Antagony

Luis Goytisolo, Brendan Riley

Description

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This potent drama, a collected volume of Goytisolo's famed tetralogy following a Catalan family, is widely regarded as one of the most profound inquiries ever undertaken on literary creation.

Antagony surveys the social history of Barcelona and Catalonia, primarily since the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. The work, originally published as a tetralogy and now collected into one volume, follows the youth and education of Raúl Ferrer Gaminde, son of a well-connected, middle-class Catalan family that embraces Franco and Spanish Nationalism. Its potent drama plays out through Goytisolo’s crisp, forceful presentation of youth, humor, optimism, rebellion, violence, sexual awakening, indulgence, punishment, and the realization of one’s artistic vocation. Alternately modern and historical, Antagony displays intelligent realism, emotional gravity, profane beauty, brute vulgarity, sweeping rhetorical scope, and seamless transitions through long, streaming passages of narrative and introspection.

Sujets

• Literary
• Cataluña
• Franco
• Spain
• Catalonia
• Spain (groupe)
• Barcelona
• Fiction
• Francisco Franco
• Catalogne

Informations

• Publié par: Deep Vellum Publishing
• Date de parution: 02 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781628974188
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

From the Prologue:
In very general terms and limiting drastically the diversity of readings that the text offers, declared Luis Goytisolo in an unpublished interview, you could say that Recounting is the biography of a man, Raúl Ferrer Gaminde, told up to the moment when, sloughing off everything that has impeded him for years, he finally finds the adequate flow to give free rein to his vocation as a writer. The Greens of May Down to the Sea , continued Goytisolo, offers us the daily life of that same man, which he now writes, mixed with his notes, with his dreams, with his texts. The Wrath of Achilles is the book that is, perhaps, most disorienting right from the start, because it apparently seems to have little to do with our protagonist: the narrator is no longer Raúl, neither in first person nor in third person but rather a woman who is a girlfriend and lover of his, as well as his distant cousin, Matilde, who gives us her own image of Raúl s world and who converts Raúl into an implicit protagonist. The Wrath of Achilles is a work dedicated to Raúl: it s like the Earth seen from the moon. Finally, Theory of Knowledge is Raúl s work, a work written by Raúl which assumes his own biographical experience, which is simply dumped into, strewn throughout, Recounting; his experience as writer, of which The Greens of May Down to the Sea offers significant glimpses, and other elements of which one has indirect notice through the testimony of Matilde.

Recounting originally published in Spanish by Alianza Editorial as Recuento in 1973.
The Greens of May Down to the Sea originally published in Spanish as Los verdes de mayo hasta el mar by Seix Barral in 1976.
The Wrath of Achilles originally published in Spanish as La colera de Aquiles by Alianza Editorial, S.A. in 1979.
Theory of Knowledge originally published in Spanish Teoría del conocimiento by Alfaguara in 1983.
Copyright © 1973, 1976, 1979, 1981 by Luis Goytisolo
Translation copyright © 2017, 2022 by Brendan Riley
Prologue copyright © 2011 by Ignacio Echevarría
Prologue translation copyright © 2022 by Brendan Riley
First Dalkey Archive edition of the complete Antagony , 2022.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.
All rights reserved
Cover design by Jack Smyth
Interior design by Anuj Mathur
www.dalkeyarchive.com
Dallas/Dublin
Printed on permanent/durable acid-free paper.

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Table of Contents Prologue by Ignacio Echevarría Recounting I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX The Greens of May Down to the Sea I The Old Man Dowser? Dowsers? Aphrodite Dialogue Lunasol II Itinerary The Bowels of Attila Metaphor of Europe I’ll Tell You Four Times Royal Staircase Tics III The Caesar Dialogue Conversion, Diversion, Immersion Aurea Incognita Matilde Moret The Crackpot The Arrival of the Aphrodite Warts The Complete Idiot Mobilis in mobili IV Veils Observations Air Dionysian Lunasol Dialogue Recapitulation The Cove Santa Cecilia Conversion I’ll Keep Her Unless Her Owner Shows Up May 18 Investment, Amusement V Inculations One Thing I’ve Discovered Grafts Six Days VI Periplus The Wrath of Achilles I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX Theory of Knowledge [The Diary of Carlos as a Young Man] I II [Notes by Ricardo Echave] III Attics Getting the Message IV The Siren Effect Dialogue with Tape Recorder Private Diary The Old Man with the Dogs V Rehabilitation of the Knight Errant The Eye VI Northward, Port de la Selva [The Old Man] VII VIII IX X XI XII
Guide Table of Contents Begin Reading
PROLOGUE
I suppose that, upon opening a book such as this, a volume of such intimidating magnitude, it s best to be as direct as possible and not run the risk of encouraging the reader to plunge headlong into a journey that might become arduous, in addition to being long. So I ll start by tackling, almost by way of promotional claims, a few weighty affirmations, leaving for later the arguments capable of sustaining them.
I will say, first of all, that Antagony is one of the great novels of the twentieth century; comparable in its scope and achievements, and in its ambition, to such works as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, or The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil. These are not random examples, but ones chosen-among other possible novels-because of the parallels that can be drawn between them and certain aspects of Antagony . This is, in no short measure, a novel about a writer s development; it offers a very revealing picture of a whole society, observed with extraordinary critical perspicacity; and it poses a subtle theory of knowledge based on the reminiscences awakened in the character s mind, as much by the act of writing as of reading.
Linked to this theory of knowledge, Antagony proposes one of the most exhaustive, rigorous, and profound explorations ever undertaken of literary creation, understood as a field in which language convokes meanings that it commonly conceals. From this investigation unfolds an implacable denunciation of the masking power of the word, and a radical concept of the novel and of the supposition from which questions can currently be raised about the exercise of this genre.
In the particular context of Spanish fiction, Antagony , published between 1973 and 1981, also comprises a lucid recapitulation of the historical and cultural period which was drawing to a close at that time-the era of Franco s dictatorship-and a severe challenge to every kind of rhetoric, including literary rhetorics, which prospered during the same time. At the time of its appearance, the novel signaled directions toward which, taking advantage of the path blazed until then, Spanish literature might have been able to point itself if, by those same dates, most of the newer novelists, as well as some of the veterans, had not opted for practically the opposite direction, in which many of the conventions that Antagony relegated to a second plane or, simply considered outmoded, gathered renewed validity.
Finally, Antagony splendidly illustrates, like few other novels or literary documents, the transformations of Spanish society during the decades of the sixties and seventies, delivering, in multiple passages of extraordinary incisiveness and comedy, very illuminating glimpses of the mentality, of the attitudes, of all kinds of tendencies (including ideological ones, in their broadest sense) that determined the development of Spain s much vaunted transition to democracy, and that, against all odds, have continued until the present, which gives one a lot to think about.
If the reader has reached this paragraph without having previously read the novel, the best thing would be, without continuing this prologue, for them to judge for themselves the success of the aforementioned achievements. What follows here are barely a few considerations that only serve to frame and orient one s reading enough to contribute to settling the question.
Antagony was conceived and composed over a period of almost twenty years. Luis Goytisolo has explained how its broad outlines crystallized in a matter of a few hours one day in May of 1960. It was while he was serving time in Carabanchel prison, subjected during his weeks there to a severe regimen of solitary confinement, after being sentenced for his previous militant communism. The structural nucleus then created, continued to develop in the form of notes and more notes, but it did not begin to acquire its own real identity until January 1, 1963. By then, Goytisolo had the general plan of the novel clearly worked out, along with many of its details. The final lines of Antagony , nevertheless, were not written until June 16, 1980, indeed, the very same day as the annual celebration of Bloomsday.
In 1958, at the young age of twenty-three, Luis Goytisolo had won the Premio Biblioteca Breve for Las afueras (The Outskirts), his first novel. After that, there was great anticipation about him, only partially satisfied by his second novel, Las mismas palabras (The Same Words) (1963), which he has always considered a failure, and which appeared the same year when he began to write Antagony , with which he sets things to rights. It s admirable that a writer still so young, and so promising, as Luis Goytisolo was in 1963, abstained from publishing anything for almost ten years, hard at work on a project as ambitious as Antagony . But what s certain is that, despite having the plan for the novel very clear in mind, Goytisolo did not foresee how long the novel would turn out to be. Thus his decision, at a certain point, to publish it in sections, persuaded by the need of counting on a certain number of opportunities if he wanted to carry his journey to a good conclusion.
Thus, the novel began to be publicized long before being fully completed, which had to have important consequences on the type of reception it received, and how well it was properly understood. Although from the beginning it was made clear that Antagony was a tetralogy, the value of this concept turned out to be insufficient to suggest the types of connections that unite its different parts. These were largely read as stand-alone volumes, and, what s worse: given the span of several years between the publication of each one of the four volumes, many people only read one volume or another, without connecting to the others. Today one still hears talk about the different books that make up Antagony as if they were truly separate, independent novels, segregated from the greater whole of which they form a part. What doesn t get pointed out enough is that Antagony s wide landscape contains a variety of different books, not just four. It s really just one novel, whose intentions are impossible to appreciate without reading the whole thing, as occurs with Remembrance of Things Past (nobody really considers discussing Swann s Way or Time Regained as independent novels), or as happens with The Ale