SOURCE: “(De)mystification in Juan Goytisolo's Early Novels, from Juegos de Manos to La Resaca,” in Modern Language Review, Vol. 91, No. 2, April, 1996, pp. 393-405.

In the following essay, Squires traces Goytisolo's evolution through his first five novels, specifically his relationship to myth.

Critical interest in Juan Goytisolo has focused most intently on his period of ideological realism, beginning with Señàs de identidad (1966) and characterized by a zeal for aggressive demythification, in which the task of demythifying Spain goes hand in hand with that of demythifying the part of the author that remains a prey to myth.¹ This approach he has termed ‘autenticidad subjetiva’.² The purpose of the present article is to suggest that the desire to erase all mythical illusions is ambiguously present in the early, relatively sparsely studied, novels.³ Myth (or mystification) is a paradoxical entity in Goytisolo's work, and a consideration of the early fiction...