European Writers in Exile

Abstract

This collection of essays provides an overview of the enormous impact of the exilic experience on European literary culture and expression throughout the modern period. Focused principally on individual authors, singly or in pairs, the essays explore the nature of exile and its impact on authors and their work, primarily on the content and style of literary expression, but also on their critical, social, and political thought.As one might expect, the volume contains essays on some of the century's most famous writers of fiction such as James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, and Milan Kundera. In addition, there are also essays which deal with writers who are perhaps more familiar for their impact on critical and social thought, such as Viktor Shklovsky, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Arthur Koestler. Additional essays consider more recent authors including Romanian Norman Manea, Polish American Eva Hoffman, German British W. G. Sebald, and the “transnational” British writer Caryl Phillips.The book's structure is roughly chronological. It begins in the late 19th and early 20th century with authors who accepted states of necessary but self-imposed or self-sustained exile (George Eliot, the Brontë sisters, Emile Zola, as well as Conrad, Joyce, and Kafka). The essays in this section are generally concerned with literary biography, highlighting how these writers drew upon the exilic experience to create characters who themselves are displaced and isolated—even amidst their own homelands and families. Indeed, characters like Daniel Deronda, Cathy and Heathcliff, Charles Marlow, K, and the characters of Dubliners all stand as touchstones of the modern “outsider,” adrift on the seas of social, political, historical, and moral change.This notion of the individual as outsider is in many ways a central component in the development of literary Modernism as a whole. The early Modernists’ attempt to portray their own psychological experience of exile, whether temporary or permanent, was a major factor in their collective rejection of traditional narrative and stylistic expectations. Their experiments brought the reality of the exilic experience to their readers by changing not only the subject matter, but also the reading experience itself.The literature of exile becomes more complex and varied as writers attempt to respond to the experiences of those displaced by the violent movement of borders and peoples during the First and Second World Wars as well as the rise of nationalism and totalitarianism. Thus, the book's central section considers writers who grappled with the collective experience of exile. Writers forced to flee by political and religious persecution into an involuntary and permanent exile suffered a loss of homeland, history, and community were not simply outsiders, but citizens of a stateless state of cultural displacement. Essays on the fiction of Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, and Viktor Shklovsky consider these writers’ concern with the exile's search for connections within linguistic, religious, or professional communities or subcultures. Nabokov's famous exiles—Humbert, Kinbote, and the beloved Professor Pnin—are particularly important examples of characters whose identities disintegrate into self-constructed fictions.Following the displacements of the world wars, the causes and nature of the exilic situation became even more complicated—both for the individual and as a generally acknowledged cultural phenomenon. Accordingly, writers explored this state in increasingly diverse ways. The book's essays on Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, Arthur Koestler, Christopher Isherwood, and Milan Kundera reflect these authors’ engagement with broad issues of cultural identity, political theory, and history in the face of totalitarianism. Despite their commonalities, they developed very different interpretations of the meaning of exile and very different responses, ranging from the ideological arguments of Arendt and Strauss, to the ideologically grounded fictions of Koestler and Kundera, as well as the experimental autofiction of Christopher Isherwood. Throughout this section of the book the essays are increasingly grounded in twentieth-century literary theory with the ideas of Lacan, Bakhtin, and Zizek forming a kind of subtext within the book.This subtext continues, as the essays on Manea, Hoffman, Sebald, and Phillips draw upon concepts from Adorno, Wittgenstein, Rosi Braidotti, and Edward Said (whose ideas about exile indeed serve as a guiding spirit for the book as a whole). These essays provide a worthwhile introduction for those readers unfamiliar with these more recent writers’ lives and works, as well as an exploration of the strange mixtures of benefit and loss found in the exilic experience, and new formulations of that experience. The book, which began with notions of exile in terms of an individual separated from a familiar homeland, ends with notions of exile as an epistemological revelation of the individual's identity as inherently displaced from concepts of nation, place, or history.While some might see it as primarily of interest for literary scholars, taken as a whole this volume is also likely to hold value to other readers interested in cultural history. The book surveys and reveals the complexity and significance of the exilic experience—the many ways of defining what exile is, of describing what it feels like, of conceptualizing both the collective and the individual perception of that stateless state so commonly found in the world of twentieth-century Europe. The wide range of authors under consideration—especially from central Europe—as well as the variety of different critical approaches taken in the essays provides an experience much like attending a good conference: a review of the familiar and an exposure to new ideas.