Señas de identidad as Gumbi ambience

I recently expanded an essay comparing G's Makbara to Bolaño's Los detectives salvajes.  The essay was for a conference on humor in Hispanic and Lusophone languages, which allowed me to think a lot about the style.  And I think that Goytisolo's ambience is Gumbi-like.  It stretches and diminishes what the reader would presume to be a stable location for a text.

Without delving too much into the work in that essay, I would also say that Goytisolo's first experimental novel, Señas de identidad, can also be described in these terms because it departs from the realism in his earlier work.  Sdi expands and contracts with a Gumbi-like ambience.


Even if the text begins remarking on only pure coincidence between the fiction and actual events, this text is biographical.  It sorts through the uncanny feeling of return to Spain after a sort of self-exile in France.  If we stretched (in a Gumbi sort of way) out the real time at work in the novel, its frame would be three days.  Yet its psychical time is gummed out for hundreds of pages.  Of course, mainly label his sort of work and perception on Spain as stylistically self-serving (e.g. privileging aspects of historiography that are easily absorbed).  However, the lapses and departures in Señas de identidad are not relying on the human psyche.  Indeed, the narrator falls into gaps of past time (working in a sort of anticipatory way) through his re-encounter with objects.  I would argue that these presences actually absorb the narrator and hence the narration into other times and locations.


Goytisolo's project, at this point, was a challenge to Spain's geographic and cultural signifiers.  Flight and violence prohibit any stable notion of ambience here.  Left unqualified, Goytisolo might be said to simply mobilize Gumbi ambience based on his own (nightmarish) experience with Castillian culture.  However, human memory is not the only actor roaming around in the thick of this work.

Inopinadamente se encendió la luz.  La noche había caído sin que tú lo advirtieras y, sentado todavía en el jardín, no podías distinguir el vuelo versátil de las golondrinas ni la orla rojiza del crepúsculo sobre el perfil sinuoso de las montañas.  El álbum familiar permanecía entre tus manos, inútil yacen la sombra y, al incorporarte, te serviste otro vaso de Fefiñanes y lo apuraste de un sorbo.  Las primeras estrellas pintaban encima del tejado y el gallo de la veleta recortaba apenas su silueta airose en el cielo oscuro.  (76)

Is this simple description?  The narrator, already addressing himself in the second person, gradually fades into the darkness alongside the photo album, the sparrows and the rusty brook.  This darkness coincides with a like of active verbs in the first person.  Instead, objects of memory guide readers through dark tunnels of time, spitting us out on new shores.  It is kind of like the time bomb on the cover of his most recent novel (El exiliado de aquí y allá).