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About David T. Gies
David T. Gies


David T. Gies is Commonwealth Professor of Spanish and former chairman of the Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese at the University of Virginia. Professor Gies holds a BA from Penn State University and an MA and PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. An expert on the literature of Enlightenment and Romantic Spain and contemporary Spanish film, Professor Gies has published twelve books and critical editions of Spanish literature, including The Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish Culture (1999), Theatre and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge, 1988), and The Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge, 1994; Spanish version, 1996), which won honorable mention from Phi Beta Kappa in Virginia. He has authored more than eighty articles and one hundred book reviews, and has lectured at universities in the U.S., Canada, England, Italy, Germany, France, Argentina, and Spain. He edits DIECIOCHO, a journal dedicated to the study of the Spanish Enlightenment, and has been awarded numerous grants from agencies such as the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Spanish Ministry of Culture. In 1992 he won the University of Virginia Outstanding Teaching Award. In 1999–2000 he served as chair of the Faculty Senate, and in October 2000 he was awarded the highest recognition presented to a member of the University of Virginia community, the Thomas Jefferson Award. He is currently organizing and editing the Cambridge History of Spanish Literature.

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Juan Goytisolo, Prodigal Son

David T. Gies

Forbidden Territory: The Memoirs of Juan Goytisolo, 1931—1956. Translated by Peter Bush. North Point Press. $18.95.

Since Rousseau (or at least since Lillian Hellman) we have known that "autobiography" is the art of lying gracefully, an act of self re-creation mediated by memory, purpose, and language. As Jean Guehenno informs us in his work on Rousseau (1962), sincerity and truth are not necessarily synonymous, a statement equally applicable to Juan Goytisolo, one of Spain's best-known contemporary novelists. Forbidden Territory may be sincere, but its truthfulness has been questioned even by Goytisolo's novelist brother Luis. In Investigatiónes y conjeturas de Claudia Mendoza (1985) he contradicts Juan's "memories" of the house they grew up in in Barcelona and the experiences of their early childhood. He does not suggest that his recollections are more correct—that he is a "privileged reader" of their past—only different, but some of Juan's readings of his childhood experiences do not square with Luis's (Luis writes that the differences are so great that he would have to write a book as long as Forbidden Territory to put them straight). Among other things, Luis defends his grandfather against Juan's accusations of pederasty and his father against Juan's portrayal of him as a tyrant. Where does the "truth" reside? Impossible to tell, and probably irrelevant, since Forbidden Territory, the work of an exciting and provocative novelist, should be read as fiction rather than as fact.
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