ࡱ> c 7jbjbSS \11v,Z-]<<<<8t$T<d$(((((((@dBdBdBdBdBdBd,egLnd(((((nd\.$((\\\(,P((@dDDD\D(@d\J\@d@dP<<TX@d CHAPTER I Consciousness and Memory The driving force in Antagona is Rals effort, indeed compulsion, to understand the processes that underlie what humans perceive to be reality from the various perspectives his senses, experience, and imagination can afford him. He begins by attempting to comprehend the paradox formed by his uniqueness on the one hand and his connections to everything that has or ever will exist on the other. It is a personal quest that reflects a collective one: to identify the most basic elements and forces of matter and being, and then to explore the ways in which they combine and recombine as the individual and reality interact and mutually transform one another. In La historia ms bella del mundo, Joel de Rosnay notes: Complejidad no es complicacin. () La vida es as, repetitiva. El tomo est en la molcula que est en la clula que est en el organismo que est en la sociedad (). Nuestro cerebro, con sus tres estratos, conserva la memoria de la evolucin. Tambin nuestros genes. Y la composicin qumica de nuestras clulas es un fragmento pequeo del ocano primitivo. () Nuestro cuerpo relata la historia de nuestros orgenes. (111112) For Ral, the search for those basic elements as they are reflected in his inner and outer realities begins with the chaotic fragments of childhood memories wedded to the form of a narrative that gradually develops to become both a legacy and a prophesy. Biologically and psychologically, each human life literally retraces the evolution of the species; therefore, every individual carries within him/herself the history as well as the possibilities of humanity, even of the universe. Each individual repeats a collective process that is perceived in a highly individual, self-reflective manner, fostering the sense of uniqueness and separation that is the basis of the human experience. The awareness of the uniqueness of the individual con-sciousness leads to the realization that, at some point, the world as it is seen from that perspective will cease to be, simply because it will disappear at the time of death. That particular eye of perception will close, and the person, as well as everything else s/he is and knows, will vanish. Hence, in part, our reverence for life and our fear of death. At the same time, however, we also understand that throughout human history other eyes have seen and experienced many of the same things that we have, albeit from perceptual frameworks both similar and radically different from our own. Just as we draw on them, others will draw on all that we are creating as we blend our knowledge of the past into our prefiguration of the future, the very prefiguration that will alter the shape of future events. It is this never-ending confluence of frameworks that yields an infinite number of creative possibilities in the present and for the future. So, in spite of the death of the individual, a death that is necessary to regenerate the species and matter, a cycle of life continues that does not completely annihi-late the fact of the individual human existence. Biologically, our descendants will carry the signals passed down to them through DNA. Culturally and psychologically, their lives and ways of thinking about themselves and the universe will be marked by layer upon layer of symbols, objects, and cultural structures created by the thoughts and deeds of their predecessors. The narrative formed by Rals perceptions, experiences, and interpretations of reality exemplifies the process and the awareness described above. Goytisolos characters are not generally of the flesh and blood variety. The author has said that characters are important to him in terms of their function rather than their personality (Dos textos 111). Certainly, Ral is an example of the use of character as function because, for all that the events of his life and his innermost thoughts are recounted, he remains an enigma as a person. Even Matilde Morets outside view of him does little to overcome the disembodied state in which Ral exists in the readers mind. There is, of course, a good reason for this: Ral is presented as pure consciousness. He is the intellectual vehicle through which the reader observes the foggy, disjointed beginnings, the development in fits and starts, and the maturation of a conscious self into a kind of field of energy that collects, connects, and discards (but never really forgets) endless thoughts, feelings, and items of information. From them, he creates an evolving understanding of himself and the world as we watch. In Los verdes, as Ral is making notes to himself about the way in which he wishes to construct the basic structures of his novel, there is a description of the function of character that reiterates what has just been said: Rehuir toda caracterizacin cerrada, coherente. Nada de personajes, de caracteres sicolgicos; un solo mecanismo mental en accin, gracias a cuyo funcionamiento cobran entidad las personas y las cosas, los hechos, ni verdaderos ni falsos en relacin no ya a una realidad objetiva o en relacin a s mismos, sino simplemente as o as en relacin al mecanismo mental generador. (II 3738) Apart from the character of Matilde Moret, the generating mental mechanism, or focus on reality through an individual locus of perception is the rule. At the beginning of this chapter, I mentioned that Rals search has its basis in the wedding of memory to narrative. In Recuento, the two are brought together principally through the structural framework created by narrative voice. Throughout this volume, an oscillation exists between a very subjective third person telling us about Ral, but very much from his point of view, and a somewhat detached, objectified first person voice narrating the process of his writing. This second voice effaces itself for all practical purposes in Los verdes. Goytisolo alludes to the fine line drawn between Rals story being told and Ral telling his story when, in his summary of Antagona (presented in the introduction to this study), he states: El Aquiles es el libro que tal vez desorienta ms al principio, porque, en apariencia, poco tiene que ver con nuestro protagonista: el relator no es Ral, ni en tercera ni en primera, sino una antigua amante y prima lejana, Matilde () (Ortega, Entrevista con LG, 144, emphasis is mine). The implication is that Ral is telling his story, whether he does it from the relative anonymity of a third person stance or from a first person one. As Wayne Booth aptly notes in The Rhetoric of Fiction: To say that a story is told in the first or third person will tell us nothing of importance unless we become more precise and describe how the particular qualities of the narrators relate to specific effects (150). Since these particular qualities and specific effects are critical not only to Antagonas organization but also to its meaning, I will focus first on some of the particular effects narrative voice creates on the structure and themes in Recuento. In Los verdes, as Ral/Ricardo is thinking (on paper) about how his text will be configured, the following comment is made about narrative voice: En cuanto a persona narrativa, recurrir tambin a la primera, pues as como en Csar el uso de la tercera persona constituye un recurso encaminado a obtener una mayor verosimilitud y objectividad en el relato, as, en general, resulta difcil saber dnde hay ms campo libre para lo imaginario, si en esa falsa objectividad de los relatos en tercera persona o en la falsa intimidad que ofrece el uso de la primera. (II 38) This pretty much sums up the advantages and disadvantages of these two postures toward the narration of the text. It also includes a warning to the reader about accepting those postures at face value. Indeed, Luis Goytisolo takes the advice of the narrator in Los verdes and most of Antagona, apart from Recuento, is narrated in the first person. Notable exceptions are the Periplo section of Los verdes and the interpolated novel, El Edicto de Miln, in La clera, both of which are quite brief compared to the six hundred plus pages of Recuento. The use of a third person narrator at the beginning of this novelistic cycle, however, allows Goytisolo to do several things: 1) it provides a flexible focusing mechanism that can distance the reader from the character, thus limiting the possibility that its functional nature will be undermined, or, alternately, it can create feelings of sympathy and complicity that invite the reader to draw parallels between his/her own life experiences and those of Ral; 2) in terms of its distancing function, it facilitates the objectification of the life and thoughts of the character so that they are more easily converted into referents when Ral begins to write (i.e., the structures, images, and symbols used in the other volumes of Antagona); 3) it allows for a foregrounding of process and structure, particularly relative to the function of memory since the narrative voice generally adapts itself to a certain extent to the stages of psychological development of the character. In reference to the last point, it is through memory that the individual objectifies him/herself. We often look back on that person we were at different stages of our life as if we were someone else. Especially in Recuento, a line is drawn by both the narrator and the character between the person Ral was before he began writing and the person that he becomes once he begins to act on his literary vocation. The use of a third person narrator that then shifts to a first person stance in the last pages of the volume serves a dramatic function, akin to a rite of passage, marking a significant shift in the emotional, intellectual, and psychological state of the character as contemplation gives way to action. To a great extent, this is an illusion. The reader understands at the end of Recuento that it was indeed written by Ral himself in his function as author and not by someone else using him as a character. This narrative certainly bears none of the marks of diary fiction that would suggest that it was written as Ral grew and changed. Ral, as a mature writer, looks back on and objectifies his past within a complex, interconnecting series of situations with respect to his own memory of the stages of his personal development. Still, when the character assumes the first person voice, the temporal point of view changes radically as the emphasis is shifted from memory and what was learned from the exploration of the past to the use of that information as the referential base for his future writing. When the protagonist and the narrative voice merge, the cycle formed by the objectification/observation process ends for both Ral and for the reader. Once the narrator/protagonist becomes more involved with the writing process, the reader is likewise called upon to make a similar transition from observation (even if it was a demanding observation) to a more active participation. This creates a completely different set of expectations surrounding the reading and interpre-tation of the text. The resulting dynamic perhaps reaches its height in La clera de Aquiles. We will be examining that interaction in other parts of this study. Limiting ourselves for the moment to an overview of Recuentos structure, it should be noted that the narration of Rals life follows a generally linear progression beginning with his earliest memories and continuing until the time of his trip to Rosas with Nuria, three years after his incarceration. The temporal focal points in each chapter represent key moments in his psychological development. The other events leading up to or occurring after that moment, but related to it in Rals mind, jump from events both past and future to these temporal touchstones, so that they are constantly being reviewed, aug-mented, interpreted, and understood from within the changing context of the protagonist. In order to demonstrate how Goytisolo uses this strategy, I have chosen to look at Rals memories of his aunt Paquita and the way in which they are associated with some of these key moments. His earliest recollections of her are comprised of fleeting images and phrases interspersed at random among other images relating to various people and events from his childhood. They include: her love of music reflected in her comments on Mozart; that one of the maids, La Pilate, worked in her house (I 12, 13); that Paquita helped La Pilate when she taken by the Nationalists for consorting with the enemy; and that she consoled his anxious grandmother about her appearance when a party was being prepared to celebrate that victory (I 16). The narrators representation depicts the child at that stage of his life when he reacts instinctively to his environment. There is little if any sense of before and after between the brief scenes, images, and sensory perceptions. Particularly in this first chapter, the narrator uses Ral like the lens of a camera, aware of his environment at a perceptual level, but not yet able to associate or interpret what is going on around him into anything approaching logical patterns. This portrayal coincides with Carl Jungs characterization of childhood as a preconscious state in which connections are not made between new perceptions and an already established context. Memories exist as scattered and unrelated events that become important later in life as they form the basis of the ego which will eventually distinguish the child, in his own mind, as one entity among many others in the world (Modern Man 98). As if to underscore this lack of self awareness, Rals name is never even used in this first chapter. There is a reference to Lalo, but it is not really clear that the nickname refers to the protagonist at that point (I 13). By the time Ral reaches adolescence in Chapter III, Paquitas activities form part of a repeating pattern, mostly associated with the familys visits to Vallfosca, the country estate. The narrator creates a more subjective tone in this chapter by giving the reader greater access to Rals affective state. Instead of a recording instrument, Ral is now portrayed as a feeling person whose attitudes and opinions reflect his environment. The use of the imperfect tense by the narrator emphasizes the extent to which ingrained patterns characterize the young Rals understanding of his reality: Paquita and her family usually stay at the estate until September (I 32); she irritates her husband by accompanying him on hunting expeditions and scaring off all the prey (I 35); she criticizes her niece (in her absence, of course) for her liberal lifestyle (I 40); she arrives at mass dressed all in black, cubierta en velos como una santa, and she and his father always sit in the first pew on the left at church on Sunday, while Ral does all he can to sneak out of the mass (I 48); and she becomes increasingly religious, cementing her image in the family as a beata. In this chapter, the narration demonstrates that Ral has developed a very clear understanding of the interrelationships between the various members of his extended family and of the attitudes they project that connect them to the values of the community at large. His perceptual world has broadened well beyond the family unit to include friends and even incipient romantic involvements, and he eas-ily recognizes accepted patterns of behavior and values and deviance from those patterns. This leads him to categorize people into types and to be attracted to or uninterested in them based on his interpre-tation of their behavior or relation to the group. His growing aware-ness of social and cultural norms can be seen throughout Chapter II which focuses primarily on his experiences in a parochial school and the manner in which the expectations of the family, religious, educational, and political structures reinforce one another as the child is developing a sense of what the world is about and his place within it. The subjective tone and the narrators sympathetic portrayal of Ral in these early chapters as he becomes actively involved in his world serve to draw the reader closer (but not too close) to the charac-ter, a strategy that facilitates the remembrance of a similar stage in the readers own life, before the responsibilities of adulthood became overwhelming. The processes of memory that involve objectification on the one hand and complicity on the other are fully operational at this point in the novel. It is through memory that we can both be our-selves and stand outside of ourselves at the same time, depending on how we are using the process. Memory allows us the flexibility to detach from or connect to earlier images of ourselves and others in an ebb and flow of mental and emotional distancing similar to that being effected in the text. In Chapter VIII, Paquita dies of an extended illness, and with her die the last vestiges of Rals adolescence, although he doesnt fully appreciate it until later. As he visits her in her final days and observes the collection of family members that assemble for the funeral, it is clear that he has undergone extensive changes in perspective and attitude since the time that he spent summers at Vallfosca. The experiences of his young adult yearspolitical activism, the university, military service, friendships, etc.have radically altered his sense of identity and the terms of his connections to the broader world. Whereas in Chapters IVVI much of his youthful idealism was still intact and he was experiencing a relatively high level of integration in the various aspects of his life, he has now reached a moment, quite unexpectedly, in which everything seems to be falling apart. He would like to be able to see the world in terms as simple as those of his youth, but that is no longer possible. His world view, self image, and circumstances have combined in such a way that they are radically dissonant. The chapter begins: Ms triste, s, ms triste si es posible, mas no con la tristeza tierna que complace en el fondo ni con sentimiento egosta alguno, no sumido en ensoaciones solitarias, no, sino, ms bien con el nimo deprimido de quien contempla la entrada victoriosa de los ejrcitos enemigos y, en contraste con el movimiento y las aclamaciones circundantes, no percibe su cuerpo ms que como una presencia grvida, piedra irreparablemente desplomada. (I 265) This description of Rals frame of mind makes implicit references to the earlier stages in his development of self-awareness by charac-terizing the types of sadness that one might feel when events and the emotions they engender are felt at less profound levels. It also returns to the end of Chapter I when Ral was witnessing the jubilation of his family as the Nationalist troops entered the village. Because he has developed the capacity for empathy, he now understands what the other side must have been feelingthe isolation, the betrayal, the devastation. It is significant that the depth of his feeling coincides with the moment that death becomes real for him. In this chapter Nurias father dies in an accident, his aunt dies of cancer, Federicos girlfriend undergoes an abortion, and even his pet turtle, Achilles, dies in a fire. He is overwhelmed by the forces of inevitability and randomness that appear to be dismantling his understanding of what life should be based on what he has learned. Nothing has a clear meaning or struc-ture anymore. In this psychological moment, Paquita serves as a stimulus that sets his thoughts and feelings into a whirlwind of interconnected reflections that mirror back to the reader his changing, much more complex, ideas about the nature of reality and existence. The narration fluctuates between the various perceptual levels of which Ral is now capable, since present levels always include earlier modes of perception, but the process also allows for regression along the scale when situations demand differing degrees of understanding. So, as in Chapter I, the narrator still uses the character like a video camera, recording the presence and inane conversations of his grieving family without any more interpretation than that which the reader is willing to offer. Interspersed in this type of presen-tation, however, there are moments when the narrator relates Rals thoughts on what he sees around him. One example would be the note of irony in his observation that his aunts earlier obsessive religious devotion had probably burned itself out, leaving su como desinters de ahora por lo piadoso (I 276), but that the relatives insisted on continuing the rituals, thinking they will somehow bring her comfort. They are interpreting her present needs from her past behavior. From Rals point of view, that is absurd, since lo ms probable es que, en aquel momento, su conciencia de estar recibiendo un sacramento de vivos fuese prcticamente nula (I 276). The narrator, again through Rals eyes, notes that the family members carry on conversations about a broad variety of superficially treated subjects, and that they deal with each other con un respeto exquisito por las lneas que con el tiempo han ido tipificando la imagen social de cada uno (I 279). The stereotypes and charac-terizations that explained the world in Rals youth now appear to be rigid and hypocritical to him. His own hypocrisy has made him very sensitive to that quality in others. He is desperately trying to maintain the illusion that he is a good son, with a serious girlfriend, and working hard to ensure a respectable career for himself while he is really a political subversive whose girlfriend had an abortion so they wouldnt have to get married. Paquitas death and the fact that her place as the matriarch of the family will end, thus creating a new cycle in the family history, lead Ral to a series of associations between the family and other, broader historical contexts. It a mental journey that leads him to an important insight: ()la idea de que la historia, por ejemplo, no parece tener un sentido coherente y acaso no tiene por qu tenerlo, y, ni mucho menos, un obligado final feliz (I 284). This passage goes on to describe the fear that Paquitas demise creates in others, a fear that inspires a superficial solidarity among them as they engage in communal commiseration in the hope of shaking off the feelings of dread in their midst. They indicate their condolences with: ()el acto de oprimir una mano, firmar en el libro de las condolencias o ponerse a la entera disposicin, sinceramente emocionados, qu duda cabe que sinceramente emocionados, al ofrecernos a los familiares de la difunta (I 284). (Notice the switch from third to first person as the mourners come to include the reader!) The narrator indicates Rals disgust at such affectation, a disgust that indicates a denial of his own fear, by intro-ducing and then repeating the cynical comment about the sincerity of the emotion involved. Finally, in Chapter IX, in a section that previews those of Los verdes in that it is titled, Cbalas, construcciones, family histories are compared to old jokes that somehow become true stories that happened to someone specific even if all the details cannot be remembered. The similarities between the processes of memory and those of fiction are clear in this analogy. These stories are linked to others concerning the ties created by blood or by the inheriting of a certain type of character, all of which contribute to the psychological connections, perhaps more important than the genetic ones, that bind the individual to the family unit: Tendencias a sacralizar el cdigo cifrado del clan frente a cualquier explicacin gentica. Una explicacin que excluyera el parentesco, por ejemplo, del por qu la muerte de ta Paquita pudo afectar a Ral ms all de toda previsin. Que refiera ese por qu, pongamos por caso, al hecho de que para Ral, con ella desapareca un nexo de relacin entre el pasado consciente y recordado de los veraneos en Vallfosca, y aquel otro ms olvidado, pero no menos intenso en sus destellos, del Montseny durante la guerra civil. (I 520521) This thought, coming to Ral as it does during the final moments of the mass being celebrated in the prison in which he is being held, a ritualized event that at once creates a fusion and separation of the various levels at which the story has been operating, indicates the degree to which his consciousness has opened itself to an exploration of all the possible influences upon it. Paquita becomes, even more than a stimulus to piece together his active memories, a link to a broader past, some of it remembered and some of it forgotten, but still present and alive in its effects on him. Montseny represents the place where he spent time with his mother. What if, pongamos por caso, he mourned Paquitas death because it made him feel all the more keenly the absence of his mother who died before the civil war was over? The ripple effects of her death can be seen in his neuroses: his fear of abandonment and betrayal; his inability to be close to anyone; his need to control and possess; his unwillingness to commit to a desire to write that is more real to him than any other part of his being. But his mother, in a sublimated form, is also is the symbolic key that later will unlock his creative energy and so help him survive his acute depression and convert all that energy to more positive uses. All of this finally occurs to him because the depth of his emotional and psychological crisis forces him to search for solutions to his plight anywhere that he can find them, whether they seem logical or not. He feels like he is dying and that his past is the only vehicle he has for trying to make sense of his present so that he can begin to imagine a future. Through the objectification of himself that the third person narration provides, Ral is able to regress to his earliest memories and then follow the path, in broad terms, that leads to his current emotional state. C. G. Jung provides a description of this type of process in Symbols of Transformation: Regression is also an involuntary introversion in so far as the past is an object of memory and therefore a psychic content, an endopsychic factor. It is a relapse into the past caused by a depression in the present. Depression should therefore be regarded as an unconscious compensation whose content must be made conscious if it is to be fully effective. This can only be done by consciously regressing along with the depressive tendency and integrating the memories so activated into the conscious mindwhich was what the depression was aiming at in the first place. (404) Philosopher J. T. Fraser makes another interesting observation about the relationship between psychological equilibrium and tem-poral perception: Indeed, there seems to be a reciprocal relationship between the unity of conscious experience and the degree of focusing on a present. When one is in healthy equilibrium with the environment, aware of the future and past but not overwhelmed by them, and concentrating on tasks at hand, there is also usually an unquestioned sense of unity of self. The loss of this unity is a clinical sign of disturbance and is often accompanied by the loss of the capacity to focus on the present. (264) This idea explains, in part, the need for the narrator, even if it is Ral looking back on his own life, to dissociate itself from the protagonist. In Chapters VIII and IX, Ral as a character focuses on his present only to the extent that he compulsively ritualizes it in order to avoid possibly adverse effects of present behavior on a future that terrifies him. The past, at least for a while, is a more comfortable psychological space for him in that it is the known part of his existence and because he can forget or remember, or even revise parts of it to suit his current needs. Still, he finally becomes obsessed with it: Vrtigo y torbellino, nombres, cosas, acontecimientos, sucedindose, transformndose, metamorfosendose, fantstico vrtice aquel, con el deseo, en el centro del fondo, de pararse y pensar () (I 451). He will need to face up to all of the psychological defenses against the reality he has built in order to extract himself from the vortex his memories have created, to reintegrate his sense of self and so be able to return his focus to the present and its many challenges. There are two operative aspects of the third person narrator implied in the preceding review. They represent aspects of Rals perception of reality and, over the course of the volume, indicate his ability to reflect critically on his experiences within broader contexts. One aspect is marked by a generally straightforward representation of the events in Rals life. It corresponds to the level of the text that is associated most closely with plot and a generally more mimetic style of representation. It allows for the recreation of the linear temporal progression of narrated events, although some things do not actually get put into their temporal place until Chapter IX. Its information sources are located in the external world and they enter Rals consciousness via the senses, principally sight. By and large, visual images will have the greatest effect on Ral and are those to which he recurs most often when he begins to write (the eye becomes a major thematic symbol in and of itself). The second aspect of the third person voice reflects Rauls sense of self-consciousness, and it insinuates itself into the narration of events as the character begins to interpret his world. This aspect gradually becomes the predominant force in the shaping, connecting, and interpretation of the events and images being presented. It feeds on everything Ral perceives, feels, and knows, but it reflects that knowledge inwardly and creates a version of reality that plays on the screen of Rals mind, eventually establishing a kind of parallel universe that is in constant conflict with the external reality around him, separating the world as he thinks it should be from the world as it is. It also forms part of what might be called in Freudian terms Rals talking cure. Its tools are analogy, metaphor, satire, parody, and rhetoric; and it is this aspect of the narrative voice that eventually undermines and destroys the interpretation of the world that Ral has formed in his childhood and adolescent years, thus clearing the way for him to accept lifes ambiguities and contradictions and to utilize them creatively in his writing. As the aspect of the narrative voice related to the protagonists growing consciousness gradually becomes more important and takes up a greater amount of narrative space, the mimetic level of the text gives way to a progressive deformation of reality, thus breaking the illusion that the representation of Rals world in the first few chapters was in any way a realistic one. The author undermines the illusion by systematically reducing the official image of society to the status of a hypocritical mask by the relentless satire and parody to which it is subjected. Through this brutal attack on the surface image, be it of families, of social institutions, of officially sanctioned histories of cities, of religion, or of literature, Goytisolo cautions us about the dangers of taking any image at face value and the importance of looking beneath, behind, beyond, or even through that image at the forces that create and interpret it, including our own motivations. The oscillation from one aspect of the narrative voice to the other provides one model of how to employ such a critical reasoning process. By preserving a straightforward presentation of events por-traying day-to-day reality and the surface image it provides, and by then contrasting it with a gradually more intellectually challenging critique, the author manages to represent the maturation of the char-acter as well as to teach (though this may not have been his intent) the reader how to engage in a similar critical process vis a vis the text. We return to Fraser once again for a description of the essential differences in human perceptual approaches to reality that parallel the aspects or perspectives on reality demonstrated by Goytsisolos third person narrator. Drawing on scientific studies, he uses the terms observer and agent to designate these approaches. Applying this definition to our analysis provides insights into the possible impact of such a perceptual split on the individual in general and the reader of Antagona in particular: The technique of the observer is primarily that of classification. He prepares a list about the agent, made up of items which, if they are to be held as true, are unchanging characteristics of some sort. The items on this list must therefore be lawlike, thus, at least in principle, recordable in spatial forms. In contrast, the agent identifies himself by a process which is a continuous integration of his memories and expectations in his ever-changing mental present. The elements of this self-identification are not fixed items but processes, or segments of processes; they are connected primarily by value judgments and not by laws. (248) If one looks at the text of Recuento, the observer aspect of the narrative voice corresponds to the one that fill us in. It tells the story, classifies the characters, and describes the places that affect Rals development. It also reflects the level of consciousness and maturity of the protagonist up to and including his childhood and early adolescent years, before Ral establishes a clear sense of self (roughly, Chapters IIV). The agent aspect, on the other hand, challenges earlier perceptions, including that first sense of identity, and questions the validity of the limitations they impose from a more mature perspective. The overlapping of these two narrative aspects over the course of the volume allows the reader to witness Rals progress as he first recognizes and accepts the world as it was given to him and then challenges it so as to be able to take possession of his identity and reality by recasting them in an evolving series of models that are concretized in Los verdes and Teora. It is through this process that the character, and every individual for that matter, is finally able to lay claim to a self-constructed identity capable of developing a vision of the world and to act to achieve that vision, in spite of any fears about where it may lead. Of course, there will most likely be other crises over the course of a lifetime which will evoke similar cycles of regression and reassessment. In fact, we will see several of these crises throughout Antagona. Nevertheless, when Rals first definitive crisis leads to the acceptance of his vocation as a writer, the end of one cycle has arrived and a new one begins. At that moment, the protagonist assumes the role of narrative voice. We have already seen an example of the interaction between the two aspects in the description of the conversations between Aunt Paquitas mourners. First, the narrator-as-observer depicts Ral as he scans the scene and records the words and expressions of the family members. In one paragraph, the character is listening to a conversation about scandals in Barcelona, and in the next (an unusually clean break), the agent aspect takes over, engaging in a critique, first of the declining good taste of the family over several generations, and then of the citys personality that includes Bar-celonas rivalry with Castilla, the effects of money on social class, the lamentable state of architecture in the city, its lack of political astuteness, and its general attitudes of impotence and desperation before the idea of changing its ways. The sentences in this five page section are much longer and more baroque in style that those used by the observer aspect and a great attention to detail and many shifts in mental direction are required for the reader to follow the connections being creating that lead from one topic to the next. By no means, however, is this an exercise in free association. The narrator provides key words and phrases that forge links connecting the ideas of family history, city history, Spanish history, European influences, and then culminates with the statement given earlier that then undoes all these links: () la idea de que la historia, por ejemplo, no parece tener un sentido coherente () (I 284). Through the exposition of Rals thought process by the agents voice of consciousness, the reader is at once given a rendering of the patterns Ral is accustomed to using to associate ideas and his discomfiture with these patterns reflected in the cynical attitude and parody inflicted on the ideas being expressed and the suggestion that their progression is in any way a logical one. Critic Linda Hutcheon has observed that parody is a deviation from the norm and includes that norm within itself as backgrounded material (The Metafictional Paradox 50). In this case, it is not only the material, but the structures underlying that material that are called into question. The type of crisis Ral experiences, although admittedly more dramatic than many individuals might expect to have, is the result of a normal developmental process that puts the roles of the observer and the agent within each of us into conflict. Human beings like predic-tability and order, and the observer is the conservative part of our nature that, through the information our capacity for memory provides, places events in a sequential order, sees the patterns, and predicts the future based on those patterns. This creates one set of expectations based on the idea that the future will repeat the past by following the same patterns (Fraser 251). The agent, on the other hand, is that aspect of our nature that is living the experience and which, therefore, sees the future as a set of unpredictable variables. In spite of the indications of what might already be known, everything learned, experienced or perceived in any given moment by the agent causes a recalculation of expectations concerning the future. Also, the agent is keenly aware of the element of surprise, one that often undermines the logic of cause and effect. Indeed, the agent is aware that his own actions constantly alter his reality in significant and unanticipated ways. Existential tension arises within the individual as s/he strives to balance the two sets of expectations (Fraser 253256). In Rals case, in Chapters VIIIX of Recuento, there is a great disparity between the world as he thinks it should be based on the patterns of the past, and the world as he is experiencing it. One makes no sense in terms of the other. Until Chapter IX, he is even very unrealistic in terms of the effects of his own behavior on his reality; in other words, he has not yet accepted responsibility for the impact he has as an agent on his environment. Reality, from his point of view, is something that is happening to him and over which he has no control; therefore, he resorts to superstitious behavior and rituals in a mis-guided effort to appease the forces of chaos. He tries desperately to balance the two visions of the world he is carrying within him, but this cannot occur without a fundamental shift in his perspective. The aspects of the narrative voice work together with the portrayal of the character to demonstrate effectively the psychological mechanisms at work as Ral passes from one stage of perception and development to another throughout the text, especially in the moments when the con-flicting views most overlap and so cause a crisis in the character that is brilliantly reflected in the complexity of the narrative representing his confusion and desperation. Another example of the interplay of agent and observer, this one a bit more subtle, is found in Chapter VII in the discussion of the communist party activities of Ral and his group. Their plans for a protest at the university and the subsequent need to create diver-sionary tactics to protect their group from arrest lead to a map-like description of the city and possible escape routes. Almost imperceptibly, that concrete level of plot is left behind to enter into a historical/religious parody: Uno sale hacia la salida de la plaza del Rey y el otro hacia la de la calle de los Condes de Barcelona. O sea, si se ha entrado por la plaza del Rey, salir por la calle de los Condes de Barcelona. O bien, en la Catedral, entrando por la calle de San Ivo, tambin llamada de la Inquisicin, y saliendo por la de la Piedad o por la de Santa Eulalia, ambas en los claustros. () dejando atrs aquel ncleo de rancias estrecheces y piedra hmeda, olores fluctuantes, propios de alrededores catedralicios, comercios y artesanas desarrollados al amparo de la iglesia () olores sucesivamentes matizados sobre un fondo ms general de cargados vahos industriales, contrastadora atmsfera matutina de luz amarilla penetrando en la sombra (). (I 201202) In this instance, the references to smells and light signal a change in tone that marks the transition from the observers to the agents level of narration. The sentences in the section that follows the transition are very long, often more than a page, so it is difficult to present their sense or movement in an abbreviated form; but expressions like the following demonstrate the tone of ludic parody which is superimposed on this tour of the city: () la ciudad vista desde Montjuic o Montjuich o Monycich o Montjony o Montjoin, etctera, mole fortificada y vigilante antes llamada Mons Jovis o Mons Judeo-rum, la Barcelona del siglo XVI, espejo, farol, estrella y norte de la caballera andante () (I 203). Obviously, neither the narrator nor the young political activists see Barcelona in terms of being a bea-con or mirror of chivalry. The official interpretation of the history of the city is being undermined through ridicule and through a displace-ment of that identity demonstrated by the polinomasia employed. This example is typical of the many such transitions that appear throughout the volume. There is another factor that adds to the interactions of the narrator and the protagonist in Recuento and throughout Antagona. So far in this chapter we have focused on the relationship between the protag-onist and the aspects of narrative voice, but perhaps it is time to make reference to the effects within the text created by the implicit presence of its extratexual author. Thinly veiled behind Rals life is that of Luis Goytisolo, and the interplay between the two immediately feeds into images and struc-tures in the text shifting between the world being created within the volume and the real, external world of its author, thereby creating an expanded context within which to read the novel. One of the structural mirrors of the many present throughout Antagona is created by the interplay of perspective generated between Rals fictional biography and autobiographic details taken directly from the life of Luis Goytisolo. There can be no question that Antagona is a work of fiction, and it also is clear that Goytisolo never meant to write an autobiography or anything approaching it in this novel. Neverthe-less, to the readers aware of Goytisolos life, the autobiographical details he chooses to include as important aspects of Rals life are strikingly important ones: the death of his mother in the war; the decline of the family fortune; the political activities which end in imprisonment; and the notes, written on toilet paper while he was in prison, from which he would create a novelin fact, the very novel we are reading. When asked why he includes so many autobiographical details in his novels, the author has replied that these were the details he had at hand and that they created a context within which he felt comfortable. He is not the first to maintain that authors always write about themselves and from their own experience. Still, the reader has the suspicion that there is more going on in the merging of these two worlds than the establishment of a comfort zone for the author. Antagona, and particularly Recuento, is a work that straddles the borders of fiction and reality, both in terms of its use of genre and in its continual references to the roles of history and literature in culture. The use of the blurred genre boundaries allows Goytisolo to under-score the processes of transformation and interpretation in all human thought through the mirroring effects it creates. The French critic Phillipe Lejeune has described in detail the benefits of the blurred boundaries resulting from the superimposition of fictional biography and autobiography in a type of literature he calls autobiographical fiction. According to Lejeune, in autobiographical fiction, the author creates a space around and within his work that amplifies and multi-plies the narrative possibilities available to him/her, thus creating a three-dimensional effect that reaches beyond the boundaries of the page to include the image of the author and even that of the reader (Lejeune 217). The dialogic implications of this type of doubling, of the author existing inside and outside his work, are enormous because they create a series of parallel and competing structures that broaden the meaning of each individual phrase and image in the novel depen-ding on the point of view from which one chooses to regard them. The mirroring of the real life author and his character creates what Lejeune calls a stereo effect that expands the structural possibilities in the text (217). In autobiography as a genre, the complexity or the ambiguity inherent in the novel may be lacking; in the novel, the sense of realness or exactness of autobiography may not exist. The combination of the two sets of referents establishes a relationship between them, creating a space containing both and reducible to nei-ther one (217). In Antagona, as in several of Goytisolos novels, there is a constant interplay between the author, his character/narrators, and the informed reader that would not exist had he chosen to delete the events of his personal life from those of his protagonists. By creating texts that bring the reader into collaboration with the author and, at the same time, distance the reader from him, Goytisolo stretches the limits of his novels and facilitates the transgression of the boundaries between fictional and real experience. This effect, I would add, is compounded when other metafictional techniques are employed and the fictional author, who already embodies elements of the life of his creator, includes images of himself within the fictional world which he, in turn, is seen to be creating. In Antagona, of course, this is exactly what happens. In Recuento and throughout Antagona, the structural underpinnings of the text related to the interactions between author, character, narrator, and reader, like those in the foundations of buildings in earthquake zones, have the ability to sway, whether it is from one perspective to another, as in the case of the differing inflections of narrative voice, or from fiction to reality and back again via the effects that autobiographical fiction provides. These move-ments add to the complexity of the fictional world thus making it a truer representation of the processes involved in our perceptions and interpretations of reality, whether it is external to us or created from within. The point in all this is that ideological and intellectual constructs, like the walls of a living cell, must be permeable, emitting and taking in what is necessary for the maintenance of the overall organism. If the walls become rigid and block that interaction, the organism dies. In the same way, ideas and relationships destroy themselves by insisting on a confrontation between a set of either/ors that have their basis in a mental construct of reality as a series of irreconcilable dichotomies rather than an ebb and flow between the apparently conflicting values or interpretations that one issue or question might engender. This is, in effect, what occurs in the development and juxta-position of many concepts presented in the text, such as the oppo-sitions of Catalua/Castille, communism/Francoism, reason/intuition, masculine/feminine, body/spirit, or fiction/reality. The rigidity of each side and the societal dictate that individuals choose between them in order to identify themselves with a right or wrong world view, eventually lead to the revelation of their superficiality. So the reader of Recuento follows the interactions between the subjective third person narrator, that, even within the parameters of its function in the text further fragments to reflect postures that, though conflicting in some ways, are essentially aspects of a single conscious-ness. But that consciousness would be incomplete without the other aspect of the self that is reflected by the first person stance. Given the use of the past tense throughout Recuento, the reader knows that the narrator is reviewing the life of the protagonist from a future vantage point. In Chapter IX, that vantage point is fixed as the time when Ral assumes the first person narration that combines, henceforth, the observer and the agent functions. Until that happens, however, the reader is re-living Rals past from the perspective of his designation of certain temporal touchstones that mark the key moments in the development of his consciousness. These moments are those that, for whatever reason, radically alter his world view by adding depth and breadth to his perspective. In other words, he is able to perceive subtleties within his reality at that time of which he was previously unaware. Events occurring in immediate proximity to the touchstones are spaced around it in terms of their narration in such a way that the reader and the narrator are constantly looping back and jumping forward in relation to a point in time, a narrative perspective, and a series of intertwined real and fictional referents. This type of movement and connectivity between a diverse and yet interrelated series of individual elements (people, events, images, per-ceptions), structures, and patterns of thought replicate the processes of the human memory. Particularly in Chapter IX, Ral reflects on the transformational nature of memory. On one level, he understands that he is using it as an organizational tool. He is putting his life back together by retracing his temporal steps to see if he can fix the point in time when everything started to go wrong for him. Following an ingrained pattern of western thought, he at first simplistically assumes that if he can find the causes that produced the disastrous effects in his life he will be able somehow to change his behavior and regain control. Of course, that doesnt happen. Then, however, memory itself begins to fascinate him as he questions why he remembers certain things and not others, or why humans are constantly transforming their interpre-tations of the past in terms of their present reality. It is only a short step from that point to the utilization of his own memory as that referential iceberg that, combined with the human capacity for autogenic memory, serves to prefigure and establish other realities. In a section of Frasers book entitled The Mind of the Matter, in which the functioning of the human mind and its capacity for symbolic representation is studied, the author notes that the human brain is so complex that it is: capable of containing, in whatever language peculiar to it, models of the external world, of the body of which it is a part, and of things and processes which do not necessarily exist (259). He notes that this follows an evolutionary pattern that is constantly generating cycles and biological programs that do not necessarily have a model in existing reality. In the same way, the brain contains models of its environment: Such models might pertain to memories, expectations, or creative thought. The signs of language appropriate to the mind would be such symbols as were left undetermined by the laws of life. For instance, there is nothing in biology that would prohibit the existence of a poem, or a bridge (). The contents of the mind then, comprise the next higher integrative level above that of life. It is reasonable to assume that as the programs of the mind evolve they will generate new symbols which have no prior physiological counterparts in the brain. I shall call such self-generated, new engrams autogenic memory. Imagery is not to be understood as exclusively visual however; it is intended to include auditory and textual elements as well. (259) Autogenic imagery is the fundamental building block of what we ordinarily call thinking, but it is particularly important in creative thinking and in its role in influencing the future reality we are creating by interacting with and speculating on the reality we are living at the moment. For this reason, it has significant implications for the present study. Many of the processes inherent in memory have already been described as we have discussed the effects of narrative voice and the fact that each chapter in Recuento evolves from a temporal reference point that is tied to a significant memory. We each have observer and agent functions that mediate our experience of past events and the effects of that experience on present and future thoughts and actions. We also, as we look back on our past, remember things in snap-shot terms. In other words, we focus on one image of a time, place, event, person, etc. that then, through the power of association, leads us to other memories connected to that one in any number of ways, depending on our present context and needs. Though we may forget the exact temporal order or separate events, for example, whether someones birthday is before or after their anniversary, we will remember specific, limited events in their correct temporal order; for example, we will remember whether a car was moving forward or backward, but not see it going backward in our minds eye when in fact it was going forward, at least not without a forced, conscious effort. As Fraser puts it: Stored memory is by no means a continuous record of the past, something that could be compared to a stored motion picture. Rather, is may be compared to a family album of pictures, many of them overlapping in time but otherwise helter-skelter, each with its own coding of before-after. They seem to form sets and sub-sets with personal history being the most inclusive set. (250) These are the same patterns that Goytisolo follows in the narrative presentation of the events of Rals life, all of which are remembered from the contextual vantage point of a time when he is approximately three years beyond his incarceration, a factor that mediates both what he remembers and the associations that flow from those memories. He is now a writer and he is using the memories of his life, the material that he has available, as referents. The process he uses as a writer amounts to an inversion of memory in that the associations of his most inclusive set of memories, that of his personal history, will now provide a sort of launching pad for the autogenic imagery function of the mind. As Fraser notes, the possibilities of images that may be created are endless: It is rather an understatement that the variety and number of possibilities in the physical universe stagger the imagination. But if my reasoning is correct, then the store of images contained in and generated by the mind is immensely richer than that of the external universe, for it comprises, in addition to an inner map of that world, models of things and events which may exist, though need not; models of things and events which could not possibly exist or come about, and also a model of the self. Hence, figuratively speaking, the variety and number of possibilities in the mind could stagger the universe. (262) In Chapter IX of Recuento, the reader is presented with what amounts to a more concise summary of what has occurred in the previous chapters, as if in the protagonists mind a great many disparate elements are beginning to flow together toward a realization, which, in fact, they are. This summary generally flows backward in that the closest events in time, Rals family difficulties, political activism, relationship with Nuria, etc., are narrated first, followed by a gradual progression to his earliest memories, including those, like the forgotten memory of his mother, that no longer appear at the surface level of his consciousness. This review is interspersed with the description of the religious service in prison mentioned earlier, and extends beyond it to the three year time period before Ral and Nuria go to Rosas. In this chapter, Ral begins to focus more on the process of memory itself than on the reconstruction of his life. He notes that memory is far from an objective means to ascertain the truth about past events, why they occurred, or what their effects may have been. The review of his life has placed all its illogical, ambiguous, and contradictory qualities squarely in front of him: Las trampas de la memoria, sus vacos, sus disfraces, sus apropriaciones. () Por lo dems, cmo estar seguro de que no superpona imgenes? El recuerdo de lo que les contaba Padritus: que la Pilate se la chupaba. Algo que Ral cont en el colegio, atribuyndoselo, como algo que le haba pasado a l. Y la Pilate, y sus novios milicianos, hombres con aspecto como de ferroviario. Y lo que vean cuando espiaban por las ventanas. Eran cosas que haba visto personalmente o que los otros contaban que vean o haban visto? (I 563564) From the deformation of the size of places, to the forgetting of trau-matic events while remembering the most trivial of details, to the total displacement of the referent, remembering what happened to someone else as if it happened to us or vice versa, personal memory is, at best, an unreliable indicator of what really happened. Yet it is the referential base on which we build our sense of identity and understanding of reality which means that it ultimately shapes our future. It is not only personal memory that is subject to these deformations. Recuento is full of parodies that highlight the ambigui-ties and downright falsehoods of the official histories of social institu-tions. As a child, Ral began with a faith that history was truth; that it was something that existed outside the realm of his subjectivity and was therefore more true, more real than his own experiences: No era simplemente que la geografa y la historia le prestaran, como el cine, material creador para sus juegos. En su fascinacin por la geografa y la historia haba que buscar motivaciones ms profundas en la medida en que se le ofrecan como realidades absolutas e inapelables, lugares que existan aunque l no llegara a conocerlos nunca, con total independencia del curso de su vida, acontecimientos inmodificables en cuanto ya sucedidos, hechos acaso increbles pero ciertos e igualmente autnomos e inapelables (). (I 557) Over the course of his reflections, however, he realizes how wrong he was. Every story is an interpretation that is created within a temporal and cultural context and that always serves a certain end. Perception is reality after all. No cause and effect theory based on a chain of events can be justified because that chain is an intellectual con-struct that is always open to debate. To emphasize the point, Ral imagines such a chain, stretching back to the Roman Empire and connecting the founding of Barcelona, the Visigothic conquest, Columbus discovery of the new world, a Ferrer who went later to that new world, and there married a Gaminde, then returned to the peninsula where his parents were married, leading to the events of his life that finally resulted in his incarceration: () yo, aqu, en este instante, o por el contrario, que tal cadena no existe, que la alternativa de un hecho contingente no puede ser sino otro hecho contingente, dominio absoluto de lo arbitrario (I 570). Ultimately, Ral recognizes that all interpretations of history are arbitrary systems that promote a given world view and insist on its veracity as a means of exerting control over the individual and collective minds of given social groups. This realization results in the cyncism that generates the many parodies in the text concerning the history and origin of everything from the supremacy of western civilization, the imperative of reason, the historical origins of Barcelona and of the Ferrer family. Eventually, however, Ral accepts that his anger toward the existence of these systems is futile; what he must face is his fear of the absence of such systems so that he can make peace with the arbitrariness of existence and the inevitability of the fact that memory, that most human of functions, will endlessly create such systems as a survival mechanism. Ultimately, he compre-hends the importance of the journey that allows humans to become aware of the processes to which they are subjected as they seek to understand the interrelationships between the individual and the multiple implications of his consciousness on the creation of reality: El camino que conduce hasta estas notas escritas sobre la cara satinada de bastas hojas de papel higinico. Un itinerario largo y enrevesado, a veces como bloqueado, como cortado; a veces perdindose como se pierden en el monte los senderos que no llevan a ninguna parte. Y, sin embargo, el primer resultado tangible de aquella imprecisa intuicin que tuvo un amanecer, mientras montaba guardia junto al polvorn, a levante del campamento. Intuicin o tal vez recuperacin de intuiciones olvidadas, justamente de aquello que, cuando nio, en sus redacciones escolares, se esforzaba no tanto en desarrollar como en ocultar, escribiendo no lo que hubiera querido escribir sino lo que supona que se esperaba que escribiera. De igual modo que tal vez no fue aquella guardia junto al polvorn la decisiva. Ni aquel amanecer. Antes y despus hubo otras guardias, otros amaneceres. (I 535) In this quotation, it is clear that the details of his life as such no longer matter to him. The origin of a thought or intuition has become much less important than its effects. That realization irrevocably changes his interpretation of the recuento of his life, and the stage is set for that process to feed another, that of creation. One cycle ends and another begins. Ral learns to objectify his personal memories so that they serve as the referents for his work. They provide the models of thought and action that he can then infuse with the energy of autogenic imagery. As memory is the ultimate referent for consciousness, so language is the ultimate system of representation as that consciousness seeks to express itself. Memory and language are intricately interwoven in terms of their function, a fact that is made clear in Recuento and throughout Antagona. So, as Ral begins to alter his understanding of memory and the purposes that it can serve in the creative process, he also is drawn to reconsider the function of language. In the twentieth century, it has almost become a clich to say that language has acquired a density that makes it, like memory, simultaneously visible and invisible. Every word is comprised of layer upon layer of meaning that refracts, like light through a prism, when context and interpretation reveal one aspect or another of it to us. Occasionally we are fortunate enough to engage simultaneously various meanings in a word and, when that happens, language can open up vistas of meaning. In this respect, it must be noted that Goytisolo is very adept at making language more fully visible to us in this way. We began this chapter by saying that Recuento is the story of the wedding of memory to narrative, so it is significant that the process that reviews Rals psychological develop-ment in terms of memory also includes his relationship to language at the different stages of his life. First, as a child, words are signs that represent objects, people, and activities. They are windows through which he can see directly to the thing being named. In his capacity as a recording device, he does not yet perceive connections and interpretations that would complicate expression. As an adolescent, he is very aware of the power of context to change meaning, but he directs that power toward conquering his environment and making things adhere to his interpretation and his needs. His words are like possessions that he utilizes to create an identity for himself even as he speaks them: Hablar: tambin como un reflejo en el agua, no an una huella en la arena, mirando an el presente y no el pasado, fomulndose a s mismo al formular lo que uno cree, explicndose a s mismo en el acto de explicarlo, es decir, creando lo que uno cree o se desea creer o lo que desea que parezca que uno cree. (I 179) Words create an image of who he is to others and that image is reasssuringly reflected back to him. Language has the power to name and identify, but the reverse side of this is that a loss of language can represent the loss of identity. Several times in Recuento, the ambiguous nature of the Catalan culture is linked to the loss of its native language. In the following digression from Rals story that focuses on the history of Barcelona, the ideals of Catalan culture are recited: Pueblo noble, tierra patricia, rica as en arte como en comercio, en ocios como en industrias, panoplia de gestas y de famas, de honras y de triunfos, para envidia del mundo y las estrellas (I 251). As the narration unfolds, the hypocrisy inherent in this self image becomes evident, but equally evi-dent is the fact that the Catalan language is an integral part of the regions identity: () lugar propicio a la creacin de fantsticas fabulaciones, historias de un pueblo, una tierra y una lengua, verbo tan a menudo hecho sangre por la conjugacin de diversos factores, siempre entre la realidad y el deseo (). (I 251). The narrator speculates about what evil star must reign over the city that its history should be filled with so many broken illusions. Ultimately, it is the lenta sustitucin de una lengua por otra, desde arriba y desde abajo, desde dentro y desde fuera, patria bfida, paulati-namente alejada de su imagen primigenia that comes to represent the deepest problems in the culture (I 253). And, over the course of Recuento, that original glowing image is destroyed through language, a language that is characterized later in the narrative as un lxico crptico y esotrico, imputable, como el de los orculos, a la necesidad de valorar debidamente sus futuros emolumentos (I 412). Again, cynicism glares through this phrase which juxtaposes to good effect the reference to the esoteric language of oracles predicting the future of gods and humankind with that of a secularized and thoroughly materialistic society. At this moment in his development, Ral is fully aware of the power of language: poder asignativo de la palabra, su facultad de estereotipar la vida cotidiana, de interponerse entre uno y las cosas, entre uno y otros, entre uno y s mismo (I 408). Language has acquired a heavy density, and it frustrates Ral and separates him from that earlier sense of identity and coherence when words and events could be taken at face value. Not until the very end of the volume does language free itself from the opaqueness it had acquired for him, opening itself up to forces that transform it and allow it to flow through him to create a revitalized image of reality. In the midst of the ordeal that eventually liberates him from a life that was destroying him, he recognizes that the writing he is doing on sheets of toilet paper is different than before: Y lo que escriba ahora no era como lo que escriba antes, cuando en lugar de imponerse a las palabras, las palabras se le imponan a modo de material objetivo, de acuerdo sin duda, con el papel represivo del lenguaje sobre la personalidad, en la medida en que una relacin cualquiera entre los nombres y las cosas que designan es a la vez expresin y reflejo de una determinada realidad exterior. Y es a travs de esas relaciones del lenguaje como se van conformando, en la mente del nio, las relaciones imperantes en el mundo exterior. (I 575) At first, language molds the childs understanding and establishes a system of relations between words and objects that exclude all others, that literally made them unthinkable (I 575). But, looking back, Ral always felt that, somewhere, there was buried within him the intuition that other modes of interpretation, other systems, other vantage points, might be possible: Tal posibilidad, sin embargo, existe; podemos intuirla durante aos, olfatearla, cada vez ms prxima, localizarla. Slo que su realizacin, esto es, su nacimiento, no es sencillo, ni tiene por qu ser afortunado. Y casi parece que para que el fenmeno llegue a producirse sea preciso un naufragio o una destruccin o una condena. (I 575) Because of the depth of his experiences, Ral now has a sense of the possibilities that can become manifest through his art, through the power of language and the symbols it conjures up in the mind. He also recognizes that the awareness of these possibilities was bought at a high price and that it may ultimately lead him to other shipwrecks, destructions, or condemnations. But it is worth it to him to see his words become a reality in and of themselves. He sees that they will have the potential to change other realities, his own as well as those of readers, and that he will be able to create una realidad nueva en vez de contar una historia (I 576). At this point he feels that his writing is liberated and transgressive, and that it projects itself into the future so that it may serve as the stimulus for future creations (I 576577). His words and his life acquire a density as well, but it is a density replete with meanings and significance and alive with possibilities. Rals search for identity no longer lies in separating himself from his personal and collective past and the language that carries them within it. They are no longer a weight under which he is being crushed, nor do they alienate or anger him because he cannot believe the stories they tell. Now he is able to remember and reconnect with the time before identity meant separation, but with the advantage of being fully aware of himself as a part of that reality: Decir: ese sol que soy yo, ese cielo de metal que soy yo, esas roderas en la arena que soy yo; y el ruido del agua en la noche que soy yo y los nevados picos del Montseny que soy yo. Y el peculiar brillo de la tierra en los senderos del jardn cuando le da el sol, casi deslumbrando, seguramente debido a las partculas de mica que contiene aquel viejo terreno de granito en descomposcin. Y, sobre todo, la galera, los desvanes, la bodega. Yo. (I 562) The review of his personal history has led him to appreciate the connections he feels, the intuitions he has been suppressing, the fears of confrontation with painful past memories that, even though repressed, and perhaps because of that, continue to haunt him. It has led him to the realization that knowing himself, a process never com-pleted in a lifetime, and embracing his own uniquely subjective outlook on reality are not enough: Los caminos de la memoria. Algo as como la visita a una de esas catedrales edificadas sobre otra anterior, construida a su vez con residuos de templos paganos, piedras pertenecientes a esa otra ciudad excavada bajo la ciudad actual, ruinas subterrneas que uno puede recorrer contemplando lo que fueron calles y casas y necrpolis y murallas protectoras, cimentadas casi siempre con restos de ciudades precedentes. Un recorrido, no obstante, que suele encontrarse no ya en la base del conocimiento de uno mismo, sino, adems en la plena realizacin de todo impulso creador. En estas notas. Pues tal un Eneas que, as como Herakles fund Barcelona tras un naufragio, fund Roma tras la destruccin de Troya, as Ral se enfrentaba no tanto a su pasado como a su futuro al tomar sus notas sobre aquellas hojas de papel higinico, con la aplicacin y el ahnco de un Robinson en recuperar la nocin del tiempo o de un Montecristo en horadar la roca. (I 575) For Ral, the layers of memory and the interrelationships formed between the various levels in the strata of human knowledge, must go beyond an understanding of personal history. They become acces-sible to the individual through the manifestations of the creative impulse. Allowing that impulse to take possession of the individual connects him/her to the efforts of the heroes of a collective mythical memory, or to those of equally influential literary ones, ultimately based on variations of their predecessors. Everyone and everything is a complex repetition and transformation of all that has preceded him/her, biologically, psychologically, and culturally. The third person narration in Recuento ends prophetically with an allusion to the noises of construction and the first person narration begins with the first manifestation of that construction: Los martilla-zos. Desde alguna obra en construccin (I 586). The stage is set for the explosion of autogenic imagery that has been forming and will continue to form during the rest of the novel. In Recuento, the reader has witnessed Rals realization of the importance of cycles, of complex levels of interaction, of the development of human consciousness, and of the processes that cause the human memory to constantly transform the past through its ex-perience of the present and projections into the future. All of this knowledge comes together for him in the image of a fertilized human cell: Se dira que as como una clula humana fecundada contiene ya en germen todo lo que ha de ser la persona con cuyo nacimiento culminar su desarollo, hay igualmente instantes en la vida del hombre que, por su fuerza metafrica, vienen a ser resumen o compendio de todas sus percepciones conscientes e inconscientes, la concentracin, una dentro de otra, de toda experiencia implcita, instante y duracin, un tiempo muy superior, en su elasticidad y amplitud, al tiempo cronolgico. Y fijar este instante, esa duracin, supone un desarrollo centrfugo, crculos que se dilatan sucesivos, que se amplan como las ondas que se agrandan en torno a donde la piedra se hundi en el estanque o como una metfora dentro de una metfora supone un relato. (I 577) On the one hand, this quotation explains the narrative structure of Recuento with its temporal reference points and metaphors that are repeated over and over with ever greater implications and density. On the other hand, it points to the future development of Rals text and its purpose. By empowering the words he uses with this vision of the life force, he reaches: ()el momento ureo, la sensacin de que por medio de la palabra escrita, no slo creaba algo autnomo, vivo por s mismo, sino en el curso de este proceso de objetivizacin por la escritura, consegua al mismo tiempo comprender el mundo a travs de s mismo y conocerse a travs del mundo (I 577). The dichotomy of inside/outside has not been resolved in this process; rather the author/narrator/protagonist has used the tension it creates to push the individual consciousness outside the boundaries of its limited experience and into an exploration of the progressive transformation of the collective consciousness of which it is a part. The individual is the tip of the iceberg who constantly draws on all that is underneath the surface, whether s/he is aware of it or not. Recuento, through the experiences and vision of its protagonist, foregrounds the fundamental structures and process that undergird the human experience. We will now proceed to a examination of other structures used in Antagona that speak to the underpinnings of the human experience and the transformation of reality. We will begin with the basic divisions of the text into books, chapters, and sections, and the symbolism inherent in the numbers and geometrical images those divisions represent.  PAGE 42 Consciousness and Memory Consciousness and Memory  PAGE 43 NOTES  In Chapter IV, after a section which depicts the conversations of Ral and his friends, the narrator notes: Era agradable aquello de llegar a comprenderse con una mirada, con medias palabras, o, incluso, sin palabras (I 70); and, later: Era excitante la complicidad creada por sus conversaciones, por el descubrimiento de un mundo secreto de relaciones y actividades, clandestino, subyacente, imperceptible en apariencia, como camuflado bajo la vida de la ciudad, de las realidades ms cotidianas ( I 78).  For specific examples of the use of irony and parody in Recuento, see: Antonio Sobejano-Morn, Irona y parodia en Recuento de Luis Goytisolo: Crtica y destruccin de la Espaa de posguerra, Hispania 72 (Sept. 1989): 510515.  Parts of the following section were previously published in my article, La memoria y sus dilogos, in Ojncano: Revista de la literatura espaola 4 (Octubre, 1990): 5969. 4 Goytisolo has stated this in several interviews. One example comes from a dialogue with Fernando Valls: Yo no pretendo contar mi vida. Lo que hago es tomar fragmentos de ella, porque es lo que conozco, como una base para ir ms lejos, para contar otras cosas. No tengo ni la ms mnima intencin de contarme a m mismo (Trayectoria 89). 5 For a more complete description of the advantages of autobiographical fiction in a literary text, see: Phillippe Lejeune, The Autobiographical Contract, in French Literary Review Today: A Reader. Ed. Tzvetan Todorov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982): 192222. 6 Good examples of this effect can be found in Investigaciones y conjeturas de Claudio Mendoza and Estatua con palomas. 7 An engram is the specific reorganization of neurons in the brain that result in the manifestation of a memory of any particular event (Fraser 246). 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