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Notes
[1] In what is the first significant critical reading of the Cuaderno de Sarajevo Prout (Citation2001) notes that Goytisolo's journalism is often ignored or relegated to second place behind his fiction and autobiographies.
[2] These are the concluding sentiments of the last essay in the Cuaderno de Sarajevo series. The original nine articles were published in El País in summer 1993 and are referenced as Goytisolo (1993a–i). They were subsequently collected as Goytisolo (Citation1993j). I am grateful to Araceli Buj Algarra for providing me with original cuttings of the essays.
[3] One might want to object that the narrating persona in Cuaderno ought to be distanced from the real-life Juan Goytisolo since the notebook is a written artefact. However, as Prout notes (Citation2001, p. 94), Goytisolo identifies completely with the text's first person. Indeed, the Cuaderno derives its impact from the fact that it documents the trip of a well-known writer, Goytisolo even declaring that one of his aims in travelling to Sarajevo was to encourage other intellectuals to take an interest in the city's plight (1993j, p. 10).
[4] The former two—authenticity and rigour—might reasonably be expected of the travel writer too. Indeed, they have often been used as criteria by which to judge Goytisolo's Campos de Níjar, and Abigail Lee Six (Citation1996) offers an excellent discussion of this problem in her guide to that work.
[5] The subtitle appears only in the book version of the Cuaderno but the citation from Machado does appear at the head of the first newspaper article.
[6] Simpson (Citation1999, pp. 445–446) and Hastings (Citation2001, p. 166) both make this point, and David Rieff admits that his own journalism was partisan (1995, p. 9).
[7] The main thrust of his argument is that war journalists have frequently failed to challenge political or military establishments and have served them more than the cause of truth or honesty. Correspondents during the First World War, for instance, did not criticize sufficiently the military high command and thus were willing accomplices in the concealment of appalling blunders.
[8] The book also contains three extra essays by Goytisolo on topics relevant to the siege of Sarajevo: ‘El Romancero de los lobos’ (1993j, pp. 109–118), ‘La limpieza étnica’ (1993j, pp. 119–127), and ‘De vuelta a la tribu’ (1993j, pp. 129–136).
[9] Even in wartime, the demands of the story are paramount, as Knightley notes of the First World War. The public then, he says (1978, p. 69), ‘was not convinced by logic but seduced by stories’.
[10] Lee Six (Citation1996, pp. 12–13) notes the overlap between narrative, the basic itinerary of a journey, and travel writing in Campos de Níjar. The Cuaderno is not, however, strictly chronological. In the third essay Goytisolo describes two visits to a hospital, the second three days after the first. In the same piece, he visits the offices of the newspaper Oslobodjenje and states that he had interviewed its editor three days previously. In the penultimate paragraph he notes that he has now spent five days in the Holiday Inn hotel. The actual time-frame of the visit to Sarajevo is not, therefore, easily reconstructed from the essays. This is not, in itself, a problem since Goytisolo does not claim to have written a blow-by-blow account, but it is an indication of the way in which these testimonial-style essays have been creatively shaped by the writer.
[11] The Institute of Public Health (Ministerio de Higiene y Salud Pública in Goytisolo's text) gave details of daily, weekly, and monthly casualties in Sarajevo.
[12] These are Hispanicized spellings. The Serbo-Croat is Baščaršija and Vojvode Putnika.
[13] The name of the newspaper is misspelt by Goytisolo. The paper became an important voice against ethnic nationalism during the war (Thompson Citation1994, pp. 243–247).
[14] This recalls the mockery of the French tourists in Campos de Níjar, which Lee Six (Citation1996, pp. 46–48) interprets as a gesture intended to distinguish the tourist from the travel writer, whose motives are not selfish.
[15] A similar feeling of sorrow that he cannot quite identify with the locals and their plight permeates Campos de Níjar.
[16] It is true that the League of Nations imposed an arms embargo on Spain, just as the United Nations imposed an embargo on Yugoslavia, despite the fact that the Yugoslav federal army and its arsenal was under Serbian control. However, the impact of the embargo on Bosnia is difficult to gauge. David Rieff (Citation1995, p. 13), a strong supporter of the Bosnian government and loud critic of US policy in the Balkans, argues that, whilst the embargo was in itself immoral, its lifting would have made little difference in practical terms, since there would have been a problem getting arms to Bosnia.
[17] Simpson comments, from bitter personal experience, that anyone who questioned the analogy was regarded as pro-Serb, pro-Nazi, and anti-Semite.
[18] In his account of his visit to Trnoploje, Vulliamy quotes one woman who went to the camp voluntarily as it was safer than remaining in her home town. Another man stated that he could leave if his relatives claimed him and guaranteed that he would leave the Bosnian Serb Republic. Immoral as the camps were, they were not Dachau or Auschwitz.
[19] This is stressed even by David Rieff, who declares (1995, p. 11) that ‘from the beginning of the fighting, the Izetbegović government's strategy was to try to get the West to intervene militarily’.
[20] Simpson writes of that awful event: ‘The final evidence of responsibility is lacking…. The bomb had landed straight down, rather than at an angle, so there was no clear indication which direction it had come from. On the one hand the Serbs were constantly firing at the city anyway, and maybe this was just another shell. On the other hand, it is clear the Bosnian government was capable of carrying out attacks on its own people in order to further its political position’ (1999, p. 448). He goes on to berate US journalists for encouraging simplistic reporting and for failing to appreciate the manipulation of the media that occurred during the Bosnian war.
[21] For a full account of the myth of ‘heavenly Serbia’ and its modern permutations, see Anzulovic (Citation1999). Briefly, the legend originated after the Battle of Kosovo, at which the Serbs were defeated by the Turks on 28 June 1389. A previously prosperous, sovereign Balkan state was reduced to an insignificant community within the Ottoman Empire. The story, retained in folk songs, tells of Saint Elias sending a messenger to Prince Lazar to offer him the choice between an earthly kingdom and a heavenly one. He chose the latter, and the role of the myth was clearly to turn military defeat into moral victory. However, in the past century alone Serbia has been variously regarded as a noble nation battling against oppressors both by the Allies in the First and Second World Wars (Serbia having fought the forces of Islam and resisted Nazi domination) and by the Nazis in the Second World War, until, that is, they discovered they were unable to conquer them (Serbia's age-old struggle against the Turks made them a war-like people to be admired). The gift of Kosovo to Serbia, now a major source of conflict, in 1913 was achieved at the behest of the French, British, and Russians, despite the predominantly Albanian population in the region. One ought, then, to be wary of myths, and today this one is widely used ironically by Serbs, a nuance that escapes Goytisolo. I am indebted to Milica Djurdjevic-Flatley for this last point.
[22] Goytisolo's use of the word pesme is instructive. It has been Hispanicized by the addition of the plural marker ‘s’, whereas in Serbo-Croat pesme is plural and pesma is the singular. The term is also feminine, yet Goytisolo accords it masculine gender, possibly by analogy with poema in Spanish. However, one could speculate that giving the word masculine gender reinforces the macho sentiments which Goytisolo associates with it.
[23] The term chetnik is used throughout the articles. Patria celeste occurs in 1993a, p. 8; pueblo celeste in 1993d, p. 10; and los cruzados de la Gran Serbia in Goytisolo (Citation1993b, p. 11).
[24] Goytisolo also fails to notice that his suggestion to the Bosnian Muslim poet, Abdulah Sidran, to edit an anthology of Bosnian literature is not only mistimed but conceptually misplaced as such volumes serve to reinforce ethnic sentiment (1993i, p. 11).
[25] By memoricidio Goytisolo means the wilful and deliberate destruction of the deposits of cultural memory—monuments, buildings, spaces, books—which testify to a people's sense of collective identity. He regards the resurrection of forgotten, lost, or destroyed cultural memories to be central to the struggle against intellectual persecution and, in political terms, extreme nationalist feeling. See Goytisolo (Citation1999, pp. 50–51), where specific reference is made to such destruction in both Sarajevo and Palestine.
[26] This connection is stressed in the first additional essay in the book version of the Cuaderno, ‘El Romancero de los lobos’.
[27] Prout notes this dilemma too (2001, p. 106).