Re-reading Goyen's final novel at this moment, more than 30 years after its publication, it seems to me that its great accomplishment is that it cares not at all if it offends. Goyen was never one to follow prevailing tastes, or to respect conventional notions of well-formed-ness. His language and rhythms and themes were all his own. He certainly does things in this novel that authors are not "supposed" to do. He writes in dialect, or a dialect -- Spanglish, one supposes; Southern, but only to the extent that East Texas is a weird vestige of the American South -- mostly of his own invention. He writes from the perspective of an individual whose gender and sexuality are not his own... although Arcadio's hermaphroditism is as much symbolic as it is real and felt. (In Goyen's work, the spirit and the flesh are elements confused beyond all doctrine.) And the book is open about its religious concerns. I don't know what other contemporary readers might make of all this, but I suspect it would turn off some, if not many. Which would be a shame, for the whole point of Arcadio's story is that it must be attended to, and in all its gilt and fuming. Goyen understands the difference between prurience and pathos, but he also knows that, in order to achieve empathetic understanding (a very contemporary obsession), we have to be willing to abandon ourselves in the uncomfortable territory between those two conditions. ARCADIO is one of those books that confronts you with your own vulnerability. Which is just another way of saying: "It's beautiful."
