<i>Ulysses</i> and the Spanish Novel

Abstract After a survey of parallels with Joyce’s narrative experimentalism in the Spanish Silver Age (Generations of 1898, 1914, and 1927) this essay examines how interior monologue, fragmentation, and other techniques of the Joycean mode of expression noted in Ulysses came to characterize pivotal novels of the opposition to the Franco regime, especially Camilo José Cela’s San Camilo, 1936 (1969) and Juan Goytisolo’s Don Julián (first published as Reivinidicación del Conde don Julián in 1970; definitive edition, 2004). Attitudes of religious iconoclasm converge with political dissidence in these novels, since the dictatorship was based on National Catholicism. This paired Joycean formal innovation with an affinity for his religious irreverence on a thematic level as well. Commingling of the sacred and the erotic is highlighted as a strand running through all three of these transgressive texts. The intrusion of modern media on the consciousness of the narrators is a difference nonetheless, one that marks the Spanish successors to Ulysses. The common habitus of a Catholic-dominant social and cultural context makes for striking Joycean resonances in the treatment of religious themes in the postwar Spanish nouveau roman, yet Cela and Goytisolo create uniquely perspectivist models of literary dissidence.