The Reader in Luis Goytisolo's "Antagonia" Tetralogy: A Study in Narrative Communication

Abstract

The Reader in Luis Goytisolo's Antagonia Tetralogy: A Study in Narrative Communication. By Kevin E. Teegarden. Potomac, Maryland: Scripta Humanistica, n.d. 211 pages. Good novels have always required astute readers. This is so no less for Don Quijote from the seventeenth century than for Ulysses from the twentieth, each demanding that readers exercise care and creativity to draw out the intricate and sometimes ambiguous elements of their composition. Some good novels-and Luis Goytisolo's Antagonia stands as one of them-not only require acts of creativity implicitly but also devise the process of writing and reading as the cynosure of their narrative, thus challenging the reader to engage the text from a variety of perspectives. In The Reader in Luis Goytisolo's 'Antagonia' Tetralogy, Kevin Teegarden accepts such a challenge and offers a fine overview of how Luis Goytisolo compels readers to enter and disentangle his novel. Teegarden divides his study into four main parts, which in turn he devotes to the four parts of Antagonia (Recuento, 1973; Los verdes de mayo hasta el mar, 1976; La colera de Aquiles, 1979; Teoria del conocimiento, 1981). His analysis is shaped by reader-response criticism, defined in the introduction with an eclectic mix of ideas from Iser, Kristeva, structuralism, and semiotics. On the one hand, this approach allows Teegarden to scrutinize the rich diversity of Antagonia drawing upon the general interactions of text and reader; on the other, it also enables him to focus on specific components of the individual works in each of his chapters. In Recuento, Teegarden draws out the emergence of Raul as writer and principal focalizer who orients the reader; in Los verdes de mayo hasta el mar he unravels the complicated self-referring genesis of the novel and shows how the narrative theorizes against itself through the contingencies of reading in an unstable text. La c6lera de Aquiles presents a different challenge for the reader. While Teegarden rightly underscores the relative stability of the reader's place in the novel, he also explores the larger project of the tetralogy: the relationship between reading narrative and reading one's own life, both of which are fraught with pitfalls even when everything seems in order. In La Teoria del conocimiento, the final part of the Antagonia, Teegarden ably covers the narrow focus of the novel on epistemological matters as well as Goytisolo's broader attempt to summarize the whole of his literary theory on the relationship among author, text, and text-reader. …