Luis Goytisolo’s La paradoja del ave migratoria as Postmodern Allegory: A Critique of Absolutism

Luis Goytisolo’s short work of fiction, La paradoja del ave migratoria , was published in 1987 in a Post-Franco Spain and a Postmodern world. I will investigate this unusual novel as a postmodern allegory, relying on Brian McHale’s assertion that postmodern allegory challenges the “unequivocalness of traditional allegories” by problematizing the naive assumption that abstract concepts can be communicated transparently through language (1987, 141). Luis Goytisolo populates his allegory with mythical, and historical characters that hail from a dizzying array of time periods, creating a heterotopic universe in which no one context of references serves as the key to interpretation. Characters are lifted out of familiar situations, and readers are prevented from making automatic associations and must read these characters and contexts without recourse to one absolute paradigm.