The Exile Trilogy by Juan Goytisolo

First published:Señas de identidad, 1966 (English translation, 1969); Reivindicación del conde Don Julián, 1970 (English translation, 1974); Juan sin tierra, 1975 (English translation, 1975)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1963 to 1975

Locale: Spain, France, and Morocco

Principal Characters:

• Alvaro Mendiola, the narrator and central character
• Alvaro Peranzules
• The Great Figurehead, alias
• Seneca, ), the leader of the Spanish people
• Tariq, the Arab invader of the Spanish Peninsula
• Julian, the Spanish traitor who collaborates with Tariq in the Arab invasion
• Father Foucauld, the priest who promulgates a message of hedonism
• Father Vosk, the priest who preaches the virtues of asceticism

The Novels

These three novels are frequently referred to as Juan Goytisolo’s Exile Trilogy, because of their thematic unity and the numerous references within the text of each novel to the fictional reality of the others. The novels portray three stages in Alvaro Mendiola’s search for his “marks of identity”—the significant characteristics of his existence, identified in Juan the Landless as “race, profession, class, family, homeland.”

Marks of Identity begins in 1963, as Alvaro returns to Barcelona from his exile in France to search for an understanding of his experience at the university in the 1950’s. Renewing his friendship with his fellow students and with Dolores, his former lover, Alvaro examines the relics of his past—family photograph albums, police reports on his underground political activities, places that he frequented during his student days. As he engages in lengthy conversations with his friends, Alvaro remembers and narrates episodes from his youth in Barcelona. At every point, the memories and the present experiences are narrated against the background of the repressive Spanish society of 1963. In the last scene of the novel, as Alvaro prepares to return to his exile in France, he goes to the Castle of Montjuich to look out over the city in which he spent his youth. In the presence of the tourists and the surveillance of the police, he experiences an overwhelming feeling of despair and disillusionment.

Count Julian is the narrative of a typical day in the life of Alvaro Mendiola, who now lives in exile in Tangiers. He gets up in the morning and looks out his window across the straits at his homeland. He sweeps up the dead bugs in his kitchen, takes them to the library, and crushes them between the pages of the volumes of Spanish literary masterpieces, obliterating the sacred words of his cultural heritage. Alvaro then spends the day first in the company of Tariq, the Arab, who takes him to an opium den, and then with the Great Figurehead, Alvaro Peranzules, alias Seneca. The narrator relates a series of hallucinatory scenes which detail a fantasized destruction of traditional Western morals. A tourist, whom the narrator calls the D.A.R. lady, is bitten by a snake charmer’s serpent. As she lies writhing on the ground, bloated by the poison, the Arabs who witness the scene pull up her dress and urinate on her body. The narrator recalls his experience as a child in the biology laboratory with insects that inject poison into one another, then imagines contaminating the blood supply of Spain by donating his own blood after suffering an attack by a rabid dog.

The Great Figurehead extols the virtues of the asceticism of his namesake, the Stoic philosopher Seneca, then takes Alvaro to meet his mother, the devout Queen Isabel la Catolica. Isabel takes Alvaro aside and performs a lewd striptease, while the Great Figurehead, attacked by flying insects after delivering a speech on the beauties of the Spanish literary tradition, dies trying, in vain, to pronounce an obscene word. His funeral cortege is led by a young man with a cross, who is transformed into Julian, the traitor, as the procession becomes an unbridled orgy from which the Hispanic populace flees in terror, pursued by the licentious African invaders.

The Great Figurehead is transformed into a bullfighter, who is run through by the horns of Tariq, the Arab bull, and then into a child, Little Red Riding Hood. His grandmother, Julian, turns him over to Tariq, who rapes him with his enormous serpent. The narrative of Count Julian ends at sunset, once again in the room of the narrator Alvaro Mendiola, who looks across the straits at his mother country and vows that tomorrow the invasion will begin again.

The text of Juan the Landless begins, still in Morocco, with an examination of photographs that evoke the origin of the narrator, Alvaro Mendiola, a white child born of the sexual union between a black slave woman and Chango, the enormous gorilla-god of the slaves of Cuba. The narrative continues as a contemplation of the significance of the Spanish experience, developed through a series of metaphorical scenes. The child Alvaro sits on the toilet while the forces of evil encourage him to defecate and the forces of good urge him to emit only sweet perfume. The black Cuban slaves and the Arabs relieve their bowels in open sewer ditches while Western society first invents the chamberpot, then develops the flush toilet, and finally evolves to the point of not having to expel their body waste at all. The slaves rebel by practicing witchcraft, which makes the whites sweat and smell and menstruate and defecate in the presence of the blacks.

The narrator becomes an Arab watching a perfect Spanish husband and wife copulating in a store window. Then he is King Kong, whose enormous penis intimidates the poorly endowed Spanish bridegrooms and disillusions their innocent brides. The narrator moves the scene to France for a consideration of the role of the Arabs in the 1968 revolution and then passes throughout the Arab world portraying the gradual domination of Western society by the licentiousness of Arab culture.

A dissertation on the ascetic ideals of Spanish culture is transformed into a scene in which the auto-da-fe becomes a spectacle staged for tourists. The king and queen of Spain deliver a speech, pointing out with great pride that they do not defecate. Father Vosk preaches a sermon on the path to perfection, which is a process of becoming immune to the need to empty the bowels. That is followed by a passage which proclaims the virtues of elimination of body wastes and the democratization of all people through the removal of all restrictions on defecation, through a worship of the eye of the Devil—the anus—and through a glorification of the enormous penis of King Kong.

Father Vosk berates the narrator for his departure from the realistic tradition and laments the destruction of modern literature by the invasion of the alienated novel. The novel ends with a discussion of literature and textuality, in which the narrator describes the development of the plotless discourse that becomes a text operating as an autonomous object. In the final pages of the novel, the language breaks down into an incoherent series of words, then a jumble of letters, a passage in transliterated Arabic, and finally, several lines of Arabic script.

The Characters

Only in Marks of Identity is it appropriate to speak of characters in the traditional fictional sense. In this first novel of the trilogy, the characterization of Alvaro Mendiola is developed through an approach that is primarily sociohistorical. His discontent and despair are identified as grounded in his early childhood experiences and in the facts of the cultural and historical milieu of mid-century Spain. This interpretation of Alvaro’s identity is clear in the first scene of the novel, in which he searches for the roots of his rebellion against his marks of identity in the photographs that he finds in his family album. He was born of parents whose grandparents owned a sugar plantation in Cuba worked by hundreds of black slaves, and his most vivid image of childhood is the strict prohibition against any kind of erotic expression. Thus, the conflict of the cultural stereotype of the African as the incarnation of sexual freedom and the restraints on sexual expression in Western society, reflected in Alvaro Mendiola’s political activities and in his reactions to his homeland when he returns in 1963, become the central motifs of the Exile Trilogy.

The other characters in Marks of Identity, the university friends of Alvaro, serve primarily as stimuli to the memory process, evoking narratives of Alvaro’s life in Barcelona during the time he was a student. Not until the second novel, Count Julian, do the secondary characters gain significance. Their elaboration is grounded in the conflict of Senecan stoicism and African hedonism that is first suggested in Marks of Identity.

The secondary characters are either metaphorical portrayals of actual persons of historical significance or personified myths of the Spanish cultural tradition. The Great Figurehead, Alvaro Peranzules, whom the narrator presents at times as the perfect boy child and at times as the revered leader of the country, is a fictionalization of the Fascist Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Julian and Tariq are elaborations of the myth of the Spanish traitor and his Arab coconspirator who opened the doors of the Iberian Peninsula to the Arab invaders to avenge the rape of Julian’s daughter by the Spanish king.

The characters appear again in Juan the Landless, along with others that function as metaphorical representations of the conflict of Western asceticism and African hedonism. The great gorilla-god of the black Cuban slaves, Chango, who also appears in the form of King Kong and as a personified, phallic mosque turret in Ghardaia, is the incarnation of the myth of the enormous African penis. Father Foucauld, obsessed with unbridled, hedonistic carnality, is the counterpoint of Father Vosk, who proclaims the gospel of perfection of the flesh, of evolving to a purer state of righteousness characterized by the absence of the need to defecate.

Throughout the narrative, the identity of Alvaro Mendiola merges at times with the identity of each of these symbolic characters. Alvaro becomes the Great Figurehead, or Tariq, or Julian, thus acknowledging the historical and cultural origins of his marks of identity, as he moves in and out of his fantasies and hallucinations. Because the characters other than Alvaro Mendiola are employed, in Marks of Identity, primarily as means of stimulating the narrator’s memory, and in the two later novels, primarily as fantastic, irrational inventions, the narrative is dominated by the presence of one consciousness, that of Alvaro Mendiola, the narrator and creator of the perverted, obscene vision of contemporary Spanish reality.

Critical Context

Goytisolo’s early novels, Juego de manos (1954; The Young Assassins, 1959), Duelo en el paraiso (1955; Children of Chaos, 1958), and Fiestas (1958; English translation, 1960), attacked the repression and psychological deprivation of Franco’s Spain in a conventional narrative style typical of social realism. The publication of Marks of Identity represents a significant shift in the development of Goytisolo’s fiction. His disillusionment with the possibilities of traditional fiction, and with the values and mores of Western society, becomes evident in the first novel of the Exile Trilogy and then more pronounced in Count Julian and Juan the Landless. His disenchantment with the repressive society created by the regime of Franco, his pessimism, and his experimentation with narrative form are not unique for his time. They are also evident in the work of other Spanish novelists of the postwar period, such as Carmen Laforet, Luis Martin-Santos, Juan Marse, and, most of all, Juan Benet. Goytisolo’s view of the corrupted, obscenely degenerate nature of Western society, however, is the most disturbing. It is a nihilistic vision that offers no hope for redemption within the boundaries of Western concepts of morality.

The novelist’s emphasis on the analysis of the role of language is one of the significant aspects of the trilogy, for it makes coherent the maze of obscene, perverted portrayals of a wide range of cultural and historical signs. Goytisolo is destroying an intricate complex of myths associated with Western culture and Hispanic tradition, myths that are entrenched in and inseparable from the language that has conveyed them and kept them entrenched in the European experience for centuries. The “marks of identity” of Alvaro Mendiola—his race, profession, class, family, and homeland—can be conceptualized only in terms of language. The destruction of those marks is possible only through the annihilation of language itself.

The theme of the trilogy, then, is closely linked with the cultural context in which it was created. The destruction of the myths of Western society and, more specifically, of Spanish society is effected through the destruction of the language that embodies them. The trilogy presents the process of annihilation through an innovative historical metaphor—the Arab invasion of Spain, reenacted in its most terrible form, as the subjugation of the sexually repressed Spanish society to the violent, licentious carnality of the Arab world. The perverted fantasies of the narrator in Count Julian and Juan the Landless become a demythologizing of Hispanic culture. The traditional Spanish themes of purity of the blood and of the spirit are contaminated by visions of penis worship, anal intercourse, sodomy, defecation, vaginal fixations, masturbation, and by the prevailing theme of the pollution of Spanish blood with the poisonous semen of the African.

Bibliography

Fuentes, Carlos. Preface to Count Julian, 1974.

Schwartz, Kessel. “Juan Goytisolo’s Non-fiction Views on La Espana sagrada,” in Revista de estudios hispanicos. XVI (October, 1982), pp. 323-332.

Spires, Robert C. “From Neorealism and the New Novel to the Self-referential Novel: Juan Goytisolo’s Juan sin tierra,” in Anales de la Narrativa Espanola Contemporanea. V (1980), pp. 73-82.

Ugarte, Michael. Trilogy of Treason: An Intertextual Study of Juan Goytisolo, 1982.