Politics & Power Quote by Juan Goytisolo

When faith is thick in the air, literature stops pretending it’s a lone wolf. Goytisolo sketches a moment when the writer becomes less an outsider than a civic instrument: not merely reflecting society, but syncing with it, breathing in its certainties and exhaling them as art. The line is almost seductively orderly - “totally,” “perfect harmony” - as if creative life can be tuned to a single frequency when a culture is unified by religion or politics.

That perfection is the tell. Goytisolo, a Spanish poet and novelist forged in the long shadow of Franco and later self-exiled, knew how “faith” gets manufactured, policed, and staged. His phrasing reads like a description with an asterisk: harmony can be real, but it can also be enforced. In such climates, the writer’s social function becomes suspiciously clear: to consolidate consensus, to turn collective feeling into official feeling, to make belief aesthetically irresistible. That’s how propaganda becomes indistinguishable from patriotism, and how piety can masquerade as unity.

Subtextually, he’s naming a trade-off. A society bursting with hope can energize writers, giving them a shared vocabulary and an audience hungry for affirmation. It can also flatten the range of what’s sayable, rewarding chorus over dissonance. The sentence’s calm certainty is doing double duty: it captures the intoxicating pull of belonging while quietly warning that when everyone sings the same hymn, the silence around the dissenters starts to sound like “harmony,” too.