SOURCE: Tucker, Martin. An introduction to Literary Exile in the Twentieth Century: An Analysis and Biographical Dictionary, edited by Martin Tucker, pp. xiii-xxiv. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.

[In the following excerpt, Tucker attempts to define the concept of exile in historical, cultural, and literary terms, comparing various exiles' notions about the theme.]

Because the awareness of exile has recently grown to such an extent—witnessed by the many studies of it published in the past fifty years and by university courses specifically centered on the definition and experience of exile—the term has become a generalized one. Exile as a concept and as an experience is never vague, but it is a complex of emotional reactions and residues of feelings. Its complex nature, based on a simple fact of rejection or isolation, has caused sympathetic observers and speculative commentators to apply its characteristics in varying ways and means. It is best, at this point, to go beyond the beginning to define terms.

Exile is not a new phenomenon: it is as old as the first home one has left in the prime of consciousness. Its growing incidence, and the psychic states attendant upon the awareness of the loss it renders, is, however, a contemporary phenomenon. Exile, or the consciousness of it, has become a dominant part of the modern age and in some cases has acted as a nurturing stimulus to creative expression of its impact.

Historically, exile has always been awesome, drawing on mythic sources to sustain its power, whether those powers stem from religious, psychological, geographic, political, or social and communal pressures. By its nature exile posits the awareness of loss. In this volume psychic loss as exemplified in works of literature generated either by forced or voluntary physical separation is considered the basic content of exile. But as in all vital content, the experience of it is rendered in different forms and produced by different agents in different fashion. Exile is invidious, but the stages of its mutabilities are protean.

In the past the use of the word exile was generally restricted to the incidence of forced physical separation, to a decree of banishment by an external force, whether that force were governmental, churchly, communal, or authoritarian in some other guise. A form of expulsion associated with national, communal, and religious roots, the term rarely has been applied to such mundane expulsions as those from a school, fraternal group, or community organization. The feelings generated by expulsion—those of separation, isolation, alienation, loss, confusion, desire to rejoin the group or its converse, unrelenting rancor against the expelling body—are similar, and they delineate what some commentators call the exilic behavorial response. It is assumed that loss of one's country or religion or family is of a profounder nature than loss of one's school or club, but in a psychological perspective and context the matter is debatable. That which makes one feel exiled is the form and shape of exile; its affect is its own demonstration of the fact of an incontrovertible feeling. In this study, exile is viewed as the experience of rejection from one's native land; all other incidences of exile as they spring from this loss of literal land may follow, but inclusion in these pages demands the loss or rejection of country as a primary, native consideration. Thus, internal exiles and dissidents and writers in prison for their ideas—all forms of another body of exile, which some critics put under the umbrella term internal exile—are not listed here. If the internal exile in turn becomes a victim banished from his native land, he or she is included in this survey. On a few occasions, when the banishment is to another part of the country or geographic area that is different in feel and culture from the lost land, the act is recorded in these pages as one of exile.

This study, however, treats more than the literal exile. Exile, even by denotative signification, covers in its blanket sweep the voluntary exile, that is, one who chooses to absent himself from his country and often in consequence his home and family. The word, which comes from the Latin root to jump, carries with it the notion of flight, as one must jump from somewhere, and the where in a jump must come from above in order for descent to be made. Both in the classical and in Joyce's modern version, the figure of Daedalus is an exilic one, who must fly by the nets that constrain him from wandering, as well as through the nets of wandering to home; both the Greek Daedalus (and his son Icarus) and the Joycean Dedalus must jump into flight in order to conclude their period of exile.

Daedalus is but one example of exile; in the classical version he is motivated into it by a whimsical emperor who wants his crafty mazeman by his side, but the crafty inventor in his turn finds escape through flight. An earlier Egyptian example of exile may be found in the legend of Osiris and Isis. When the king Osiris was assassinated by his brother, the assassin ordered that the coffin bearing his brother's body be taken beyond the country's borders; even death in this tale is put out to exile. After the discovery that the jewelled coffin bearing Osiris's body had been brought back to his native land by Osiris's loyal wife, Isis, and hidden in a swamp, the brotherly assassin went mad with rage and cut his brother's dead body into fourteen parts. Such is the power of allegial presence; such is the desire to disperse and thus exile any presence of a powerful memory.

Other examples abound from the classical past: Sappho on Lesbos, Ariadne on Naxos, Oedipus on Colonnus; from Roman history: Ovid and Seneca banished by their emperors; from the medieval and Renaissance periods: Dante, who wrote his masterpiece in exile, and Shakespeare, whose works exhibit a context of exile's enduring presence. Compare, for example, the most tender banishment, that of Romeo, but also the bitter spite of Timon, who spits on his countrymen; Coriolanus, who rejects the Rome that has rejected him; Antony, who gives up a world of honor for bondage in Egypt in the arms of Cleopatra; the Moor Othello, yearning for his native land even as he performs his yeoman service for the Venetian Republic; and most profoundly, Lear, banished from castle, family, and all in which he has vainly believed before he becomes a new citizen unto himself again, shorn of everything but his awakening and longed-for death.

Conceivably the sense of wandering, nostalgia, yearning for its own sake that would produce oxymorons of pleasurable pain began at the end of the eighteenth century when reason was discovered to be less than visionary and a rational worldview insufficient to meet the demands of a sensuous soul. Weltschmerz, however, is not a German prerogative, and its coinage is a period piece; its phenomenal appearance in the nineteenth century, along with the rooted veils of the Romantic movement, bears intense witness to the exilic contagion that spread over Europe in that century.

Some observers see as the primal exile that of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden, or in its psychological parallel, that of the child wrenched from the womb of utter self-centeredness. The theme and position of exile dominate religion and religious lore—Moses and the flight from Egypt to the Promised Land; Jesus and the exile to martyrdom as the son of God; Muhammed and the Hegira to Mecca; Buddha and Tao on their pilgrimages to vision.

In this study such concepts of extranational exile as those mentioned above are surveyed in the personal experiences of writers who have departed their country because of religious, social, communal, sexual, political, and personal pressures. Some of these flights into exile have been voluntary, if by voluntary is meant that no specific authoritarian force or decree was employed in the isolate action of exit. Voluntary exit is, however, as much a form of exile as an involuntary move, if what follows it is the pattern of exilic behavior. Thus an expatriate may be viewed as a variant form of exile, if what drives him from his native land to a foreign one is a sense of aloneness, psychic separation, and the despair of nonbelonging. Expatriation is of course a happier state than exile; for the expatriate, if nothing else, is a willing exile who can take his baggage of home supplies with him; he does not have to take flight at a moment's notice, and he can return at whatever point he wishes, unlike the banished victim of exile who must wait for a new order in his land.

What both the exile and the expatriate feel in common is this apprehension of being cast out from their group. Though expatriates do not wander like the exile Cain with the brand of memory goading them, they are never at home till they travel beyond their home communities. The expatriate has been included in this survey as a representative example of the modern phenomenon of the choice of a foreign land over one's own. That choice represents, if not literal exile, the evidence of psychological exile and separation from community.

Literary terms have their semester of fashion as do any other quotients of living language. In the twentieth century, the image of the suitcase is intimately associated with the modern refugee—once the suitcase has been taken away, or the refugee no longer worries where his suitcase sits, he is transformed from a refugee into some other being; he acquires a new name, whether for the better or the worse. An exile then may also be defined as a refugee without a suitcase, one who has found a place after much wandering, and one who begins the equally tortuous routes of wandering through memory and yearning.

One critic, Leszek Kolakowski (in the Times Literary Supplement, October 11, 1985), separates the refugee from the exile in terms of personal action. The refugee is one who flees (suitcase or no) to a new border; the exile is one whom his group expels or banishes. In Kolakowski's view the exile is acted upon, while the refugee, shabby as his material condition may be, has engaged in a heroic retreat from the tyranny of the majority and keeps as an option a later battle with his oppressors. Kolakowski places the exile in such a mode of transport as physical deportation or banishment, while the refugee is a fugitive who has made good his escape from persecution and a possible death sentence from his enemies. He is in effect living in self-exile.

Kolakowski sees in the distinction not so much an operating terminology as a means of insight into psychological states and conditions of being. The refugee may harbor guilt for having fled and survived, while those left behind, or those who chose on their own to remain, may have suffered imprisonment or death. Conversely, the exile, if he or she survives, may feel freed from all lingering responsibility to his or her national and local state, and for his or her physical and psychological state, having borne the consequences meted to him or her. The exile in such a case becomes a stoic creature accepting the tragedy of history.

Distinction must also be made between exile and émigré, émigré and emigrant. One is an active choice, the other is a passive reaction, though decision and action are taken in the tension of reaction. Émigré activity follows a flight by choice, a decision taken on to avoid a feared harm or wrong and/or an expulsion by decree of the sociopolitical unit, whether it be a group of people, a religious community, or a local/national government. An émigré, in this scheme, flees to avoid harassment, torture, imprisonment, or worse apprehensions; the method of operation is a matter of varying circumstance and opportunity. An exile, by contrast, is more passive; choice is determined by a decree of banishment from a group above. Continuing this scheme, the emigrant is one who leaves not out of fear but out of the apprehension of a larger, better opportunity elsewhere. Yet, while each distinction is clear in the abstract of definition, every concrete case is murky in its peculiarities. Exclusivity of label, in effect, includes profound deviations from the exclusivity of the label; the exilic complex is never a simple sentence of biography. For example, émigrés and exiles arrive in a foreign land as a result of the same circumstances and attitudes; they feel the same pangs of loss. Even emigrants, who consciously and without ostensible fear of physical harm have chosen to leave, suffer the guilt of the survivor; they sometimes desire to return to that land they thought they had put into a past tense. Again, it is more pertinent to refer to each case, circumstance by circumstance, in order to understand and to draw configurations of the exilic complex.

Paul Tabori, in his pioneering study The Anatomy of Exile (London, 1972), a book now sadly out of print, lists several terms that together make up the exilic experience but singly represent different aspects of it. These differences are subtle, sometimes protean, but always felt. It is essential to keep such differences in mind when reading the various entries on individual writers in this book, but it is impossible to label a writer definitively by these intellectual categories, simply because a writer's work reflects many moving experiences—that is, the writer's material is transmitted by his or her being into a been that subsumes differences before they are analyzed. Few of us are pure in any case (although we can be “purified” in case studies for analytic purposes). Our experiences reveal an amalgam of virtues and ideals, decadence and failures, and occasionally premeditated crimes against personhood and community. The reader in using this study will find that a writer's exilic experience is described in biographic/historic terms and his or her work examined in literary/critical ones; on further study the student may discover that distinguishing referents can be applied to the writer so that his or her uniqueness can be summed up by a specialized term. The decision of the editor to use such terms sparingly in the biocritical entries is based on a simple precept: it is better to be reportorial in commentary before approaching critical encapsulation.

Yet the dangers of such an approach are also apparent. Exile, defined as national allegial loss or psychic-centered void, is so broad a concept that a whole age can be swallowed in it without the distinctions (the teeth) that aid understanding (digestion). To avoid enveloping fumes of critical haze, the following flags have been set up as markers for communities of exile.

Political. Writers who have been forced to leave or who have fled their native land to avoid feared arrest and/or harassment by ruling local or national authorities. Among the state conflicts of the twentieth century that have resulted in political exile of writers are the rise of Hitler in Germany and later the German military action in Europe; the Spanish Civil War; the change of national boundaries after World War I; World War II; the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917; the military dictatorships of Latin America, whether on the Right or Left; the Socialist Revolutions in China and the ensuing Cultural Revolution in the four decades since the 1950s; Red Scares in the United States and Canada following World War I and during the era of Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist campaign in the 1950s; the repressive regimes in East and West Europe; the abuse in many areas of the world of individual rights and political persuasions; the Armenian Genocide, in which some 2,000,000 people of one faith were slaughtered or starved; and the revolutions in Iran, Cuba, Kenya, Iraq, and elsewhere, which both freed and later imprisoned outspoken, independent critics.

Religious. Writers who have been forced to leave, or who have fled before their feared arrest, harassment, and/or ostracism because of conflicts in their religious beliefs with those of their local and national community. Among such conflicts are the Holocaust, with its record of extermination of 6,000,000 Jews; persecution in socialist and communist revolutionary states in which atheism is proclaimed as the national and single religion; civil war, in Africa and Ireland over religious beliefs; Iran, where a zealous and theocratic state punishes non-believers in fundamental Islam; and Israeli and Arab wars of hatred and the ensuing stones of the heart.

Cultural. Writers who have left their country because they desired a freer state of being, whether in politics, religious observance, or social and/or sexual mores. Generally, this work lists expatriates as examples of this kind of exile. The American expatriate movement in Paris in the post-World War I decade is seen as a form of voluntary cultural exile. (The expatriates would probably say they gained a new culture rather than lost an old one, since they did not view their departure from their country as any significantly cultural sacrifice.) Under this rubric would also be found colonial writers who chose to emigrate to the large metropolis, to the supposed center or dominant focal place of culture. Frantz Fanon's concept of the colonial victim manipulated by imperialistic forces, and his struggle for freedom from its cultural yoke, serves as an example of cultural exile both for the colonized writer who takes flight to the imperial center and for the writer who moves into another domain. Among these colonial writers are Katherine Mansfield, V. S. Naipaul, Sam Selvon, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Randolph Stow, Doris Lessing, and Jean Rhys.

Personal/Social. Writers who have chosen separation from their social groups or communities for a number of reasons other than the specific ones listed here. What distinguishes them is their sense of isolation.

Sexual. Writers who have left their country for greater freedom in their sexual expression and/or for a sense of acceptance in a less hostile world. Some of these writers have felt more like exiles in their home communities than in their adopted land. Most of these writers have not been banished or expelled and possibly not even harassed for their sexual behavior or for their writings, but they consider themselves nevertheless victims of repressive milieus. Many of these writers have also felt alienated from their social communities in political, cultural, and economic matters as well. See the group entry “Gay and Lesbian Writers in Exile” as well as individual entries on Gore Vidal, Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), Robin Maugham, and Alfred Chester, among others.

Legal and Criminal. Some writers have chosen exile and/or emigration for reason of tax abatement, finance, or flight from criminal prosecution. Although such writers are not exiles in that they have not fled or left their country for any reason beyond the mundanely personal one of saving money or ameliorating their financial or legal situations, they often suffer the consequences of exile. Their works bear the stamp of loneliness and yearning for a return home, or they are a broad, often satirical, canvas of memories and observations. Those writers who have fled their country either as criminals or as fugitives from criminal prosecution bear the burden of a home lost to them with a heavy reparation as the condition of return. Among such writers may be mentioned Eldridge Cleaver and Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

It should be emphasized again that these “markers” are guideposts and directional signals for clarification in a complex of observations. No one category may be fully satisfactory for an encapsulation of a writer's work in exile; religious persecution in Hitlerite Germany, for example, was a political event as well as an antireligious act. Indeed all religious persecution is political in consequence, if not also in origin, and all cultural harassment is equally an abuse of political freedom, as no culture exists in a societal vacuum. Lists of writers are provided under each of the above categories in the appendices at the end of this book, but individual entries of specific writers should be studied for a less terminal understanding of categorical exile.

Unfortunately, the most virulent form of exile in the modern period is the obvious one—forced emigration because of political, religious, and communal harassment. The diasporas continue in modern times; once started, the stones of the heart they induce cannot be rolled back but must in some way be shattered into the powder of transcendent adaptation. The reverberations of the Jewish exile from the Holy Land thousands of years ago continue, both in the current loyalty to a Zionist state and in the awareness of Jewish people in various countries of their differentness from the majority of their community; in the black experience, both in return-to-Africa movements and in the striving for more viable worlds and landscapes of different and equal crops of human activity and responsibility; in the Holocaust, with its afflictions of the knowledge of horror and evil, which lie dormant but tensed for awakening in the capacious breasts of humans; in the revolutions in the name of greater religious or social good that have displaced hundreds of thousands, in some cases millions, of nonbelievers in those later adherences that evolve from the newly established systems of revolutionary activity. In the twentieth century the list is frighteningly fulsome.

Although other centuries have played host to persecution and exile, it is apparent that exile is more than a passing current in the modern era: it is one of its most dominant literary fortresses and a stasis of the time. The critic Terry Eagleton has asserted that among the eight major writers of the first half of the twentieth century, only one, D. H. Lawrence, is a nonémigré. (See Eagleton's book Exiles and Emigres: Studies in Modern Literature, 1970.) Eagleton's point may be strengthened by my assertion that D. H. Lawrence is a preeminent example of an exile, a wanderer whose roots were in no land but that of his visionary world of pantisocracy and who traveled, restlessly, for thirty years after World War I to find a place he could call home. Lawrence chose Taos, New Mexico, with its mix of ancient North American and Renaissance Spanish culture as his “favorite” place; his ashes are buried there, brought by his widow Frieda. The exile thus came home to a foreign place more natural to his nature than the England that lay behind his novels, short stories, and plays.

Exile may also be perceived as a concomitant of the Western postempirical age, with its cause rooted in a political system rather than in such aberrations of history as the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. The critic Andrew Gurr posits that exile is integral to empire, and that the colonized victim who becomes a writer exploits his empirical servitude and imposed menial status into a nurturing material of literary exploitation and substance. Gurr's thesis of exile as a constructive force for the colonized writer may be compared to Edmund Wilson's earlier premise (in turn indebted to Sigmund Freud) that the artist works from a wound that shoots its own arrows of artistic strength and stimulation. Gurr proposes the consideration that the colonized writer, growing up in a place distant from the metropolis of the empire, or its ruling center, makes a conscious, and subconscious, decision to flee from his origins and to build a new home on foreign shores. The colonized writer is already a victim of alienation; in his new surroundings in the metropolis he gains strength from his memory of what he has fled, and he uses material of early life for the substance of his work. The pattern is suggestive of that of James Joyce, who, adopting the creed of silence, exile, and cunning, wandered through Europe but never forsook the land of his birth and in the process immortalized Ireland, the Catholic church, and his family in every one of his fictions. The colonized writer's pattern, then, is that of flight at an early age, reconstruction during the next decade of his origins through revision of memory, followed by an artistic flowering. By their reliance on concrete details of memory of home, these writers are saved from the self-pity, isolation, and alienation an impersonal and often amorphous metropolitan society imposes on its inhabitants.

The most significant ironies in Gurr's thesis are that the artist, if he is successful in his constructs—that is, if he achieves the creations of his vision—will emerge without any home or history. For in creating his own myths about his native land he will have rendered the historical constructs of them anachronistic. This pattern again is similar to the one Joyce exemplifies—Joyce's Ireland is not a reportorial land naturalistically described, but a modernist communion with Celtic myth and history filtered through the unique Joycean vat of ironic glories and comic quiddities. Not merely for literary declaration did Joyce parallel Ireland with Homer's Greece, but for a deeper rationale—the need of the psychic exile to make contact with a cosmology and an era that would return him to his local place in a universality of time, and in the process transform history into both legend and a new period literature.

The converse of the exile who refuses repatriation is the one who returns to the homeland he has left earlier. He returns to the rocks and sturdy trees of his origin to find he no longer bears the same spacial relationship to those physical manifestations he has sheltered in his dreams during his long years of exile; he no longer is a perennial season, becoming green again each spring like the trees in their appointed (for him preappointed) places. Such a return is at least as unbearably painful as the concomitant knowledge that time passes all human things into a great wash of record. For such a writer-observer, the knowledge of such experience is likely to lead again to the preference of memory over revisitation. The harbor of memory eliminates the inconveniences of new sailings, protecting berth-rights from trauma. In some exilic works, the shelter of dream visions overcomes historical realities, but the dreams are of an imposed past overwhelming the tension of a personal and future mood. Such dreams represent an allegiance to shadows that will not dim their lights.

Such exiles, full of the certitude of uncertainty, construct order over the chaos they feel by re-creating in their literary renderings a world turned static; their memorialized perspective provides a reassuring system of time's notation for their traumatized dynamic. This operation of activity cuts reality down to the size of entropy in a long run of time, but in the immediacy of therapy it realizes a profundity of vitality. Judgment on whether the look-back opens the course into the future, or whether such gleanings are the symptoms of cantankerous despair, lies with each individual reader. One reader will find in Vladimir Nabokov or in James Joyce a linguistic wordplay that dramatizes the profound game of freedom and represents a player's fight against a world armed with clubs that smash niceties of language in their uniform regulations. Others will see in Nabokov's and Joyce's work a profusion of puns, anagrams, and eccentricities of extraordinary variety and craft but without much redeeming social grace or communal utility.

Judgment of the work of literary exiles may thus be seen as inextricably connected with the persona of these works, if by persona is meant the totality of the writer's content, form, style, personal vision, and intimate baggage of technique by which the gift of personality is made. All writers of course use their experience in some way as the premise of their art and as a conclusion to the transmutation of it. What lies, or tells the truth, in the middle of it is the alchemy that changes their biographical experience into something universally new and by so doing creates a felt experience for readers and viewers coming into contact with it. By its nature art is both a birth and a reconstruction of existent material; it is a new body flying in space traveled for the first time every time it is traveled by the high flyer, the Daedalus-like reader who becomes one with the Daedalus creator. What is new if literature is to be made anew is the material presentation of the writer, but the material itself has been present and available since consciousness began. What happens when the fabric is—or fabrics are—suddenly, violently or irremediably torn away becomes the matter of exile. The reader will have noticed the use of dualisms in the previous sentence; this awareness of duality for anyone pursuing the quest of the meaning of exile becomes endemic, since an exile immediately has two selves. He is from there, but he is here now. Where then is he at base? Once having left a place, he has literally reshaped it by a wrenching of its steady habitual appointments. Even if he goes back to the original place, it cannot be the same. For indeed he has changed, by the fact and means of leaving. And if the place has literally stayed the same, then it has atrophied by remaining unchanged and thus decaying, while other constants have moved and replenished their shape. James Joyce knew this fact of time, this irreversible presence facing every exile's choice of departure and return. He could not go back to Dublin because to do so would destroy his memory of it, his grasp of the truth of its place which he was stealing into his art. Only by distance was he able to come home. Only by separation was he able to stay a true Catholic in the capital sense of the word, and only by using the confines of a relatively small world capital was he able to remain catholic in his range of material.

Joyce's transplantation and his protective devices to keep the seeds of his plant and flowering art warm are one way of dealing with exile. Joyce chose exile—or rather he recognized its nature, which a less discerning eye, the conventional citizen of Dublin, avoided through the eager aid of their willing ignorance. Other writers have chosen or been forced to accept other ways of transplanting themselves and thus their creativity, and other methods of keeping alive their roots in an alien land. I. B. Singer came to the United States because he had to flee his native land or suffer the deadly horrors of the Holocaust. He chose never to desert his native language—but which was his native language? Polish, the language of the country in which he was born? Yiddish, the international language of the group by which he achieves his profoundest identity? or English, specifically the version of the English language spoken by Jews in the United States, a land in which Singer has lived for more than forty years. For Singer, the choice has been Yiddish, from first to last, with only an occasional aside in English. For Singer, his style, his view, his meaning has been Yiddishkeit, the sheltering community (and possibly ghetto) of Jewishness, the sense of or rather attempt at making sense of a world gone awry. Singer's transplantation may be seen in his current living habits—is he an exile in Miami from New York? The question, deceptively comic at first (one hopes), is ironic because it is the root question in any discussion of exile. In deciding how to identify a person's place—that is, the spirit of the place of a person—the observer is deciding how to place him in the context of profoundest identity. There is a second step to this process, and that is the process of transcending exile, of integrating past into present, of discovering that roots have grown anew without severance of old vines. The critic and scholar Asher Milbauer has written on this phenomenon of transcendence of exile, using three literary exiles—Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, and Isaac Bashevis Singer—to justify his assertion. Milbauer's analyses illuminate the pattern by which literary exiles go beyond their past into a future that does not deny the validity of the past while assigning it a less dominant territory than its former hegemony. I would suggest in addition that transcendence works in a multitude of ways: for some, the bridges of memory become routes to another path of life; for others, transcendence burns its own bridges of memory, creating a new life without seeds to till anew; for still others, transcendence loses its power because belief in it may be or become less potent than the routine of hopeless habit. In sum, there is a point for some writers at which memory refuses to seed its distinctive parochial boundaries and demands a recognition of isolate identity. Thus the exiled writer achieves again another instance of duality—he has a new identity, a new tradition of which he is a part, a tradition that has helped to shape him but allows him distance as well.

Language, which makes possible a writer and whose “foreignness” makes possible the destruction of that same writer, is another measure of both psychic, rooted exile and literal exile. Indeed, language may be the ultimate measure of psychic exile, for the exilic sense of separation springs from the fall of communication between foreign writer and local/national community. When a writer's language is not comprehended, he is as isolated spiritually as he is physically in an alien land. When he begins to understand the foreign tongue of the land in which he resides, his exile is lessened, for the intelligible world has joined him to a new confederacy. When a writer begins to write in the adopted language of his new country, he may well be stating that he has reached the end of his exile, that he is now associating himself with a new identity, a word no longer foreign to him. In this sense, a writer transcends exile once he adopts the home of a new language. Joseph Conrad and Nabokov exemplify this moment of literary conversion, while, representing an alternative view, I. B. Singer has steadfastly refused to divorce himself from Yiddish. In Conrad's case the issue is layered in the fact that Conrad did not write for publication, with rare exceptions, in any language but English; at the earliest stage of his literary career, he chose English as his medium. Although Conrad did not change his literary language in midstream, he did arrive at English as a third linguistic way. His background was Polish, and he spoke fluent French before he chose English as his writer's voice. Conrad's pattern represents the reverse of the usual exilic experience; his was an act of selfmotivated declaration rather than a practical reaction to circumstance. Nabokov's case differs from Conrad's in that he began the composition of his novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in 1939 in English, fully conscious of forsaking one language (in which he had achieved public distinction) for another. It is pertinent that in Sebastian Knight Nabokov explores the question of identity and puts his protagonist through a series of unveilings that allows the character to clothe himself in the new trappings of an emigrant. At the same time Nabokov continued his Russian literary studies and translated work from the Russian into English.

Yet while language is a measure of the distance spanned in the circles of isolation and community, it is a fluid measure. Many writers do not simply exchange languages. More often they become bilingual or trilingual and write in a language that suits their particular context. It may be argued that such a stance proves the validity of the proposed thesis of language as a measure of exile and the isolation erased from it as on a palimpsest of new allegiance. For if a writer retains his native language and learns no other while living in a new land, he is likely to become one kind of exile and remain one kind of foreigner; if he adopts a new language he is likely to become a naturalized citizen of his adopted language-country, though his naturalness with it will come in questing stages; if he learns many languages and uses each in his planned turn of events, then he is more likely to become another kind of exile, perhaps a transcendent of it if he integrates his employment of languages into a unified personal vision rather than a dichotomous, partite set of specific goals. Examples may clarify the issue, although they cannot resolve it: Joyce knew many languages but chose to write in only one; Stefan Heym writes alternately in two, English and German, and lives in one state of Germany which until 1989 banned his work while the other state of Germany read it eagerly; Joseph Brodsky has written in two languages and seems determined to employ English as his language from this point on; Thomas Mann, although he lived for a long time in the United States and expressed his gratitude to his place of haven (even when he departed from it in fear of what he conceived as its political hysteria), did not forsake the German language and relied on translators to spread the word in his fictions; Samuel Beckett, an Irishman resident in France, wrote in French for many years and only later in life wrote in English (a reverse from his earlier habit of writing first in English and then translating into French); Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Chinua Achebe, who once wrote in English and who now write in their African languages (Kikuyu and Ibo), either before or after writing their creations in English, in their attempts to reach and educate a local audience and to reach and educate in a different way the Western and Eastern worlds; and Jerzy Kosinski, who writes only in English, having made a conscious choice to identify himself with the new society he chose to enter a generation ago.

Life is never a losing matter, even in the gain of loss and sorrow. Accretion of experience is what shapes our present and future and makes possible our understanding of the past. In this sense memory is a revisionist movement, forcing us to see yesterday in present light. The duality of perspective is shared by others besides the exile, but the impact of the lensing experience may provide a greater illumination to the exile's consciousness than to others.

Exile is a living tissue that grows in stages and degrees. We are exiled from the womb in the psychological apparatus of growing up. We have been exiled from the Garden of Eden. We leave things behind and cannot go back to them at many moments in our lives, and there are moments we cannot revisit; moments pass even when we are silent and hold our breaths in the fierce wish to hug a moment forever to our breasts. Such examples are universal and common to mankind, but rarely studied as exile. The more usual forms have been mentioned earlier: the historical, the political, the religious, the social and cultural, the sexual. Exile has been studied as a time capsule—a hurtling from the space of time as well as from the land.

I believe that now, at the end of the twentieth century, exile may be seen as one of the most deeply rooted characteristics of the modern era. Exile, which by definition makes one feel always the other, has become a widely traveled terrain of our times. It represents one of the modern era's significant communities of experience.