Urban Sexuality and Geological Erotism in Antagonía by Luis Goytisolo

ABSTRACT

This article presents an analysis of the metaphors that relate the domains of space and sexuality in the tetralogy Antagonía by Luis Goytisolo, based on a discourse dynamics approach. Metaphoremes such as <terreno erótico> and <erotismo geológico> are identified and analysed according to cognitive, linguistic, affective, and socio-cultural factors, with a focus on the first two. I also draw from the processes of source redeployment, development, literalization, and unrealism to explain the details of several discourse metaphors in the text. These are framed in their immediate and extended contexts. The results show the complex web of spatio-sexual metaphors readers encounter in the text and the rich array of resources the author uses to portray sexuality.

KEYWORDS:

• Metaphor
• discourse
• space
• sexuality
• Luis Goytisolo
• Antagonía

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The following typeset is used throughout this article. Metaphors are written in small caps, metaphoremes are written between angle brackets, and excerpts in Spanish from Antagonía are written between single quotation marks.

2. This example is particularly interesting for the mélange of sexual and scatological nuances of meanings. The descriptions of the river and the Masai woman are joined through the element of water. Space is scatologized when the woman ‘en cuclillas, abre un pequeño arroyo entre las piernas’ Goytisolo (2004, 276). The act is further sexualized when the narrator describes the ‘respirar alterado, el aliento que exhalan los jadeos; movimientos y susurros’ (Goytisolo, 2004).

3. A reviewer has suggested that the generic pattern space is sexuality and sexuality is space could be rephrased as landscape is body and the body is landscape.

4. It would be interesting to compare the metaphorical patterns through which the city is conceived as a (sexual) human being in Antagonía to those in the Bible (Vermeulen 2021).

5. Note that Cameron (2008) uses a slightly different taxonomy of the processes affecting sources of metaphors in interaction. Barnden (2016) uses processes similar, but not exactly equal, to those in Cameron (2008). Barnden’s metaphorical processes of elaboration, replacement, compounding, and strength modification can also be subsumed under Cameron’s process of development. The former all target the source of a metaphor, much like the process of source development. However, Cameron’s redeployment and literalization affect the target of metaphors, which is not the case with the processes proposed in Barnden (2016).

6. The calculations are as follow. Out of the total number of words of Antagonía (509,649), 45.4% (231,568 words) correspond to Recuento, whereas the other 54.6% correspond to the other three volumes. More specifically, 17.8% (90,853) corresponds to Los verdes de mayo hasta el Mar 18.2% (93,023 words) to La cólera de Aquiles, and 18.4% (94,205 words) to Teoría del conocimiento. In terms of metaphors, Recuento has a roughly proportionate number of metaphors, namely 47.2% (24 metaphors), to its number of words. The percentages of words and metaphors in the other three volumes are disproportionate. The second volume has 37.2% (19) of metaphors in comparison to 17.8% of words, that is, almost double the proportion. The opposite is found in the last two volumes, where the proportion of metaphors, 9.8% (5) and 5.8% (3) respectively, is substantially lower than the proportion of words in each of them (see above). Overall, these indications show that landscape-as-sex metaphors are mostly found in the first and second volumes of Antagonía, a finding in line with that of Sobejano (1983, 418) about metaphors in general.

7. López-Morales also models female genitalia as landscape features in Pedro Lemebel’s Tengo miedo, torero: ‘[l]os órganos sexuales femeninos […] son metaforizados como ‘cavernas’, ‘colinas’, ‘profundidades’ y generalmente se asocian a la geografía terrestre’ (2011, 97).

8. Although Xavier is a male in the text, the description flows beyond the limits of male corporeality and establishes links to female corporeality, hinting at a possible queer reading of some excerpts in Antagonía.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jose Antonio Jódar-Sánchez

Jose Antonio Jódar-Sánchez is a lecturer at the Departament de Filologia Catalana i Lingüística General at the Universitat de Barcelona and a doctoral candidate at the Department of Linguistics at the University at Buffalo. He specializes in typology, language documentation, and Papuan linguistics. He is also interested in topics such as lexical semantics and language and sexuality. He has taught Spanish and designed materials for Spanish as a foreign language classroom.