FictionThrough the hole pierced in the plastic of the window by stray shrapnel or by an inquisitive and claustrophobic guest - the traveller had been peeking since dawn at the desolation of the landscape [ . . . ]
It was then that he caught sight of her: she had appeared at the street corner, a few meters away from the burned-out kiosk [ . . . ]He felt the pendular beats of his heart: a very fine thread joined him to the silhouette [ . . . ]What sort of treasure was she lovingly safeguarding in her bag? Firewood, food, gifts for her four children? Four, had he written four? What secret bond had he established with that silhouette abandoned amid the winter desolation?
When Juan Goytisolo visited the besieged city of Sarajevo in 1993, he was so appalled by the devastation he witnessed, and so outraged at the West's indifference, that he felt compelled to write not one but two books on the subject. His initial pretext for the trip was a series of reports for the Madrid daily, El País. These were later included in Landscapes of War, a collection of the novelist's essays on contemporary flashpoints such as Algeria, Chechnya and Palestine. The volume is eloquent testimony to one of Goytisolo's enduring concerns - the West's consistent denigration of the Arab world as its demonised "other". It's a theme which he initially pursued from a purely Spanish perspective in the contemporary classic, Count Julian, but which, with the end of the Cold War and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, has acquired universal appeal.
Then, in 1995, Goytisolo published a novel based on his Sarajevo experiences, State of Siege, now translated by Helen Lane. This book, we are told in a brief closing note (inexplicably omitted in the English translation), was written to cure the author of the haunting and traumatic images which besieged him after his visit to Sarajevo. The most striking of these, quoted above, provides both a frame to the novel - opening and closing it - and an indication of the metafictional complexities of Goytisolo's writing. In his autobiography, Forbidden Territory, Goytisolo recalls the death of his mother, caught up in a Nationalist air-raid on Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War whilst shopping for toys for her four children. For years afterwards the author avoided footage of the war for fear of witnessing his mother's death on screen. Besieged Sarajevo, then, was a doubly horrific place - an abyss into which a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic civilisation had sunk, to be replaced by the barbarism of ethno-nationalist conflict; and a vision which evoked painful childhood memories of Spain's own fratricidal war. From this conjunction of the personal and the political stems the intense power of State of Siege.
The novel is highly moving, yet also surprisingly playful - but reader beware, for this ludic dimension is intended as more than light relief from the serious matters at hand. It constitutes a dramatisation of the very process of writing in what is by now Goytisolo's trademark style. Tracing his narrative poetics back to Cervantes, whom he regards as the father of modern fiction, Goytisolo has consistently produced postmodern texts in which he plays with the conventions of the novel whilst resisting postmodernism's hesitancy in dealing with ethical questions.
Hence, State of Siege weaves together several apparently distinct, but in reality intertwined, narratives: the siege of Sarajevo and its inhabitants' instinct for survival against the odds; the disappearance of a Spanish traveller, enigmatically known by the initials "J.G", after a mortar attack on the city's Holiday Inn; the imaginary transposition of the siege to a district in Paris; and the dream-like confusions of a major in the "International Mediation Force", one of whose relatives was arrested by the Nationalists at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War for having written homosexual poetry. The broadening of the narrative to include Paris and Spain is intended to draw the reader into the text, confronting him or her with the familiar rendered unfamiliar in order to convey the sense of personal horror which the author himself experienced in Sarajevo. And the proliferation of narratives demands an active response from the reader who must engage with the novel in order, quite literally, to decipher its coded references.
Such unsettling of conventional author/ reader relations is a key feature of Goytisolo's fiction, whether in overtly committed works, like State of Siege and Count Julian, or in slapstick satires, such as his recent A Cock-eyed Comedy. In this novel - a mixture of fiction, criticism, and autobiography - Goytisolo blurs generic boundaries, gleefully confronting his reader with sexual and moral taboos. A kind of Orlando combined with 'The Oxen of the Sun' from Joyce's Ulysses, the book narrates the journey of one Father Trennes through the ages in a recuperation of the satirical tradition in Spanish literature. From the original, 16th-century Cock-eyed Comedy, supposedly by Fray Bugeo Montesinos, through Francisco Delicado's Portrait of Lozana and Francisco de Quevedo's picaresque The Swindler, to Goytisolo's own satire of Francoist Spain in Juan the Landless, the novel weaves its bawdy way with a cast of dozens of the most famous in Spanish letters. A principal butt of the satire comes, however, from very different lineage - The Way by Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei. Reversing the mystical idiom, which uses the language of eroticism to express divine love, A Cock-eyed Comedy is a hilarious, acerbically witty cultural odyssey which cocks a snook at literary convention and amply validates Carlos Fuentes's accolade in naming Goytisolo the foremost novelist of contemporary Spain.
Alison Ribeiro de Menezes is lecturer in Spanish at UCD, and is preparing a study of the works of Juan Goytisolo. His novel, A Cock-eyed Comedy, translated by Peter Bush for Serpent's Tail, is on the longlist for the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin literary award
State of Siege By Juan Goytisolo, translated by Helen Lane Serpent's Tail, 155pp. £8.99