In: HeLix - Dossiers zur romanischen Literaturwissenschaft, 5 (2012), S. 91-103

Abstract

As is the case in world literature more broadly, Argentine literature presents two types of exiles. Haroldo Conti, David Viñas, Antonio Di Benedetto, Daniel Moyano, and Héctor Tizón, among others, give us the external, in which intellectuals are forced to emigrate. Beatriz Guido, Syria Poletti, Jorge Riestra, Federico Peltzer, and Elvira Orphée write of the internal exile, the individual who lives in exile without ever leaving the country. In internal exile, the “others” were those who were previously one’s “own,” cities become more sinister, more brutal in the Freudian sense, and time leads to future projects. In this environment, Juan Martini’s narrative creates a space transiting the factual experience of exile along a path made from and leading to the tongue, where it condenses the uncertainty of the man of the century, the fortunes of the writer’s task, and the unsettling feeling of the summons. The anguish of the exile is not simply geographic, social or political, but also to some extent ontological.