Writing as conquest and anxiety of influence in Juan Goytisolo’s reivindicación del Conde don Julian

Abstract

Time and again critics have pointed to Juan Goytisolo's novel Count Julian as the first Spanish work that was influenced by Latin American narrative of the decade of the sixties.¹ They have praised its experimental quality, its linguistic innovations and "the very complex net of convergences" (Oviedo, 1976: 199) which define its textuality. A rhetoric of complexity marks, in my opinion, this novel manifesting itself in an overabundance of stylistic and narrative strategies which echo Spanish American literature. The text is also full of riddles which fascinate the readers and prompt them to search for a solution. The present essay investigates such rhetoric of complexity as the author's means of both thematizing and linguistically enacting the idea of writing and reading as conquest. I have chosen this novel in order to illustrate the impact of Spanish American literature and in order to show how the anxiety of influence² shapes the style of a modern author..