"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...