December 30, 2022
Across the map of the world, waves of desperate humanity are sweeping, their homes lost or too dangerous to stay in, and everywhere, in their heartless selfishness, those who have homes are baring their teeth like guard dogs, warning away those who must have refuge or die. Whole political parties are founded on the principle of hostility to immigrants and refugees, and their membership is swelling as the political and climatic upheavals of our time swell the tide of those who have no choice but to seek a new place to be. I think of all these people on the verge of New Year’s, a holiday founded upon the hope that time can be renewed, that the world may be returned to its unfallen condition, as it was in Eden or the Golden Age. For exile is the very definition of the Fall. It is the Fall as a universal experience, and if you do not believe in a literal Fall, then just say it is the human condition. What home we may have is precarious: we may lose it in a minute. All it takes is a hurricane, an illness that brings financial ruin, a political takeover, a war. That is why those who still have homes defend them fiercely. If they open their doors even for a moment, they may be overrun and lose what they have. For there are both foreign refugees and, domestically, the homeless, those who, like the Son of Man, have nowhere to lay their heads. Decade after decade, science fiction has reimagined the fragmenting of humanity into armed and hostile camps and clans after the breakdown of the social order, whether by nuclear war (Robert Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore), climate change, or the triumph of fascism (Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower and its sequel).
The great poet of exile is Dante, who developed the theme into an epic vision in the Divine Comedy. But for him exile was not just a literary convention: he lived it personally, having been exiled from Florence in 1301, depending for the next 20 years on his literary fame to win him the status of guest at the courts of a succession of benefactors. It doubtless sharpened his awareness of the fact that the central narrative of both the Bible and the Classical epic tradition is one of exile. The first exile was from Eden into the wilderness, but it is a principle of Biblical interpretation that the Fall repeats itself endlessly in human history. The true curse of the Fall is that it does not happen just once but recurs in every human life and in every cycle of history. We just keep falling, over and over again, and in doing so repeat the initial exile from our true home. Understood in that way, the sadness is almost too much to bear. Adam had to endure not only his own exile but the subsequent exile of his son Cain, so that in a way he lost both sons. The Hebrews became the chosen people, the Israelites, at the price of being desert exiles seeking a Promised Land. After they found it, they lost it again in the Babylonian Exile, and although they eventually returned, the nation was destroyed in 70 CE as a result of its disastrous rebellion against Rome, becoming not a nation but a Diaspora until 1948. The current intransigence of Israel about the Palestinians clearly derives from a defensive possessiveness about a homeland that it is determined never to lose again. Sharing it, especially with Israel’s enemies, is out of the question: it will sooner rally behind a thug like Netanyahu than loosen its grip.
In the Classical tradition as well the pattern of history was that of displacement, the fall of Troy being the symbolic equivalent of the Fall of Adam and Eve. On the Greek side, Odysseus in the Odyssey took ten years of wandering to get back home after the war. On the Trojan side, Aeneas led a remnant band of refugee Trojans on a years-long quest for a new homeland, which is why Virgil’s Aeneid was so important for Dante. Another Trojan exile, named Brutus (not the one who killed Julius Caesar) ended up in the British Isles, which were named after him, so that British people of Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s time claimed that their empire, like the Roman, descended from the Trojan diaspora.
Traumatic in itself, banishment had symbolic overtones that increased its emotional resonance. In the opening of Shakespeare’s Richard II, Richard banishes Harry Bolingbroke on a false charge of treason in order to eliminate a dangerous political rival. Richard II is one of three linked plays, along with A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, written at the same time, that form a meditation on the powers and limits of the imagination, but Richard II dwells more upon the limits. Bolingbroke’s father John of Gaunt urges his son to use his imagination as a compensation for exile: “Look what thy soul holds dear, imagine it / To lie that way thou goest, not whence thou com’st” (1.3.286-87), but Bolingbroke is not having it:
O, who can hold a fire in his hand By thinking on the frosty Caucasus? Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite By bare imagination of a feast? Or wallow naked in December snow By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat? (1.3.294-99)
Bolingbroke’s exile and triumphant return leads to the fall of Richard II, which in turn triggers a chain of events that culminates in the end of a dynasty and a historical cycle, and Shakespeare’s imagery makes clear that Richard’s fall repeats the original Fall.
Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest, is also a play about the uses and limits of the imagination in a fallen world, and its plot turns upon the 12-year exile of Prospero, magician and Duke of Milan, to a desert island. The Tempest was performed as part of the enormously protracted wedding celebration of the marriage of James I’s daughter Elizabeth to Frederick V of the Palatinate on Valentine’s Day in 1613, prompting John Donne to write his famous Epithalamion. But Frederick was soon to become known as “the winter king of Bohemia” because his rule as king of Bohemia lasted only one season in 1619-20, after which he was forced into exile for the rest of his life. Such is the stuff that dreams are made on.
American history is also a history of exile, from the Puritans, who arrived as religious refugees, to the later waves of immigrants around the turn of the 20th century, which included my Polish and Italian grandparents, who came following the American Dream (and, in my Italian grandfather’s case, fleeing conscription into the Austrian army during World War I). Like all the immigrants who passed the Statue of Liberty and its welcoming message on their way in, the eastern European and southern Mediterranean immigrants were resented and despised by those who thought of themselves as “real Americans,” stereotyped in a way that has become all too familiar: they were lazy, they were criminal, they were morally lax. Those who kept going and ended out west became an exploited proletariat, like the Okies portrayed in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, or like the migrant farm workers of Woody Guthrie’s powerful ballad “Deportees” (1948), killed when the plane crashed that was deporting them from California back to Mexico.
We have ceased to be civilized in the ancient manner, according to the custom called xenia, the custom of hospitality to strangers ritualized as “guest-friendship.” The rule was that “Guests and strangers come from Zeus,” who was sometimes called Zeus Xenios, patron god of strangers, and who sometimes came down to earth in disguise, judging who was naughty and who was nice by the way he was treated, a tactic employed by Odysseus in the second half of the Odyssey. In Genesis 19, two angels test Lot in the same way. Lot takes them in, and when a mob comes to abuse the strangers, Lot offers his two virgin daughters instead, which modern sensibility might feel is taking hospitality a bit far. But the rule was that, once you accepted someone as a guest, you were responsible for that person with your life. It was considered rude even to ask a stranger’s name before granting hospitality: the Phaiakians throw Odysseus an entire book-long party before the king finally considers that he has the right to ask the stranger’s identity. What are we instead? Social Darwinists: if you are in need, you have been lazy and imprudent. Here are your bootstraps: start pulling on them. Not everyone is so heartless, but, still, most of us are caught in a common-sense “realism” that is genuinely mystified by a kindness that asks no questions. Until we read an article about someone doing a good deed for a total stranger, and for a moment our hearts are touched. Then we remember the reason: what if we were the ones alone and desperately in need, with no recourse? It could so easily happen.
Becoming a refugee or immigrant is not the only form of exile. Exile means losing one’s home, and it has a special poignance when associated with children. Birth is itself an exile: we are, to use Heidegger’s word, “thrown” into this world. As King Lear tells Gloucester: “Thou must be patient. We came crying hither. / Thou knowst that the first time we smell the air / We wawl and cry” (4.6.178-80. We cry, he adds, that we have come “to this great stage of fools.” Childhood is mythologized as paradisal, and simply growing older means to be exiled from Eden. But a special kind of exile, from fairy tales to Dickens to Batman and Harry Potter, is that of the orphan. To lose one’s parents and be utterly alone in the world at a helpless age is one of the most terrifying prospects imaginable.
Only slightly less nightmarish is the collapse of family fortunes and abrupt plunge in social status. It is the fairy tale situation of Snow White and Cinderella: the good mother dies, a wicked stepmother and sisters take over, and the heroine must cast about for a fairy godmother or seven dwarves in order to survive. The fairy tale pattern is endlessly modernized. In David Copperfield and Little Dorrit, Dickens fictionalizes the trauma of his family’s bankruptcy and his own childhood labor in a blacking factory. Frankenstein’s “monster” surreptitiously stays with a ruined family and is moved by their ability to be happy with each other despite their life of bare subsistence. The title character of the comic strip Little Orphan Annie was based on a plucky street urchin that cartoonist Harold Gray met while looking for story ideas in 1924. Annie is taken in by millionaire Daddy Warbucks, though resented and mistreated by status-obsessed Mrs. Warbucks, who plays the wicked-stepmother role. It is a tribute to the twistedness of human nature that Gray had an obsessive hatred of Roosevelt’s New Deal and its attempt to build a social safety net for the vulnerable members of society. If the Scrooges of the world condescend to pay for Tiny Tim's operation, that is all the safety net we need. In real life, having the bottom fall out of one’s family’s financial security is likely to be deeply traumatic. One reason so many of my students suffer from anxiety is that their families were devastated by the financial meltdown of 2008, then further traumatized by the job losses of the pandemic. Going away to college, leaving the nest, is always a bit scary, but this year I have had an unusual number of students who wanted to quit school in order to go back to feeling safe within the shelter of the family circle, in which they spent two years of lockdown.
The loss of home and social status is of course suffered by adults as well as children. The Old English poem “The Wanderer” is a first-person lament of a man who has lost his place as a member of his lord’s group of retainers. What torments him far more painfully than stormy seas and icebound lands of exile are the memories of sitting at the warm hearth of his giftgiving lord along with his companions, now all dead.
Exile is the opposite of the quest myth, of the hero’s journey. It is the difference between searching for something and having nothing to search for. Wandering in search of something gives life meaning and purpose, and that in itself may conquer alienation despite adverse circumstances. But to know that there is nothing to search for is the final despair. This is all there is. Exiles comfort themselves with the hope that their expulsion outward into the wilderness is but one half of a circle, that exile will bend back and return. This is the dream of homecoming, of nostos, a word originally designating the return after the Trojan War. In colleges and universities, freshmen arrive feeling exiled and homesick; four years later, college itself has become a home from which they are exiled as seniors into what claims to be the real world, to survive as best they can. Schools have “homecoming” celebrations, weekends in which nostalgic alumni return to their alma mater.
But the circular journey of return is a human shape, a construct of the imagination, not found in the “real world.” In the natural or profane vision of life, there is no return, only an endless expansion further into alienation. Just a few years ago, cosmologists changed their opinion about the Big Bang, the explosion that flung the universe centrifugally in all directions. All my lifetime, there was a debate about whether that expansion would reach a limit, after which gravity would draw all the matter of the universe back, imploding into the original source again, and, who knows, perhaps begin the process all over again. But with the discovery of dark matter (can we speak of a discovery if it hasn’t actually been found yet?), the consensus is now that the universe will not slow down but in fact continue to speed up. It will expand forever, until it thins itself into universal death. This is life from the point of view of the natural self. A Wallace Stevens poem speaks of the “dumbfoundering abyss” between subject and object, and in the fallen vision of the natural self that abyss only widens as we age. What is old age? In old age, you lose and you lose: friends die, family lives at a distance, your profession or life task ends in retirement or in your inability to perform it any more, body parts stop working or working very well, one after another, until the last moment of your life.
Worse than the outward expansion is the inward. The blues tradition sings about the train that carried my baby away. The memory of one we have loved recedes like a face in the window of a train pulling away from the station, never to return. The old cling to memories of childhood precisely because childhood is receding into greater and greater distance, seen from the wrong end of a telescope, presence becoming absence until we question whether the memories are even real.
However, exiles may be voluntary rather than forced, and the choice to leave, to walk out the door, may be the first step of the imagination’s countermovement against the natural vision’s despair. Sometimes we choose to leave home when we have come of age, knowing that we have outgrown it, that if we stay it will become a trap. The definitive song of the sadness of leaving home, for my countercultural generation, is Murray McLaughlin’s “Child’s Song,” so poignant and bittersweet that Tom Rush, who first recorded it, said it took him a long time before he could sing it all the way through without bursting into tears:
Goodbye to this house and all its memories We just got too old to say we’re wrong Got to make one last trip to my bedroom Guess I’ll have to leave some stuff behind It’s funny how the same old crooked pictures Just don’t seem the same to me tonight… Thank you for the good times that we’ve known But I must find my own road now to follow You will all be welcome in my home Got my suitcase I must go now I don’t mind about the things you said
Ah, yes, the things you said. Meghan and Harry know about those things. Blamed for leaving even though not accepted if they stayed. They are deemed to be nothing but spoiled rich brats whining, because they are rich while ordinary English people cannot afford to live, and besides British imperialism, yadda. Yet what they want is not money or the British empire. What they want is common human happiness, and to find it means exile to the wilds of North America.
Every divorce is an exile, no matter who does the leaving. Another form of voluntary exile in the sense of the loss of home is going away to war. Exiles journey from a center to a desacralized circumference, a wilderness that is more or less demonic, approaching hell on earth in visions of the battlefield from the Iliad to the trenches of World War I and beyond. A soldier at the front clings to every letter from home; in the jungles of Vietnam, the soldier in Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” carries a picture of the girlfriend whose life is so utterly different from his that the relationship becomes impossible. Wartime produces vast crowds of refugees, of course. It also produces famous cultural figures forced to leave dictatorships, like Thomas Mann during World War II. Disillusionment in the aftermath of the First World War helped produce a whole Lost Generation of expatriates in the 1920’s—the Hemingway crowd, rejecting an entire old cultural order, its ossified conservative moral and artistic values, its unadmitted deathwish drawing it into ceaseless yet utterly pointless wars. James Joyce (who wrote a play called Exiles) left Ireland to spend the rest of his life on the Continent, living according to a rebel’s code of “silence, exile, and cunning.”
Exiles risk becoming caught between two worlds, fully belonging to neither. I teach an essay by Andrew Pham called “Viet Kieu,” a phrase which refers to Vietnamese people who have grown up in the United States and become Westernized. But Pham is not accepted by the Americans who yell “Chink!” at him from the windows of pickup trucks, or who complain loudly enough to be heard in a restaurant about how “those people” are taking over everyplace. When he returns to Vietnam, however, he does not fit in—he is too educated, too well fed, too tall even. The only welcome he gets is from a prostitute who wants him to take her away from Vietnam and its dead-end poverty.
Still, passive resignation to a no-win scenario is not the only possible response.
Two teenaged boys in Cleveland, Ohio somehow knew this when they created Superman in 1938—although it is sometimes pointed out that Jerry Siegel and Jerry Shuster were possibly drawing upon the heritage of exile in their Jewish background. Sent to earth before his home planet Krypton explodes, Kal-El adopts a life of silence, exile, and cunning, assimilating, so to speak, becoming mild-mannered Clark Kent (not hard—all he had to do was put on a pair of glasses). He also becomes earth’s greatest hero, yet he is a lonely man, whose refuge is called the Fortress of Solitude. He belongs nowhere, and, like Frankenstein’s creation, has no mate of his own species. Nevertheless, that famous bright-colored costume represents the imagination’s determination to reject an identity based on exile and loss, remaking it into something positive. The outsider with the power of a god dedicates himself to a life of self-sacrificial service, a way of belonging, even of embodying “truth, justice, and the American way” even as he is set apart by his calling.
Shevek, the hero of Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed (1974), one of the most important literary science fiction novels, is also a man of two planets and also a kind of superhero. His superpower is his brain: he is a physicist of genius, on the level of an Einstein. The central image of the novel is that of a wall, which appears in the very first sentence, and Shevek is determined to break down the wall between his home world, the communo-anarchist society of Anarres, and Urras, divided between corrupt capitalism and totalitarianism, Cold-War fashion. By joining the two worlds he ends being an outsider in both of them. It is only as an outsider that he could have leveraged an immense social change. Shevek becomes a center, a linch-pin, an integrator of opposites, but whatever it may be at the top, it is lonely at the center.
The purpose of art is to turn exile into nostos. Refusing to accept the “realistic” vision of centrifugal entropy as final, the imagination is determined to re-collect, in all senses. I am always baffled and dismayed by the hardhearted refusal to help those in need, those whom Bob Dylan describes in “Chimes of Freedom” as “the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse.” The bells of the title chime “for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe.” I am by instinct a rescuer, a dangerous reflex, as I am well aware. I keep it partly under control—I am not a crazy cat lady with 55 cats in a single house, or a crazy pigeon lady like the one I remember in Toronto’s Queen’s Park 40 years ago, covered with the pigeons she was feeding until you could not see her. But I feed the outdoor animals here, even though they advise you not to, even advise you it’s illegal (don’t tell). They will advise you that, oh, animals know how to survive on their own, but in fact many animals starve in the wild, especially in winter.
As for people, I have not adopted one of those orphans, being too much an introvert for that, and admittedly somewhat wary of the dangers. Rescue animals can be psychologically damaged, and the same is true of people. Mr. Earnshaw brought a feral child named Heathcliff into his home, only to have his adoptee become a fox in the henhouse. Orphanages are notoriously hellholes, breeders of Heathcliffs, but schools can sometimes be places of refuge. The cartoonist Lynda Barry has a moving article about how school was her refuge from a dysfunctional home life when she was six years old. And it was an understanding teacher who set her up in the back of the room with drawing materials and thus gave her the means of creating for herself that refuge we call art. Hogwarts and Professor X’s School for Gifted Youngsters are powerful symbols of the refuge that schools can be, and it is in this way that I have chiefly indulged my rescue instinct, always tensely aware that, yes, there are professional lines to be drawn. Then, too, there is the rescuing of women from the world’s various dragons and evil magicians. That is the most dangerous rescue operation of them all, in which the rescuer may finally find himself in dire need of rescue, including—especially—from himself.
To re-collect, as Plato first showed us, on the deepest level means to collect again what has been lost from memory, exiled into the unconscious. According to Gnostic and Hermetic mythology, we have forgotten who and what we are. In The Secular Scripture, his study of romance, Northrop Frye speaks of the Gnostic Hymn of the Soul in the Acts of Thomas (103-04), in which the Soul says that he was sent on a mission to Egypt to find a pearl guarded by a serpent, but was tempted and fell into sleep, which meant forgetting who he really is. His parents sent a letter jogging his memory, of which Frye says,
It seems that one becomes the ultimate hero of the great quest of man, not so much by virtue of what one does, as by the virtue of what and how one reads. | In traditional romance, including Dante, the upward journey is the journey of a creature returning to its creator. In most modern writers, from Blake on, it is the creative power in man that is returning to its original awareness. (104)
Pierce Moffat, the antihero of one of the greatest modern literary fantasies, John Crowley’s Aegypt tetralogy, grows up in hardscrabble rural Kentucky, in coal-mining poverty, but dreams that he really is an exile from “Aegypt,” not Egypt but the Otherworld of Gnostic and Hermeticist mythologies. It is perhaps the dream at the heart of all fantasy, to wake from this narrow and constricted world of ours into another realm that is actually where we originally fell from, but had forgotten.
What is the content of this moment of self-recognition? The imagination turns exile inside out by turning consciousness inside out. The ego is, well, egocentric: a center of alienated consciousness for which the rest of reality is an ever-receding circumference. The imagination is a circumferential consciousness that contains within it all that we have lost—that mournful word tolling elegiacally all the way through Milton’s epic on our exile from paradise. T.S. Eliot has a poem, perhaps his greatest poem, about the experience of awakening into that kind of consciousness, a deeply, quietly moving poem called “Marina.” The speaker begins by asking “What seas, what shores…/ What images return / O my daughter.” It is a return from exile at sea that is also a recovery of memory and identity: “Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat / I made this, I have forgotten / And remember.”
That is the imagination’s motto: I made this. I have forgotten. And remember. It provides a home, a refuge, a Noah’s ark for all the animals and people and everything we have loved. In his “Author’s Prologue” in verse at the beginning of his collected poems, Dylan Thomas laughingly speaks of himself as “the moonshine / Drinking Noah of the bay,” a reference to Noah’s famous drunkenness and his own. Is it a drunken dream when he imagines that all of us, including the animals, will sail out and, “Under the stars of Wales, / Cry, multitudes of arks!” as if the imagination were an ark whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere, and everything we look upon is an ark?
Exile: such a lugubrious theme. But on the other hand, this circumferential-consciousness thing: do you have to be tipsy, a mystic, or a jokester to experience it? The best recipe, a medicine for melancholy, in Ray Bradbury’s phrase, might be a bit of all three—as in the poetic sequence called The Boatman by the extraordinary Canadian poet Jay Macpherson, which begins with a poem of the same title:
You might suppose it easy For a maker not too lazy To convert the gentle reader to an Ark: But it takes a willing pupil To admit both gnat and camel— Quite an eyeful, all the crew that must embark.
Exact details are not forthcoming, but the trick is to take the reader “And you pull him through his navel inside out. | That’s to get his beasts outside him, / For they’ve got to come aboard him.”
When they do, “Fellow flesh affords a rampart, / And you’ve got along for comfort /All the world there ever shall be, was, and is.” Once that happens, let it pour, let it pour, let it pour.
References
Barry, Lynda. “The Sanctuary of School.” In The Longman Reader. 12th Edition. Edited by Judith Nadell & John Langan & Deborah Coxwell-Teague. 136-39.
Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance. In ‘The Secular Scripture’ and Other Writings on Critical Theory, 1976-1991. Edited by Joseph Adamson and Jean Wilson. The Collected Works of Northrop Frye, volume 18.
Macpherson, Jay. The Boatman. In Poems Twice Told: The Boatman and Welcoming Disaster. Oxford University Press, 1981.
Pham, Andrew. “Viet Kieu.” In Dreams and Inward Journeys: A Rhetoric and Reader for Writers, 8th Edition. Edited by Marjorie Ford and Jon Ford. Pearson, 2012. 54-61.
Shakespeare, William. The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th Edition. Edited by David Bevington. HarperCollins, 1992.