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Questions of Travel
Postmodern Discourses of Displacement
By Caren Kaplan Duke University Press
Copyright © 1996 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-8204-1
CHAPTER 1
"THIS QUESTION OF MOVING" Modernist Exile/Postmodern Tourism
It seems to me that I would always be better off where I am not, and this question of moving is one of those I discuss incessantly with my soul.
— Charles Baudelaire
Modernism looks quite different depending on where one locates oneself and when.
—David Harvey
The commonsense definitions of exile and tourism suggest that they occupy opposite poles in the modern experience of displacement: Exile implies coercion; tourism celebrates choice. Exile connotes the estrangement of the individual from an original community; tourism claims community on a global scale. Exile plays a role in Western culture's narratives of political formation and cultural identity stretching back to the Hellenic era. Tourism heralds postmodernism; it is a product of the rise of consumer culture, leisure, and technological innovation. Culturally, exile is implicated in modernist high art formations while tourism signifies the very obverse position as the mark of everything commercial and superficial. What is at stake in contemporary Euro-American assertions of oppositional qualities between these categories? Looking at exile and tourism as cultural representations aids an analysis of the social practices of different kinds of displacement and travel, moving beyond mystification to more historically and culturally nuanced interpretations.
Like all symbolic formations, Euro-American modernist exile culls meaning from various cultural, political, and economic sources, including the lived experiences of people who have been legally or socially expelled from one location and prevented from returning. I will argue, however, that the modernist trope of exile works to remove itself from any political or historically specific instances in order to generate aesthetic categories and ahistorical values. The Euro-American formation "exile," then, marks a place of mediation in modernity where issues of political conflict, commerce, labor, nationalist realignments, imperialist expansion, structures of gender and sexuality, and many other issues all become recoded.
Euro-American modernisms celebrate singularity, solitude, estrangement, alienation, and aestheticized excisions of location in favor of locale —that is, the "artist in exile" is never "at home," always existentially alone, and shocked by the strain of displacement into significant experimentations and insights. Even more importantly, the modernist exile is melancholic and nostalgic about an irreparable loss and separation from the familiar or beloved. This said, unlike particular individuals in exile who may experience all or some or none of these qualities, the formation of modernist exile seems to have best served those who would voluntarily experience estrangement and separation in order to produce the experimental cultures of modernism. That is, the Euro-American middle-class expatriates adopted the attributes of exile as an ideology of artistic production. Because their displacement has been represented as exile, I see these groups as important sites for deconstructing the binary opposition between exile and tourism in an effort to understand the production of modernisms.
Asserting difference between the cultural representations of exile and tourism maintains the division between "high" and "low" culture, that is, between art and commerce. Deconstructing these binary oppositions demonstrates that Euro-American modernist privileging of exile relies upon a conflation of various kinds of displacement, including expatriation and tourism, while tourism stresses the mystiques surrounding exile and modes of travel associated with the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Whether celebrated as the "exploring and mapping" of the "realm of the 'not yet,'" or described as the "desire to seek a place outside the tradition that enables it," representations of displacement function as powerful tropes in the cultural production of modernisms.
"The Place of Art's Very Making": Modernist Geographies
For Modernism is a metropolitan art, which is to say it is group art, a specialist art, an intellectual art, an art for one's aesthetic peers; it recalls, with whatever ironies and paradoxes, the imperium of civilization. Not simply metropolitan, indeed, but cosmopolitan: one city leads to another in the distinctive aesthetic voyage into the metamorphosis of form. The writer may hold on to locality, as Joyce did on to Dublin, Hemingway the Michigan woods; but he perceives from the distance of an expatriate perspective of aesthetic internationalism ... Thus frequently it is emigration or exile that makes for membership of the modern country of the arts, which has been heavily travelled by many great writers—Joyce, Lawrence, Mann, Brecht, Auden, Nabokov. It is a country that has come to acquire its own language, geography, focal communities, places of exile—Zurich during the First World War, New York during the Second. The writer himself becomes a member of a wandering, culturally inquisitive group—by enforced exile (like Nabokov's after the Russian Revolution) or by design and desire. The place of art's very making can become an ideal distant city, where the creator counts, or the chaos is fruitful, the Weltgeist flows.—Malcolm Bradbury
The preceding passage from Malcolm Bradbury's classic study of literary modernism strenuously demonstrates the Euro-American modernist trope of exile. Written in collaboration with James McFarlane for the Pelican Guides to European Literatures series and published in 1976, Bradbury's study of the cosmopolitan world of modernism describes a "country" with its own "landscape, geography, focal communities, places of exile." If modernism is a country, then its capitals are the European and North American metropoles that drew refugees and émigrés during the turn of the century and between the two World Wars. In this narrative, the internationalism of modernism does not extend below the Mediterranean, far into Asia, or south of the U.S. border. Lagos, Buenos Aires, Delhi, and Tokyo are not yet members of the "imperium of civilization" in Bradbury's modernist world order.
In a critical narrative such as Bradbury's, modernist exile is practiced by a "wandering, culturally inquistive group," those who seek metamorphoses in form through the fruitful chaos of displacement. No matter whether the exile is "enforced" or by "design and desire," the only passport needed to cross the border into the Weltgeist is an ability to make the "distinctive aesthetic voyage." Bradbury refers to George Steiner's notion of the modernist writer as "extraterritorial" or "unhoused," but he could just as easily have referred to Harry Levin's discussion of literature and exile or Malcolm Cowley's "lost generation." Euro-American modernist literary histories are replete with references to exiles and expatriates; displacement comes to define modernist sensibilities and critical practices.
While major critics have constructed an imaginary "country" of exiles throughout the twentieth century to house the unhoused, as it were, or to collect and manage the disparate cultural productions that fall under the broad rubric of "modernism," it is interesting to consider the tension between location and dislocation or between nationalism and internationalism in their descriptive narratives. Thus Bradbury imagines an "ideal distant city" for his cosmopolitan subjects. Lifted out of the material political and social conflicts that generated so much displacement in the twentieth century, the exiles who come to live in Bradbury's modernist sites are men without a country. Aesthetic concerns separate these metropolitans from other modern subjects; it is modernist practices that free the artists from the worldly locations of nation-states and bring them together for loftier pursuits.
Benedict Anderson has argued that all communities are imagined and therefore cannot be judged on the level of whether or not they are more false or genuine. Rather, Anderson suggests, communities can be distinguished "by the style in which they are imagined." Following Anderson's lead, then, Euro-American modernisms foster the collective imagining of a condition where national identity matters only in its distance from a present space and time. Or, as Rob Nixon puts it, in such a modernist formation "dislocation" is confused with "detachment," signaling a perceived "freedom from ideology." Throughout recent modernity, at the very least, the idea of an escape from the nation-state into the cosmopolitan and polyglot city underscores most ideologies of modernism. Before we assume that such modernist imaginary communities are Utopian refuges from the nationalist conflicts of this century, we would do well to examine the Eurocentric nature of these formulations. The modernist cities of Calvino, Cowley, Bradbury, Eco, Steiner, and others are fashioned more like medieval city-states built to shelter nomadic exiles than sprawling metropoles. That is, the difference between modernist and postmodernist imaginary geographies may be a nostalgia for clear binary distinctions between "country and city" on the one hand and an attachment to less oppositional hybrid cosmopolitanisms on the other. Bradbury's modernist metropolis not only produces unity through heterogeneity but creates specific, invested identities (for example, in Bradbury and McFarlane's Modernism, Kafka's identity is "Austrian" while Italo Svevo is labeled "Jewish-Italian"). Modern cities, especially major ports, function as crucibles where identities are formed, transformed, and fixed. Such identities are not always self-chosen, welcome, or advantageous to the newly arrived, but they do play roles in the formation of literary and artistic canons as well as the deployment of political interests on the part of state institutions.
It is difficult to read against the grain of Euro-American modernist romanticizations of the metropolitan experience because the myth of the mixing of peoples and mingling of influences is so powerfully linked to Western ideologies of democracy and nationhood. Yet, following Raymond Williams's suggestion, I would like to take the myth of modernist exile and turn its methods upon itself; that is, I want to "explore it with something of its own sense of strangeness and distance, rather than with the comfortable and now internally accommodated forms of its incorporation and naturalization."
In his posthumously published essays on modernism, Williams called for the historicization of the homogeneous myth of the cosmopolitan modernist city. Challenging the modernist interpretation of its own processes as universals, Williams argued that criticism must look "from time to time, from outside the metropolis; from the deprived hinterlands, where different forces are moving, and from the poor world which has always been peripheral to the metropolitan systems." I would recast this directive, retaining the destabilization of the modernist metropolis as a new formation of Euro-American centrism without reconstituting Williams's nostalgic peripheries. Far better to stretch the imagination further to examine the locations in our communities where the myth is confounded, where the universalizations do not hold true. Williams himself aids this task by proposing studies of the specific locations of the new subjects of modernism, by examining the uneven developments within Europe as well as between Europe and its former colonies. Contrast the following passage from Williams's "Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism" to Bradbury's description of the geography of modernism:
Thus the key cultural factor of the modernist shift is the character of the metropolis: in these general conditions, but then, even more decisively, in its direct effects on form. The most important general element of the innovations in forms is the fact of immigration to the metropolis, and it cannot too often be emphasized how many of the major innovators were, in this precise sense, immigrants. At the level of theme, this underlies in an obvious way, the elements of strangeness and distance, indeed alienation, which so regularly form part of the repertory. But the decisive aesthetic effect is at a deeper level, Liberated or breaking from their national or provincial cultures, placed in quite new relations to those other native languages or native visual traditions, encountering meanwhile a novel and dynamic common environment from which many of the older forms were obviously distant, the artists and writers and thinkers of this phase found the only community available to them: a community of the medium; of their own practices.
While both Williams and Bradbury emphasize the break with national or cultural origins and the formation of a new imagined community through cultural practices, Williams's version of the modernist metropolis pays more attention to historically generated relationships as opposed to Bradbury's transhistorical Weltgeist.
Nevertheless, Williams's modernist affiliations cannot be ignored and, thus, the similarities between Williams and Bradbury are as important as the differences. Both critics celebrate a community of artists in search of substantially different forms and methods. Both critics view physical displacement as conducive to groundbreaking insights and experimentations. Finally, both critics formulate European or North American topoi for modernist metropolitan communities. The peripheries in such configurations provide immigrants and exiles but are never the sites of modernist cultural production themselves; that is, they provide the raw materials to be synthesized in the generative locations of the modern, Western metropolis or they offer opportunities for spatial exploration on the part of metropolitans in search of metaphysical displacement.
Williams's perspectives on modern metropoles, then, demonstrate that an emphasis on mass displacement alone does not deconstruct a modernist trope. Nor, as Paul Gilroy has argued, does such an emphasis escape neoconservative affiliations. In order to destabilize the Euro-American myth of modernist exile, it is necessary to critique the formation of centers as well as peripheries as modernist productions. One way to begin to examine the production of cultural margins through formations such as Euro-American modernist exile is to look closely at the operation of nostalgia in the aftermath of modern imperialism.
Imperialist Nostalgia and Aesthetic Gain: Exiles Reward
Various manifestations of nostalgia participate in Euro-American constructions of exile: nostalgia for the past; for home; for a "mother-tongue"; for the particulars that signify the experience of the familiar once it has been lost. Such nostalgia is rooted in the notion that it is "natural" to be at "home" and that separation from that location can never be assuaged by anything but return. Elsa Triolet, the spouse of surrealist artist Louis Aragon, expressed this exilic sentiment when she wrote: "It must be accepted that it is natural for a human being to be born and to die in the same place or, at least, in the same locality; that everyone should be an organic part of all he calls his native land, his country." Triolet likens human beings to plants and animals, arguing that "certain species" can never achieve "successful acclimatisation." The exile, in this formulation, suffers from a "terrible malady: homesickness."
The malady of homesickness that can never be cured without a return home is akin to melancholia. Freud's distinction between mourning and melancholia, between a "normal" period of grieving and a continuing, debilitating fixation on loss, proposes a useful model for the study of modernist exile poetics and politics. This psychoanalytic model locates the source of melancholia in unresolved anger toward one who has died or been irrevocably removed; unable to resolve the conflict or express this anger openly without guilt, the melancholic subject remains in a state of acute loss. When this particular kind of aggression is turned inward, against the self, melancholia becomes a preoccupying state that replaces or fills the space left by death or separation.
Euro-American modernist exile formations foster a culture of nostalgic melancholia. In Renato Rosaldo's investigation of representational violence in modern nostalgia, he argues that there are degrees of difference between the common forms of nostalgia linked to childhood experiences and the cultural expression of dominance he terms "imperialist nostalgia." Coming into use in the late seventeenth century, nostalgia ("from the Greek nostos, a return home, and algos, a painful condition") has become naturalized into a pseudo-psychological truism. Yet Rosaldo demonstrates that the seemingly innocent sentiment masks aggressive impulses: "Imperialist nostalgia revolves around a paradox: A person kills somebody, and then mourns the victim. In more attenuated form, somebody deliberately alters a form of life, and then regrets that things have not remained as they were prior to the intervention. At one more remove, people destroy their environment, and then they worship nature. In any of its versions, imperialist nostalgia uses a pose of 'innocent yearning' both to capture people's imaginations and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination." The structural similarities between Euro-American childhood and imperialist nostalgias may contribute to the deployment of the latter version in modernity. Imperialist nostalgia erases collective and personal responsibility, replacing accountability with powerful discursive practices: the vanquished or vanished ones are eulogized (thereby represented) by the victor. When the loss concerns a nation, culture, or distinct territory, the representations articulate nostalgic versions of the past (the recent rash of "Raj" nostalgia or the colonial discourse of "big game" hunters in Africa are two of the most obvious examples of this phenomenon). Within the structure of imperialist nostalgia, then, the Euro-American past is most clearly perceived or narrativized as another country or culture.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Questions of Travel by Caren Kaplan. Copyright © 1996 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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