Authors: William H. Gass
Then, when the walls come tumbling down (as, eventually, they always do), the confined will run away in search of freedom, unaware that they have been sent into exile by circumstances.
We should always allow the Greeks to instruct us. You may remember how the soothsayers came with their worry to the king when Oedipus was barely born and scarcely asleep in his cradle., They foretold what every father fears: your son will succeed you, and enjoy all you now enjoy, and possess the love of your wife in her role as a mother; her breasts will be no longer yours, nor her caresses, nor her looks of love; your son’s youthful vigor shall shade you and stunt your growth; and he shall slowly edge you into your grave with the negligent side of his sandal. In heed of these warnings, the babe was taken to the mountains during the night, his ankles pinned the way a skinned lamb is trussed for the spit, and there he was abandoned in the belief that the cold wind would freeze his heart, and his lungs would expel his soul with their last outcry of breath; hence no human hand could be blamed by the gods for the child’s demise.
Of course the infant is rescued and raised by a shepherd who finds him in among the rocks or under a bush, or by an animal who takes him to her den (the stories vary), and he grows up in increasing puzzlement about his nature, because he doesn’t resemble a wolf or a bear, or the parents who adopted him. Twice an exile—first into life, as we all are exiled, then into another country—and now an alien among his so-called kin. Why wasn’t he drowned in a butt of malmsy, a method favored by the English kings? Or simply swallowed, as Cronos swallowed his children, or the whale did Jonah, or Mount Etna vain Empedocles?
This becomes an important theme. The dead have relatives, sons have mothers, few expungements are really complete. Six
million erasures were realized, yet there remained still more Jewish names. The mother arms the swallowed son with a dagger, and there in the darkness of his father’s belly, center of his father’s powers, he slits his way out while the Titan is asleep, or (the stories vary) the Titan is given an emetic and vomits the gastrically scalded boy, or a stone is substituted for the baby’s body (stories vary) and a gluttonous Saturn swallows that. In any case, the saved child seizes a sickle and cuts his father’s cock, his father’s balls, off and heaves them out an embrasure, over a parapet, across a cliff’s edge, into the sea. It is an instructive story. More morals than an evangelist’s pitch. The Greeks were great educators. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, rose from the ocean in the splash and, blood-borne, rode to shore on a shell formed from the foam of what had fallen. We could go on—it is tempting—but the tale would take us toward another lesson, rather than the one we are intent on now.
Let us move, for a moment, from myth to history. You recall how the friends of Socrates had arranged his escape. Athens had no desire to make a martyr of a man who had practically pushed them into voting his execution. His enemies would be well satisfied if the troublesome sage would go into exile like his protégé, Alcibiades, and encourage the decay of some other city. Let the gadfly bite another rump. Here was one horse, at least, who was weary of being kept awake. But Socrates declined, nettlesome to the last, claiming, among other things, to be a son of the State and unable to renounce his parentage. His arguments are interesting, although their reasons are hidden, and one of them can tell us something of what exile is. He claims, of course, to have gotten fair treatment at his trial. All he, or you or I, can correctly ask of the judicial system is that it give us our due, and Socrates felt that he had received it. If the umpire’s call goes against him, he can’t then take himself out of the game in a snit, a game whose rules he has accepted and whose advantages he has enjoyed. Above all, exile is amputation, a mutilation of the self, because the society Socrates lives in is an essential part of his nature, a nature he cannot now divide.
In short, Socrates invokes three principles, none precisely put,
but each profound: he affirms the importance of due process (which means he places a sound method above any result, however right it might chance to be, if it remains unsubstantiated), he believes in the co-relativity of rights and duties (which means that none is inalienable, but that each right is earned through the discharge of a corresponding and defining obligation), and he takes for granted a kind of anatomical connection between individuals and their society (which means that our community is to each of us like a shared arm, and is thus a vital increase of the local self).
We are generally related to other things and persons in one of three ways: instrumentally, as Locke saw us connected, in terms of our interests, so that the State, for example, is seen as a means to the individual happiness of each of its citizens; collectively, as Hegel saw us constituted, in which we are all functional elements contributing to the health of the whole; and, as I shall call it, Somatically, where the community is an essential organ of the self but not the sum of that self.
Families, societies, governments, are properly dissolved, on the instrumental view, when they fail to serve the interests of their members, just as we would replace a broken drill bit with another, or an incompetent business associate with a go-getter, or a losing football coach with one who will win. Let us suppose I am a bachelor troubled by nerves, acne, and anorexia. Life seems pointless, i.e., without sexual direction. My doctor advises me to marry. “Marriage will clear your complexion, calm your nerves, fatten you up.” So I decide to say “I do” and await the benevolent consequences. After several years, however, my zits return, my nerves refrazz; once again I can’t keep my pasta down. Clearly, divorce is indicated.
Under the concept of the collective, on the other hand, individuals can be substituted for others when they fail to perform their function, the way a pitcher is replaced on the mound, because it is the team that will continue (doesn’t our alma mater?) even though the coach and those who played for him have passed into history. The bachelor who happened to have bad skin was admitted to the
Family in order to perform his function there, as husband and father, even grandfather eventually. If, however, his performance is poor, then he may be removed for a better breadwinner, or for one whose social standing is on steadier stilts. Families, in this ruthless fashion, sometimes survive centuries of misfortune and calamity. We have seen teams limp through losing season after losing season, with coaching staffs dismissed and players continually shuffled.
This example allows us to observe that, although the team itself may be collectively constituted, the owner’s relation to it may be completely instrumental. If the club not only loses games but also loses money, he may sell it and establish, instead, a line of ladies’ ready-to-wear. Money, of course, is the pure and perfect emblem of instrumentality, and that is why, though so universally desired, it has always been, by the better sort, despised. The true fan naturally thinks of the team as a kind of artificial totem, through which the community enjoys and suffers together the team’s varied fortunes, maintaining a common temperature, as if every citizen shared the same heart.
A common blood is a common bond in the case where the community is defined as the shared self, like a public park or a library, belonging to all but owned by none. If my arm is injured, I feel sorry for that part of me; I worry about that part of me; I tend that part and try to heal it; and even if it has offended the rest of me, I do not amputate my limb. Only when the whole self is threatened would that remedy be recommended. The loss would be mourned, and considered irrevocable. So if our young man’s skin breaks out again, or if the family’s fortunes decline because of him, he is not to be turned out of doors. Rather, the reasons for his earlier happiness must be discovered, the healthy state of affairs restored, and the family’s welfare, in that way, sustained.
Exile, as I am trying to define it, is not a condition that can arise for the instrumentalist. I can, of course, be separated from my rod and reel, my hamburger franchise, my seventh wife, and that separation might be costly, especially if the fish are biting, or my
wife is wealthy or especially litigious; but “exile” would always be far too strong a word for what really would be an inconvenience and a disappointment, even if these were severe.
Under the collective conception, exile is an unmitigated catastrophe for the person expelled, since the entire self would depend upon the definition given to it by the State. On the other hand, the State which has cast that person out need suffer nothing, nor the other citizens sense a loss, so long as the job that was once done continues to be done obediently and well.
Athens may wish him out of the way, but Socrates will be missed, because his contribution, and the contribution of every citizen to the State, has to be regarded as unique, so long as we are speaking of society as a shared self. Only here does each man’s death truly diminish me, in Donne’s famous phrase, because only here is each individual, without any sacrifice of self or its sovereignty, a part of the whole.
City-states were small, both in population and in territory, so that when the city felt it had a dangerous element in its midst—a cell which was becoming cancerous—expulsion was the reasonable recourse. But a body beset by enemies may not only attack and kill them, or send them away with a violent sneeze; it may seal them off inside itself, forming a sort of Siberian cyst. Countries with colonies can penalize one of them by shipping it idealists, convicts, and religious zealots. Individual malcontents, if simple disappearance isn’t feasible, can be tossed overboard, marooned, or left to the mercies of the wilderness, as Oedipus was. For its victim, exile has two halves, like a loaf cut by a knife. Heart, home, and hearth fill one side—the land the exile loses; while foreignness, strangeness, the condition of the alien, occupy the other—the strand on which the castaway is washed.
Despite the grim character which the Greeks gave it, the term “exile” nowadays has many honorific, romantic, even poetical applications. Paris is clearly the most favored modern island of exile, but it is difficult to take seriously the punishment that sends you there. American writers who took extended vacations along
St-Germain because Paris was Paris and because of the favorable rate of exchange liked to think of themselves as exiles, although they readily went home when their money gave out, or to further their careers.
Henry James and T. S. Eliot became expatriates out of sympathy and convenience, and from a vague distaste for their place of birth. In a way, they had been English all along, and the move merely confirmed their identity. Only Ezra Pound was ever a real exile, and that didn’t occur until his incarceration at St. Elizabeth’s. Shut away in an asylum for the insane (a common resort), he achieved, after those many years in Europe, exile’s dubious status among the discomforts of home. These days there are a lot of things you can become besides an exile: you can be an immigrant, an undesirable alien, a displaced or stateless person, a dissident, an expatriate, a deportee, a wetback, a criminal, a colonist, a tourist, a Flying Dutchman or other boat person, a Robinson Crusoe, a Rushdie, a Wandering Jew.
To be exiled is to be flung not out of any door but out of your own door; it is to lose your home where home suggests close emotional belonging and the gnarled roots of one’s identity. I cannot be exiled from café society because I never had a home there. I can be blackballed from my club or cashiered from the army, expelled from school or ejected from the game, but I cannot be exiled from any of them. However, those black people who were enslaved and carried out of Africa: they were being exiled from the human race, and reduced to instrumentalities, to livestock, to machines, to money. Black people have not yet been let into America. They are the dark artery that is denied.
I can be forced from my homeland by a usurper, or by a conquering army, but so long as I cannot feel I have been excluded by the country itself, I am not really an exile. Exile involves rejection by a loved one, as if the face in your mirror grimaced when it looked out and saw you looking in. Exile is a narcissistic wound.
Our species cannot regenerate a limb. Only in rare cases, and immediately, can any severed member be reattached, sewn back
like the finger of a glove. Perhaps one can pretend to be a tourist for thirty years, as Gertrude Stein did, and never be an exile, just a Yank on an extended trip abroad. Perhaps one can write in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris while becoming more Irish than ever, a Dubliner of dreams. Perhaps.
A friend has told me how it felt to flee East Germany as a child of ten, and to leave behind the real companions of her heart. She had a number of dolls, which she cared for in a most motherly way, and she reported to them everything that happened to her, and shared with them what she read, and explained to them how she felt and what she thought. Above all, she invented stories for each one, since each was an individual and had personal preferences. It was natural that the stories would begin to intertwine, creating a single enriched narrative, one part of which she would then relate to the doll most deserving of it, while another part she would tell to the doll desiring that. So she had a special listener for each part of her life, a listener who listened with the same sort of attentive ear, and sympathized, and supported, and forgave, perhaps more perfectly than her own heart could, whatever needed forgiveness, hugs, reassurance, tears. She was told that when she left she could take only one doll. The family’s exit would be illegal, and they would travel light. But to choose? And to leave one thread intact and snap the others as if you were your own malignant fate? She never played with dolls again, and never invented another story. She says that for a time she closed down her soul like a shopfront’s steel shade.
She could return now to “her native haunts,” of course. But her doll days are over. When you are exiled from a space, you are also exiled from a time—in my friend’s case, a childhood. The hurt heart heals, but the healed heart still hurts.