Border TalesAgainst Cosmopolitan Pessimism Stefano Evangelista (bio) Two writers. Two encounters on the border. Two tales of borders as zones of transformation and renewal. The first is Oscar Wilde, who landed on American soil in January 1882. After moving from Ireland to Britain, Wilde now seized the opportunity to extend his international reach: America was to launch his career as poet—something that, in the event, did not work out as well as he had hoped—but also as a cultural mediator and exporter of aestheticism across the Atlantic. It is at the custom check in New York that Wilde said one of the most famous things he might never have said: "I have nothing to declare except my genius."1 This aperçu set the tone for his use of America as a stage of literary and mediatic self-fashioning. Another writer who fully grasped the theatrical potential of the border was Christopher Isherwood. Many years later, speaking of his arrival in Germany in 1929, he claimed that, on being questioned about the purpose of his journey by the passport official, "he could have truthfully replied, 'I'm looking for my homeland and I've come to find out if this is it.'"2 Isherwood was fleeing the repressive atmosphere of 1920s Britain, where the Well of Loneliness (1928), and its author Radclyffe Hall, had just been put on trial. Crossing the German border marked the symbolic birth of the writer out of a repudiation of national identity. That both of these border tales involve a dose of fabrication seems only appropriate: borders are places where identities are tested and individual lives are slotted into official narratives. Here, officials are on [End Page 75] the lookout for untruths and illegal traffics. Subverting the questioning ritual, Wilde and Isherwood represent crossing the border as a decisive step towards the making of a new self—crucially, in their cases, of a literary self. In this respect, it is also significant that they are both queer writers: at this time of social and legal persecution of homosexuality, the marginalization of the queer subject sharpens the critical stance towards citizenship and normative categories of belonging. Wilde and Isherwood cast borders in an ironic light. But there is another side to their tales of privileged self-fashioning: borders are also sites of trauma, best represented by the enforced displacement of migrants and refugees. In the course of the nineteenth century, New York Harbor where Wilde docked in 1882 was the entry point into America for millions of immigrants, mostly from European countries including Wilde's Ireland—a phenomenon that the website of the Ellis Island Foundation describes as "the largest mass human migration in the history of the world."3 The same foundation now runs a large oral history project of what it terms the "immigrant experience" and invites visitors to search its passenger databases in an attempt to recover some of the stories of those that were funneled through this narrow space that marked for many the beginning of a new life. It hardly needs to be stated that the German border that Isherwood crossed buoyantly in 1929 would soon become a zone of conflict and fear, as Germany's aggressive contravention of the territorial boundaries established by the First World War settlement plunged Europe and large parts of the globe into another disastrous war. In Christopher and His Kind (1976), Isherwood later tells the story of trying to bring his German lover, "Heinz," into Britain in the years leading to the Second World War: he failed, as Heinz was turned down at the border in Harwich on suspicion of trying to enter the country as an illegal worker.4 Keeping Heinz outside of Germany meant saving him from conscription and from the brutalizing influence of Nazism, but also from the very concrete threat of the regime's vicious prosecution of homosexuals. These two tales that bookend the long fin de siècle illustrate the importance of the border as a vantage point on the complex dynamics that regulate the formation of literary identities in relation to international flows of people and ideas. Historians have long seen the decades [End Page 76...