El lenguaje espaciotemporal del exilio en Animal de palabras de Carlos Martínez Moreno

Abstract

This article aims to analyse the language of exile present in Carlos Martínez Moreno's last work, Animal de palabras (1987), published posthumously but written in the period immediately before and completed in the midst of the Uruguayan author's Spanish exile. The nine essays that make up the volume present evident linguistic traces of the exile to which the author was forced by the civil-military dictatorship and which he translated into literary categories that are not conventional, but linked to the vital phenomenon that he had to live through as a ‘form-of-life’ (Agamben 2001). If all exile is political, then the politics implied in life becomes ‘biopolitics’ (Foucault 2009), which in Martínez Moreno leads to the unspoken - mixed with denunciation and nostalgia - between autobiographical testimony and fiction. With an emphasis on qualitative reflection, the reception of these texts - between internal and external readings - will be rooted in Steiner's (2001) indissoluble relationship between space, time and language, which we will adapt to the literary sphere (Said 2005). His analysis will lead us to verify whether, in addition to time - delayed, dilated or simply involved in a constant digression (Calvino 2018) - Martínez Moreno's linguistic exile can be approached with an ‘un-time’, with an eventual change of the mother tongue, that is, whether an ‘outside’ of language can be ascertained.

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