Context N°22
I have always rejected the term “experimental” in relation to my novels following Marks of Identity. Every work that aspires to be innovative does just that, experiment, but its contribution to the tree of literature can’t be reduced to a simple laboratory test: form and material should be a tight fit, and their ideal symbiosis go unnoticed to whoever accepts the challenge and adventure of a reading. That is the case with Count Julian as well as the novels written from Makbara onward. But in the case of Juan the Landless, my wish to break with artistic, social, intellectual, and moral conformism doesn’t entirely succeed in fusing betrayal as theme and betrayal as language; the latter is too visible, and undermines the desirable unity of the book.
My rereading of the novel opened my eyes to a theoretical overload, particularly in the third and sixth chapters of the first edition, and I have now removed a good number of pages. I think this pruning or slimming-cure lightens the text and brings a greater unity of composition. The doctrinal pressure exerted by some of the mandarins of the Left Bank, which Severo Sarduy experienced and resisted as best he could, had a passing influence on me in the years 1965–1975, when I was reading widely in the Russian Formalists, the Prague Circle, Benveniste, Bakhtin, the Tartu School, and Noam Chomsky. The third chapter of Juan the Landless suffers from sequences or sub-chapters that are entirely or partly unnecessary (“hairottomaniacs,” “the eighth pillar of wisdom,” “incursions into Nubian territory,” “variations on a Fez theme,” “in the footsteps of Father Foucauld”), in which the you of the narrator identifies with individuals like Lawrence of Arabia, the sanctimonious founder of the White Fathers, or Anselm Turmeda, whose single common denominator was a fascination with Islam. Digressions—the preferred method of going round the houses—may amuse and stimulate if handled with artistic ingenuity—Tristram Shandy is a magnificent example of precisely that—providing the novelist turns these into the backbone that structures the entire narrative where they are embedded. But not everyone can be a Sterne and leaps across the jungle like by a Tarzan clinging to a liana can end in crash-landings, and their gratuitousness or pedantry will only annoy the reader.
I like the sequences I’ve eliminated, with the sole exception of “hairottomaniacs.” However, I prefer them to be read as independent pieces. Their idiosyncratic and anachronistic meandering, behind changing masks, through the Sahara, North Africa, Nubia, or Jordan, excised from the present and definitive version of Juan the Landless, are printed at the end of the third volume of my (In) Complete Works, in a narrative miscellany of unconnected texts. As for chapter six of the first edition, which contains the most theorizing in the novel—the parodies of Professor Vosk, whom only my former students at New York University could identify—constitute heavy stodge the reader can well do without. The good Professor, and others of his species, have well earned their relegation to oblivion.
Stripped now of its excesses, the violence of Juan the Landless is starker, and this heightened tension imbues the whole of the writing. Its uniqueness provokes a feeling of strangeness in the general reader: I know of no other book in Spanish literature that has these features. If I must seek a precedent—another jubilant hymn to Evil—I find it in the same pages where the destructive poetic rage of some of the surrealists found inspiration. Obviously, I’m thinking of Les Chants de Maldoror by Isidore Ducasse, the Count of Lautréamont, and a neighbor of mine in my arrondissement in Paris.
The first chapter in the novel serves as the thread binding the others, and is the one I like most. The return to the scenario of the sugar-mills and plantations that belonged to my Cuban forebears, prompted by the LP cover of a 33 RPM record by the “raunchy fat lady”—my much-lamented Celia Cruz—and the pages of the masterpiece by the historian Moreno Fraginals on the island’s sugarocracy and the system of slavery on which it was based, begins with the burlesque scene with great-grandfather-God and Little Fermina-the-Virgin-Mary, and her dialogue with the priest on the subject of their slave-holdings.
When I was writing the book my only aids were the letters from slaves and the faded yellowing photos of great-grandfather’s sugar-mills, the Goytisolo and Montalvo sugarcane train and the corvette Flora, which were preserved until 1985 in the old family property in Torrentbó and had already been mentioned or reproduced in the first chapter of Marks of Identity. The essay recently published by the researcher Martín Rodrigo y Alharilla, of the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, on the sugar plantations built and run by my ancestors, includes valuable information on how these worked and made their profits. The purchase of African slaves and Chinese coolies, the acquisition of new land and the way the wealth accumulated was channeled to Barcelona—at the time, the engine of Spain’s incipient industrialization—are described by the protagonists themselves, who were extremely worried by the rebellion of the mambises and black runaway slaves, and thus decided to invest their fortune in the capital of Catalonia. The correspondence between my great-uncle Agustín Fabián and my grandfather Antonio is not to be missed, especially when read in tandem with the really shocking letters from the slaves.
One of their exchanges inspired some thoughts I published in Babelia on September 11, 2004, under the title “The Conspiracy of Chance”:
Reason wrestles with determinism and chance. Our existence shifts between the two poles, never choosing either. In modern times, philosophers, from Pascal to Kierkegaard, have confronted the dilemma without resolving it. In two stories in The Aleph, Borges describes the extent of the problem better than anyone: “There is no fact, however humble it may be, that is not implicated in universal history and its infinite concatenation of causes and effects [. . .], that is so vast and so intimate that perhaps not a single fact, however insignificant, could be erased, without invalidating the present. To modify the past is not to modify a single fact: it is to erase its consequences, and they tend to be infinite.”
Recently, when I was reading the essay by Professor Martín Rodrigo y Alharilla on the financial vicissitudes of my Basque-Cuban ancestors (“From Landowners in Cienfuegos to Investors in Barcelona,” Revista de Historia Industrial, 23), I found irrefutable proof of the correctness of the above observation by Borges. The author reprints some letters my paternal great-uncle Agustín Fabián sent to my grandfather Antonio, where he advises him to marry the woman who would then become my grandmother, Catalina Taltavull: “You look after yourself, marry a well-off girl, and don’t try to make money on the Stock Exchange, because you’ll only get a battering you never bargained for”; and in a later letter, “If you’re thinking of getting married, make sure lots of cash is involved, because that’s what you need in life. So go for it. And what about this Taltavull girl?”
From the moment I began to reason and ask questions about the world and my appearance in it, I’d never seen the concatenation of chances behind my own existence so clearly: I was born, have lived, and am who I am because of those letters from November 1881! Thanks to them, my grandfather Antonio married that sweet, bright, and distant Catalina Taltavull, whose beautiful portrait as a melancholic adolescent I often contemplate, and who was impregnated a dozen times—ten boys and girls survived—by her very disinterested husband, and died in childbirth before reaching the age of forty. The erasure of this distant, apparently nondescript fact would invalidate the existence of several generations of my family, a product of that “conspiracy of chance” that Scheherazade mentions.
I immediately thought: what would have happened if these letters had never reached their destination? If the boat carrying them had sunk? If an unscrupulous postman had stolen them? Ladies and gentlemen, I would not exist and, consequently, neither would you, at least as readers of the lines you’re now perusing. Without the judicious advice from my great-uncle, his letters, their transportation by sea to Barcelona, and arrival in the hands of the recipient, none of all the good or bad I have done would ever have happened.
The Bakhtinian scene when the English engineers are installing the WC or clean aseptic toilet, where the owners of the sugar-mill sublimate their feces in front of “the niggers,” goes back to my readings of Norman Brown and Octavio Paz, a sentence by whom—“the face distanced itself from the ass,” taken from Conjunctions and Disjunctions—figures as a quotation at the beginning of Juan the Landless. This technological gadget to conceal our animal nature would thus allow
the non-material invisible odorless perfect emission, which, thanks to rear flaps, plummets down the double cavity to the central cistern, that vault of riches, immaculate and aseptic as a bank’s
a thousand leagues from those
de-surplus-valued blacks of the common trench, in direct contact with coarse matter, vile exertions, viscerally plebeian evacuations
The implicit parallel between defecation and the sexual act, whether solitary or not, and the heroic efforts by the boy Alvarito, encouraged by the Master of the Sugar-Mill in the Sky and the White Virgin, expended on not defecating in his china chamber pot, provide the thread underpinning the remaining chapters of the book. The concealing of the act of excretion and the chastity imposed or regulated by the Church are two faces of the same coin: the futile aspiration towards the angelic that sours the lives of Catholic believers and drags them into a repeated cycle of sin-confession-sin by a Rome which thus asserts its domination. Adolescent sexuality is as natural and irrepressible as the act of defecating, and Alvarito will never be a saint, a halo in motion, as The Master Up Above and the White Virgin want. The public trench of the Arabs and blacks irresistibly attracts the you of the narrator and narrative and leads him through the various episodes in the book, from King Kong’s New York to the African desert, from great-grandfather’s slaves to the Nubians, from the fallacious casuistry of the “biped species” to the adoration of the slinking slithering snake. His surrender to the pariahs and the abominable pleasure they bring won’t transmute him into a blessèd being or new man but into a member of the horde taking its revenge on the hypocrisy of the world. His voice will thus be the voice of the body, of verbal imagination and mortal and artistic transgression:
listen carefully to what we say
the traps set by your logic will not catch us
morality
religion
society
patriotism
family
are threatening noises whose loud resonances leave us indifferent
don’t count on us
we believe in a world without frontiers
wandering Jews
heirs to John Lackland
we’ll set up camp where our instinct leads us
the Agarene community attracts us and we’ll take refuge there
forget that same old story
the hackneyed threat of shameful ruins and catastrophes
après nous la déluge?
WE SHALL SOW TEMPESTS!
After the supplications to the African gods of the Abakua and the Lucumis in Cuba and the reciting of the ora pro nobis of devotion to Mary intercalated in Pleberio’s soliloquy in Celestina, the recrimination against the World by its author Fernando de Rojas with which I begin my public readings of the dialogue with the demiurge from The Blind Rider, will cast its lucid shadow over the final chapter:
So now fearless, like someone with nothing to lose, like that fellow who now finds your company irksome, like a poor man walking along, unafraid of cruel bandits, singing at the top of his voice.
The destructive endeavors of Count Julian and Juan the Landless end here and, from now on, Spain—a “blotch on the map”—will disappear from the horizon in the majority of my novels and become, conversely, the undoubted protagonist in my books of essays. The peremptory declaration made by the you invoked in Juan the Landless “if you write in the future, it will be in another language: not the one you have rejected and that today you bid farewell to after turning it upside down, undercutting and stunning it,” and the dissolving of the latter, first into phonetic colloquial Cuban and then the North African dialect of Arabic, were interpreted by some as my farewell to Spanish and my death as a Spanish writer. More modestly, I was referring to the dispossession or uprooting necessary in order to start from scratch and be reborn without the restrictions imposed by the social, moral, and aesthetic order that was the product of oppressive indoctrination in my youth: to move on to a counter-education and self-taught cycle of learning that has yet to end. Life and literature are different realities: flesh doesn’t resuscitate. The only genuine death/resurrection exists in the ambit of literature and nowhere else.
The last page in Arabic characters brings the general reader up against a dead end. It’s an abrupt way of saying goodbye and shutting the book on him. The short text I composed in Darisha was transcribed in a better hand than mine by a New York Arabist, and means the following:
If you don’t understand,
stop following me.
Communication between us is ended.
I’ve gone definitively over to the other side,
with the eternal pariahs,
sharpening my knife.
Juan the Landless stopped there and I continued on my way.
From Obras Completas III: Juan Goytisolo Novelas (1966–1982). Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg, 2006.
Translation by Peter Bush
