. Rather predictably, the quest has heroic dimensions. The Boom was indeed characterized by heroic gestures, often as not manly or, to give a nod to Che Guevara, “newly” manly. Like so many artistic movements, the Boom was dominated by men, with hardly a woman penetrating the daunting upper echelons of experimentalism – or the publishing houses. Whether in Barcelona, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, or Madrid, the old boys’ network was still more amenable to new boys than to women. García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and others set the stage for a reevaluation of literature in Spanish that generated a profound shift away from the Iberian Peninsula to Latin America.
The shift, however, from a male-dominated notion of culture to one more sexually equitable has been longer in coming. The few Spanish women who did manage to figure in critical overviews and editorial promotions – Carmen Laforet, Ana María Matute, Carmen Martín Gaite – were generally relegated to particular positions that figure only fitfully, if at all, in the male-dominated cultural debates of the day. For the questioning of the text in Spain is carried out most resoundingly by such men as Juan Goytisolo, Torrente Ballester, and Benet. However particular these writers are, each has been at the center of some controversy considered (but again, by whom?) to be of general cultural importance. Controversy may well be the “handmaid” of experimentation, the veritable proof of derring-do.
Goytisolo, Torrente, and Benet are caught in the sonic ripples of the Boom, though only Goytisolo throws himself into it with calculated abandon, managing to garner a chapter in Carlos Fuentes’s La nueva novela hispanoamericana (1969). Torrente remains more guarded, while Benet waxes cantankerous. All three must contend with the notion that literary experimentation, like scientific research, is a foreign import (though they do not question whether or not it is a masculine prerogative): something from France, Colombia, Germany, Argentina, Mexico, or the United States. Goytisolo actually foments this notion, effecting in Reivindicación del conde Julián a deconstructive assault on Spain that pretends to reveal that what is authentically Spanish is nothing much at all. Goytisolo’s contacts with Fuentes, Severo Sarduy, and other Latin Americans, even more than his contacts with Jean Genet and Simone de Beauvoir, secure him a relevance that might be qualified as enviable.
Torrente, older, more discreet, and haunted by youthful flirtations with fascism – most distinctly in Javier Mariño (1943), a work nonetheless quickly prohibited by Franco’s censors – rockets to literary attention with La saga/fuga de J.B. after years of unobtrusive production. Though immersed in Galician and Spanish cultural history, La saga/fuga brings to mind the fabulative frenzy of García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967) and the inventive humor of Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres (Three Trapped Tigers, 1967). Despite Torrente’s repeated attempts to temper such comparisons, some sort of transatlantic relay is undeniable, though comparisons with fellow Galician Álvaro Cunqueiro also obtain. Benet, the cultivator of perhaps the most opaque literature in Spanish, is less marked by the Latin American Boom and derides its very existence. For Benet, the Boom is a commercial invention or, at most, a chance agglomeration of writers of widely dissimilar quality.6 Still, there is little doubt that Benet benefits – however “vulgar” such an assertion might seem to him – from the questioning of realism that the Boom entails.
It would be foolhardy, however, to limit the web of contacts to the contemporary Spanish-speaking world or to reduce, as Benet fears, the literary to the socio-economic. The machinations of Carlos Barral, the influential editor involved in the promotion of both social realism and the Boom, do not account for the writing of the texts, which is necessarily overdetermined. Faulkner, Pessoa, Genet, Kafka, Unamuno, Cervantes, San Juan de la Cruz, the Bible, the Koran, and a lengthy if select “et cetera” punctuate the literary exercises of Benet, Goytisolo, and Torrente. That said, it would be equally foolhardy to collapse any one of these Spaniards into the other. All three writers, prolific and polemical, grappled with some mode of realism, Benet somewhat cavalierly from the outside (Benet’s play Max [1953] is his most conventional work), Torrente and Goytisolo more tortuously from the inside. All three defended, or came to defend, some variant of literary autonomy, away from, beyond, or beside the realist mirror. Each one, however, writes in an unmistakably different manner; each one privileges a different idea of what writing is and should be.
For Benet a privileged term is style; for Torrente it is play, and for Goytisolo it is freedom. Three of their critical works – Benet’s La inspiración y el estilo (‘On Inspiration and Style’, 1965), Torrente’s El Quijote como juego (‘Don Quijote as a Game’, 1975), and Goytisolo’s Libertad, libertad, libertad (‘Freedom Freedom, Freedom’, 1978) – make explicit what runs throughout much of their fiction. Style, play, and freedom are rather seriously bound to the perceived and professed lack of style of social realism, and this past seems to haunt these writers – haunts, but does not determine them. For while we might playfully conjecture that the social realists are the unwelcome ghostwriters of the highly stylized Volverás a Región or the seemingly loose and errant Juan sin tierra, we would not go so far as to make a case for a linear, genetic, teleological vision of literary history. Goytisolo, however, does go so far as to scorn some of his earlier texts and to parody almost all of them in his later texts. Even as he questions conventional chronologies, he writes, as in En los reinos de taifa (Realms of Strife, 1986), of his maturation and of “the conquest of a literary expression of [his] own, [his] subjective authenticity.”7 Benet, more consistently than Goytisolo, scorns an array of texts by others, from all of Galdós, Pereda, and Fuentes to most, if not all, of Nabokov, Joyce, Borges, and Martín Santos, his former friend. He does not, in general, refer to seeking or attaining authenticity, though he does make much of the impact that his “discovery” of Faulkner had on him and he does hold on to the value of rewriting. Torrente, for his part, is less scornful than mischievous, and parodies not just social realism but also the reaction against it, the metafictional experimentalism that he himself so brilliantly cultivates.
Benet and Goytisolo are men of strong opinions, perhaps especially when they touch on ambiguity, uncertainty, mystery, and other related terms that function almost fetishistically in their repertoire. They judge, extol, disqualify, and execrate with unswerving confidence, Benet more than Goytisolo, both more than Torrente. Comparisons can be odious, but anyone who has read the essays, interviews, and editorials of Benet and Goytisolo cannot but be struck by the passion of their convictions, the odiousness of their comparisons. But here, too, is a difference. Goytisolo, keeping his faith in the discourse of (personal) authenticity, does not abandon a notion of engagement and testimony, though it does become convoluted and introspective. Benet, in contrast, is adamant about never having had any inclination to “mix” or “confuse” literature and politics in the first place. For Benet, style is everything, and he manifests an almost slavish understanding of it, an understanding that fuels his desire to master it. Thus his trajectory is smoother than it might at first appear: an engineer by profession, he takes years to write his first works, years to find a publisher, and years to find a public, and never more than a small and select public at that. Benet puts up the money to publish ‘Nunca llegarás a nada’ (‘You’ll Never Get Anywhere’, 1961), and enjoys nothing remotely like the contacts that Goytisolo enjoyed from a fairly young age. Benet’s trajectory is smooth, however, because he does not seem to struggle with the contradictions between social commitment and aesthetic autonomy that make Goytisolo’s later work so impressive; nor does he struggle with the specter of past political leanings that, however pale, makes Torrente’s later comic work almost poignant. Benet does struggle with those who would take literature as a manifestation of politics, although again the struggle merely steels his resolve. For Benet, literature is, quite simply, only literature: and that is what makes it so difficult, so complex, so significant.
Accordingly, Benet debunks the mimetic imperative to advocate a more fractured, speculative approach. Specular representation had a tendency, from its inception, to be speculative, to give way to a theorization in which, as the dictionary puts it, “evidence is too slight for certainty to be reached.” Of all the writers here considered, it is Benet who most unflinchingly mines the uncertainty that inhabits realist certainty, taking up many of the most trusted tools of realism (description of the natural environment, attention to detail, concern for time) and rendering them derelict. Examples abound. In Volverás a Región: “Why bother entering into details? Of what importance are people, names, places, dates, the type of error (or lack)?”8 In Un viaje de invierno: “the enigma of destiny is produced back there, in forgetfulness, and [ . . .] history is only the reproduction of the memory that dissolves it.”9 In En la penumbra (‘In the Shadows’, 1989): “silence is without a doubt what admits of most interpretations.”10 So many reflections on history, storytelling, and meaning constitute a sustained and supple mise en cause of the realist project.
Volverás a Región is the first text by Benet to merit serious attention. It opens with an unknown traveler’s departure from Región – a place that, as critics have noted, could well be Spain – by way of an “antiguo camino real,” an old royal, but also real, road. The traveler takes this road because the modern one is not passable. The traveler, rich in ancient symbolism, must traverse a desert that seems interminable and soon is lost. From the outset, Volverás a Región courts an allegorical reading that turns on its reader, likely lost as well in the poetic morass of Benetian prose. Loss, abandonment, inadequacy, deferral, decadence, and ruin are the signposts of a literary exercise where pleasure is meted out in frustration and illumination in obscurity. Sweet and useful instruction, utile et dulce, is all but wasted in Benet, and narration, as a mode of knowledge, let alone entertainment, is all but devastated. Which is perhaps a tortuous way of saying that they are saved, for Benet’s work indicates that sweet instruction lies, if at all, in the heart of bitterness and pain, and that narrative knowledge lurks in the shadows, always out of our reach.
High-sounding stuff, but Benet is nothing if not high-sounding. He deplores what he calls the “entry into the tavern,” the lowering of standards by which literature is rendered small and accessible.11 Little wonder that he would have no truck with social, neo-, dialectical, or any other form of realism. At the same time, he also would have nothing to do with more sprightly modes of anti-realism along the lines of Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963) or Cabrera Infante’s Tres tristes tigres. Railing against the vogue of the open book, the birth of the reader, and the pleasure of the text, Benet declares that “only an absolutely closed work can produce the maximum power of suggestion.”12 Closure, he asserts, is not dogmatism, but signifies instead the difficulty of knowledge, far removed from the seductive play and performativity that are, he intimates, the consolation of idiots. It is along these lines that Benet cultivates a difficult, demanding, solemn mode of writing. Even El aire de un crimen (‘A Crime in the Air’, 1980), a novel that Benet writes on the dare that he cannot write anything that is not demanding, is far from transparent. Some critics have described Benet’s work as aristocratic, but Darío Villanueva describes it more convincingly as ascetic,13 a description that Benet claimed, rather coyly, not to understand. Yet Volverás and, even more, Una meditación do suggest that there is something sacred in the cult of literature precisely because it no longer commands the respect it once did.
Secularization and socialization go hand in hand for Benet, and he would prefer to have nothing to do with either; however, this is not to say that he is a proponent of religious faith – far from it. For him, the ruin of religion, philosophy, and art is their finest token, and he is fond of quoting that “only ruin can save us from greater ruin.”14 Benet’s disdain for communication, which he communicates in numerous interviews and essays and enacts in his fictional works, is intricately tied to his interest in the Spanish Civil War. Benet revisits the war in order not to clarify it but to delve its troubling depths. Región itself is a bellicose scenario, one that does not admit of easy understanding. Against partisan presentations from both left and right, Benet offers an account in which right and wrong are much less clear-cut. What matters for Benet is not so much who did what to whom, where, and why, as that it all be rendered grandiloquently: truth lies in style, not in what others would take to be the verifiable presentation of facts. In Benet’s fictionalized accounts of history, discourse reigns stylishly supreme.
Juan Goytisolo also abandons the realist road and finds himself in a world that could also be Spain, were Spain “true” to its heterogeneous past and hence “other” than it officially is. Influenced by such thinkers as Américo Castro, who challenged a purist conception of national history, Goytisolo embarks on a literary project that tends to eschew discrete boundaries, whether between nations, people, or cultural endeavors such as literature and politics. If Región is a realm unto itself that recalls not just the “reality” of Spain but also the fiction of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Goytisolo’s is a realm that shifts from text to text, even within a given text. His scenarios are the real world – Paris, Pittsburgh, Barcelona, Tangiers, Marrakesh, Sarajevo, Cappadocia, and Cuba – rocked by desire, fantasy, and the imagination. Señas de identidad announces Goytisolo’s break with the social realism that he had so fervently practiced. An autobiographically inflected story of a young intellectual’s disenchanting coming of age, Señas presents a sobering picture of anti-fascist resistance (in exile) and ends with a view of Francoist Spain’s incorporation into Europe through tourism. Goytisolo highlights subjective consciousness in a manner that conveys the gaps wrought by exile and time (generational difference) but that also conveys the fragility of consciousness, its imbrication in history, myth, and language itself. Whereas Benet’s texts are distinguished by lengthy and involuted sentences, few if any paragraph breaks, a dearth of dialogue (the dialogues in Volverás function almost monologically), recondite vocabulary, and a profusion of parentheses, Goytisolo’s later texts can be almost staccato in form. True, they also deploy a recondite vocabulary and parentheses, but Goytisolo’s texts rely on fragmentation – with its cuts, breaks, and empty spaces – in a graphic fashion; the very materiality of the writing is distinct from Benet’s.
It is with the publication of Reivindicación del conde don Julián, however, that Goytisolo breaks the mirror of representation or turns it intolerably inward. For Fuentes, Conde Julián is “the most monumental questioning of Spain, its history and culture, that has ever been written”;15 for Pere Gimferrer, it is “the most radically subversive masterpiece” of Spanish.16 Such superlatives abound. Written in the wake of May 1968 and while Franco was still quite alive, Conde Julián is a virulent diatribe against the faded grandeur of Spain and an angry testimony to its resistance to change. A gruelingly passionate book, it draws on the history, myth, and legend of the Moorish invasion of Spain and champions the cause of the “traitor,” Julián, who purportedly allowed the Moors entry into the Peninsula. Goytisolo grafts this national morality play, full of sex, violence, and intrigue, onto a contemporary story of anguished identity. The narrator-protagonist is alienated, sick, and given to drug-induced hallucinations, but he can also be identified – and that is perhaps the problem – as a Spaniard who hates being a Spaniard and who dreams of being otherwise. The dream leads to the imaginary destruction of “sacred Spain” and, by implication, of the recalcitrant narrator-protagonist himself. Identity and its marks are critical to Goytisolo’s work, functioning as sources of play but more consistently of pain. In Conde Julián, Goytisolo figures the destruction of national identity as a sado-masochistic process that implicates the linguistic subject so thoroughly that no escape seems completely possible.
In Juan sin tierra, Goytisolo takes this insight to the limit, closing the text with the parodic disarticulation of Spanish and defiant articulation of Arabic. When Juan sin tierra first appeared, a number of critics read the last pages as a declaration of independence from the Spanish language, as if Goytisolo were to write henceforth only in Arabic. That was not the case, but both before and after Franco, the question of identity, linguistic and otherwise, remains tied to Goytisolo’s major concern, freedom. Goytisolo’s defense of literary freedom is always bound to his defense of a freedom beyond literature, a freedom not merely from but of particular identities. The shift in Goytisolo’s corpus from a social-realist to an experimentalist aesthetic must be qualified. Goytisolo’s language becomes more reticular and opaque; his frame of reference more global; his self-referential tricks more tenacious, but what does not shift is his commitment to the disenfranchised, marginalized, poor, and oppressed. His works, even at their most self-indulgent, relate an avid concern for justice, equality, peace, and freedom. In this, he could not be more different from Benet, who provocatively proclaimed that he was committed to himself.17 Goytisolo’s formal innovations, including his idiosyncratic use of punctuation (the colon), do not spell the disappearance of a testimonial or documentary ethic. However much Goytisolo celebrates ambiguity, it remains clear where his sympathies lie; however much he extols aesthetic autonomy, it remains evident that his texts refer to a highly fraught political reality. And if he privileges a state of consciousness, it is a state under siege. His work, accordingly, is open to contradictions that, depending on one’s perspective, can be riveting or tiring. Whatever the case, it nourishes and is nourished by a tension between art and society that Benet would resolve in favor of the former.
As important as Goytisolo’s and Benet’s endeavors are, the questioning of the text need not entail the abandonment of more established notions of storytelling. García Márquez and Günter Grass knew as much, and so did Torrente Ballester. The narrator of Goytisolo’s Makbara (1980), inspired by El libro de buen amor (The Book of Good Love) and The Arabian Nights, may wax rapturous about storytelling, but it is a rapture that tends to remain at a remove. We are told that the storyteller is a magician and that narrative, particularly oral, is a delight, or even that it is “the necessary antidote for a miserable, barefoot existence, empty bellies, a reality that is cruelly unjust.”18 Torrente, in contrast, tells us about storytelling while telling us a story. True, in La saga/fuga de J. B. the story is extraordinarily intricate, abounding with characters that intersect, overlap, and may or may not be one and the same. Torrente’s narrative games, full of comic verve, engage the oral traditions of Galicia, the Celtic cult of King Arthur, theology, detective stories, political history, Golden Age drama, high modernism, literary theory, and so on, in a swirling paean to the creative imagination. Goytisolo also casts a wide cultural net, drawing from literature high and low, and there is no doubt that his work, as well as Benet’s, is richly imaginative. The difference is that Torrente’s imagination is more unabashedly entertaining, not darkly comic or Kafkaesque. Castoforte del Baralla, the scenario of La saga/fuga, has little of the turgid darkness of Región, even though it is threatened with non-existence and figures on no official map. The title of Torrente’s opus is well chosen, for it designates the flight – in an almost musical sense – of the great genealogical sagas of narrative (back) into the metamorphoses and adventures of yore. Lighthearted as this may be, the text touches on such weighty issues as censorship, governmental centralization, civil strife, rebellion, the manipulation of history, and the frailty of truth. Like his admired Cervantes, Torrente combines incisive cultural criticism with an appreciation of the insubstantiality of literature.
It is a lesson that Torrente learned after years of writing. His early works, including Javier Mariño and the trilogy Los gozos y las sombras (‘Pleasures and Shadows’, 1957–62), while certainly not assimilable to social realism, adhere to most of the tenets of mimetic narration, from chronological development and well-rounded characters to attention to social history and reliance on dialogue. The result, for all its merits, is ponderous, far from the boisterous metafictional fantasies that, more or less from Don Juan (1963) on, would become Torrente’s trademark. But there is no absolute break here either; Don Juan itself is born out of what the author describes as “a surfeit of realism” (p. 9). To say that La saga/fuga appears without warning or that it depends on Cien años de soledad is thus untenable. The self-referential ploys and abyssal moves of Torrente’s later novels are evident even in El señor llega (‘The Master Arrives’), the first installment of the aforementioned trilogy, where the title of the text that we read is the title of a text that one of the characters struggles to bring to light.
Torrente’s metafictional bent has long been recognized, especially in the 1970s when metafiction was all the rage. Metafiction supposes not just an exteriority (a distancing from fiction) but also an interiority (an implication in fiction) and entails a constellation of concepts such as self-referentiality, self-consciousness, and self-reflexivity. It is typically avoided in realist fiction, because (or despite the fact that) one of its effects is to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality. The Quijote remains the model of all metafiction, and it comes as no surprise that Torrente takes Cervantes’s masterpiece as an object of scholarly inquiry and imaginative recreation. Torrente is an insightful critic, and his painstaking analysis of parody as a comic imitation of a supposedly serious model in El Quijote como juego takes some delightful twists and turns. For one, it implicates social realism, an attempt at serious imitation, not of some fictional model but of a less than model world. For another, it implicates a good deal of so-called anti-realism, serious in its pretensions to ensure grandeur, attain authenticity, and preserve the mysterious truth of lying. For yet another, it implicates the criticism of realism and anti-realism, the generalized perception that the European novel was all but dead and that the only thing the questioning of the text had left unquestioned was the power of critique itself. It implicates or, better yet, parodies all of these modes of writing.
In La saga/fuga, Fragmentos de Apocalipsis (‘Fragments of an Apocalypse’, 1977), La isla de los jacintos cortados (‘The Isle of Cut Hyacinths’, 1980), and other novels, Torrente writes about writers who struggle to make sense of history, literature, the world, and themselves. Goytisolo does something similar, and many of his characters, as in Las virtudes del pájaro solitario (‘The Virtues of a Solitary Bird’, 1988) and Las semanas del jardín: Un círculo de lectores (The Garden of Secrets, 1997), are critics, students, translators, interpreters, and other subjects who wrestle with language and meaning. Both pay homage in various moments to Scherezade and Ariadne, and through them to the variations, labyrinthine constructions, and seductive poses of narration. If Goytisolo’s characters are sketchier than Torrente’s, it may be because his growing interest in Sufi mysticism, evident at least since Paisajes después de la batalla (‘Landscapes After the Battle’, 1982), has bestowed his suspicion of the existence of personality with an aura. After all, Sufi mysticism, which values illumination through darkness and ascent through debasement, seeks the devastation of personality (associated with individualism, selfishness, greed, jealousy, and so on). Torrente, less given to whirling dervishes and oriental gnosticism, also flirts with the nothingness of being, the masks of personality, but more in the line of Unamuno, the existentialists, and certain Catholic saints. And yet there is something rather than nothing.
Different as they are, Torrente and Goytisolo recognize that the transformative potential of the word is central to literature and that if it does not quite translate into the transformation of the world, that does not mean that the world is in no way implicated. The recognition that the world resists transformation or that rhetorical transformation is not real, or that the reality of rhetorical transformation is never the only reality, that there is a gap, a difference, may be the most worldly thing that these wordy endeavors accomplish. And it may be the most politically critical one, too. Even Benet, who underscores the gap between word and world, art and politics, might be said to do so out of respect for both. Literature does not mirror reality, or reality literature, without a gap. The mirror breaks, but it is quickly put back together, or its breakage is overstated, or it profits from the breakage and dazzles in all directions. Style, freedom, and play: the writers who question the text take the mirror as less than reliable, but take it, nonetheless, even if to break it. And so the mirror and its breakage become, if only for a period, a stylized and yet somewhat freewheeling game of mirrors. Then again, “perhaps what I have just said is too clear and thus rationalized and far from the truth”: the quotation is from Torrente,19 but it might have been from Benet or Goytisolo. At any rate, it has a way of snaking back and implicating the critic and literary historian, too.
2 M. Santana, Foreigners in the Homeland: The Spanish American New Novel in Spain, 1962–1974 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000), p. 54.
3 D. Villanueva, Estructura y tiempo reducido en la novela (Valencia: Bello, 1977), p. 198.
4 G. Navajas, “The Derealization of the Text in Salinas’s La mina,” South Central Review 4.1 (1987), p. 123.
5 Santana, Foreigners in the Homeland, p. 17.
6 J. Benet, Cartografía personal (Valladolid: Cuatro Ediciones, 1997), p. 48.
7 J. Goytisolo, En los reinos de taifa (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1986), p. 153.
8 J. Benet, Volverás a Región (Barcelona: Destino, 1981), p. 164.
9 J. Benet, Un viaje de invierno (Madrid: Cátedra, 1980), p. 167.
10 J. Benet, En la penumbra (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1989), p. 19.
11 Benet, La inspiración, p. 78.
12 J. Benet, “Intervención de Juan Benet,” in Novela española actual, ed. Andrés Amorós (Madrid: Cátedra/Fundación Juan March, 1977), p. 177.
13 D. Villanueva, “Intervención de Darío Villanueva,” in Novela española actual, p. 171.
14 Benet, Cartografía, p. 61.
15 C. Fuentes, La nueva novela hispanoamericana (Mexico: Joaquín Mortiz, 1969), p. 83.
16 P. Gimferrer, “El nuevo Juan Goytisolo,” Revista de Occidente 137 (1974), p. 22.
17 Benet, Cartografía, p. 20.
18 J. Goytisolo, Makbara (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1980), p. 220.
19 G. Torrente Ballester, La saga fuga de J. B. (Madrid: Alianza, 1998), p. 110.