The cult of exile

Exile is in fashion. It evokes images of a critical spirit operating on the margins of society, a traveller, rootless and yet at home in every metropolis, a tireless wanderer from conference to academic conference, a thinker in several languages, an eloquent advocate for minorities, in short, a romantic outsider living on the edge of the bourgeois world.

This may sound frivolous. For exile is surely no fun. There is nothing glamorous about the poor shivering Tamil, sleeping on a cold, plastic bench at Frankfurt railway station, or an Iraqi, fleeing from Saddam's butchers, afraid of walking the streets of Dover lest he be attacked by British skinheads, or a young woman from Eritrea, standing at the side of a minor road to Milan, picking up truck drivers so that she can feed her baby. These are not fashionable figures, but outcasts, who have nothing in common with the multicultural intellectuals whom we honour as the poets of post-colonial narratives.

I have in front of me a book, Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language and Loss. It is a collection of lectures given at the New York Public Library by five well-known writers "in exile." Edward Said is introduced as a Palestinian in exile, Eva Hoffmann as a Pole in exile, Bharati Mukherjee, a Bengali in exile, Charles Simic, a Yugoslav in exile, and André Aciman, as an exile from Alexandria.

The lectures are, on the whole, unexceptionable. The curious thing is, however, that of the five, only two were forced to leave their country of origin: Aciman, whose family was kicked out of Egypt, and Simic, whose parents could not live under communism. Said, who grew up in Cairo, was sent to a private boarding school in the US, not because of any force majeure, but because his father, a US citizen, believed that an American education offered better prospects for a bright young man. Bharati Mukherjee, born into a rich Calcutta family, married a Canadian writer, moved to North America and has no desire to return to India, except for vacations.

Why then, this description of "exile"? Why the conscious identification with banishment, with the outcasts of the world? In her contribution, Eva Hoffmann comes up with a plausible explanation. Exile, in her view, "involves dislocation, disorientation, self-division... And within the framework of postmodern theory, we have come to value exactly those qualities that exile demands - uncertainty, displacement, the fragmented identity. Within this framework, exile becomes, well, sexy, glamorous, interesting."

In literary and academic circles, then, exile has acquired something far removed from those cold plastic benches at Frankfurt station, the skinheads of Dover, or the truck drivers along the B-routes to Milan. What we have here is exile as metaphor, to use Said's own phrase, exile as the typical condition of the modern intellectual. This is not an original thesis. Said's hero, the German critic Theodor Adorno, who was for a time a real as well as theoretical exile, claimed that a sense of alienation, of not feeling at home even in your own home, was the only correct moral attitude for an intellectual to adopt. Adorno is part of a German romantic tradition in which intellectuals form a secular clerisy guarding the moral and intellectual health of the nation. (Günter Grass is an example of a writer who still takes this line.)

Exile as metaphor is not a new idea either. In the Jewish tradition, a metaphorical meaning has been attached to exile for a very long time. The last words of the story told at the Pesach Seder, "Next year in Jerusalem," express a pious wish, which, for most of those who voice it, is an abstraction. For orthodox Jews, it is only time to return to Jerusalem once the Messiah has come and the temple has been restored to its former glory. It would be a form of blasphemy, in the orthodox tradition, to turn the vision into a political reality. So the idea of doing just that, of making Israel the homeland of the Jews once again, had to be a secular enterprise, started by non-orthodox, often socialist Jews like Theodor Herzl.

The Israeli novelist AB Yehoshua calls Jewish exile, the golah, a "neurotic condition." It is neurotic to express a longing for something, without actually wishing to attain it. In Yehoshua's view, the longing to return to Jerusalem is no more than a neurotic form of nostalgia, a not uncommon condition among certain literary exiles too. But Yehoshua goes further - he thinks that Jews are victims of their own delusion, the idea, that is, of having been chosen by God. The idea of Jewish exceptionalism is hard to maintain at home, in a largely Jewish nation, with its own government, army, political parties, showbiz celebrities, scandals, gangsters and whatnot. The self-flattering notion of being chosen, of being different from the others, is easier to maintain in exile, where one's special status can be confirmed almost daily by instances, imagined or real, of discrimination. The Holocaust came as the final proof that this was not a sensible recipe for a quiet life.

The choice to live in a metaphorical exile is in fact already a form of privilege, something only people who face no real danger can afford. Herzl, who felt at ease with the higher goyim of Europe, understood this perfectly well. The return to the holy land was not to help himself, but to help other Jews who were not in a position to enjoy their status as the chosen ones. But Herzl, as far as I am aware, had the honesty never to use the word exile to describe his own condition.

 

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One of the first stories of exile in our literary tradition is the story of Adam and Eve. No matter how we interpret the story of their expulsion from the Garden of Eden - original sin or not - we can be certain of one thing: there is no way back to paradise. After that bite of the apple, the return to innocence was cut off for ever. The exile of Adam and Eve is the consequence of growing up. An adult can only recall the state of childlike innocence in his imagination, and from this kind of exile a great deal of literature has emerged; it is infused with the melancholy knowledge that we can never return to Eden.

The transition from childhood innocence, and the security of the maternal embrace, to the hard world of maturity, is described in Edward Said's memoir, Out of Place. He describes his arrival from Cairo in 1951, to go to school in the US. The worst wrench was to leave his mother, who never ceased to remind her son how "unnatural" it was to be living apart. He can still feel the loss today, "the sense that I'd rather be somewhere else-defined as closer to her... enveloped in her special maternal love, infinitely forgiving, sacrificing, giving-because being here was not being where I/we had wanted to be, here being defined as a place of exile..."

We all know the feeling, even though we may not express it quite so tearfully. But exile from Eden is a part of life. Some men never look back, some never get over it, and look for the maternal embrace in the beds of many women, and yet others turn it into art. This explains the universal fascination with exile in literature. Ovid, Li Po or Joseph Roth appeal to us, because their banishments, which were not imaginary, also contain a deeper, metaphorical meaning.

There are some instances where the childhood Edens cease to exist. A society, a culture, even a people can disappear. Czeslaw Milosz, born as a Pole in Lithuania, has described what it is like to look back now, as an American in California, to his youth in Vilnius. He still writes in Polish about people and ways of life which no longer exist. All things change everywhere, of course. But in the case of Milosz and Isaac Bashevis Singer, the worlds they describe exist only in their books. The same was true for Joseph Roth. He lived in exile, twice over, for he grew up in the Austro-Hungarian empire, which ceased to exist in 1918, and died as an exile in Paris in 1939, one year after Austria was swallowed up by the Third Reich.

On the other hand Ulysses, one of the most remarkable exiles in western literature, was not really banished at all. But since his return from Troy was blocked for ten years, he was a kind of exile. Ulysses pined for Ithaca, where his house was, his family, and his wife Penelope. He was lord of Ithaca; that was his place in the order of things. A man who has lost his house, his wife or his position is not a proper man, but a beggar, a vagabond, half dead in the land of the living. A vagabond is sterile; he doesn't produce a family; he leaves nothing behind. The Odyssey is the story of a man who must regain his position in the order of things.

It is impossible to know precisely what Homer meant to convey in his epic, but I think he was dealing with the tension between human autonomy and fate. A grown person has to feel responsible for his or her life. This is to assume that we have some degree of control over it. But The Odyssey shows that man is also a plaything of the gods. And this has something to do with exile too. Anyone who has wandered alone in foreign countries, often without knowing the language or customs, knows how helpless, indeed child-like, that can make you feel. Your fate really does appear to be in the hands of others, government officials, hotel managers, policemen, or even, who knows, the gods. And if I, a privileged European can feel this way, how about the poor Tamil in Frankfurt station? Only after his return to Ithaca can Ulysses wake up as a grown man who knows his way around.

There are many ways to interpret The Odyssey. Dante, himself an exile from Florence, believed that the hero never really wanted to be at home. Dante's Ulysses was a kind of eternal student who loathed the idea of domesticity, with a wife and children and a nice little dog. Who needed that kind of responsibility? It was too boring. First he would "win experience of the world," hitchhike to India, as it were, sleep with many women, and above all, gather knowledge. Just as Eve couldn't resist that bite of the apple in Eden, Dante's hero thirsts for knowledge, with the risk of getting burnt, like Icarus. Ulysses returns to Ithaca, just as he does in Homer's tale, but then takes off again, and ends up entering the infernal gates. Dante lived in the middle ages, but he was also touched by the spirit of the Renaissance. He admired the hero's wish for knowledge. His Ulysses is really the harbinger of the intellectual as a romantic exile. Banishment is his fate by choice. He was almost a man of our time.

Heinrich Heine was already a man of our time. A romantic, a poet, a revolutionary and an intellectual outsider, Heine felt nostalgia for his native Germany, but preferred to live in Paris. Germany, as he put it, kept him awake at night. Heine was an outsider as a Jew in Germany. He found it impossible to get an official position, even after he had converted - without conviction - to Christianity. He felt like an outsider, too, because he was a free-thinker who couldn't stand the authoritarianism of the German states. Heine loved Germany, just as Germans loved his poems, but at a distance. He would have liked to have died in Germany, but politics and illness prevented his return, and like Marlene Dietrich, another ambivalent wanderer from German lands, he died in Paris.

Heine was in many ways a typical example of the modern literary exile. The borderline between banishment and emigration was fuzzy. He was really an expatriate, someone who has chosen to live his life abroad. And by Heine's time the typical place of exile has shifted, from the desert - the cold, lonely, windswept plains, beyond the borders of civilisation - to the metropolitan centres of the west: London, Paris, Berlin, New York. Here political action, plotted in cafes and public libraries, began to play an increasingly important role in the life of exiles-freedom, usually in a left-wing form, was their typical religion. Exile from Rome in the age of Augustus, or Florence in Dante's time, meant the loss of liberty, the civil rights of a metropolitan citizen. The modern exiles in our great cities, however poor or lonely, almost invariably enjoy more freedom than the citizens of the countries they left behind. Karl Marx could complain as much as he wanted to about all those British philistines, but he stayed in London because he was free to design his workers' utopia.

London was a centre of European revolutionary activities after the disasters of 1848, just as London today is a centre for Arab or African politics, or New York for the Chinese diaspora. It is not an easy life, in this twilight world of émigré journals, shabby apartments and personal feuds, fed endlessly by old animosities and political frustrations. Time, in this kind of exile, often appears to have been frozen. People live only for the future, and once it finally dawns on them that the desired future will never come, they live only in the past. I have seen many examples: Chinese intellectuals, who once advised government leaders in Beijing, subsisting in lonely rooms in Queens, in a mess of old newspapers and magazines. Because exile was supposed to be temporary, these fallen men never bothered to learn English or read an American paper. Before they know it, it is too late to return-stranded, their place gone, their way back cut off for ever, they might as well be dead.

It doesn't have to be like that. Sometimes an exile will go home as a revolutionary hero. The point is, however, that exile has become a phenomenon of the big city-like alienation, existentialism, and post-modern, multicultural deconstruction. The outsider - romantic, sexual, ethnic or whatever - is described and often celebrated in our metropoles. Isherwood's English novels came from the homosexual world of 1930s Berlin. Joyce wrote about Dublin in Trieste and Paris. Burroughs brooded on his American sexual delirium in a hotel room in Tangiers. Salman Rushdie wrote in London about his fantasies of Bombay. What started with Heine became almost mainstream in the 20th century.

Once more, I do not wish to appear frivolous. Writers and other exiles did not always move abroad for fun. Joyce chose to live abroad. But Roth, Feuchtwanger, Zweig, Schoenberg, Weill and many others, had to flee for their lives. However, the difference between self-imposed exile and banishment was in many cases ceasing to exist altogether at the end of the 19th century. Exile had became an attitude, a literary and intellectual way of observing the world. Baudelaire saw the writer as a detached flâneur, a mocking dandy in the big city crowd, alienated, isolated, anonymous, aristocratic, melancholic. For Joyce - and other writers - isolation and detachment were necessary conditions for writing literature. "Silence, exile and cunning" was his prescription, or at least that of Stephen Dedalus, his literary alter ego. A writer has to operate alone, as a stranger among strangers. Joseph Brodsky, whose departure from the Soviet Union was hardly voluntary, wrote that being a writer in exile "is like being a dog or a man hurtled into outer space in a capsule... And your capsule is your language." Like Joyce, he believed that exile was good for a writer; you were alone with your language. Exile provided distance. Exile, in this sense, is not so much metaphorical as metaphysical; it gives meaning to a way of life.

Many people were forced into exile before and after the second world war. But the middle decades of the last century also saw exile and the outsider, or the outlaw, emerge as one of the main subjects of European literature. Detachment as an ideal held a particular attraction for homosexuals, but also for straight Don Juans. Genet was an extreme example; gay, criminal, homeless. Isherwood, in Berlin and LA, was a less extreme case. But aside from the quality of their prose, about which one might argue, we should also consider Henry Miller, an American in Paris, and Lawrence Durrell, an Englishman in Egypt.

And yet detachment, like everything, has its limits. Joyce might have seen distance and isolation as necessary conditions for writing his masterpieces, but the loneliness of the modern étranger, and the absurdity of the weightless, unbounded existence, made others thirst for engagement, a kind of solidarity, if not with a particular people, then with humanity in general, or at least that part of humanity living in what came to be called the third world. This is how a fashion for Maoism, the most extreme revolt against individualism, could follow from existential alienation. But extreme nationalism has also cast its spells.

A number of Japanese artists and writers moved to Europe at the beginning of the last century, to find a refuge from the narrow provincialism of Japan. They lived mostly in Paris, gathering knowledge, seducing women, painting, writing poems, and seeking the key to their innermost souls in the anonymity of a foreign crowd. And it was precisely these same people who often returned home in the 1930s, with a sigh of relief, to bask in the motherly embrace of the Japanese nation, which was being whipped up just then into a mood of xenophobic hysteria. Scorched by their lonely travels, some became the fiercest war propagandists once they got home.

 

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My intention, in citing these examples, is not to plead against the spirit of adventure, promiscuity, curiosity or freedom abroad. On the contrary. I have always been led by wanderlust myself. What I am trying to get at instead is the tension between political engagement and intellectual independence. Edward Said has written about this, without quite resolving the problem. He has made great claims, for independence as well as engagement. His argument is that an intellectual should always stand up for the poor, the weak and the disadvantaged. The free-thinker should resist the dominant powers, which means, in his case, Israel and the US. But while going about his acts of resistance, he should also guard his independence. The question is whether this is always possible. Can you be a spokesman for the Palestinians, as Said was for many years, and remain independent at the same time? He believes you can. I'm not so sure it is possible.

One solution to this dilemma is to plump for an offshore kind of engagement, a detached involvement. The intellectual abroad, a Sikh in Toronto, let us say, or a Palestinian in New York, or a Jew in Washington, calls for action, sometimes violent action, to be carried out thousands of miles from his home, the consequences of which he will not have to bear. Engagement of this kind can become a politics without responsibility. This type of politics, like modern literary exile, might be metaphorical for the "exile" in New York, Paris or Toronto, but not for those living in India, Jerusalem or Gaza. Said called his stone-throwing stint on the Lebanese border a "symbolic gesture," a metaphoric throw of a metaphoric stone. But stones in the middle east are seldom metaphoric; they hurt; they result in further violence; they kill people.

Political engagement can be essential. But too often it results from intellectual frustration. Intellectuals have neither power (outside the universities), nor much influence in modern democracies. This is because western intellectuals, since the Enlightenment, have won their independence. They have fought themselves free. Unlike in China, where the notion of the independent intellectual barely exists, western intellectuals represent nothing but their own ideas. They are not, or should not be, a band of scribes who guard the dogmas that justify the powers that be. Instead they are obliged to take their ideas to the marketplace, and that is how it should be. For intellectual independence is sacrificed once ideas are made to serve a political organisation. This might be essential, on occasion, but one should be clear about the sacrifice involved.

Yet, many intellectuals would like to represent more than themselves. The "Republic of Letters" is pregnant with political ambition. The great revolutionary ideals, which intellectuals once served as secular priests, are out of fashion for the moment. But the multicultural society in which we live, (if we live in the great cities of the western world), offers new chances. Especially in the US, the identity politics of minorities have become increasingly important, and the identities to be promoted are often based on a sentimental sense of collective victimhood. The smart thing to do for an intellectual with political ambition, is to act as the spokesman for such feelings. By identifying himself with the plight of more or less discriminated minorities or other forms of collective suffering, the lonely intellectual manages not only to escape from his isolation, but becomes a symbol of that suffering himself, and so obtains many of the perks and privileges that go with it.

The point here is not that intellectuals shouldn't stand up for society's victims. They should. But not by pretending to be victims themselves. To don the bloody mantle of real victims trivialises actual suffering; victimhood becomes a fashion item. The soi-disant exile status might attach a certain glamour to the writer in London or New York, but it does nothing for that poor Tamil sleeping in Frankfurt station.

The cult of victimhood, marginality and exile has also had a paralysing influence on academe, where literature, anthropology and even history are difficult to discuss anymore without being cuffed in the chains of post-colonial discourse. The notion of exile, especially from the third world, has given post-colonial intellectuals the sacred task of attacking the "cultural imperialism" of the western metropole. Intellectuals compete to become the new priests of the post-colonial dogma. One of the main dogmas is that "hybrid," "marginal," "post-colonial" writing should undermine the imperialist, even racist propaganda of the European literary canon.

There is something to be said for this. Any culture or tradition is bound to be rejuvenated by outside influences. And the idea that the western canon should be surrounded by a culturally impregnable moat is absurd. But this so-called marginality is often a form of intellectual self-celebration, for the new influences rarely penetrate from anywhere outside the western world. Glamorous exile, the "hybridity" of literary style, the attack on the cultural imperialism of the metropole are products of that same metropole, and have become part of a dogma which is exported to the rest of the world. Bookstores in Beijing or Bombay are full of books which evangelise the post-colonial, multicultural, anti-imperialist gospel. And the authors of these gospels live in New York, London or Boston. They live in a closed world of theory, in metaphorical exile, far from the problems of real victims, of people who are forced to live in real exile. Worse than that, multicultural theory has led to ethnic and sexual divisions of labour in intellectual life: more and more, women write about women, gays about gays, blacks about blacks, and so on. This is not hybridity or marginality in a positive sense; it is a new and unnecessary constraint.

One way of creating more clarity in these matters is to separate metaphor from reality, or what Confucius called "the rectification of names." All he meant by this was that we should call a spade a spade. Exile means banishment, not intellectual loneliness. A writer or an intellectual might operate on the margins of a modern, democratic society, without political authority, but that does not make him an outlaw or an exile. It is time to reject the assumed badges of victimhood. For then we would be better able to recognise the real victims, as well as maintain our intellectual independence. And for those who find an intellectual odyssey too burdensome, they are best advised to seek another occupation.