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58 CHAPTER FOUR Exile’s Time Given that exile often forces travel to new lands that speak foreign languages, many scholars have focused on the problems of spatial displacement and linguistic estrangement in the cultural production of exiles. Amy Kaminsky, in Reading the Body Politic, draws the connection between spatial displacement and a crisis of language for the exiled writer: “Exile is dislocation, both physical and psychic. The exile is a stranger, not seen, misperceived. The departure into absence of exile contains and will foster a will to return to presence. The exile’s writing aims to win back the land; its longed-for destination is that one place where it can never be” (32). While many scholars have researched the ramifications of the exile’s spatial and linguistic alienation , the question of time, of the exile’s time, has often been neglected. The following analysis proposes a theory of the exile’s time and suggests that temporality for exiles from the latter part of the twentieth century often involves a dialectic between pre-modern myth and circularity, modern linear history, and postmodern ahistorical timelessness. Previous studies of the exile’s time have sparked contrasting and contradictory remarks. For instance, Paul Tabori cites Józef Wittlin, as stating: “In Spanish, there exists a word for describing an exile, the word destierro, a man deprived of his land. I take the liberty to forge one more definition, destiempo, a man who has been deprived of his time. That means deprived of the time which now passes in his country. The time of his exile is different. Or rather, the exile lives in two different times simultaneously , in the present and in the past” (32). Wittlin suggests that the exile lives in the present of his country of exile and in the past of his native land. The exile is exiled from the present time of his native land. Such a condition heightens the exile’s remembrance of the past and creates a great nostalgia. But living in the past of your native land and in the present of your adoptive residence is not quite the same as living “destiempo,” which would literally mean outside of time. Other scholars have posited that the exile’s time is only the past, insofar as the exile dwells in nostalgic melancholy unable to engage with the present in any manner whatsoever. Additionally, other critics have described the existential crisis of the exile as a timeless state. Guillén argues that “even when the causes of banishment were political , its consequences were frighteningly cultural, for to be expelled from the center of the circle amounted to the danger of being hurled into the void or doomed to non- Exile’s Time 59 being” (275). This is Guillén’s description of the timeless state of the ancient exile, yet, he maintains that even in the modern age of exiles, where the individual is expelled from a nation and not an empire, the “coordinates of [the exiles’] political fervor would become, one might say, increasingly temporal. . . . In our time the most terrible of banishments will often be the exile from the present—or even worse, from the future” (275). Guillén emphasizes that the exile has been removed from the historical time of his nation. Absent from national life, the exile is no longer physically present and therefore has been stripped of a temporal and historical connection to his or her land. Claudio Guillén also cites Wittlin as he argues that the exile’s time is disconnected from the present: “la expulsión del presente; y por lo tanto del futuro— lingüístico, cultural, político—del país de origen” (Múltiples moradas 83) [“the expulsion from the present; and consequently from the—linguistic, cultural, political— future of the home country”]. Guillén suggests that exiles lose ties to future time in their homeland as well. There can be no reinsertion into the historical time of the lost nation. Tabori has noted that the exile often has a greater impact on cultural developments in his adoptive land than in the country from which he has been exiled. In his words: “The contribution of his exile to his new country is always likely to be greater than his influence still sensible in his land of birth. His successes abroad are likely to be envied and derided” (38). Interestingly, Goytisolo, Dorfman, and Peri Rossi have all suffered the consequences of international success. In all three cases there...

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