William Gass

The Philosophical Significance of Exile

I should like to welcome you all to the second Congress of Vienna. This second congress differs from the first in a few essentials, of course: we are not heads of state, and we have not gathered here to carve up a continent, but only to analyze a concept and describe a condition, or to investigate many concepts and outline many conditions.

As we do so, we shall be pulled in two directions: on the one hand, toward the engrossing immediate past and all of those things which make up the concrete details of émigré or exile life; on the other, toward the equally strong enticements of ideas and the lure of ideology for the implications of thought. Somehow we must strike a profitable balance between our rationalist and empirical impulses.

For many Americans the idea of exile must be a highly romantic one, consisting principally of poets in Paris passing their time in cafés and having their saucers counted. As the reality of exile itself becomes customary and recedes into the past, these writers often become as anecdotal as war is for its soldiers.

After Socrates was found guilty by an Athenian court, he was lodged rather lightly in prison to wait for the end of an important festival, when it was expected that he would spare the state the guilt of his death by committing suicide. His friends came to him and urged him to escape. The guards could be easily bribed.

Neither his friends nor his enemies were eager to endure Socrates the martyr. Dead, he would be as much trouble as he had been alive. So Socrates was offered exile as an alternative. What did this mean to him?

We all know that Socrates chose the hemlock. He was old; his work was done; he had a nag for a wife and a kid with a small goat's future. Death was nothing but dreamless sleep, he said, and even if there were another life, he could then continue his questions and his conversations there, making a veritable hell of an otherwise vapid and shadowy underworld. But his real reason was that he considered exile an amputation of self. Socrates was essentially an Athenian, and to be an Athenian was to continue to practice what he took to be his proper role in the city, that of the gadfly. Socrates did not believe a mute, inglorious Socrates was possible, but his choice depended on a conception of the relation between the citizen and the city (we would now say between the individual and the state), which has almost entirely disappeared in our time.

That conception has been replaced by two others, quite opposed to one another. The first might be called the utilitarian view: that society is, or ought to be, a source of human happiness, an instrument of the citizen's well-being. And if society does not perform its function well, the citizen has the right to seek another, as he might choose a screwier screwdriver, or divorce an unfulfilling spouse. When things go wrong, it is the state which is sent into exile. Perhaps that is too strongly put, because the instrumental relation is weak and does not deserve the term "exile."

Then we have the so-called collective view: the individual serves society, has a place and station, function and fitting within it; the players come and go, but the Notre Dame football team carries on forever. Each of us occupies a position in the collective, and if we cannot correctly carry out the tasks that define our nature, we are replaced by someone who will. When a player graduates, or is sent to the bench, or is traded to another team, he is not sent into exile, because for his original team he no longer exists. Only he, banished as he is, traded unkindly to another team, may feel exiled. That is because in his own eyes he has come apart; he needed that role in society to be what he was; now he no longer has that role, and shortly he will realize that without an essence he is nothing; he is naught.

Socrates, however, felt that the city was like his right arm, an important part of himself. Not his entire body and soul, surely, but a vital element. His arm served him, indeed as a hammer or a screwdriver might, but when his arm became weak, he did not, could not, replace it. Instead he tended it; he nursed it; he sought its health and hoped for its goodwill.

According to one view then, to take the family as the model, I marry because I hope it will cure my nervous afflictions, because it will elevate me in society, because my intended spouse is rich, and so on. I expect the family to help me be happy. From the other point of view, the family is a set of functions—husband, mother, daughter; the family endures, even if wives are run through faster than they run through their own hose. According to this view you do not divorce your husband; you simply replace him with a man who will do a better job.

Finally, there is Socrates's view: if some member of the family is weak and inadequate, that member must be looked after, not abandoned, just as you would not abandon your physiognomy, although in these days of plastic surgery that is increasingly possible. You would not leave a limb behind, unless you were a rat in a trap, unless your leg were gangrenous, unless it threatened the rest of you with death.

Exile, in this ancient sense, is a severing of blood; it is a loss of family ties, of clan identity, of cultural definition. You are not exiled from your work if you have simply lost a job when another job will do as well. Socrates would not only have been deprived of his position in the polis, he would have been deprived of that philosophical activity which was his life.

The lost limb yearns to rejoin its body; the body, however it pretends to have adjusted to its loss by calling it necessary, imagines that limb is still in place, and puts the old pain back in the empty air, where the flesh once was.

Personally, I would not allow my family to define me, and I will not allow the state to do it either. At any rate, the political aspects of my society, and many of the social ones as well, do not permit an artist that kind of close allegiance. Socrates could embrace a society that had condemned him because it was still a part of his soul's anatomy. But if the state were to cast me out as an undesirable, it would be (as I presently pretend, at any rate) like being thrown from a horse in some old movie. High-ho Honda, I would then say instead, and drive away.

But suppose I were deprived of my tongue, my power of speech, my language. He who steals my comforts steals trash (and probably does me a favor), but whoever takes even a sliver from my essential self, however unsocial that self has been forced to become, takes a sliver from the head and impales it in the heart.

Birth is your first experience of exile, the Greeks maintained. That's why a child bellows when it is...