Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

University of Oklahoma

On the Literature of Exile and Counter-Exile

Author(s): Claudio Guilln
Source: Books Abroad, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Spring, 1976), pp. 271-280
Published by: Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma
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The Writer in Exile

On the Literature of Exile and Counter-Exile

By CLAUDIO GUILLfiN
Much has been said and much continues to be said in connection with a historical
phenomenon exile- which, despite its antiquity and immense variety of forms and
instances, persistently retains a singular degree of identity. More than fifteen years
ago Harry Levin opened his definitive essay on "Literature and Exile" with some
comments regarding Boris Pasternak, who, after the award of a Nobel Prize, had
refused to go into the exile that he considered "equivalent to death."1Were Levin to
rewrite his essay today, his inaugural example could be Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose
expulsion recalls many more or less remote incidents for which the mot juste would
be banishment- banishment of an individual writer, not a group, for political motives,
by authorities representing the State. Karl Marx, who knew his classics, wrote to
Engels after he was ordered by the Paris police on 19 July 1849 to leave for the
Morbihan,that he had been sent to the 'Tontine marshes of Brittany."Clearly, we are
confronted with the sort of political, social or linguistic pattern of events which one
may call a historical structure.Insofar as it is historical, it cannot be dissociated from
political discontinuities and social or economic changes. As a structure, it reveals
enduring conflicts and responses. It may be that what students of the subject need
today is not so much another review of the pertinent events as an effort to approach
the patternas a whole.
Literature tends to draw sustenance from itself, of course, and thus to frame to
an unusual degree the continuities and recurrencesof the structuresrelated to exile.
Broad though the spectrum of these literaryresponseshas been, it can be observed that
they range, in the main, from a pole A to a pole B. Pole A is the direct or near-

Ed. Note: Claudio Guillen's and RichardExner's papers were read at the Boo\s Abroad session of the MLA
Convention in San Francisco, December 1975, which was dedicated to the topic "The Writer in Exile."
Josef Skvorecky'spaper was submitted but not read by him at the meeting; on the other hand, Dennis
Brutus (Northwestern University) did read a paper on South African emigre writers but could not submit
it in time for inclusion in our present issue. Ewa M. Thompson's introductoryremarks to the session will
be found on pp. 325-28 of this issue.
Why was this particulartopic chosen for an issue of our 50th year? Because, its perennial timeliness
aside, three of our journal's five editors actually have been emigre authors themselves: Ernst Erich Noth,
a novelist in both German and French; Robert Vlach, a Czech poet; and the current editor who has
published poetry in Estonian. Thus Booi^sAbroad has quite naturally reflectedsome of the problems of the
writer in exile for a significantpart of its history. We chose the topic to remind our readersof this interesting
fact.

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autobiographicalconveyance of the actual experiences of exile itself by means of emotions reflecting the experiences or of attitudes developed toward them. Pole B is the
imaginative presentation of relatively fictional themes, ancient myths or proposed
ideas and beliefs growing from what are essentially the consequences in the changing
writer, or group of writers, of the initial experiences.A certain kind of writer speaks
of exile, while another learns from it. In the first case, which is common in poetry
and often assumes elegiac modes, exile becomes its own subject matter. In the second,
which may lead to narrativesand essays, exile is the condition but not the visible cause
of an imaginative response often characterizedby a tendency toward integration, increasingly broad vistas or universalism. Writings of the former sort can be rightly
regarded as examples of the literatureof exile. Instances of the latter compose what I
shall call the literature of counter-exile, that is to say, of those responses which incorporatethe separation from place, class, language or native community, insofar as
they triumph over the separation and thus can offer wide dimensions of meaning
that transcend the earlier attachment to place or native origin.
No doubt Ovid can be and has been regarded as the original hero and archetype
of the first kind. We may grant that the various forms of the odyssey, or of the Ulysses
theme, are sufficientlyrepresentativeof the second. To be sure, we are only speaking
here of ideal models or polar concepts, and I for one do not propose to forget, despite
my interest in theoretical orders, the pains and the injustices and the sorrows which
exile itself brings. But my subject is literature and the ways in which the injustices
and the sorrows can be, and certainly have been, fruitful or constructive.I cannot suppose that the direct expression of the sorrow, which is the Ovidian mode, is the most
important response. It would be interesting to inquire, in fact, concerning any particular writer, to what extent the Ovidian mode has led to some version of the Ulysses
theme.
Vladimir Nabokov has continued to compose, long after he turned to writing
novels in English, Russian poems in the Ovidian mode, that is, singing of exile in
epistolary,elegiac or satiricalfashion. In one such piece, "The Paris Poem," written in
1943,an exile, the author's friend, looks at his watch and also contemplates, through
the hours, as one might through clear water, a point distant in time. What the two
friends see, then, is Ovid. In Nabokov's own translation:
Havinglookedat his watchand glimpsed
bottom,
throughthe hourits pebble-strewn
he dressedand went out. He and I
dubbedthatbottom:"Ovidius
crammedwith carmina"
In a more literal translation: "Ovid drew nourishment from his carminar2 We are
reminded, quite correctly, of the one way in which Ovid, leaving aside his pleas to
Augustus, could meet and alleviate the afflictions of banishment: through the consolation of poetry itself (Tristia IV. 1. 3 ff.) and the anticipation of the fame that it
would bring (I. 6. 35 and passim)- the fame which Nabokov, nearly twenty centuries
later in the 1959 poem "What is the Evil Deed," would visualize in the shape of a
marble statue, worthy perhaps of a poet laureate: "despite proofreadersand my age's
ban, / a Russian branch'sshadow shall be playing / upon the marble of my hand."

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273

Rich though the thematics of exile are in Nabokov (the unresolved loss of childhood and the need in the poet, expelled from the vert paradis des amours enfantines,
to possess this or that Lolita), it would also be possible to find in his novels the
itinerariesof counter-exileand the consolations of philosophy so often attached to the
odysseys of the soul. Even Professor Timofey Pnin, that most ludicrous of emigres,
rejectedin the end by Waindell College, triumphs in his double banishment over the
sedentary mediocrity of his tenured colleagues. Pnin retains a measure of purity and
particularlyof hope as, at the end of the novel, his speeding car fades and disappears
"in the soft mist where hill after hill made beauty of distance, and where there was
simply no saying what miracle might happen." For if the figure of Ulysses can be
distinguished from Ovid's in a literal sense by the wanderer's hope and ability to
return home, we might rememberthat Dante's declareddesire to go back to Florence"ritorneropoeta" (Paradiso XXX. 7)- is voiced as he opens the canto in the Paradiso
that will be devoted to the theological virtue of Hope.
Spes alunt exsules (exiles nurture hope) is one of the Adagia by means of which
Erasmus, in a Renaissance gesture of synthesis, brings together and comments upon
Ovid and Ulysses as the two proverbial models of exile.3 (Ovid himself, of course,
in an effort to find parallels in Greek myth, had attempted to contrast his own trials
and sea journeys with the ultimately victorious homecoming of the King of Ithaca:
Tristia I. 5. 57 ff.) By now exile has become a poetic theme worthy of imitation by
those who, like Joachim du Bellay, invited by the powerful Cardinal du Bellay to join
his elegant retinue in Rome, can hardly be said to have suffered from genuine banishment. Like Petrarchanlove, this was a theme that could inspire, with or without the
immediate support of experience, a truly talented sonneteer. Du Bellay, in his Regrets
(1558), having ransackedthe Tristia and recalled their author ("Ovide osa sa langue
en barbare changer / Afin d'estre entendu . . .," X. 10), refers to Ulysses in the
famous poem in which Rome, once the center of the world and the object of Ovid's
nostalgia, ironically yields to the poet's own province:
Plusme plaistle sejourqu'ontbastymesayeux
Que despalaisRomainsle frontaudacieux. . .,
Plusmon petitLyreque le montPalatin,
Et plusque l'airmarinla douceurangevine.
The same paradoxcould be discoveredthree hundred years later in one of the Crimean
Sonnets (1826) by Mickiewicz, "The Pilgrim," where the marshes of Lithuania are
preferredto the splendor of a valley "of mulberriesand pineapples of gold" (XIV. 8) .
Though I have scarcelytouched the thematicsof exile, with respect to Ovid and his
successors in the West, the point need not be stressed here. Doubtless a recurring
constellation of topoi has been a feature of the literature of exile, and I shall return
later to some of the ways in which they make possible the polaritiesof exile and counterexile. We should not fail to question, when faced with such literary continuities, the
historical and social circumstancesunderlying the realities of banishment and emigration and, above all, whether these circumstances coalesce in the form of historical
structures. For students of comparative literature, there is a privileged instrument
today that can be made to serve such questioning: East-West studies. As a layman,
I can only allude to some aspects of this avenue of research.

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The archetypalpoems of exile in Chinese go back to the Ch'u Tz'u anthology of

songs from the southern kingdom, collected in the second century A.D. and composed
for the most part some five centuries earlier. In the genre known as sao the poet,
speaking in the first person, leaves most often for an extended trip: "he reverts again
and again to his grief and anguish; for before his journey he is wronged and embittered, and after he has embarked on it he is homesick and remorseful."4In Western
terms, we might say that the dimensions of the journey underlie the Chinese poems
of exile, as the Odyssey and its followers make possible Ovid's use of his sea travels
in the first book of the Tristia. In the Ch'u Tz'u, the cycle known as the Nine Declarations, or "Chiu Chang," singles out banishment as the condition for spatial movement,
nostalgia, remembranceof times past and elegiac lamentation:
I left my old homeand set off for distantplaces,
And followingthe watersof the Chiangand Hsia,I travelledintoexile . . .
Butmy soulwithinme longedto be returning:
Ah! when for one momentof the day have I not longed to go back? . . .
That I was castof?andbanishedwastrulyfor no crime.
By dayandnight I nevercanforget.
There the poet, like Ovid or Dante, has chosen the role of the exul immeritus. He has
been wronged by his Emperor. Now, the Chinese concept of world empire goes back
to the Han dynasty (second century B.C.-second century A.D.), or the times framing
the Ch'u Tz'u, as the German scholar Peter Weber-Schafer makes clear in a book
Oi\umene und Imperium (Munich, 1968), dedicated to the study of the Chinese
idea of empire in terms often referredto the Roman imperium mundi. For the purposes
of our subject,it probablywould be most fruitful to investigate the works of the great
T'ang dynasty poets (seventh-eighth centuries A.D.), as much information is available regardingthe exile of such writersas Han Yii and Liu Tsung-yiian to the southernmost regions of the Empire. Assignment to outlying areasof the Middle Kingdom was
viewed as a most severepunishment: "Disgracedpoliticians were banished to a distance
proportionalto the degree of the disgrace the more heinous the crime, the further
infected
lands of Hainan and Annam."5 This
south they were sent, even to the hot,
circular and centripetal conception of significant space clearly informs the poems by
the greatestof writers- a Tu Fu or a Li Po- implying or expressing exile. Li Po's "To
Tung Tsao-chiu,"or the poem paraphrasedby Pound with the title of "Exile'sLetter,"
can be readily approachedby the Western readerin Ovidian terms, i.e., of the literature
of exile itself; these are elegiac epistles, one might say, dominated by the theme of
friendship and its ability to heal the wounds of separation in space and time, by the
exerciseof memory and the tendency to, or need for, autobiographyand self-reconstruction. The elegiac motifs are acutely rendered; but at times the itineraries of counterexile- in thought, in politics, in belief- are also delineated.For "the sun and the moon
shine alike on all" and to have left society may have made pastoralmeditation feasible
or facilitated a reunion, as in Wang Wei's landscape pieces, with the rivers and the
mountains. Li Po himself finds consolationsof this sort:
On lookingout on thesethings,my griefmeltedawayin my heart.
windowthatopenedto the sky
We satby the gauze-curtained
And overthe greentreesthatgrewlike hairby the waterside,
Watchingthe sun with fearlest it be swallowedby the mountains,
And merryat moonrise,drinkingstillmorewine.

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275

Centuries later the great neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yang-Ming (1472-1529)

was banished by the Emperor to Lung-chiang, in modern Kuei-chou, which was inhabited,we are told, by "thebarbarianMiao tribes";in the words of a recent biographer,
"life was rugged and difficult . . . Having to face in isolation all sorts of hardshippolitical,natural,and cultural he was driven back to searchwithin his own mind. One
night in 1508,when he was thirty-seven,he suddenly understood the Confucian doctrines of the investigation of things and the extension of knowledge. After another year
of thought he began in 1509to pronounce the doctrine of the unity of knowledge and
action."6In China as in the West, when the space of civilization covers exactly the
dimensions of the world from which the writer is banished, two of the fundamental
responses are: withdrawal from the world, and the philosophical effort to seize it, to
apprehendit as a whole, and thus to erase the coordinatesof exile.
Do we now understandOvid better,his banishment to the northernmostfrontier of
the Empire, to an orbis ultimus (Tristia I. 1. 126-27) near the mouth of the Danube,
among the Getic and Sarmatiantribesmen whom he could only regard as barbarians?
The historyof Greek and Roman attitudestoward the barbaroicannot be simplified;the
rise of philosophy and science would support finally the emergence of a universal
concept of humanitas among those Romans for whom education, as Bruno Snell
remarks, was an even greater achievement than in Athens, because they had learned
to learn from the Greeks.Yet for an Ovid in the West, as for a Han Yii in the East, the
barbariansdeserved at best to acquire the only culture worthy of the name- imperial
expansion. In both civilizations the archetypesof the literatureof exile were produced
within the framework of an imperium mundi based not only on growing imperial
power but on absolute confidence in the superiority of a single centralized culture: a
blend of imperialism and culturalism which the exiled writers themselves, on a conceptual and emotional level, largely shared. In both cases the basic dimensions and
symbols of exile could be considered the circle and the center; and even when the
causes of banishment were political, its consequences were frighteningly cultural, for
to be expelled from the center of the circle amounted to the danger of being hurled
into the void or doomed to non-being.
Many centurieslater, to be sure, these basic dimensions would be modified in ways
that I cannot begin to summarize here. But it would behoove us to remember the
intensity, since at least the Renaissance,of modern feelings of nationalism.Harry Levin
comments upon some of these feelings and the fullness of meaning that they have attached to the modern experienceof exile: Heimweh, the yearning for the natural colors
and the local tastesof one's homeland, la maladie du pays. Emotionally, if not culturally,
nationalismretainsand nurturesthe centripetaltendenciesin exile. The great difference,
it seems to me, when one comparesthe older forms of banishment with the "proscription" or the expatriationof such nineteenth-centurywriters as Mazzini and Mickiewicz
and Kossuth and even Heine, lies in the crucial function of the political motive and the
political consequencesof exile. Whenever these writers thought or acted together, the
results tended to be centrifugal and ultra-national;and the coordinatesof their political
fervor would become, one might say, increasingly temporal. In our time the most terrible of banishments will often be exile from the present- or, even worse, from the
future.

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As one reads the biographiesof Chinese exiles, one is struck by the flexibility of a
system which made their homecoming practicallythe rule, as they slowly climbed the
ladder of rehabilitationand reinstatementin office.This is what Thomas Metzger calls
a "probationaryethic,"or the possibility of "renewing oneself" through morally blameless performance of one's bureaucraticduties.7 Since the Middle Ages the results of
exile have been different in Europe, where it has often implied political dissidence and
reliance on the likelihood of political reform in a changing society. The expulsion of
nineteenth-centurypatriots and revolutionarieslike Giuseppe Mazzini and Karl Marx
was intended to serve as banishment from the politics of the present. Homecoming in
their case, if at all meaningful, would have necessarily meant drastic political reform
or the achievement of revolution. On the other hand, continuing exile could easily
acceleratethe growth of revolutionary ideas. For we cannot fail to notice that where
the systems or the persons responsiblefor proscriptiondo not change, the exiles themselves do. In our historical societies a man anchored in his native town may remain
always the same or almost the same- a provincial in historical time. An exile, whose
status is "a dynamic one," cannot. We all know of refugees who have become, in the
course of time, emigrants. Conversely,Marx emigrated to Paris, which was the center
of socialist thought, and later was expelled from Paris and Brussels. Pablo Picasso
emigratedto the capitalof the arts,which happened to be Paris too, and died, like Marx,
an exile. Sometimes a single wanderer, like Blanco White in England, is later overtaken and subsumedby collective waves of refugees (the Spanish liberatesmoving after
1823to London, which was the capital of toleration). Even those exiles who owed their
original departure to political conditions would find more often than not that novel
forms of experience would modify their ideas and their attitudes toward politics in
general. Mickiewicz was banished to St. Petersburg in 1820, and no one would deny
that he left his native province a patriot and a Pole. But he was not moving from a
center to a cultural periphery.He was leaving further behind, in fact, his origins in the
eighteenth century.Mickiewicz was lionized by the large Polish colonies in Russia, met
Pushkin and found himself in Moscow "for the first time," writes Wiktor Weintraub,
"in a large, lively and up-to-dateliterary center .... But he was only mildly interested
in Russian literatureitself. We know that while in Russia he ransacked German and
French anthologiesof Orientalpoetry,studied Italian writers (Dante, Petrarch,Machiavelli) and other Western poets."8Some yearslaterhe heard Hegel in Berlin, talked with
Goethe, met Fenimore Cooper in Rome, and wandered, a relatively prosperous"poettourist,"9through various European countries. Could one possibly imagine the growth
and the richness in Mickiewicz's poetry without the adventures of exile ? Most important, he was markedly"politicized"by the Polish insurrectionof 1830,by his own faltering role in it and by the great wave of Polish emigration which submergedhim in 1831.
Though he chose for his prose writings then a Messianic thesis that made of the Polish
Emigration a modern counterpartof the Babylonian Captivity, he went on to organize
militant groups in Italy and later in Constantinople, where he died. One need not
searchfor a more instructiveexample of the dynamics of recent exile, or of the passage
from the centralizedspacesin which Ovid was tormented to the time-bound,strung-out
shapesof modern expatriation.
These are the directionsof change which we recognized earlierin their associations

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with the journeysof Ulysses, that is, with the itinerariesand trials whose fruits are moral
or political, intellectual or spiritual. Should we not sort out, however, such different
processesof change ? What of those refugees who embraced above all the consolations
of philosophy? What of those whose experience of history led to nothing but an
exclusive concentrationon political action? Must such variegated lessons dislodge one
another,and is it so rare to counteractmisfortune in more than one way ? Two of these
main dimensions, the moral and the intellectual, predominatein the principal work of
counter-exile that has come down to us from antiquity, Plutarch's De exilio (Peri
phuges). This treatise belongs to the genre of the consolation; and Plutarch, in his
swift eclecticism,collects a number of conventional Stoic topics: exile is but one of the
hardshipsover which the wise man must triumph in his self-relianceand inner freedom.
Moreover, "no native land is such by nature"; and man is a citizen of the world
(Kosmios) . The words I quoted a moment ago, "the sun and the moon shine alike
on all," were a Confucian saying. Plutarch'sown terms are these:
[The sky above] is the boundaryof our nativeland, and here no one is eitherexile
or foreigneror alien;herearethe samefire,waterand air; the samemagistratesand
- Sun, Moon and MorningStar;the same laws for all,
procuratorsand councillors
- the summersolstice,the winter
decreedby one commandmentand one sovereignty
solstice,the equinox,the Pleiades,Arcturus,the seasonsof sowing, the seasonsof
planting.(De exilio,p. 601)
These are surely the essential coordinates of the dialectics of counter-exile, or of the
back-and-forthmovement between the local and the universal.
That the basic tensions and the various kinds of apprenticeshipinvolved, ranging
from the political to the religious, need not exclude one another, that they can all
flourish and develop in exile, is fully and supremely proved by the works of Dante. I
am referring, of course, to the political anger that is voiced as late as canto XXVII of
the Paradiso and to the other consequences of Dante's banishment, moving from the
direct, Ovidian lyric of exile in the Rime- "L'esilio, che m'e dato, onor mi tegno" (I
hold in honor the exile given me; "Tre donne . . .," 76) - to the spiritual journey of
the Commedia itself and Cacciaguida'sprophecy in canto XVII of the Paradiso.There
the poet presents himself narratively within the poem not merely as the pilgrim but
as the future exile whose trials will ultimately bear the fruit of the composition of the
Commedia and the assertionin it of "L'amorche move il sole e l'altre stelle" (the love
that moves the sun and other stars). Thus the significant associations between the
ascent of Dante the pilgrim in the poem and his subsequent historical exile after his
return to earth, as foretold also in the poem, are singularly rich : the wanderings of the
banished poet are no mere literal foundation for the spiritual odyssey of the soul; for
at the same time the ascent of the soul is viewed as a figure and example to be matched
by the actual exile that follows and by its fruit in poetry. A similar itinerary can be
tracedin the Latin epistles,from Dante's bitter denunciation of his enemies in Florence
to the hope that Henry VII, like another Moses in Egypt, will free entire peoples from
their captivity (Epistolae V. 4), and finally, when the poet chooses not to return home
in dishonor,to these exile-transcendingwords in the twelfth epistle: "What? Perchance
will I not have everywhere [ubique] the view of the sun and the stars? Will I not be
able to contemplateunder every sky {ubique sub celo] the sweetestof truths [dulcissimas
veritates\ even though I may not surrender, ingloriously and disgracefully, to the

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people and city of Florence?" (XII. 19). Statements such as these make clear the dialectics of counter-exileand the extent to which banishmentor self-banishmentunderlies
and nourishesthe long odyssey which, unlike the misguided philosophicaljourney that
took Ulysses to the Inferno, will become the full analogue of the itinerarium mentis ad
Deum.10
The Sun Also Rises, in another context, is a novel written by an expatriate about
expatriates,and it bearscomparisonwith those other narrativeswhich, though composed
in Paris or elsewhere in Europe, told stories or signified odysseys occurring in the
writer's country of origin- be it Michigan or Dublin, England or New York. But it
would seem that in most cases, as in Dante's, literary expression moves from exile to
counter-exile- in the terms used in this paper- and does not reduce itself to the presentation of banishment or of emigration in the basic plot of a narrative.On the other
hand, it is of course possible for these stories to be told by writers who never suffered
or learned from the shocks of actual exile. I already mentioned one example- Du
Bellay's Regrets- of the fictional use of the Ovidian mode. Suffice it to recall here,
among the many myths and tales of exile, the medieval epic of Spain, the Poema de
mio Cid (twelfth century). The poem begins with the banishment, based on historical
fact, of the Cid, Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, by King Alfonso VI of Castile. The entire epic
grows from this initial situation and narratesthe triumphant attempts of the banished
hero and his followers to regain the favor of the monarch reigning in "gentle Castile":
"De Castiella la gentil exidos somos aca" (1. 672). But the Cid at the end of the poem,
as a matter of fact, after his final reunion with the King in Toledo, after the defeat
of the treacherousCounts of Carrionand the highly honorable marriagesof his daughters to relativesof the King, returnsnot to Castile but to Valencia, the city which he had
conquered from the Moors. Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar had actually gone on to become
el Cid, the fabulous Christian warrior, as a result of his banishment, and he retains,
unlike Ulysses, the power and the fame which he obtained away from home. It is not
so much a healing of the physical exile or separationas a restorationof the social and
religious fabric which his expulsion had originally destroyed. In this sense we are
confronted here with the actualization through the story of exile of the much broader
and more ancient structuresof myth which Propp identified in the folk-tales of Russia.
The overarchingstructure,in Propp'sview, led from an initial estrangement- eloignement in Todorov's translation- due to an earlier misdeed (like the calumny causing
the Cid's unjust expulsion) or failure, to a final reparationor compensation (the marriage of his daughters). The appropriatenessof exile, as it were, to the dimensions of
certain medieval tales seems remarkableand offers an area in which history and myth
could and can meet.
Stories of exile have been composed by exiled novelists, as in the case of L 'emigre
(1797), written during the French Revolution by Senac de Meilhan, who was, to be
sure, an emigre in Germany. Examples such as this do not pose, at first glance, very
difficult problems for the literary critic. The direct communication of the peculiarities
of exile itself will be distinctive enough and will possess a sort of identity that one can
readily recognize in literaryterms. But as we proceed to the attempts and explorations
of counter-exile,the singularity of the poetic forms under study becomes questionable.
Is the literatureof counter-exile,then, a distinct kind of literature? In this instance and

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in those of other responsesto historical experience,why should the poetic imagination

be expected merely to reflect the original impact of the experience? Difficult though
this problem is for the critic, it might be reasonable to assume instead some form of
movement away from the original situation as an effective manner of conveying the
dialecticsof counter-exileand the process whereby the initial separationis transcended.
I implied a moment ago that Senac de Meilhan had written a mediocre novel in which
the defeat of aristocraticrefugees was merely reproduced.But the book, in fact, moves
beyond this situation. The hero of L'emigre separateshimself sentimentally from his
original loss by imitating Saint-Preux and the Count of Nemours and falling in love
with his German hostess- though with a force as intense as his feelings of social and
national despair. Students of the literature of counter-exile may be able to single out
certain themes or genres or forms which have proved to be particularlyuseful in the
past to the processeswhich these works appear to have in common.
I have already mentioned a frequent theme- the extended journey. Moreover, a
closely related genre or mode has been the elegy since Ovid (Tristia III. 2. 12 ff.), the
of
the
Arabic
older
Chinese sao and
qasidas exile, arduous though it immediately becomes for us to distinguish between the elegies that have their roots in exile and those
that do not. Consider, for example, these lines from Ibn al-Rumi (836-96), where the
poet yearnsfor a lost city :
My soulcriesfor thee,O Basra,with a sigh like the blazeof a conflagration;
My soul criesalas for thee, O mine of excellences,with a sigh that makes
me to bitemy thumb;
My soul criesalasfor thee, O tabernacleof Islam,with a sigh whencemy
anguishis prolonged;
My soul criesalasfor thee,O anchorageof the lands,with a sigh that shall
continuefor long years. . .11
Would the context make it clear that Basra has been lost not through exile but through
war (the Slaves' Rebellion of 871) ? Would the separation from the object of desire
and the desireitself not remain the same? Are the terms used so differentfrom those we
find in the poems of exile by that poet-wandereral-Mutanabbi,whom a modern wanderer, Mickiewicz, translated and imitated several centuries later? Solomon Ibn Gabirol
(1021-58), in the poem "On Leaving Saragossa,"expresseshis feelings of estrangement
so radically as to suggest that his anguish, as a Jew living in Spain, was rooted not so
much in his departure from Saragossa as in his alienation from Jews and Gentiles
alike- perhaps through their rejection of his philosophical works- and in his inability
to departfrom his body and the stricturesof life on earth.
I thirstfor a friendandam quenchedbeforemy thirstis
quenched,as thoughthe heavensand theirhoststoodbetween
me andmy desire.I am consideredan alienor a stranger.I live
amongcruelostriches,amongthe crookedand the foolish,who think
thattheirheartsarethe seatof wisdom.12
I have referred,in another article, to the Spanish versions of the verb "to be," ser and
estar, in order to comment upon these fundamental aspects of the elegiac tradition:
"en el primer piano de la elegia hay personasque son pero no estan: el amigo muerto,
la amiga alejadao perdida."13It is possible for the poems of counter-exile,in this sense,
to move, like other elegies, between the poles of ser and estar.
The erotic elegy and the lament for the dead, in other words, have essential emo-

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280

BOOKS ABROAD

tions in common : the sorrow over a loss and the need to alleviate or suppress the loss
and the sorrow. It does not matter all that much whether the absence in question is
final, as in death and certain kinds of exile, or equivocal or temporaryor open-ended,
as in love and still other kinds of exile. In all instances an absence must be met at the
moment of the writing and through the process of the writing, the dialecticalprogress
of the poem. Death is the apparentlyabsoluteloss and separation;but this does not mean
that the poet does not know of apparentlypresent, irrefutablethings in which, above
all, meaninglessnessis found, or that he will cease to envisage metaphorslinking present
things with absent things. No great writer can remain a merely local mind, unwilling
to question the relevanceof the particularplaces from which he writes, or to extend the
radius of their presence,or to estrange and exile himself, so to speak, at some point in
his searchfor metaphor, from immediate circumstance.Thus the estrangement of the
"innerexile"- of an Ibn Gabirol,or most obviously,of the modern artistsalienatedfrom
middle-classsocieties- and the strangeness of the "actual exile"- confronted by force
with the multiplicity of strange signs that a foreign society offers- begin to touch at
the level of the elegiac creativeprocess.For the elegy can be understoodas an extended
metaphorfor the responsesof the poetic intelligence to the limits of the given or immediate realities around us, or for the attempts of that intelligence to triumph over the
polarities of absence and presence and to transcend simplified views of the relations
existing between these polar concepts and the qualities of meaning and being. These
are some of the processesthrough which the poetry of counter-exilebecomes so representative of literatureitself, or through which the consequences of exile may seem, at
times, so much like the conditions of literatureitself.
University of California,San Diego
1 H. Dieckmann, H. Levin, H. Motekat, Essays
in ComparativeLiterature,St. Louis, 1961, p. 2.
2 My thanks go for this translation to Jerome
Katsell. The original texts are in Nabokov, Poems
and Problems,New York, 1970.
3Cf. Adagiorum Chiliades,III. 1. 92.
4 David Hawkes, Introductionto Ch'u Tz'u. The
Songs of the South, Oxford, 1959, p. 8.
5 Edward H. Schafer,The Vermilion Bird, Berkeley, Ca., 1967, p. 38.
6 Wang Yang-Ming,Instructionsfor PracticalLiving and Other Neo-Confucian Writings, Wing-tsit
Chan, ed., New York, 1967, p. xxv. The poems
quoted are from the Ch'u Tz'u, D. Hawkes, ed., pp.
66-67, and The Wor\s of Li Po, Shigeyoshi Obata,
tr., Tokyo, 1935, p. 178. I am grateful for their generous advice to Thomas Metzger and Wai-lim Yip.

7 Cf. Thomas A. Metzger, The Internal Organization of Ch'ing Bureaucracy, Cambridge, Ma.,
1973, pp. 400-404.
8 Wiktor Weintraub,The Poetry of Adam Mic\iewicz, The Hague, 1954, p. 76.
9 Ibid., p. 134.
10 Cf. David Thompson, Dante's Epic Journeys,
Baltimore,1974.
11 The translationis by A. J. Arberry,in Arabic
Poetry, Cambridge,1965, p. 63.
12 The translationis by T. Carmi and will appear
shortly in the "Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse."
I am indebted to Dan Pagis for his kind assistance.
13 "Satira y poetica en Garcilaso,"in Homenaje
a ]oaquin Casalduero, G. Sobejano, ed., Madrid,
1972, p. 222.

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