The Space of the Text and the Author as Authority

In Juan sin Tierra (1975) and Makbara (1980) Goytisolo develops a number of themes already outlined in Don Julián, but from a more international and less purely Spanish perspective. The author's search for a dissident literary identity, as the majority of critics have argued, is now subsumed into a wider political preoccupation with North–South and East–West relations. Although certain autobiographical aspects of the earlier novels are retained – the opening allusion to a Cuban sugar plantation in Juan sin Tierra, for instance, deliberately recalls the manner in which Goytisolo's greatgrandfather amassed the family fortune – the focus broadens to a geographical contrast between the Orient and the Occident, which finds expression in an intensification of the parallel between the physical world and the world of the text. Dissidence is now given a spatial configuration, developing the comparison between the city and the text that underpinned Don Julián into a contrast between two manners of inhabiting space and two associated ways of writing fiction.

In Juan sin Tierra, Goytisolo sets out a comparison between nomadic and sedentary society that draws on the theories of Gilles Delueze and Félix Guattari to offer a ‘nomadic text’ that has no apparent narrative coherence in the traditional sense. Makbara, although seeming to appeal to this same notion of nomadism, in fact focuses on a circumscribed space. The novel is centred on the oral storytellers of Marrakesh's main square, Xemaá-el-Fná, but the notion of oral literature allows Goytisolo to explore other means of achieving textual fragmentation and flux. Both novels retain Don Julián’s emphasis on physical embodiment, though Goytisolo destroys even the notion of a protagonist which that novel had retained in order to decentre the narrative speaking voice and wage war on authority.

A primary preoccupation in these works continues to be the articulation of dissidence and its association with alterity.