An approximation to the exile of Tomás Segovia through the ‘fidelity’ of Goethe, Cesare Pavese and Albert Camus

Abstract

To study the concept of ‘exile’ used by Tomas Segovia (Valencia 1927 – México 2011), we resort to the notion of ‘fidelity’, given that the author considers the exile as an ‘experience of fidelity-infidelity’. In order to understand the origins of Segovia’s concept of ‘fidelity’, we go back in time to his essays written in the 1950s and 1960s (Sextante 1991), in which this notion appears for the first time. In Segovia’s interpretation, clearly influenced by French existentialism, ‘fidelidy’ is not static but dynamic: it is an individual project, a human plan for which there exist no recepies, no fixed values nor a preferred method. He emphasizes the innovative and creative dimension of ‘fidelity’, which renews itself constantly: true ‘fidelity’ is a changing attitude which borders, in certain circumstances, on ‘infidelity’. Segovia’s dynamic and innovative interpretation makes it possible to mark out a bordering territory in which fidelity and infidelity meet. In this border zone Segovia’s ‘condition of exile’ is situated.