Career
After law studies, Goytisolo published his first novel, The Young Assassins, in 1954. His deep opposition to Francisco Franco led him into exile in Paris in 1956, where he worked as a reader for Gallimard. In the early 1960s, he was a friend of Guy Debord. Breaking with the realism of his earlier novels, he published Marks of Identity (1966), Count Julian (1970), and Juan the Landless (1975). As with all his works, they were banned in Spain until after Franco's death.
Count Julian (1970, 1971, 1974) takes up, in an act of outspoken defiance, the side of Julian, count of Ceuta, a man traditionally castigated as the ultimate traitor in Spanish history. In Goytisolo's own words, he imagines "the destruction of Spanish mythology, its Catholicism and nationalism, in a literary attack on traditional Spain." He identifies himself "with the great traitor who opened the door to Arab invasion." The narrator in this novel, an exile in North Africa, rages against his beloved Spain, forming an obsessive identification with the fabled Count Julian, dreaming that, in a future invasion, the ethos and myths central to Hispanic identity will be totally destroyed.
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