From the tree of literature to the forest of letters: the canon by Juan Goytisolo

In several texts, Juan Goytisolo develops his idea of literature with the image of a tree of letters to which each writer in each culture adds a branch nourished by his/her own literary heritage, at the same time realizing their links to other trees and plants that constitute the forest of literature. From that "forest" I have selected four figures of the 19th and 20th centuries peninsular literature, clearly included in Goytisolo's canon: Jose Maria Blanco White, Ramon del Valle Inclan, Luis Cernuda, and Jose Angel Valente. Goytisolo has written in-depth studies about each of these four authors, in which his affinities with them are clearly detected: they were representatives of a literature he considers especially fruitful due to the three roots that nourished it: Christian, Jewish, and Arabic.