a few more thoughts (exile)

Last time we spoke you talked about the fact that your work has never really been 'confessional' - it's about things in the outside world and not primarily about you (although it does, of course, present your particular vision of those external things). And we also talked about the idea that this project actually seems to invite some reflection on the self - what it is to be a traveller - in a way that is complementary to the exploration of what is out there in the world.

In some ways, the concept of 'exile' works very well from that perspective precisely because the state of exile has been described, at various times and by different people, as a sort of ideal to which we should actively aspire, from the early Christian idea that life should be seen as an exile in the world up to a modern scholar like Erich Auerbach, who, driven into exile from Nazi Germany, wrote his masterwork, Mimesis, in Istanbul and claimed that it could have been written under no other conditions. In both cases, exile is viewed as an ideal position from which to view the world: one that makes the world more experientally immediate, perhaps, while also holding it at a distance, or, to put it another way, one that radically reorders one's investment in the world.

In this context, I've been thinking a lot about the word 'ideal'. It is self-dramatising and self-deluding, I think, to suggest that we will voluntarily 'go into exile'. Well, I suppose we could, potentially, but the fact is that we aren't going to burn all our bridges, give up the privileged status of being US or EU citizens, and trust ourselves to fortune in any very radical sense. So for me to figure the mild strangeness of my summer in the headwaters as an 'exile', for example, would be self-deluding and entirely lacking in moral integrity. However, if 'exile' is an ideal state which it is almost impossible to realise in a voluntary way and which, when it comes, usually comes as a catastrophe, then it acquires quite a different use in reflections on the self. It becomes that against which we measure the limitations of our perception and our moral awareness.

It was this idea that I was grasping at when I posted about James Alison back in November (here and here). Alison isn't writing directly about exile, but, in his interpretation of the story of the 'man blind from birth', he is pointing towards the importance and the extreme difficulty of 'getting outside' one's situation. The challenge of the story, as he has it, is to stop congratulating ourselves on how much we despise the Pharisees and come to understand that we are in a sense the Pharisees. It is almost impossible for us to live in this state of 'outsideness' - we keep finding ourselves 'back inside' - and this is why the term 'ideal' is so important. To figure onself as the blind man against the Pharisees is an act of self-delusion but to see the process of stepping outside as an ideal condition which we often (usually?) fail to achieve is quite a different proposition.

Also in November, I posted a few times on Raymond Williams (here and here) and his idea of 'unlearning'. I realise now that these points were also gesturing towards the idea I am trying to articulate here. The issue there was that both liberal (Williams actually says 'socialist') and conservative commentators often articulate ideas with the goal of 'laying hands on life and forcing it into our [yes 'our'] own image'. And, once again, this is an 'inside' position. To understand that there might be any wisdom elsewhere requires a kind of 'unlearning' which, like Alison's call to identify with the 'villains' of the gospel story, is very difficult to achieve.

Thought of in this way, the concept of exile-as-ideal might provide a way into the process of reflecting on the self. It has the advantage of focusing less on 'how I feel' and more on 'what I aspire to'. And it also has the advantage of not being a figure for 'how things are' but a sort of parable of 'how they should be'. Thought of in this way, the point of evoking images of exile (in the myth of Odysseus, the figure of the viator, and so forth) is not so much to say 'this is me' but rather 'this not me, alas'. Or it might be to ask 'could this be me?'

As I write this, I'm already beginning to find my articulation of the idea rather over-simple or reductive and this is exactly what I like about the Odysseus material. The image of exile-as-ideal developed there is so complex and open-ended that it invites a kind of inventive, imaginative, acrobatic interpretation that is richer than the literal 'spelling-out' that I'm doing here. It provides powerful, vexing, resistant material for thinking about these questions of being-inside/being-outside, learning/unlearning, settling/passing through, etc etc etc.