El lenguaje espacio-temporal del exilio en Animal de Palabras de Carlos Martínez Moreno

This article analyzes the language of exile present in Carlos Martinez Moreno’s last work, Animal de palabras (1987), published posthumously but written in the immediately preceding period 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 transferred to literary categories that are not conventional but linked to the vital phenomenon he had to live as an Agambenian form-of-life (Agamben 2001). If every exile is political, then the politics implied in life becomes Foucauldian biopolitics (Foucault 2009), which in Martínez Moreno leads to the unsaid –mixed with denunciation and nostalgia– between autobiographical testimony and fiction. With emphasis on a qualitative reflection, the reception of these texts —between internal and external readings— is rooted in Steiner’s (2001) indissoluble relationship between space, time and language, which is adapted to Martínez Moreno’s literary sphere (Said 2005). On the basis of such premises, it will be discovered that the author strengthens an intrinsic courage that in the face of horrors takes strength from them and drives him to search for a language alien to common places, inscribing himself in an experimental and intellectualized line that allows him to make a qualitative leap in the thematic arborescence of his stories and in the unmistakable specificities of his interpretative code.