Sunset on a Fictional Career?

In 2003, with the publication of Telón de boca, Goytisolo rather dramatically announced an end to his fifty-year career as a writer of fiction. Whether or not this turns out to be the case, the last three novels of Goytisolo's career to date constitute a review of the main preoccupations of his writing since Señas de identidad. In this sense, they bring us full circle, for each novel tackles anew the themes of authorship, identity, and dissidence with which this book has been concerned. But these novels are not just a review or summary of past works. They also offer a critique of Goytisolo’s dissident textual practice, both in terms of his approach to novel-writing and his thematic preoccupations over the course of almost five decades. The picture of authorship that emerges from Las semanas del jardín (1997), Carajicomedia (2000), and Telón de boca (2003) is radically intertextual, in that it consists of a dialogue between a series of texts, and also paratextual, in that it incorporates elements conventionally regarded as on the margins of the literary text. Thus we find Goytisolo toying with his authorial signature in Semanas; critically reassessing his treatment of sexuality in Carajicomedia; and exploring the fracture line between fiction and autobiography in Telón de boca. This has significant implications for our present argument, since Goytisolo now deliberately flaunts his practice of simultaneously erasing and reinscribing the authorial presence in his works, and he also subjects that authorial identity to scrutiny as he reviews his fictional and non-fictional output. As if to defy Derrida's notion of thanatography – or the inscription of the authorial signature as fixity and so a form of death – Goytisolo asserts authorial control as a means of correcting the past and reasserting, yet again, his identity as a dissident.