[In La reivindicación del Conde Don Julián (Count Julian)] we are propelled into the world of powerful and militantly aggressive satire. (p. 366)

[Goytisolo was responding to a] sense of futility and impotence … within the specific political and cultural circumstances of Spain in the 1950's and 60's, and … [he] sought to overcome this crisis by revising the entire concept of what was to be attacked through … [his] writing, and by revising as well both the weapons and the strategy for carrying out that attack.

The weapons which Goytisolo marshals for his assault are the traditional arms of the satirist: complex parody and quotation, traditional fables, parables and high-sounding homilies, hallucinatory scenes characterized by a grotesque and often obscene distortion of an objective reality, even direct invective are all brought into position for this radical attack. (p. 367)

Satire, of course, calls for a dramatic or fictive context within...