This article offers a reading of Señas de identidad that elucidates Goytisolo's hitherto unacknowledged debt to Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. The opening of Señas dramatizes the process by which Goytisolo's narrator becomes a creator, as he discovers through Proust his voice and the means to tell his story. At first Goytisolo's text is incoherent. Twice his narrator tries and fails to begin his narrative. But the narrator eventually discovers a literary progenitor who will allow him to give shape to his inchoate discourse.