Life & Wisdom Quote by Juan Goytisolo

A modest verb like "allow" does a lot of work here: Goytisolo isn’t promising a single, authoritative meaning so much as designing a reading machine with multiple gears. Coming from a poet-novelist who made a career out of prying open Spain’s official stories, the line reads as both aesthetic credo and quiet provocation. “Diverse levels of reading” isn’t just about difficulty; it’s about audience, permission, and control. Who gets to read what, and how safely?

Count Julian (1970) is the key context: a furious, anti-mythic novel that takes the legendary “traitor” who supposedly invited the Moors into Spain and turns him into a tool for smashing national Catholic purity narratives. Under Franco, literature was policed not only by censors but by the expectation that a novel should behave: clear moral scaffolding, stable identity, orderly history. Goytisolo’s “levels” function as camouflage and as invitation. On one level, you can encounter a historical fantasia; on another, a savage satire of xenophobic nationalism; on another, an erotic and linguistic assault on the very idea of “clean” Spanishness.

The subtext is craft as resistance. Layering lets a book circulate where it “shouldn’t,” reaching readers who can decode it while still confronting those who would reduce it to scandal or heresy. It’s also an ethics of reading: if Spain’s identity has been built by narrowing what counts as legitimate interpretation, then a text that multiplies interpretations becomes a political act, a way of restoring complexity as a form of freedom.