Modernism and …

Series Editor: Roger Griffin, Professor in Modern History, Oxford Brookes

University, UK.

The series Modernism and …. invites experts in a wide range of cultural, social, scien-
tific and political phenomena to explore the relationship between a particular topic
in modern history and ‘modernism’. Apart from their intrinsic value as short but
groundbreaking specialist monographs, the books aim through their cumulative
impact to expand the application of this highly contested term beyond its conven-
tional remit of art and aesthetics. Our definition of modernism embraces the vast
profusion of creative acts, reforming initiatives, and utopian projects that, since the
late nineteenth century, have sought either to articulate, and so symbolically tran-
scend, the spiritual malaise or decadence of modernity, or to find a radical solution
to it through a movement of spiritual, social, political—even racial—regeneration
and renewal. The ultimate aim is to foster a spirit of transdisciplinary collaboration
in shifting the structural forces that define modern history beyond their conven-
tional conceptual frameworks.

Titles include:
Roy Starrs
MODERNISM AND JAPANESE CULTURE
Marius Turda
MODERNISM AND EUGENICS
Shane Weller
MODERNISM AND NIHILISM
Ben Hutchinson
MODERNISM AND STYLE
Anna Katharina Schaffner
MODERNISM AND PERVERSION
Thomas Linehan
MODERNISM AND BRITISH SOCIALISM
David Ohana
MODERNISM AND ZIONISM
Richard Shorten
MODERNISM AND TOTALITARIANISM
Rethinking the Intellectual Sources of Nazism and Stalinism, 1945 to the Present
Agnes Horvath
MODERNISM AND CHARISMA
Erik Tonning
MODERNISM AND CHRISTIANITY
Mihai I. Spariosu
MODERNISM AND EXILE
Play, Liminality, and the Exilic-Utopian Imagination
Forthcoming titles:
Maria Bucur
MODERNISM AND GENDER
Frances Connelly
MODERNISM AND THE GROTESQUE
Elizabeth Darling
MODERNISM AND DOMESTICITY
Alex Goody
MODERNISM AND FEMINISM
Paul March-Russell
MODERNISM AND SCIENCE FICTION
Ariane Mildenberg
MODERNISM AND THE EPIPHANY

Also by Mihai I. Spariosu

REMAPPING KNOWLEDGE: Intercultural Studies for a Global Age
GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT: Toward an Ecology of
Global Learning
THE WREATH OF WILD OLIVE: Play, Liminality, and the Study of Literature

Modernism and …
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 MODERNISM
AND
EXILE
Play, Liminality, and the
Exilic-Utopian Imagination

Mihai I. Spariosu
Distinguished Research Professor, University of Georgia,
Athens, USA
© Mihai I. Spariosu 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-0-230-23141-2
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First published 2015 by
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For Diana, Ana Maria and
Michael Anthony
 CONTENTS

Series Editor’s Preface ix

Preface xv
Acknowledgments xxi

Part I Exile, Utopia, and Modernity:

A Cultural-Theoretical Approach
1 Modernity and Modernism: Preliminary Theoretical
Considerations 3
2 Play and Liminality in Modernist Cultural Theory 18
3 Exile and Utopia as Playful Liminality 28

Part II Historical Excursus: Modernity and

the Exilic-Utopian Imagination in the Ancient World
4 The Birth of Modernity: The Exilic-Utopian
Imagination in Ancient Near-Eastern Narratives
(The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Pentateuch) 43
5 Modern Consciousness and the Exilic-Utopian
Imagination in the Hellenic World: Sophocles and Plato 61

Part III Exile, Utopia, and Modernism in

Literary Discourse
6 The Exilic-Utopian Imagination and
Literary Discourse in Modernism and Postmodernism 83
7 Exile, Utopia, and the Will to Empire:
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness 111
8 Utopia, Totalitarianism, and the Will to Reason:
Koestler’s Darkness at Noon 128
9 Exile, Dystopia, and the Will to Order:
Huxley’s Brave New World 142

vii
viii CONTENTS

10 Exile, Theotopia, and Atopia: Mann’s Joseph

and His Brothers and Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita 161

Afterword: The End of Exile: Toward A Global Eutopia 180

Notes 187
Bibliography 197
Index 204
 SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

As the title “Modernism and …” implies, this series has been con-
ceived in an open-ended, closure-defying spirit, more akin to the
soul of jazz than to the rigor of a classical score. Each volume pro-
vides an experimental space allowing both seasoned professionals
and aspiring academics to investigate familiar areas of modern
social, scientific, or political history from the defamiliarizing
vantage point afforded by a term not routinely associated with it:
“modernism.” Yet this is no contrived make-over of a clichéd con-
cept for the purposes of scholastic bravado. Nor is it a gratuitous
theoretical exercise in expanding the remit of an “ism” already
notorious for its polyvalence—not to say its sheer nebulousness—
in a transgressional fling of postmodern jouissance.
Instead this series is based on the empirically oriented hope that
a deliberate enlargement of the semantic field of “modernism” to
embrace or be conjoined with a whole range of phenomena appar-
ently unrelated to the radical innovation in the arts it normally
connotes will do more than contribute to scholarly understanding
of those topics. Cumulatively the volumes that appear are meant
to provide momentum to a perceptible paradigm shift slowly
becoming evident in the way modern history is approached. It
is one which, while indebted to “the cultural turn,” is if anything
“post-post-modern,” for it attempts to use transdisciplinary per-
spectives and the conscious clustering of concepts often viewed as
unconnected—or even antagonistic to each other—to consolidate
and deepen the reality principle on which historiography is based,
not flee it, to move closer to the experience of history of its actors
and victims not away from it. Only those with a stunted, myopic
(and actually unhistorical) view of what constitutes historical “fact”
and “causation” will be predisposed to dismiss the “Modernism
and…” project as mere “culturalism,” a term which due to unexam-
ined prejudices and sometimes sheer ignorance has, particularly
in the vocabulary of more than one eminent “archival” historian,
acquired a reductionist, pejorative, philistine meaning.
ix
x SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

“Liminality” is a social and anthropological term no stranger to

the more theoretical discussions of the phenomenology of moder-
nity, but Mihai Spariosu’s Modernism and Exile, as its subtitle “Play,
Liminality, and the Exilic-Utopian Imagination” signals, has created
a new cluster of concepts in a way that disclose unforeseen heuristic
power in revealing how deeper reaches of the contemporary imagi-
naire and existential home can be explored and links with ancient,
archetypal even, narratives can become luminously transparent.
Especially when brought into the force field of the “modern” as an
atemporal mode of anomic culture, literal or metaphorical exile, the
liminal phase of a rite de passage, and utopian thinking turn out to
have an unforeseen phylogenic kinship. It is one as surprising as
the genetic research which shows hippopotamuses to be the closet
living relatives to whales.
The conceptual ground for such a radical rethinking of familiar
terms under the conceptual umbrella of modernism has been pre-
pared for by such seminal texts as Marshall Berman’s All that is Solid
Melts into Thin Air. The Experience of Modernity (1982), Modris Eksteins’
Rites of Spring (1989), Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and Ambivalence
(1991), Peter Osborne’s The Politics of Time. Modernity and the Avant-garde
(1995), Emilio Gentile’s The Struggle for Modernity (2003), and Mark
Antliff’s Avant-Garde Fascism. The Mobilization of Myth, Art and Culture
in France, 1909–1939 (2007), and, in this series, Agnes Horvath’s
Modernism and Charisma (2013) in which the role of liminality in
unleashing irrational energies of heroization plays a central role.
In each case modernism is revealed as the long-lost sibling (or even
illegitimate offspring) of historical phenomena from the social and
political sphere rarely mentioned in the same breath.
Yet the real pioneers of such a “maximalist” interpretation of
modernism were none other than some of the major aesthetic mod-
ernists themselves. For them the art and thought that subsequently
earned them this title was a creative force—passion even—of revela-
tory power which, in a crisis-ridden West where anomie was reaching
pandemic proportions, was capable of regenerating not just “cultural
production,” but “socio-political production,” and for some even soci-
ety tout court. Figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner,
Wassily Kandinsky, Walter Gropius, Pablo Picasso, and Virginia
Woolf never accepted that the art and thought of “high culture” were
to be treated as self-contained spheres of activity peripheral to—and
cut off from—the main streams of contemporary social and political
 SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE xi
events. Instead they assumed them to be laboratories of visionary
thought vital to the spiritual salvation of a world being systemati-
cally drained of higher meaning and ultimate purpose by the domi-
nant, “nomocidal” forces of modernity. If we accept Max Weber’s
thesis of the gradual Entzauberung, or “disenchantment” of the world
through rationalism, such creative individuals can be seen as setting
themselves the task – each in his or her own idiosyncratic way – of
re-enchanting and re-sacralizing the world. Such modernists consciously
sought to restore a sense of higher purpose, transcendence, and Zauber
(magic) to a spiritually starved modern humanity condemned by
“progress” to live in a permanent state of existential exile, of liminoid
transition, now that the forces of the divine seemed to have withdrawn
in what Martin Heidegger’s muse, the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, called
“The Flight of the Gods.”. If the hero of modern popular nationalism is
the Unknown Warrior, perhaps the patron saint of modernism itself is
Deus Absconditus.
Approached from this oblique angle modernism is thus a revo-
lutionary force, but is so in a sense only distantly related to the one
made familiar by standard accounts of the (political or social) revo-
lutions on which modern historians cut their teeth. It is a “hidden”
revolution of the sort referred to by the “arch-“aesthetic modern-
ist Vincent van Gogh musing to his brother Theo in his letter of
24 September 1888 about the sorry plight of the world. In one
passage he waxes ecstatic about the impression made on him, by
the work of another spiritual seeker disturbed by the impact of
“modern progress,” Leo Tolstoy:

It seems that in the book, My Religion, Tolstoy implies that whatever

happens in a violent revolution, there will also be an inner and hidden
revolution in the people, out of which a new religion will be born, or
rather, something completely new which will be nameless, but which
will have the same effect of consoling, of making life possible, as the
Christian religion used to.
The book must be a very interesting one, it seems to me. In the end,
we shall have had enough of cynicism, scepticism and humbug, and will
want to live - more musically. How will this come about, and what will we
discover? It would be nice to be able to prophesy, but it is even better to
be forewarned, instead of seeing absolutely nothing in the future other
than the disasters that are bound to strike the modern world and civi-
lization like so many thunderbolts, through revolution, or war, or the
bankruptcy of worm-eaten states.
xii SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

In the series “Modernism and…” the key term has been

experimentally expanded and “heuristically modified” to embrace
any movement for change which set out to give a name and a public
identity to the “nameless” and “hidden” revolutionary principle that
van Gogh saw as necessary to counteract the rise of nihilism. He was
attracted to Tolstoy’s vision because it seemed to offer a remedy to
the impotence of Christianity and the insidious spread of a literally
soul-destroying cynicism, which if unchecked would ultimately lead
to the collapse of civilization. Modernism thus applies in this series
to all concerted attempts in any sphere of activity to enable life to be
lived more “musically,” to resurrect the sense of transcendent com-
munal and individual purpose being palpably eroded by the chaotic
unfolding of events in the modern world even if the end result would
be “just” to make society physically and mentally healthy.
What would have probably appalled van Gogh is that some
visionaries no less concerned than he was by the growing crisis of
the West sought a manna of spiritual nourishment emanating not
from heaven, nor even from an earthly beauty still retaining an aura
of celestial otherworldliness, but from strictly secular visions of an
alternative modernity so radical in its conception that attempts to
enact them inevitably led to disasters of their own following the law
of unintended consequences. Such solutions were to be realized not
by a withdrawal from history into the realm of art (the sphere of
“epiphanic” modernism), but by applying a utopian artistic, mytho-
poeic, religious, or technocratic consciousness to the task of harness-
ing the dynamic forces of modernity itself in such spheres as politics,
nationalism, the natural sciences and social engineering in order to
establish a new order and a “new man.” It is initiatives conceived in
this “programmatic” mode of modernism that the series sets out to
explore. Its results are intended to benefit not just a small coterie of
like-minded academics, but mainstream teaching and research in
modern history, thereby becoming part of the “common sense” of
the discipline even of self-proclaimed “empiricists.”
Some of the deep-seated psychological, cultural and “anthropo-
logical” mechanisms underlying the futural revolts against moder-
nity here termed “modernism” are explored at length in my Modernism
and Fascism. The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (2007). The
premise of this book could be taken to be Phillip Johnson’s assertion
that “Modernism is typically defined as the condition that begins
when people realize God is truly dead, and we are therefore on our
 SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE xiii
own.” It presents the well-springs of modernism in the primordial
human need for a new metaphysical centre in a radically de-centred
reality, for a new source of transcendental meaning in a godless
universe, in the impulse to erect a “sacred canopy” of culture which
not only aesthetically veils the infinity of time and space surround-
ing human existence to make existence feasible, but provides a total-
izing world-view within which to locate individual life narratives,
thus imparting it with the illusion of cosmic significance. By eroding
or destroying that canopy, modernity creates a protracted spiritual
crisis which provokes the proliferation of countervailing impulses
to restore a “higher meaning” to historical time that are collectively
termed by the book (ideal-typically) as “modernism.”
Johnson’s statement seems to make a perceptive point by asso-
ciating modernism not just with art, but with a general “human
condition” consequent on what Nietzsche, the first great modern-
ist philosopher, called “the Death of God.” Yet in the context of this
series his statement requires significant qualification. Modernism is
not a general historical condition (any more than “post-modernism”
is), but a generalized revolt against even the intuition made possible
by a secularizing modernization that we are spiritual orphans exiled
in a godless and ultimately meaningless universe. Its hallmark is
the bid to find a new home, a new community, and a new source of
transcendence.
Nor is modernism itself necessarily secular. On the contrary: both
the wave of occultism, Theosophy, and the Catholic revival of the 1890s
and the emergence of radicalized, Manichaean forms of Christianity,
Hinduism, Islam and even Buddhism in the 1990s demonstrate that
modernist impulses need not take the form of secular utopianism, but
may readily assume religious (some would say “post-secular”) forms.
In any case, within the cultural force field of modernism even the most
secular entities are sacralized to acquire an aura of numinous signifi-
cance. Ironically, Johnson himself offers a fascinating case study in this
fundamental aspect of the modernist rebellion against the empty skies
of a disenchanted, anomic world. A retired Berkeley law professor,
some of the books he published such as The Wedge of Truth made him
one of the major protagonists of “Intelligent Design,” a Christian(ized)
version of creationism that offers a prophylactic against the allegedly
nihilistic implications of Darwinist science.
Naturally no attempt has been made to impose “reflexive metan-
arrative” developed in Modernism and Fascism on the various authors
xiv SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

of this series. Each has been encouraged to tailor the term modernism
to fit their own epistemological cloth, as long as they broadly agree
in seeing it as the expression of a reaction against modernity not
restricted to art and aesthetics, and driven by the aspiration to cre-
ate a spiritually or physically “healthier” modernity through a new
cultural, political and ultimately biological order. Naturally, the
blueprint for the ideal society varies significantly according to each
diagnosis of what makes actually existing modernity untenable,
“decadent” or doomed to self-destruction.
The ultimate (utopian?) aim of the series is to help bring about
a paradigm shift in the way “modernism” is generally used, and
hence stimulate fertile new areas of research and teaching with an
approach which enables methodological empathy and causal analysis
to be applied even to events and processes ignored by or resistant
to the explanatory powers of conventional historiography. I am
delighted that Mihai Spariosu, himself a cultural exile from his native
Romania and Romanian, has risen to the challenge of rethinking the
role of exile in shaping creative consciousness and utopian thinking
in such a radically ludic spirit that the book has elements of the uto-
pian ability to create new worlds through bricolage that is its subject.

ROGER GRIFFIN
Oxford
May 2014
 PREFACE

In this book, I undertake to explore the concepts of exile and

utopia in modern Western thought. But, unlike other authors who,
as a rule, study these concepts separately, I correlate the two and
place them in a larger theoretical and cultural-historical context.
I contend that exile and utopia have been operative in Western
civilization from its early beginnings in Antiquity and that, conse-
quently, they are among the key concepts that lie at the foundation
of Western thought. Other such key concepts are power, play, mime-
sis, and liminality, with which exile and utopia are closely interwoven
through mutual causality.
Furthermore, the constellation to which exile and utopia belong
has power at its center, around which all the other concepts revolve. In
other words, in the Western world, all these concepts are often sub-
ordinated to and made to serve a mentality of power. By “mentality”
I mean a specific mode of being, thinking, feeling, and acting in the
world, which generates its own systems of values and beliefs that in
turn feed and sustain it. While I do not claim that there is only one
mentality operative in the Western world—in fact there have been
myriads of them—I do suggest that the most visible ones have invari-
ably been power-oriented. In my previous books, including Dionysus
Reborn (1989), God of Many Names (1991), and The Wreath of Wild Olive
(1997), I have explored such prevalent mentalities in terms of power,
mimesis, play, and liminality. In the present study, I continue this
project by turning my attention to the concepts of exile and utopia,
but without losing sight of their close relatives.
In turn, I propose the notion of the exilic-utopian imagination to
emphasize the fact that exile and utopia are correlated phenomena
that transcend any specific period in human history, as well as any
specific cognitive field, comprising philosophical, socio-political,
psychological, historical, and artistic elements. They may also go
beyond the Western world and operate, albeit in different and spe-
cific ways, within other worlds as well. Indeed, one may venture
to say that the exilic-utopian imagination is a common feature of
xv
xvi PREFACE

all the power-oriented mentalities that have built large human

civilizations on Earth.
Since this book is part of a series on Modernism and has stringent
space and format limits, being intended as a long essay on the topic,
I had to make some hard choices in selecting and treating my mate-
rial. I felt that exile and utopia in Modernism (and Postmodernism)
could not be properly understood without providing at least a brief
historical overview of the two concepts. Given my strict space limits,
I decided to focus on the early stages of their history, always keeping
an eye on the present and leaving it for another occasion to fill in
the huge time gaps in-between. Likewise, I felt that this historical
overview, however brief and partial, should be mostly narrated as a
series of case studies, rather than as a purely linear development or
progression. The latter approach would have given the false impres-
sion that the two concepts underwent some kind of evolution, when
the opposite is the case: from the very “beginning,” the correlation
between them and their most important implications were already
there. Furthermore, some of these implications were later on pushed
into the background and obscured for long stretches of the history
of the two concepts, resurfacing only in our time.
Thus, I felt that it was necessary to devote special attention to two
narratives of the ancient world that I consider essential in under-
standing exile and utopia as foundational concepts for the preva-
lent types of Western mentality in general and for modernity and
modernism in particular: the epic of Gilgamesh and the Pentateuch.
Another crucial moment in the history of the two concepts is the
Platonic one, which I felt also needed special attention: Plato is the
first thinker to connect exile, utopia, and play, even though this
connection remains largely implicit in his dialogs. He was also
among the first thinkers in the Western world to attempt to carry
out their sociopolitical utopias into practice (the very first one
being, probably, Pythagoras). In addition to the utopian project of
the Academy, Plato inspired his disciple Dion to establish a model
government in Syracuse, based on the utopian principles outlined
in the Republic. That this “ideal” government (no less than those of
the Pythagoreans) ended in a bloodbath is both symptomatic and
paradigmatic of other, similar, attempts throughout the history of
the Western world, including our age.
My task was further complicated by the theoretical problems
posed by the idea of modernity: there are vast differences between
 PREFACE xvii
the various definitions of modernity and modernism with which
Western and other scholars operate. I have added to this complexity
by developing my own definitions, which I needed to clarify and
expand on in order to make my arguments accessible not only to
researchers in the field of Modernism and Postmodernism but to a
wider audience as well. Given these considerations, I have divided
my book into three parts: Part I develops a theory of exile and utopia
as interrelated concepts and sociocultural phenomena. Part II com-
bines very brief historical narratives with a series of case studies to
illustrate this theory, from the ancient Near-Eastern to the Hellenic
world. In turn, Part III concentrates on the treatment of exile and
utopia in Modernism, particularly through a number of 20th-century
works of fiction that not only stage the various philosophical, reli-
gious, political, and sociocultural issues raised by these two concepts,
but also point to the ways in which they can be transvalued by a shift
in cultural paradigms from a power-oriented mentality to a mental-
ity of peace.
Part I of my book starts from two general premises: (1) that in the
Western world exile and utopia have often acted as instruments of
a mentality of power and (2) that both of them can be seen as forms
of playful or ludic liminality. Although exile is usually conceived as
a political instrument of expulsion and neutralization, it may often
have the opposite effect of providing a free space or playground at the
intersection of various cultures and political systems. In this sense,
exile can be called a liminal experience (from the Greek/Hebrew
term limen, “harbor,” that is, the place between land and sea, but also
“threshold,” denoting a transitional or in-between space). Viewed in
this light, exile becomes not only a form of ludic liminality but also a
form of utopia, if we use this term in the current sense of “an imagi-
nary place” or, indeed, atopia, if we use it in the original, etymologic
sense of “nowhere.” The playground or liminal space opened by exile
can in turn be used to effect significant changes on both the expel-
ling and the receiving socio-political systems or cultures.
In turn, utopia has been conceived as a form of exile, in the sense
that it is invariably placed in a remote or imaginary land, in a distant
past or future, that is, in a neutral space or background. Though it
is deliberately removed from the actual world, it nevertheless main-
tains subtle and complex links with this world, being ultimately
designed to transform it. Furthermore, power-oriented utopian pro-
jects, whether religious or socio-political, virtual or actual, are often
xviii PREFACE

generated by an exilic consciousness that attempts to compensate

for its groundlessness, which it perceives negatively, as ontologi-
cal lack or emptiness. In the concluding section of Part I, therefore,
I propose the notion of the exilic-utopian imagination to stress the
idea that exile and utopia are ludic-liminal phenomena engaged in a
multifaceted relationship of mutual causality.
Part II is a historical excursus in which I combine brief histori-
cal narratives with several case studies featuring the exilic-utopian
imagination that manifests itself in different ways in various cul-
tural contexts and historical periods, ranging from the “Story of
Sinuhe” and “Dispute between a Man and his Ba (Soul)” to the epic of
Gilgamesh and the Pentateuch in the ancient Mediterranean world, to
Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus and Plato’s dialogs in the Hellenic world.
In turn, in Part III, I argue that even though the exilic-utopian imagi-
nation operates in most cultures and historical periods in the Western
world, in the 20th century it reaches or, possibly, even surpasses the
ubiquity that it attained, for example, in the Hellenistic period and the
Renaissance. Indeed, exile and utopia have again become so common
in our time that it would not be implausible to characterize modern-
ism itself as a product of an acute exilic consciousness, which often
seeks to generate utopian social schemes in an attempt to compensate
for its exacerbated sense of ontological loss. And nowhere is this sense
more present than in literary discourse.
Consequently, Part III focuses on several 20th-century literary
masterpieces as prime examples of the exilic-utopian imagination,
which can best be studied in interrelation with its manifestations
in modernist sociological, political, and religious thought. These
works include Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, Thomas Mann’s
Joseph and his Brothers, and Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. Of
course, I could have chosen many other authors and their works as
case studies, including the “usual suspects” that recur in discussions
of literary modernism, e.g., Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot,
Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virginia Wolf, D.H. Lawrence, and George
Orwell in Great Britain. I believe, however, that the particular con-
stellation I have picked, although very small, addresses the topic at
hand in a relatively comprehensive and paradigmatic fashion. The
works included stage major modernist themes at the same time that
they point to ways in which the modernist mentality itself can be
transcended.
 PREFACE xix
In Parts II and III, moreover, I shall show that the age-old
competition among various cognitive fields has turned literature
into a privileged locus of exile and utopia, ever since Socrates, in
Plato’s Republic, banished the poets from the realm of truth to the
realm of fiction (or lies), declaring that philosophy-science was the
only reliable foundation of ontological and political reality. In this
regard, literature has often used its marginal or liminal position in
the realm of discourse in the same way that political exile and utopia
have used theirs in the socio-political realm: it has either reinforced
or challenged the ontological status of other forms of discourse. By
openly acknowledging its fictionality, literature has allowed other
linguistic constructs such as science, history, philosophy, ethics, or
religion to be invested with the authority of knowledge and truth;
or, by the same token, it has challenged their cognitive status as
truth and has helped replace them with other forms of authorita-
tive discourse.
In other words, literary discourse has been able to offer fresh
cultural alternatives precisely because it is a ludic phenomenon—an
as if mode of activity and being in which the world of actuality and
that of the imagination become interwoven and create an intermedi-
ary, liminal world separate from, yet contingent on, the other two. By
staging a real or imagined state of affairs and presenting it from vari-
ous perspectives, literature can contribute to a better understanding
of the existential choices open to a specific community and can play
a significant role in proposing modes of historical change. Thus,
in Part III, I also analyze several examples of the interplay between
literature and politics in terms of exile and utopia in the modern
state, including the European communist states of the 20th century.
These large-scale utopian experiments in social engineering have
indirectly resulted in a considerable expansion of the literary genre
of dystopia—expansion that constitutes another salient feature of
modernism.
On the other hand, I argue that literature can also emancipate
itself from the dynamic of center and margin, characteristic of a
mentality of power, and assume a culturally transcendental position,
going beyond its immediate historical context of interaction with
other modes of discourse, including the political one. Paradoxically,
the literary dystopias themselves allow a positive view of utopia and
exile as atopia, that is, as an emotionally neutral experience of the
void or emptiness. Far from being negative and threatening, as it is
xx PREFACE

in modernism and postmodernism, this experience may be seen as

an exploration of the unknown, characteristic of all ludic activity,
which often opens up a neutral space or no man’s land where alter-
native systems of values may emerge. In most cases, these systems
of values are equally power-oriented, with power relations being
simply shifted around. But, as I argue in the Afterword, there is no
reason why alternative systems of values belonging to irenic worlds
may not emerge from the liminal interstices as well, especially
within a global reference frame. Within that larger frame, one can
envisage, in a positive utopian manner, the end of exile and the tran-
scendence of the exilic-utopian imagination based on a mentality
of power through the emergence of fully free and blossoming
human communities that do not operate on a power mechanism of
integration and exclusion, but on the irenic principle of symbiotic
cooperation.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to express my gratitude to several colleagues, students, and

friends who have read this work in its various stages and have offered
their kind comments or have helped with it in other ways: Sorin
Antohi, Vasile and Velica Boari, Ronald Bogue, Matei Calinescu,
Philip Gagner, Wolfgang Iser, Vlad Jecan, Virgil Nemoianu, Victor
Neumann, Hardy Schloer, Michael Anthony Spariosu, Gheorghe
Stefan, and Hayden White. Particularly helpful have also been Roger
Griffin, who has included this book in his Modernism series, has
been patient with my shifting deadlines for turning it in, and has
offered very generous and useful comments on its content; Holly
Tyler at Palgrave and Geetha Williams from MPS Limited, who have
guided me through the pre-production and production phases of the
book; Adela Fofiu who has helped with research on the Transition
Town Movement; and Corina Mihaela Beleaua who has assisted with
the bibliographical references, footnotes, and index.
Last but not least, I would like to thank Diana, my wife, and Ana
Maria and Michael Anthony, my children, to whom I have dedicated
this book in deep gratitude for their unconditional love and support.

xxi
 Part I
EXILE, UTOPIA,
AND MODERNITY:
A CULTURAL-THEORETICAL
APPROACH
 1
MODERNITY AND
MODERNISM: PRELIMINARY
THEORETICAL
CONSIDERATIONS

Although in the last few decades numerous studies have attempted

to come to grips with exile and utopia as independent concepts, such
studies have largely failed to see the close correlation between them or
to consider them in a general cultural-theoretical framework. In the
present study, I shall argue that the two concepts are kindred forms of
ludic liminality. Furthermore, I shall demonstrate that both of them are
inextricably linked to the idea of modernity. But, before I can under-
take this task, I need briefly to review the principal ways in which these
concepts have so far been employed in contemporary cultural theory
and clarify my own understanding of them. In Part I, therefore, I shall
first consider modernity and modernism, then play and liminality,
and finally exile and utopia, pointing out the complex conceptual and
cultural-historical links between all of these terms.

1.1 Modernity and Modernism as Historical

or “Period” Concepts

The idea of modernity is generally thought to have appeared in the

medieval period, where the word itself originated and started being

3
4 MODERNISM AND EXILE

used. The Medieval Latin word modernus was coined from the adverb
modo (“recently”). Thesaurus Linguae Latinae explains the word to
mean: qui nunc, nostro tempore est, novellus (that which is now, of our
time, new). The same dictionary lists its antonyms as anticus, vetus
(ancient, old).1 Thus, modernity is clearly connected to a specific
notion of time, where past, present, and future are perceived as both
radical difference and linear, irreversible progression. Scholars usu-
ally contrast this notion to the cyclical notion of time characteristic
of archaic, small-scale societies, where time is perceived as an eternal
return, following the recurrent pattern of day and night and the two
or four seasons.2
Another cultural phenomenon that appeared in the medieval
“Republic of Letters” was the so-called Querelle des anciens et des
modernes (the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns), or what
Jonathan Swift later on called “the battle of the books.”3 According to
the authoritative German scholar Ernst Robert Curtius, this “battle”
began as early as the 12th century. It involved “two hostile factions:
the humanistically minded disciples of antique poetry, and the mod-
erni.” (Curtius 1963, p. 119) The latter considered themselves superior
to the “ancients” because of their “virtuoso style formed in the prac-
tice of dialectics.” (Curtius 1963, p. 119) But the origins of the Querelle
are even older and can be traced at least as far back as the Greek neo-
terikoi, the “new poets” of the Hellenistic period, such as Callimachus
(310?–240 BC) who engaged in a decade-long feud with his pupil,
Apollonius of Rhodes, over Homeric epic and heroic poetry which
the latter cultivated; the “battle” was then taken up again, two cen-
turies later, by the Latin neoterics or the poetae novi, such as Catullus
(84? –54?) who engaged in literary disputes with the traditionalists of
his time such as Cicero (who actually came up with the contemptu-
ous label of neoterikoi or “moderns”). 4
Irrespective of its origins, the Querelle raged on, in various forms,
well over six centuries. The bone of contention involved, on the one
hand, issues of cultural authority and, on the other hand, an ideo-
logy of progress consistently associated with the modern spirit or
“temper.” The two sets of issues are neatly reflected in the metaphor
of “dwarfs, standing on the shoulders of giants.” This metaphor
seems to have originated with Bernard of Chartres at the beginning
of the 12th century. As John of Salisbury notes in his Metalogicon,
Bernard of Chartres “used to compare us to puny dwarfs perched on
the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther
 MODERNITY AND MODERNISM 5
than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater
height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic
stature.” (Salisbury 2009, p. 1156)
In turn, John of Salisbury uses the extended metaphor to stress the
continuity between the Western classical and modern traditions. This
continuity is transmitted and enforced through the doctrine of imita-
tion (of the ancients by the moderns). Thus, for John of Salisbury the
ancients are necessarily privileged over the moderni, who must rest
on their shoulders if they wish to produce anything of cultural value.
On the other hand, for him the metaphor also implies the notion of
progress, since the moderns do “see farther” than the giants on whose
shoulders they rest; this means that they and their heirs continually
add to, and thus advance, the knowledge they inherit from the ancients.
Such a linear notion of progress is nearly always implied in later under-
standings of modernity and often goes hand in hand with its symmet-
rical opposite, the notion of modernity as regress and degeneration.
Beginning with the late 18th century, the Romantic Movement
made the contrary claim that one can learn nothing through imita-
tion and that ancient knowledge is well-nigh worthless because it
has been continuously updated by subsequent generations, in linear
progression, or, even more radically, has been replaced altogether by
new knowledge. By the same token, cultural authority does not rest
with an antiquated tradition but with the individual creator, who
does not imitate the products but the processes of Nature. The artist
is a genius who, like God, creates out of nothing. It is in this sense that
one can interpret Shelley’s statement that “the poets are the unac-
knowledged legislators of mankind.” (Shelley 1998, p. 956)
In Shelley and other Romantic artists, the terms of the metaphor
are reversed, with the moderns now occupying the position of giants.
Indeed, one giant in particular, the titan Prometheus, is the favored
symbol, as someone who rebelled against the central authority of
Zeus and brought enlightenment to humanity, through the use of
fire and other technological innovations, against the Supreme God’s
decrees.5 In the Romantic period, then, the agonistic meaning of the
metaphor is increasingly revealed, with the two sides, dwarfs and
giants, turning from cooperative (if unequal) partners into bitter
opponents. During this period, the dynamic of margin and center,
typical of a power-oriented mentality, emerges into view as well: the
cultural margin turns into the center, with the “dwarfs” replacing the
“giants” as repositories and guardians of cultural authority.
6 MODERNISM AND EXILE

In turn, “modernism” as a term and a period concept comes into

full view in the second part of the 19th century in the wake of the
Romantic attack on the prevailing rationalist values of the “Age of
Reason” or the “Enlightenment”—these values were themselves at
some point “modern” in relation to the Middle Age but not in rela-
tion to the Renaissance and the Baroque, whose equally “modern”
representatives (e.g., Petrarch, Cervantes, Montaigne, Erasmus,
Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Descartes, and Bacon) reacted to what
they perceived as the oppressive authority of medieval scholasticism,
which they styled the “Dark Age.” During the first half of the 20th
century, moreover, Modernism as a way of moderating or taming
this Romantic attack returns to and revives some of the cultural
values of the Renaissance and the Neoclassical period, especially its
cult of Greco-Roman antiquity, but in an ironic and parodic fashion.
Revealingly, the word “modernism” had a largely negative con-
notation in 18th-century England (just as it did in Cicero’s Rome),
arising from Swift’s marked dislike for the “moderns” in his
polemical essays. Samuel Johnson, in his Dictionary of the English
Language, describes it as a derogatory neologism, coined by Swift,
who uses the word in a letter to Alexander Pope: “I wish you would
give order against the corruption of English by those Scribblers
who send us over their trash in Prose and Verse, with abominable
Curtailments and quaint Modernisms.”(Letter to Pope, Williams
ed., 1965, pp. 58–59) Likewise, in France, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
in a remarkable letter on his religious beliefs, attached the label of
“modernist” to an atheist philosopher he disagreed with (Letter to
M. de Franquières, January 15, 1769).
Later on, Rousseau himself was labeled a “modernist,” but in a
positive sense. This ironic semantic reversal is by no means uncom-
mon and illustrates a sociolinguistic phenomenon that Freud, in
the wake of Nietzsche, calls the “antithetical sense of primal words”
(Freud, 1910, pp. 155–161). The word “modernism” turned into a cri
de guerre around the mid-19th-century in France, acquiring mostly
positive meanings, particularly in the programmatic essays of
Baudelaire, notably in the collections Le Peintre de la vie moderne (1863)
and L’Art romantique (1869), where he develops a distinction between
a “bourgeois” and an “aesthetic” modernity, decrying the former and
praising the latter.6
I shall return to some of these issues when I discuss Modernism
(which I shall capitalize whenever I refer to it as a historical
 MODERNITY AND MODERNISM 7
sociocultural trend or “period” concept) and the exilic-utopian
imagination in Part III of this study. For the time being, I shall simply
remark that 20th-century literary and cultural historians, starting
from Baudelaire’s aforementioned distinction, often speak of “two
modernities,” engaged in a relentless conflict. Instead, however, one
can argue that, beginning with the mid-19th-century, the Quarrel
of the Ancients and the Moderns becomes internalized, as it were,
with “bourgeois” modernity replacing the Ancients as an “oppres-
sive” cultural tradition and with “aesthetic modernity” occupying
the progressive position of the Moderns. Another exquisite irony
is that “aesthetic modernity” in Baudelaire and other 19th-century
French men of letters recycles certain aristocratic values that were
previously associated with the Ancients and are now used to decry
the materialistic, utilitarian values of bourgeois modernity.
The internecine struggles within modernity thus re-enact the ear-
lier struggles between various cultural and/or ideological factions
within a certain society and historical period. At the same time, they
account for the split nature of “modernity” which is regarded as both
a positive and a negative phenomenon, depending on the ideologi-
cal allegiance of the critic or theorist and following the dialectic of
margin and center that I mentioned above. According to the same
dialectic, in 19th- and 20th-century European culture other binary
oppositions begin to emerge, which are typical of a mentality of
power that thrives on polarization, dividedness, and oppositional
thinking. Among the most important conceptual pairs, which are,
moreover, closely interrelated, are Modernity and Christianity, and
Modernity and History.
Modernity and Christianity prominently appear as a conceptual
pair in Nietzsche, who actually equates them: he sees both of them
as highly negative cultural developments because they have contrib-
uted to the moral and physical decay of the Western world. He rejects
them in favor of the archaic, aristocratic values that he regards as an
antidote to “modern” civilization. This rejection also goes hand in
hand with Nietzsche’s view of modernity as “decadence,” which even-
tually led, in politics, to the utopian and messianic rage for cultural
regeneration (of which Nazi Germany and other totalitarian regimes
were extreme examples), based on a revival of a fictional Golden Age,
with its idealized “heroic” virtues. Nietzsche’s declaration that “God
is dead” is intended as a battle cry against the bourgeois “herd men-
tality,” in the name of these archaic, aristocratic values. Thus, mutatis
8 MODERNISM AND EXILE

mutandis, it introduces Nietzsche’s own version of Baudelaire’s split

between aesthetic and bourgeois modernity.
Whereas for Nietzsche modernity is largely the direct result
and perpetuation of Christian values and beliefs, for many 20th
century cultural theorists it is, ironically, the exact opposite. They
interpret “God is dead” as modernity’s declaration of independence
from Christianity. This latter view is shared by many Catholic theo-
logians, including, for example, Pope Pius X who, in his encyclical
“Pascendi Dominici Gregi” (September 8, 1907), makes a thorough
and perceptive analysis of various modern(ist) doctrines inside and
outside the Catholic Church, pointing out their dangerous, heretical
nature from the standpoint of that Church.
Some secular cultural historians and theorists, on the other
hand, attribute the split nature of modernity precisely to its bad
conscience or malaise over its break with Christian dogma. This
interpretation is present, for example, in Peter Berger’s influential
book, The Sacred Canopy (1967). Starting from the Nietzschean idea
that humans are terrified of the void and prefer even enslavement
over it, Berger explains modernity’s existential angst as being caused
by the removal of the psycho-emotional security that the “sacred
canopy” of religion offered it up to the middle of the 18th century.
In turn, Berger’s book generated a plethora of theories of moder-
nity, including what by now has become a modernist critical cliché:
the notion that the modern world has degenerated into “anarchy”
and “anomy,” because it has cut itself loose from the Great Chain of
Being—a medieval, hierarchical view of the Cosmos with God as its
center (Lovejoy, 1936).
What Peter Berger and cultural theorists and historians in his vein
fail to consider is that for Nietzsche it is the will to power, not the
absence of religion, which generates the fear of the void. As Aristotle
put it, long before Nietzsche, “power abhors vacuum;” this is so,
because power, understood as materialized force, needs something
to stand in its way, or oppose it, in order to manifest itself; otherwise
it will dissipate and disappear into the void. Institutionalized reli-
gion, with its elaborate hierarchies, is one of the strongest bulwarks
that power erects between itself and the void; if it is removed, power
is suddenly confronted with what it dreads most: nothingness.
This fear of nothingness, then, is not “natural to man,” but only to
those humans or societies that live according to the power principle.
That the majority of humanity has often chosen to live according to
 MODERNITY AND MODERNISM 9
this principle is neither genetics nor fate, as Nietzsche, Berger, and
most other modernist (and postmodernist) thinkers would have us
believe. As I shall show later on in this book, there are other types
of mindsets, belonging to the ancient tradition of wisdom that are
not necessarily driven by the will to power—on the contrary, they
are incommensurable with it. Nor are they terrified by nothingness,
which they perceive positively, as a “luminous void,” out of which
all configurations and structures emerge. So, there is no reason why
most of humanity might not elect, at some point in the future, to
turn away from the will to power as an organizing principle and
adopt less counterproductive systems of values and beliefs.
Another, related, conceptual pair is that of Modernity and
History.7 Jürgen Habermas, among many others, sees in the moder-
nity of the Enlightenment a new temporal consciousness by dint of
which a majority of the European intellectual elite felt that they, not
God, were the true agents of historical change (Habermas, 1987). In
a similar vein, Reinhart Koselleck argues that this new experience
of time led, in the 18th century, to the “temporalization of history,”
which was no longer subject to Divine Providence but to deliberate
interventions on the part of enlightened humans. Koselleck asso-
ciates the rise of modern consciousness with two epochal events:
(1) the publication in 1770 of Mercier’s utopian novel The Year 2440,
which effects the “temporalization of utopia” and its transformation
into a philosophy of history, and (2) the creation of a new calendar
during the French Revolution with the purpose of replacing the
old Christian one (Koselleck, 2004). Pope Pius X, in the previously
mentioned “Pascendi” encyclical, equally traces modernist ideology
back to the French Revolution, with its persecution of the Catholic
Church and religion in general.
One should, however, point out that the modernist “temporaliza-
tion of history” has ultimately led to an agonistic relation between
Modernity and History, especially as the grandiose utopian rational-
ist schemes of the 18th century started turning into blood baths all
over Europe during the past two centuries. At that point, Modernity
ceased to present itself as an engine of History; in turn, History
became a “nightmare” or “terror” from which humanity would be
saved by none other than . . . Modernity itself. These kinds of apo-
riae are typical of a modernist mentality driven by the will to power.
A larger view of Western history might, then, include modernity
and its various forms, such as Modernism, Decadence, Avant-garde,
10 MODERNISM AND EXILE

and Postmodernism, as sociocultural (and psychopathological)

manifestations of this will.
I would also like to point out that the idea of modern temporal
consciousness is certainly worth retaining, but one would have con-
siderable difficulty placing it in any particular historical period, as
I shall show in the next subsection. We have seen that some scholars,
such as Curtius, trace the idea of modernity back to the Middle
Age; others trace it back to the Renaissance, and yet others, includ-
ing Habermas and Koselleck, trace it back to the 18th century and
the French Revolution. Nor should we forget that Christianity, at its
inception, equally saw itself, and was later hailed, as a new or modern
era in human history (the Christian counterpart of Koselleck’s secu-
lar Neuzeit of the late 18th century). Furthermore, the introduction of
the Christian calendar had a symbolical purpose similar to that of
the French revolutionary one: to mark a radically new beginning for
humanity. But, ironically, by the middle of the 18th century, and most
of the 19th century, an increasingly secular intellectual elite accuses
Christianity of regressive traditionalism and utilizes Nietzsche’s
watchword, “God is dead,” in order to take over its claim to Modernity.
The binary opposition of Modernity and Christianity, therefore,
has equally worked itself out historically in terms of the dialectic of
center and margin characteristic of a power-oriented mentality and
has little to do with a radical shift in “temporal consciousness” or in
the dominant cultural values prevailing in the Western world. In fact,
Christianity continues to claim even today that it was, and could again
be, a new beginning for humankind, if humans truly understood and
embraced Christ’s philosophy and life-style (which, ironically, many
church institutions and priests themselves often shy away from).
Finally, there is considerable theoretical confusion in the criti-
cal literature on modernity and modernism, largely because many
critics seem indiscriminately to use both terms as period concepts.
Roger Griffin attempts to mediate between the two concepts by
introducing the notion of palingenesis, whereby Modernism (which
he defines as a negative reaction to modernity, especially concern-
ing the latter’s “decadence”) takes up and incorporates, nevertheless,
various older elements of modernity. His self-styled “maximalist”
definition is useful and is worth citing in full:

MODERNISM: the generic term for a wide variety of countervailing palin-

genetic reactions to the anarchy and cultural decay allegedly resulting from
 MODERNITY AND MODERNISM 11
the radical transformation of traditional institutions, social structures, and
belief systems under the impact of Western modernization. These reactions
were fostered by the growth of ref lexivity and its concomitant, the progres-
sive temporalization of history characteristic of modernity, one consequence
of which was the trend towards re-imagining the future as a permanently
‘open’ site for the realization of utopias within historical time. Modernism
gained momentum in the second half of the nineteenth century when lib-
eral, capitalist and Enlightenment myths of progress lost the partial cultural
hegemony they had attained during the French Revolution and early indus-
trial revolution, with the result that the manifold changes that society was
undergoing became increasingly identified by intellectual and artistic elites
with decadence, so that modernity itself became a trope for degeneration
(Modernity).
Between the 1800s and the end of the Second World War, modernism acted as
a diffuse cultural force generated by the dialectics of chaos and (new) order, despair
and hope, decadence and renewal, destruction and creation, manifesting itself in
countless idiosyncratic artistic visions of how new representations of reality could
act as the vehicle to revitalize ignored or forgotten principles of a redemptive vision
of the world, and even help it regenerate itself socially and morally. Beyond the
sphere of aesthetics and ‘high’ culture, the palingenetic dynamics of modernism
have also shaped numerous personal projects and collective movements to establish
a healthier social and ethical basis for society, or inaugurate an entirely new socio-
political order. This order is conceived as an alternative modernity which holds out
the prospect of putting an end to political, cultural, moral, and/or physical dis-
solution, and sometimes looks forward to the emergence of a new type of ‘man’.
(Griffin, 2010, 54)

As one can see, Griffin’s definition is a palimpsest of most of

the other definitions of modernism that (modernist) cultural his-
torians have offered for the past 100 years. It is certainly the most
complete catalog to date of what Western scholars have discussed
or gathered under the labels of “modernism” and “modernity.” It
also enables Griffin to go beyond purely “aesthetic” modernism as
a specific manifestation in literature and the other arts, to a general
sociopolitical and cultural dimension, viewed both synchronically
and diachronically. He can thus add not only Fascism and National
Socialism but also Soviet and other types of communism to the list
of modernist phenomena. His discussions of Italian Fascism and
German National Socialism as modernist developments are particu-
larly valuable, although some cultural aspects can best be analyzed,
in my view, in terms of Postmodernism.8 For our main topic here,
one may also retain the idea of Modernism re-imagining the future as
12 MODERNISM AND EXILE

a permanently ‘open’ site for the realization of utopias within historical time,
although this feature, as we shall see, is not typical of Modernism,
but of modernity in general, including Christianity from its very
inception: in a certain sense, one can define Christianity itself as a
series of attempts (and failures) at establishing various versions of
a religious utopian model or what I have called theotopia9 within his-
torical time.
The foregoing observations bring me to the weaknesses of
Griffin’s definition of Modernism: to me at least, it appears to be
both too restrictive and too inclusive. It is too restrictive because
it depends too much on the idea of “Western modernization” (by
which Griffin seems largely to mean the Industrial Revolution), as
well as on the idea of a negative reaction to modernity in general.
On the other hand, it is too inclusive, or “too much of a good thing,”
since there is very little in contemporary Western culture that Griffin
does not label as “modernist.” For example, one could arguably
exclude from his definition several contemporary trends such as
Avant-garde, Decadence, and Postmodernism, which contemporary
literary and cultural studies consider as distinct from Modernism.
More importantly, there are cultural phenomena, especially
those related to the so-called “New Age” or the “Age of Aquarius,”
that can be traced back to the ancient tradition of wisdom. This tra-
dition is alien to, if not incommensurable with, a mentality of power,
although this mentality invariably attempts, and has largely man-
aged, to co-opt elements of it. It is the power-oriented mentality
that has in effect engendered Modernism, Postmodernism, and all
the other cultural trends associated with modernity. So treating the
philosophia perennis as integral part of modernity and modernism is
tantamount to another co-opting gesture.10
For the purposes of the present study, while by no means discount-
ing the usefulness of Griffin’s “maximalist” approach, I would like to
propose a “minimalist,” working definition of modernity and mod-
ernism, which will also serve as a basic distinction between the two
terms. My definition starts from the concept of time-consciousness,
which seems, by all accounts, to be one of the essential features of
both phenomena. “Modernity” generally involves a specific percep-
tion of and emotional attitude toward time; in turn, “modernism”
involves ever-sharper reflexivity over this perception/attitude and,
concurrently, a deliberate, or even programmatic, cultivation or
repression of it. Furthermore, whereas “modernism” can be used as
 MODERNITY AND MODERNISM 13
a period concept, “modernity” creates too much confusion when
employed that way.

1.2 Modernity as Transhistorical Mindset

or Mentality

The approach to “modernity” as a period concept runs into serious

difficulties chiefly associated with infinite regression and with what
Kenneth Burke calls “temporalizing the essence,” that is, placing
first in time things that appear to us of first ontological importance.
(Burke, 1966, pp. 9–13) Consequently, as soon as a scholar attempts
to define “modernity” and locate its inception at a specific time and
place—such as a certain century, geographical region, civilization,
or culture—other scholars come up with counter-examples (as I have
just done in the case of Habermas and Koselleck), demonstrating
that the definition proposed may apply to earlier and/or different
cultures and geographical regions as well.11
Nowadays scholars throw up their hands in despair at the intrac-
tability of the concept but then, more often than not, brush this
intractability aside and proceed to use the term as if everybody
else shared their implicit or tacit understanding of it. On the other
hand, one cannot completely de-temporalize and de-limit the con-
cept of modernity without losing its theoretical usefulness. From a
methodological viewpoint, therefore, perhaps one might be better
off to think of modernity as a type of mentality, or mindset, or con-
sciousness, or “spirit,” or “temper,” not necessarily tied to a certain
historical period, whether it is the Middle Age, the Renaissance, or
the last 150 years, or to a certain culture or civilization, whether it is
Western, or East Asian, or Mediterranean. Indeed, as I shall show in
Chapter 4 below, the idea of modernity is as ancient as history itself,
going all the way back to the beginning of recorded time.
This variation on Burke’s “temporalizing the essence” does not
imply, however, that the modern spirit does not manifest itself dif-
ferently in various historical periods and in various cultures. It
means only that it has certain recognizable common features in all
known times and places. For this reason, I would like to adopt Matei
Calinescu’s happy formulation, “faces of modernity,” and extend it,
beyond the last two centuries in the West, to other historical periods
and civilizations, as well as to many other “faces” in addition to the
14 MODERNISM AND EXILE

five others that Calinescu identifies, that is, Modernism, Avant-garde,

Decadence, Kitsch, and Postmodernism (Calinescu 1987). One may
thus trace the modern mindset within and across all of the conven-
tional historical periods that most Western cultural historians oper-
ate with: Antiquity, Middle Age, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical
Period, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Modern Age.
On the other hand, the main differential criterion in terms of var-
ious types of modernity may be historical visibility, or the frequency
and intensity with which the modern temper manifests itself in
various historical epochs. Thus, we may wish to speak of periods of
“low,” “middle,” and “high” modernity, according to the frequency
and intensity with which modern consciousness (re)surfaces and
impacts the mainstream of various cultures. For example, in the
Renaissance, Romanticism, and the Modern Age, it might take more
“virulent” forms than, say, in Antiquity (with the exception of the
Hellenistic or the Greco-Roman period, which can be seen as an age
of high modernity, not least because of the breaking of Christianity
into the Western, cultural-historical mainstream), the Middle Age,
and the Neoclassical Period. The “faces of modernity” described
by Calinescu, including Modernism, belong to one of these more
intense or virulent phases, conventionally known as the Modern
Age, which we may re-baptize as a period of high modernity, not
unlike the Hellenistic Age.
One might also discover additional “faces” as well as smaller divi-
sions and configurations, where various elements and features of
modernity will appear, disappear, and reappear, both within and
across these larger historical spans, often in a cyclical manner. For
example, what has been called the Age of Biedermeyer is one of such
faces, belonging to a middle phase of modernity within the larger
Romantic period.12 More often than not, the cycles are determined by
the contest for cultural authority that is waged among various intellec-
tual and artistic elites in various geographical regions of the Western
world. In this regard, I would like to return to the agonistic meta-
phor of dwarfs and giants and point out that “modernity” has often
functioned as one of the conceptual poles in a binary opposition, of
which “tradition” is at the other end (and certainly not only since the
18th century as many modernist thinkers claim). In turn, as the two
terms are devoid of stable content, they can easily exchange places, in
the sense that what may appear as “modern” in one historical age will
appear as “traditional” in a later or a different age, and vice versa.
 MODERNITY AND MODERNISM 15
Again, the functional nature of the term “modernity” does not
imply that it is devoid of characteristic features, but only that these
features may apply to a different, occasionally even opposite set of
ideas and historical circumstances. If employed in the political arena,
for example, it is similar to other power-oriented concepts such as
“liberal” and “conservative,” “progressive” and “reactionary,” and so
forth. To some extent, it is also connected with the generational cycles,
where what appears modern or new is as a rule embraced by the
younger generation against the seemingly antiquated and passé of the
older generation or “establishment,” which often stands for the tradi-
tional values of the community (traditional values, one may add, that
were themselves modern and new at an earlier juncture in the history
of the community and may again become so, at a later juncture).
I should thus like to emphasize, yet again, that the agonistic dia-
lectic of tradition and modernity, no less than that of margin and
center, belongs to a mentality of power and serves its main purpose
of maintaining and perpetuating itself at all costs. Consequently, the
history to which I refer in the present study involves this mentality
and its various guises, which have produced specific sociocultural
forms of organization over millennia in various parts of the world.
An overwhelming portion of this history records the relentless, but
inconclusive contest between archaic and median values that has
characterized the Western world at least since the Hellenic classi-
cal period.13 For obvious reasons of space, I cannot trace this his-
tory here in any detail, although I shall point out various aspects of
it throughout this study.
I should equally stress, once more, that unlike most contempo-
rary Western thinkers I do not believe that power-oriented mentali-
ties generate all the human history there is and that humanity has no
other choices. Indeed, my discussion of the Gilgamesh epic and other
ancient texts, in Part II below, will show otherwise. Yet, if one wishes
to turn away from such mentalities, one should become aware of the
ubiquitous nature of power and the ways in which it unwittingly, or
wittingly, permeates not only our political and socioeconomic sys-
tems but also—and in the first place—most of our systems of values
and beliefs, including our philosophical, scientific, and religious con-
cepts; our emotional impulses; and our psychic life in general.
Be that as it may, in the present study I propose to focus on what
I believe are two of the most salient features of modernity, which are
closely intertwined and which appear and reappear in various guises
16 MODERNISM AND EXILE

across the entire span of Western cultural history: attitude toward

time and what I would like to call “the exilic-utopian imagination.”

1.3 Modernity and Time-Consciousness

Perhaps even more important than the modern concept of time as

linear, irreversible progression is the modern temporal conscious-
ness, that is, the ways in which modernity perceives and lives such
temporal linearity. In this respect, a comparison with nonlinear,
circular notions of time, characteristic of archaic, small-scale, or
“traditional” societies is again useful. For the archaic or “traditional”
mindset, the passage of time is lived as an eternally repetitive series
of events and activities that follow the alternations of day and night
and the return of the seasons. The cyclical time flow is accepted as
belonging to the nature of things and, therefore, has little affective
content or, rather, it is emotionally neutral. Birth, death, and—in
many archaic communities—rebirth and/or eternal life are part of
this natural, uninterrupted time continuum. Individual events may
be met with joy or sadness but are generally integrated into the ever-
recurring cycle of communal life.
By contrast, for modern consciousness, time becomes highly
problematic as it is abstracted from its natural, circular flow and
projected into the past, the present, and the future, then divided and
measured in ever smaller segments, for example, hours, minutes, sec-
onds, and nowadays, nanoseconds. Perhaps, the appearance of the
clock (from the sundial to the clepsydra in Antiquity to the countless
mechanical contraptions since the 14th century) and that of the calen-
dar mark the moment when a particular society becomes “modern,”
but that date can be pushed back well past the French Revolution
(pace Koselleck).
In turn, modern time-consciousness is far from being emotion-
ally neutral. On the contrary, it becomes invested with high affective
value, both positive and negative. The present and the (foreseeable)
future are invariably measured against the past and are posited to be
either superior or inferior to it, or both at the same time, according
to the ways in which this past—or versions of it—are intellectually
construed and emotionally colored. Thus, many “golden age” cons-
tructions are colored by nostalgia, while future temporal projections
are colored either by hope and exultation or by apprehension and
 MODERNITY AND MODERNISM 17
despair. By the same token, the time continuum of human existence
is broken into beginning and end, with death or the “end” of life
being often experienced as a highly traumatic, emotional event,
whereas birth or the “beginning” of life is often accompanied by
highly ambiguous feelings (of joy and sadness). Indeed, one may say
that, by its very nature, modern temporal consciousness is ambiva-
lent and divided, which may in part explain why the idea of moder-
nity itself appears so contradictory and unwieldy.
Finally, one should point out that the notions of cyclical and
linear time as markers of either a traditional or a modern mental-
ity have co-existed at least since the invention of writing and the
beginning of recorded history. One can see them operating in the
ancient narratives from the Mediterranean civilizations, such as the
Gilgamesh epic and the Mosaic sagas. In Chapter 4 of this study, I
shall discuss several ancient texts that evince not only what contem-
porary cultural theorists and historians almost unanimously define
as a modern temporal consciousness but also a fully blossomed
exilic-utopian imagination, which, in my view, is another salient
feature of modernity.
On the other hand, “modernism” can, as I have already noted, be
used profitably as a period concept. To sum up, then, by Modernism
in this study I understand one of the many faces of modernity that
begins to manifest itself at the end of the 18th century, reaches full
visibility during the second half of the 19th century and the first half
of the 20th century, and begins slowly to fade after World War II.
It is an offshoot and extension of Romanticism in Western culture,
starting as an intellectual and aesthetic trend in France, England, and
Germany, but gradually impacting the cultural, social, and politi-
cal mainstream of the European and the Western world in general.
Here I cannot dwell on its manifold features, some of which I shall
discuss in Chapter 6 below, but shall only observe that it is a form
of high modernity: as such, it displays an ever more acute temporal
consciousness, with which it attempts to deal in both a radical and a
contradictory fashion. In the next two chapters, I shall illustrate this
characteristic of Modernism as I take a closer look at some modern-
ist views that concern my main topic: the relationship between play,
liminality, exile, and utopia.
 2
PLAY AND LIMINALITY IN
MODERNIST CULTURAL
THEORY

Before I can turn to exploring the exilic-utopian imagination both as

one of the main features of modernity and as a ludic form of liminal-
ity, I need briefly to review the ways in which the concepts of play and
liminality have so far been employed in modernist cultural theory and
clarify my own understanding of these concepts.1

2.1 Play and Modernist Cultural Theory

In his influential study, Homo ludens, Huizinga defines play as a

“voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed
limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but abso-
lutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of
tension, joy and consciousness that it is ‘different’ from ‘ordinary’ life.”
It is “a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as
being not ‘serious’, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely
and utterly.” Play, moreover, is not connected with any material inter-
est or work, and “no profit can be gained by it” (Huizinga 1950, p. 13).
From this general definition, we can already glean the most impor-
tant features of play, as well as its highly ambiguous nature. In Huizinga,
as in many other cultural theorists and historians before and after him,
play is invariably defined as the primary or secondary term in a num-
ber of binary oppositions, such as play and work, play and seriousness,
18
 PLAY AND LIMINALITY IN MODERNIST CULTURAL THEORY 19
play and utility, play and morality, play and violence, play and reality,
and play and culture. Within the concept of play itself, Huizinga and
other modernist scholars have generated such binary oppositions as
play versus games, higher versus lower play, rational versus irrational
play, violent versus nonviolent play, primitive or natural versus civi-
lized play, true versus false play, fair versus foul play, and so forth.
For example, Huizinga, after declaring that “in the twin union of
play and culture play is primary” (Huizinga 1950, p. 46), attempts to
make a distinction between primitive or natural play and cultural or
higher play in terms of rationality and irrationality: “Since our theme
is the relation of play to culture, we need not enter into all possible
forms of play but can restrict ourselves to its social manifestations.
These we might call the higher forms of play” (Huizinga 1950, p. 17).
According to him, such “higher forms of play” are much easier to
describe, whereas in interpreting the “more primitive play of infants
and young animals,” one immediately encounters “that irreduc-
ible quality of pure playfulness” which is “not amenable to further
analysis” (Huizinga 1950, p. 7). Ultimately, for Huizinga, culture is
grounded in primitive or irrational play, but within culture itself
rational play gains primacy. In turn, by irrational play in culture he
means first and foremost violent and/or destructive play, or what the
ancient Greeks called agon (contest) or eris (competition, strife).
Yet, on closer analysis, Huizinga’s distinction falls apart, generating
all kinds of logical contradictions, characteristic of modernist thinking.
These contradictions become particularly apparent when he attempts
to present his cultural theory of play in historical terms. According to
Huizinga, in the course of human history, the “play-element” gradu-
ally recedes into the background, being “almost completely hidden
behind cultural phenomena” (Huizinga 1950, p. 46). This “original
play-element” then becomes a golden age fiction (a form of utopia) of
the Totality of Being, from which culture perpetually regresses.
It is from the viewpoint of this ludic golden age that Huizinga
carries out an extensive critique of modernity and modernism
in particular in the last chapter of his book, “The Play-Element in
Contemporary Civilization.” He argues that contemporary culture,
despite its emphasis on game and sports, has lost the “child-like”
quality of “original” play. He offers the example of bridge, which
“would indicate, to all appearances, an immense increase in the play-
element today” (Huizinga 1950, p. 199). But, “really to play,” Huizinga
goes on, “a man must play like a child. Can we assert that this is so
20 MODERNISM AND EXILE

in the case of such an ingenious game as bridge? If not, the virtue

has gone out of the game” (Huizinga 1950, p. 199). In turn, modern
art, despite appearances, has lost its play-quality, because “when art
becomes self-conscious … it is apt to lose something of its eternal
child-like innocence” (Huizinga 1950, p. 202).
Yet, elsewhere in his study, Huizinga describes this prehistorical
or “original” play as being irrational and associates it with war and
violence. Irrational play can reassert itself in history by arresting the
same historical processes that it has initiated. As he puts it, “at any
moment, even in a highly developed civilization, the play-‘instinct’
may reassert itself in full force, drowning the individual and the mass
in the intoxication of an immense game” (Huizinga 1950, p. 47). This
is, in all likelihood, a veiled reference to the mass intoxication of Nazi
Germany, which Huizinga roundly condemns, however, at the very
end of his study, as “false” and “perverted” play. For obvious ideologi-
cal and political reasons, he is reluctant to characterize the Nazi war
“as noble play” (even though the Nazis themselves saw it that way).
Huizinga himself is aware of this logical contradiction, for exam-
ple, when he states:

Here the bewildering antithesis of play and seriousness presents itself

once more. We have gradually become convinced that civilization is
rooted in noble play and that … it cannot afford to neglect the play ele-
ment. The observance of play-rules is nowhere more imperative than in
the relations between countries and States. Once they are broken, soci-
ety falls into barbarism and chaos. On the other hand, we cannot deny
that modern warfare has lapsed into the old agonistic attitude of playing
at war for the sake of prestige and glory … The fact remains that politics
and war are deeply rooted in the primitive soil of culture played in and
as contest. (Huizinga 1950, p. 209)

Yet, in typical modernist fashion, Huizinga tries to find his way

out of this dilemma by falling back on the binary oppositions of play
and seriousness, fair and foul play, and disinterested and utilitarian
play, thereby generating more ambiguities. For instance, he states
that “only through an ethos that transcends the friend-foe relation-
ship and recognizes a higher goal than the gratification of the self, the
group, or the nation will a political society pass beyond the ‘play’ of
war to true seriousness” (Huizinga 1950, p. 209). Furthermore, “true
civilization will always demand fair play” (Huizinga 1950, p. 209), and
if the play-element is to be “a sound culture-creating force,” it “must
 PLAY AND LIMINALITY IN MODERNIST CULTURAL THEORY 21
be pure,” because “true play knows no propaganda; its aim is in itself,
and its familiar spirit is happy inspiration” (Huizinga 1950, p. 210f).
In all of the forgoing citations, Huizinga privileges the median
or rational concepts of play that have been operating in philoso-
phy and cultural theory at least since Plato and Aristotle, whom the
Dutch scholar closely emulates.2 Just like them, Huizinga attempts
to distill a “pure” and “disinterested,” rational play out of violent
contest and to separate it from the idea of power, even though he
knows all too well that the archaic ludic concepts associated with
war (as they appear, for example, in Homer’s Iliad) are equally “pure”
and “disinterested,” being manifestations of power for its own sake.
I should also note that golden age fictions, binary oppositions,
and self-contradictions, no less than searing cultural critiques and
self-critiques, are characteristic of modernity at war with itself. So,
even as Huizinga criticizes modernity and Modernism, he places
himself squarely in the modernist tradition. I shall make this point
throughout the present study about many other “anti-modernists.”
Here I should simply like to conclude my discussion of Huizinga’s
notions of play by observing that, despite his theoretical ambigui-
ties, his most important contribution to a theory of culture as play
is to have drawn attention, in the wake of Nietzsche, to the fact that
violent contest, such as war, is a favored cultural form of play in
Western civilization.
Indeed, one may add that power in general has often con-
ceived of itself—and manifested itself—as a form of agonistic play.
Furthermore, even though in the archaic period, this agonistic
ludic concept was unashamedly declared to be at the root of all cul-
ture (for example, in passages from Homer, Heraclitus, and other
Presocratics), it slowly became tamed and concealed under the
veneer of rational, “civilized” play to such an extent that the play
concept itself has gradually become entirely separated from the con-
cept of violent contest and power (Spariosu 1991, pp. 141–235). Hence,
all of the theoretical confusions and ambiguities present in most, if
not all, modern theories of culture as play.

2.2 Liminality and Modernist Cultural Theory

Like play, liminality has received an ambiguous treatment in modern

Western thought, and largely for the same reasons. And just like
22 MODERNISM AND EXILE

play, the concept of liminality has a long history within (and outside)
Western civilization. In the 20th century, the Belgian anthropolo-
gist Arnold van Gennep was the first to employ the term, in relation
to the rites de passage characteristic of small-scale societies. (Gennep,
1909) According to van Gennep, a passage rite comprises three
stages that the young initiand must successfully complete in order
to become a full-fledged member of his community: the first stage
involves the separation of the young man from his community;
the second or transitional stage, which van Gennep calls “liminal,”
involves the erasure of all social marks that may identify him as a
member of his community; and the third stage involves his full rein-
tegration in that community.
“Liminality,” however, covers much more semantic ground than
Van Gennep’s narrow, technical term seems to imply. Its etymology
has a very long multicultural history, stretching over thousands of
years: the word lmn (vocalized, e.g., in Hebrew as lmyn or lymyn) was
already present in Mediterranean cultures (Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic)
in the early Bronze Age and originally meant “harbor,” that is, a place
where land and sea meet.3 For thousands of years, harbors have been
cosmopolitan places of intersection of various cultures and lan-
guages, where material goods and artifacts are exchanged alongside
with ideas, customs, religious practices, and so forth.
In Latin, limes meant the borders or confines of the Roman
Empire. In turn, limen signifies “threshold” or “passage” denoting a
space or place in-between. By extension, limen came to mean any
transitional space, state, or situation and has given the term limbo
(Latin, limbus) in Catholic theology; it is occasionally also associated
with Purgatory and it means a “half-way station” between Heaven
and Hell, where the souls of those who died “in the friendship of
God” (such as many a pagan philosopher) await salvation at the
hands of Jesus Christ.
The concept of liminality is present in other religious doctrines
as well, for example, in the Pythagorean view of metempsychosis,
to which Socrates refers when he recounts the myth of Er in Plato’s
Republic. According to Er, who was allowed to come back to the
world of the living and report what he saw in the land of the dead,
the souls of recently deceased people meet at a middle station, where
they are allowed to choose their next lot.
A similar idea appears in Tibetan Buddhism, under the name of
bardo, which signifies “gap” or a space “in-between.” As Chögyam
 PLAY AND LIMINALITY IN MODERNIST CULTURAL THEORY 23
Trungpa Rinpoche explains, the word bardo is composed of bar, which
means “in-between” and do, which means “mark” or “island.” Thus, bardo
is “a kind of landmark which stands between two things.” For example,
the Rinpoche points out that bardo can denote “the experience which
stands between death and birth. The past situation has just occurred
and the future situation has not yet manifested itself so there is a gap
between the two.” Ultimately, the bardo experience is “part of our basic
psychological make-up” (Trungpa 1987, pp. 10–11).
In turn, in the Zoroastrian faith, hamistagan denotes a transitional
state, after death, in which the soul of a believer who during his
lifetime was neither good nor evil awaits Judgment Day. Finally, the
idea of liminality is equally present in Islam, where Barzakh describes
a transitional state between the moment of death and the day of res-
urrection, during which sinners are punished while the righteous
repose in peace and comfort. We can thus say with some confidence
that this idea is fairly universal, being present, explicitly or implic-
itly, in both large-scale and small-scale communities, and denoting
a transitional state, whether it is a rite de passage during this life, or to
the next one.
Starting from van Gennep’s anthropological study, Victor Turner
develops the concept of liminality into a full-blown theory of culture,
especially in his book, From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness
of Play (1982). In the first and most important chapter of this book,
“Liminal to Liminoid in Play, Flow, and Ritual,” Turner argues that
liminality is a key notion in understanding the differences between
small-scale and large-scale, more complex, human societies.
I have discussed his views in some detail elsewhere (Spariosu 1997,
pp. 32–40), so here I shall elaborate only on the most important
points of that discussion.
According to Turner, the second, transitional stage of the passage
rite described by van Gennep is an “anti-structure,” because it tempo-
rarily reverses or suspends the normal social structure or order of the
community. Citing Brian Sutton-Smith’s paper on “Games of Order
and Disorder” (Sutton-Smith 1972), Turner further notes that the lim-
inal stage of a passage rite is a game of disorder out of which a new
order emerges. He then extends this insight to liminality in general,
contending that any liminal process or state may be seen as a ludic
time-space par excellence. He regards such ludic-liminal time-spaces
as “seeds of cultural creativity” that generate new cultural models and
paradigms. In turn, these models and paradigms “feed back into the
24 MODERNISM AND EXILE

‘central’ economic and politico-legal domains and arenas, supplying

them with goals, aspirations, incentives, structural models and raisons
d’être” (Turner 1982, p. 28).
Turner eventually goes back to the passage rites, however, confining
the liminal to small-scale societies, because, in his view, the term
“liminality” can apply only metaphorically to large-scale ones.
Consequently, he introduces the concept of “liminoid” to describe
certain cultural phenomena specific to modern, industrial societies.
Although not identical with ritual liminality, liminoid phenomena
are either like it or related to it. Among such phenomena, Turner
includes postmodernist theater and art in general, film, television,
opera, rock concerts, carnivals, festivals, pilgrimages, and even
social revolutions.
According to Turner, the main difference between the liminal and
the liminoid stems from the different social structures of the tribal
and the large-scale communities. The traditional tribal structure is
monolithic, concerning the entire community, and thus more rigid
and serious than that of modern societies; consequently, tribal limi-
nality assumes the same characteristics of rigidity and seriousness.
By contrast, modern social structures are more diverse, loose, and
flexible, allowing for a great variety of liminoid creativity and inno-
vation. As Turner puts it, “One works at the liminal, one plays with the
liminoid” (Turner 1982, p. 55).
Here it becomes obvious that Turner’s distinction between the
liminal and the liminoid breaks down, because it goes against his
earlier contention that the liminal space is a ludic time-space par
excellence. Furthermore, this distinction now depends on the
opposition between play and work, or play and seriousness, which
earlier he had criticized as an unfortunate development of the
industrial society and had contrasted it to the “play-work ludergy”
or the “serious play” characteristic of liminal phenomena in both
tribal and preindustrial, large-scale cultures. (Turner 1982, p. 34) In
this respect, Turner returns to the theoretical ambiguities already
present in Huizinga’s definition of play. Like Huizinga, on the one
hand, he deplores the historical degradation of play into work in
industrial societies, and on the other hand, he praises the innova-
tive, “progressive” and “open” nature of these societies. As we shall
see again and again in subsequent chapters, this is a typical modern-
ist inconsistency, resulting from Modernism’s peculiar, paradoxical
mixture of self-love and self-hatred.
 PLAY AND LIMINALITY IN MODERNIST CULTURAL THEORY 25
The consistent theoretical position would be that whereas both
the liminal and the liminoid can manifest themselves as play, the
difference between them resides not in their degree of seriousness,
but in their degree of freedom. Indeed, given the ubiquity of liminal
phenomena in most cultures (large or small, ancient or modern,
Eastern or Western) throughout the recorded history of humankind,
one would be better off abandoning the distinction between the
liminal and the liminoid altogether, in order to avoid logical incon-
sistency and confusion. Instead, one can simply say that in some
small-scale communities liminality is put to uses different from
those in some large-scale societies; and that, moreover, these uses
may vary from period to period and from community to community.
What gives specificity to these functions is the degree of sociocul-
tural flexibility and imaginative freedom or play that a particular
society—large or small—allows itself at a given time.
On the other hand, it would be useful, in the context of the pre-
sent study of exile and utopia, to introduce a distinction between
the liminal and the marginal. Turner implies this distinction, when he
defines liminality as “an interval, however brief, of margin or limen,
when the past is momentarily negated, suspended or abrogated, and
the future has not yet begun, an instant of pure potentiality when
everything, as it were, trembles in the balance” (Turner 1982, p. 44).
He further observes that meanings in culture tend to be produced
at the “interfaces between established cultural subsystems,” but
then become institutionalized and consolidated at the centers of
these subsystems. Liminality can, in turn, be defined as “a tempo-
ral interface whose properties partially invert those of the already
consolidated order which constitutes any specific cultural ‘cosmos.’”
(Turner 1982, p. 41, italics in the original)
Here Turner offers an excellent description of the interplay between
center and margin, characteristic of any power-oriented world. But, as
he himself points out, the limen as threshold can be “protracted” and
become a “tunnel.” In other words, the liminal can also turn into the
“cunicular” (Turner 1982, p. 41), leading away from the center, rather
than back to it. In which case, the liminal can also transcend, not just
reenact, the agonistic dialectic of margin and center.
In my view, then, marginality implies an agonistic relation
between the center and the margins of a structure, system, or subsys-
tem, whereas liminality implies a neutral relation, such as obtains, for
example, in a no man’s land between two or more state borders. As
26 MODERNISM AND EXILE

I shall show throughout the present study, marginality cannot provide

access to or initiate new worlds, whereas liminality can do both. In
this regard, a margin can be liminal, but a limen cannot be marginal.
Therefore, liminality can both subsume and transcend the dialectic of
center and margin.
Whereas modernist trends and phenomena are, as we have seen,
subject to this dialectic, characteristic of a mentality of power, there
are also cultural phenomena that may transcend it, although they
are not the so-called “revitalization” social movements described
by Victor Turner, in the wake of Anthony Wallace. 4 Rather, they are
related to the resurgence, in our culture, of the ancient tradition of wis-
dom (philosophia perennis), as embodied, say, in Pythagoras, Socrates,
Apollonius of Tyana, and early Christianity in the West, as well as its
Eastern counterpart, embodied in the early Egyptian, Babylonian, and
Hebrew sages, as well as in early Buddhism, Daoism, and Sufism.
To conclude this subsection, I should like to point out that Turner
is the first contemporary Western thinker (at least to my knowledge)
to have realized the close relationship between the concept of limi-
nality and that of play. Although Huizinga’s definition of play that
I discussed in the previous subsection involves the idea of liminality,
the Dutch scholar is not aware of and, consequently, does not employ
the term. Huizinga describes the ludic as an activity that takes place
outside, and quite apart from, the everyday world, with its own time,
space, and set of rules. Therefore, even in his definition, play appears
as a form of liminal experience in which elements of everyday reality
are reorganized and transfigured into a different reality.
Finally, I should like to draw a distinction between the ludic and
the liminal that will be of use later on in this study. Just as the liminal
and the marginal should not be confused, the ludic and the liminal
are different categories. Indeed, the liminal has the same relation-
ship to the ludic that it does to the marginal. Play is a form of liminal-
ity, but not all liminal activities or experiences are ludic—in other
words, liminality contains but is not contained by the ludic. For
example, dreams, illness, and death are liminal, but not ludic, expe-
riences. And, again, my distinction here ought to be understood not
in terms of seriousness, but in terms of freedom.
The liminal, in its most radical form, points to boundless freedom
or “stillness”—what Zen Buddhism calls the “luminous void,” or
Dionysius the Areopagite calls “translucent darkness,” out of which
all structure emerges and into which all structure dissolves. In turn,
 PLAY AND LIMINALITY IN MODERNIST CULTURAL THEORY 27
play is an active principle—a creative activity that draws upon this
luminous void continuously to generate, reconfigure, or dissolve
structures. If we were to translate these notions into Western philo-
sophical terms, play is the perpetual process of setting and resetting
limits, while radical liminality is what Anaximander referred to as
the apeiron (the boundless) and the Pythagoreans referred to as the
“Unlimited.”5 In subsequent chapters of this study, I shall return to
radical liminality and its negative perception in Modernism and
modernity in general—perception that is characteristic of a menta-
lity of power.
 3
EXILE AND UTOPIA AS
PLAYFUL LIMINALITY

As I mentioned at the beginning of Chapter 1, in the past few decades,

numerous studies have focused on exile and utopia as independ-
ent concepts, but very few have seen them as interdependent (or
engaged in a relationship of mutual causality), and none has, at least
to my knowledge, explored them as kindred forms of ludic limi-
nality. In light of the foregoing discussion, I should like to suggest
that although exile and utopia are obviously not interchangeable
concepts, they share certain liminal and ludic features, imparting to
them that air of “family-resemblance” which Wittgenstein discerns
in the relations obtaining between discrete, yet kindred concepts
(Wittgenstein 1986). Above all, I shall demonstrate that they can
both reenact and transcend the dialectics of center and margin that is
associated with a mentality of power.

3.1 Exile as Ludic Liminality

Whereas probably few scholars will object to describing exile as a limi-

nal experience, its ludic character may not be readily apparent, because
it is, understandably, perceived as a highly negative experience by the
individual who is forced into it; therefore, exile seems to be devoid of at
least two basic characteristics of a ludic activity: it is not voluntary or
free, and it is not enjoyable. But, if one remembers that agon or contest
is one of the most common ludic forms and that power, particularly in
28
 EXILE AND UTOPIA AS PLAYFUL LIMINALITY 29
its archaic guise, often sees and manifests itself as agonistic play, then
one can begin to understand exile as a power game.
At the most obvious, immediate level, exile is a power instrument
through which an individual or a group can be removed from the
community for a number of reasons, be they political, religious,
ethical, or even physical—indeed, more often than not, because
of a combination of such factors. The expelled person or group is
temporarily or permanently marginalized and neutralized, and
thus prevented from having further impact on the affairs of the
community.
In traditional small-scale communities, common reasons for
exile involved the transgression of various taboos, including homi-
cide, and exile often resulted in the speedy death of the expelled indi-
vidual, who found it very difficult to survive outside his community.
In the city-states of ancient Greece, exile was a common way of
dealing not only with the individuals who transgressed against
the laws and the traditional customs of their community, such as
Oedipus (at first cast away as a baby by his father, the king of Thebes,
and then, much later, exiled at Colonus, because of his involuntary
parricide and transgression of the incest taboo—cf. my discus-
sion of Sophocles’s play in Chapter 5 below), but also with those
who were overeager in playing the political power contest. Thus, in
addition to the routine exile of those who opposed or tried to
change the political status quo, there was the political instrument
called ostracism, used predominantly in democratic city-states such
as Athens: ambitious, overreaching leaders such as Themistocles,
Alcibiades, or Critias (Plato’s uncle) were deemed too dangerous for
the well-being of the community and were temporarily removed
from it by a majority of votes in the citizens’ assembly.
In more recent times, exile has often been used for the same polit-
ical purposes, even though it has become increasingly “diversified.”
For example, internal exile was very common in large countries or
empires, such as Russia, where many members of its recalcitrant intel-
ligentsia were sent to Siberia, a practice that was continued under the
communist regimes as well. In the British Commonwealth, recalci-
trant or dissatisfied members of British society were often sent, or
decided on their own to move to the colonies, such as North America,
Australia, and New Zealand. In addition, the category of voluntary,
self-exile has become rather common in our time and has often
merged with that of immigrants, political and economic refugees,
30 MODERNISM AND EXILE

and business and cultural “expats” in the age of globalization. All

of these categories have greatly expanded the notion of exile, but
have not necessarily changed its cultural and emotional connotations,
which have remained largely negative.
Despite the fact that exile may often be perceived as an expedient
political instrument of neutralizing or eliminating one’s adversaries,
as well as an unpleasant, constraining experience for the individuals
who must undergo it, the exilic condition can also be fraught with
ambivalence and unintended consequences. Thus, it may actually
have the opposite effect of providing a free space or playground
at the intersection of various cultures and political systems. Once
the exiled person leaves his country, he is no longer at home any-
where, including his own land, should he be able to return there
subsequently. He is literally “in no man’s land,” between cultures,
languages, social structures, and so on. This ambivalent, in-between
position gives him a vast amount of freedom or “free play,” and it is
up to him to learn how to leverage it. In this sense, exile can be called
a ludic-liminal experience.
Viewed in this light, exile becomes also a form of utopia or, pro-
perly speaking, atopia if one uses this term in the original, etymological
sense of “nowhere” (a meaning of utopia highlighted in Samuel
Butler’s anagrammatic title of his 1872 novel, Erewhon). The neutral
playground or liminal space opened by exile can then be used to
effect changes on both the expelling and the receiving political
systems or cultures. Once the exiled person becomes aware of his
liminal condition, he can use it in at least two ways: he can engage in
the power game of turning his marginal position into a central one,
through political contest—this is the case of the majority of political
exiles throughout the ages, from Alcibiades in Sparta, to the popes
in Avignon, to Napoleon on Elba, to Lenin in Switzerland, to General
de Gaulle in Great Britain. Or he can go even farther in transcending
his exilic condition, by opting out of the power game of margin and
center altogether and engaging in other kinds of (utopian) play.
The view of exile as a form of ludic liminality, then, allows us to
value it as a potentially positive cultural experience. Claudio Guillén
is among the first prominent contemporary scholars who have drawn
attention to this positive nature of exile, even though he does not
speak of it specifically in ludic-liminal terms. In his brilliant essay,
“The Sun and the Self: Notes on Some Responses to Exile,” Guillén
draws a distinction between a “literature of exile” and a “literature of
counterexile.” For him, the prototype of a literature of exile is Ovid’s
 EXILE AND UTOPIA AS PLAYFUL LIMINALITY 31
Tristia: the Latin poet remains forever an alien among “barbarians,”
with his eyes perpetually fixed on Rome, his homeland, idealized as
both an immobile center and a lost paradise (Guillén 1990, p. 262).
The literature of counterexile, on the other hand, finds its proto-
type in the Cynic–Stoic view of exile as cosmic freedom. Plutarch,
among others, indicates that this view originates in the philosophi-
cal contemplation of the sun, the stars, and the other heavenly bod-
ies, which allows individual gazers to detach themselves from their
immediate historical and political circumstances and become at one
with the cosmos, converted into a universal, all-embracing home.
In a literature of counterexile, according to Guillén, “the poet learns
and writes from his experience, moves away from it as situation or
motif, while reacting to the social or political or, generally speaking,
semiotic conditions of exile through the very thrust of the linguistic
and ideological exploration that enables him to transcend the original
condition.” (Guillén 1990, p. 265)
From the point of view of the present study, what Guillén calls
a “literature of counterexile” is often enough a form of utopian
literature that starts from a profound understanding of the exilic
condition as a ludic-liminal space where the emergence of alterna-
tive realities becomes possible. Instead of brooding over his exilic
condition, yearning for the lost center, or conversely, engaging in the
power game of replacing the center with the margin, the exiled per-
son becomes aware of his radical freedom.
Disentangling himself from the logic of war and the power contest,
the exiled individual is now free to move from the marginal to the limi-
nal—indeed to the “cunicular,” to employ Victor Turner’s term—and
unleash his creativity, imagining alternative worlds that are not gov-
erned by power, but by other grounding principles, such as universal
love, human brotherhood, and a planetary, or even a cosmic, home.
Although such principles are certainly utopian, they are nevertheless
potentially real, because whatever arises in the human imagination
may be actualized at some juncture in human history. Understood in
this manner, the exilic condition may become a form of creative play,
because the exiled individual can now perceive it as both free and joyful.

3.2 Utopia as Exilic Liminality

Guillén’s observations about exile implicitly highlight its close corre-

lation to utopia. In most Western literary traditions, utopia has often
32 MODERNISM AND EXILE

been conceived as a form of exile, in the sense that it is invariably

placed away from the author’s homeland, in a remote or imaginary
location, or in a distant past or future, that is, in a liminal time-space.
The literary framing of a traditional utopian society contains, as
a rule, a departure of the narrator and/or the hero of the narrative
from his own land or soil (the Latin exilium or exsilium is most likely
formed by Latin folk etymology from ex, away and solum, soil, land)
on a sea voyage to distant, unfamiliar parts of the world. This voy-
age often ends in a shipwreck, with the narrator or hero stranded
on an unknown island or some other, hereto unheard of, place, that
is, literally nowhere. This is the case, say, of Thomas More’s Utopia
or Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, or Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines,
or Prospero’s island in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, or Marivaux’ Ile
des esclaves. Of course, More declares that he has coined the term
“utopia” itself from a composite of the Greek topos (place) and ou (no),
that is, “no place.” In English, this meaning is underlined not only by
Butler’s Erewhon, but also, before him, by Samuel Hartlib’s Noland or,
after him, by William Morris’s Nowhere, while many French authors
of literary utopias send their narrators to pays de nulle part (countries
from nowhere).
Furthermore, the land where the utopian society is allegedly
located is very hard to reach. Before the narrator or hero can gain
access to it, in both a geographical and an intellectual-emotional
sense, he has to undergo a veritable rite of passage, or liminal
experience, such as a devastating storm at sea and shipwreck (in
Shakespeare’s The Tempest, or in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels), pirate attack
(in countless Hellenistic romances), crossing of almost inaccessible
rivers, mountains, and deserts (in Voltaire’ Candide, Edgar Allan Poe’s
Gordon Pym, Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Mary
Lane’s Mizora), travel to other planets such as the Moon, Mars, and
Venus (in Lucian’s True History, in Baron von Muenchhausen’s tall
tales, or, in more recent times, in H.G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon,
C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, and the science and pulp fiction of
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Otis Adelbert Kline, Gustavus W. Pope and
Mary Lane), a plane crash (in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon or in the
contemporary television series Lost), or a traumatic ride in a space-
craft or a time machine (in countless 20th century sci-fi futuristic
works, of which H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris,
Stanley Kubrik’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the various episodes
in the television series Star Trek are probably the most familiar).
 EXILE AND UTOPIA AS PLAYFUL LIMINALITY 33
The utopian world is also carefully circumscribed in terms of its
architectural and sociocultural landscape. It is set apart from the
everyday reality of the narrator and his audience, having its own
time, space, and set of rules. At the same time, however, the utopian
world is not so far removed from everyday reality that the narrator’s
audience cannot recognize it. Rather, it is an alternative world in
which elements of everyday reality are reorganized and transformed
into a new reality. In other words, although utopias are deliberately
removed from the actual world, they nevertheless maintain subtle
and complex links with this world, being ultimately designed to
effect substantial changes on it.
One may finally note that the etymology of the term “utopia” and
its semantic cluster in general is as ambivalent as the liminal place it
designates—an ambivalence that it shares again with exile. As I have
already mentioned, the term itself is a playful coinage of Thomas
More denoting “no-place.” Through another pun, More also created
eutopia, derived from the Greek eu (good), that is, “good place.” In
his spirit, modernist literati and philosophers created dystopia, bad
place, and uchronia or euchronia (from the Greek chronos, time), denot-
ing either a good (fictive) past, or a good or bad distant future, that
is, a not-yet place. Various golden age fictions from Homer, Hesiod,
Aristophanes, and Plato to Virgil, Horace, and Ovid can also be placed
in the category of euchronias. Many futuristic worlds, predicated
largely on scenarios often to be encountered in science fiction, belong
to the category of uchronias. If these scenarios are nightmarish, such
as in 2001: A Space Odyssey, one may call them dyschronias, to coin a
new term (“new,” at least in the context of cultural studies, because
it already exists in the medical literature). Like exile, then, utopia
may have both negative and positive intellectual-emotional con-
notations. To this list, I would like to add theotopia, to describe the
various religious utopias from Plato to St. Augustine to Dante and
other Christian artists, theologians, and philosophers; and atopia,
to designate an emotionally neutral liminal space where the exiled
person (or any other self-aware individual or community, for that
matter) perceives radical liminality as an opportunity and not as a
“dead end” or terrifying “bottomless abyss,” using it as a portal to
access alternative worlds or even to start building entirely new ones.
In the remaining chapters, I shall consider other features and
markers of exile and utopia as ludic-liminal spaces and their inter-
pretive relevance, focusing on some familiar examples of utopias/
34 MODERNISM AND EXILE

dystopias, but also on other texts that are normally not considered
to belong to this discursive genre, whether literary or not.1 I shall
show that in all of these texts, exile and utopia are engaged in a rela-
tionship of mutual causality, with exilic and utopian threads being
interwoven to such an extent that one may speak of an exilic-utopian
imagination, which both engenders and shapes this type of text.

3.3 Outline of a History of the Exilic-Utopian

Imagination

As the present book centers mostly on exile and utopia in Modernism,

it can obviously not accommodate an extended historical study of
the exilic-utopian imagination in the Western world. Indeed, this
imagination is operative during all of the historical periods that
cultural historians associate with this world, and it would take hun-
dreds of pages to explore it adequately. Consequently, I shall have
to leave for another occasion a detailed exploration of its various
manifestations across various ages and geocultural spaces within
the huge conglomorate that today is referred to as the Western
civilization. Here I could offer only a very broad view of what this
history would look like and indicate how the exilic-utopian imagi-
nation in Modernism might be situated within this larger context.
On the one hand, such a history would follow the avatars of the
exilic-utopian imagination within several cycles of modernity: it
would span what most historians call Antiquity, the Middle Age,
the Renaissance, and the Reformation, with the latest cycle span-
ning the last 250 years, from the Age of Enlightenment onwards.
Each of the cycles would, in turn, contain their specific phases or
“faces” of modernity that may be of low, middle, or high intensity.
A good portion of this history would probably have to be devoted to
the cycles where the exilic-utopian imagination reaches moments of
high intensity such as those in the Hellenistic or the Greco-Roman
period, the Renaissance, and the Modern Age (since 1800).
Modernism and Postmodernism themselves look back to these
periods, and with good reason: in certain respects, our own age
seems to be a “return” to them. Specifically, the Greco-Roman
period saw the first major Western drive toward globalization, with
all of its intended and unintended, sociocultural and political con-
sequences that may be instructive to explore, if we wish properly
 EXILE AND UTOPIA AS PLAYFUL LIMINALITY 35
to understand our present historical circumstance. Likewise, the
second major Western drive toward globalization took place in the
early and late Renaissance, with the push toward the West (in search
of a maritime way to the East) that led to the European (re) discovery
of the Americas. It was at this point that utopia as a self-conscious
literary or fictional genre actually came into being, with the publica-
tion of Thomas More’s Utopia in 1516.
One should stress, however, that even though More coins the
word for this genre, and most discussions of utopia use him as a
point of departure, this does not mean that utopian works—and
the exilic-utopian imagination in particular—did not exist before
him: in fact, it is generally agreed that More used Plato’s Republic as
well as Lucian of Samosata’s Hellenistic True History for major models
in his own work. Besides, it was the Renaissance writers, including
Thomas More, who (re) discovered and looked back, no less than
Modernism and Postmodernism, to the ancient Hellenistic sources
(through direct translations from the Greek by Byzantine scholars
exiled in Italy from Constantinople, after the fall of the Byzantine
Empire in 1453)—sources which would have priority in any discus-
sion of the antecedents of Modernism and Postmodernism.2
Our history would equally have to account for the fact that the
grades of intensity, even during the cycles in which the exilic-utopian
imagination reaches high visibility, would not necessarily be every-
where the same: they would often vary in terms of time and place
in different regions of the Western world, where they may often lag
behind or may propagate back and forth, through resonance. For
example, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars initiated a
wave that brought middle forms of modernity to East Central Europe
during the second part of the 19th century, whereas high forms such
as communism and fascism first developed in Central and Eastern
Europe (Austria-Hungary, Germany, Italy, and Russia) during the
first part of the 20th century and then propagated back to Western
Europe and other parts of the world.
On the other hand, the history of the exilic-utopian imagination
could be traced along at least two tracks, which were already present
in Antiquity: religious and secular. It would show that the religious
track, still very strong in the Middle Age and the Renaissance, as wit-
nessed by such great theotopias as Ramon Lull’s Blanquerna, Dante’s
Paradiso, or Campanella’s City of the Sun, gradually fades into the back-
ground as the exilic-utopian imagination becomes increasingly
36 MODERNISM AND EXILE

secular and thus loses the transcendental quality that its grounding
in religion (or spirituality in general) imparted to it in earlier ages.
This history would equally show that the almost complete secu-
larization of the exilic-utopian imagination by the middle of the 19th
century leads to its being cut off altogether from the undercurrent of
perennial wisdom that was still present in the Renaissance. In this
regard, Voltaire’s Candide would be a good case in point. The French
illuminist thinker begins his narrative with a parody of the Garden
of Eden that he replaces, in the end, with the Garden of Man (defined
as a utopian, small-scale, rational communitas, based on the middle-
class work ethic). Voltaire, at least, makes raucous fun of other peo-
ple’s utopias while quietly promoting his own. But, most other earlier
and later, secular utopian “literary” productions were deadly seri-
ous, rambling counterparts to Candide. Many of these utopias were
collected and published by C.G.T Garnier in 36 volumes of Voyages
imaginaires, songes, visions et romans cabalistiques (Amsterdam, 1787–1789).
Among these Voyages imaginaires was the very popular History of
the Severambians, a turgid utopian novel (probably also parodied by
Voltaire), written by Denis Vairasse d’Allais (1630–1700), an exiled,
ex-Huguenot. It prefigured the “de-Christanized rationalist utopias
which increased in size and quantitative output until the French
Revolution put a temporary quietus on them.” (Manuel and Manuel
1979, p. 370) By the time we get to the grand utopian schemes of
Turgot, Condorcet, Babeuf, Saint Simon, Owen, Fourier, Marx, and
other would-be social reformers in the 19th and 20th century, religion
is pretty much banished from, or else given a minor role in, their ideal
societies, with various forms of spirituality being gradually replaced
by relentless materialism and scientific rationalism.
Furthermore, as we come closer to our age, the exilic-utopian
imagination experiences an impoverishment in another way as well:
it often sheds its playful literary garb (omnipresent, for example, in
More’s Utopia, with its exquisite learned wit, extensive word play
and double entendres) in the interest of naked ideology, religion,
or political dogma. This is the case, say, of Bacon (in New Atlantis),
the Marian exiles (English protestant clergy who left England for
the continent during Catholic rule in the 16th and 17th century), the
Puritan writers of the 17th century English Civil War such as Samuel
Hartlib, John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn, and
of the early American colonies, such as John Winthrop and Cotton
Mather, or the secular ones of the French Revolution such as Turgot,
 EXILE AND UTOPIA AS PLAYFUL LIMINALITY 37
Condorcet, Restif, Saint-Juste, and Babeuf, or the latter-day saints
of various communist and fascist movements such as Marx, Engels,
Lenin, Trotzky, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and the like.
At the same time, this history would show that what the exilic-
utopian imagination loses in complexity and depth is at least par-
tially compensated by its gain in width and self-awareness, which
tends to have ever more radical manifestations as decades and
centuries go by. It becomes increasingly visible not only in literature,
but also in such fields as political philosophy, political economy, and
science. It continues, moreover, to devise schemes of sociopolitical
rejuvenation of actual communities, or historical implementations of
imaginary, alternative ones. Thus, during some of the high-intensity
phases of Western modernity from the Renaissance onwards, the
exilic-utopian imagination has led to both small-scale and large-scale
sociocultural actualizations and/or “revitalizations,” to use Anthony
Wallace’s term. Examples of small-scale utopian experiments, or
“intentional communities,” include the Protestant religious commu-
nities in Pennsylvania such as Beissel’s Pietist Ephrata cloister of the
17th century; the 17th century town of Richelieu in the Loire Valley in
France; the 18th century Herrnhut communities founded in Saxony
with the help of Moravian exiles, by Count Ludwig von Zinzendorf
(also mentioned by Goethe in his novel, Wilhelm Meister); the Jesuit
utopian communities in Latin America (Paraguay and Argentina), to
which Voltaire equally makes reference in Candide; or the Fourierist
Brook Farm and Fruitlands of the New England Transcendentalists,
to mention just a few.
The most prominent example of a large-scale utopian actual-
ization is the United States, which began as a small-scale, Puritan
theotopia in New England (whose history is recorded, in self-
congratulatory fashion, by one of its founders, Cotton Mather, in his
monumental seven-volume opus, Magnalia Christi Americana, or The
Ecclesiastical History of New England, from its first planting in 1620, unto
the year of our Lord, 1698) and was refashioned, in the 18th century, as
the European Enlightenment’s conscious experiment in large-scale
social engineering. The most recent such utopian actualization is
the state of Israel, based on an interesting blend of secular and reli-
gious utopia that creates its own tensions and contradictions.
Furthermore, if during some of the low-intensity phases of
Western modernity, the exilic-utopian imagination largely projects
itself outwardly, through its will to colonization, during some of its
38 MODERNISM AND EXILE

high phases (such as the middle of the 17th century in England, or

the end of the 18th century in France and America, or the second
half of the 19th century and most of the 20th century on a global
scale), it also begins increasingly to turn upon itself, as it were, exper-
imenting with the communities in which it has originated. These
large-scale utopian experiments had their origins in the English,
the American, and the French Revolutions, two of which ended in
blood baths and the restoration of monarchy. Their initiators then
exported revolution outside their own communities, as it happened
with the Puritans who came to the United States, or with Napoleon
and his former revolutionary armies who pushed eastwards, all the
way to Russia. In turn, the European modern nation-state, which
arose in the wake of the American and French Revolutions and was
largely rooted in the ideology of German Romanticism, is equally
a product of this exilic-utopian imagination, culminating with the
communist and fascist experiments in large-scale social engineer-
ing, carried out and exported in many parts of the world as late as
the last quarter of the 20th century.
The case studies that this history of the exilic-utopian imagination
would use for its religious track would be the Platonic and Christian
theotopias of the Hellenic and the Graeco-Roman periods, the
Renaissance and the Reformation, from the works of Pythagoras and
Plato to Plutarch (1st–2nd century) and St. Augustine (4th–5th cen-
tury), to Joachim of Fiore in Calabria (12th–13th century), Ramon Lull
in Catalonia (13th century), and Pierre Dubois in France (14th century),
to the Pansophist creations of Campanella (City of the Sun), Bacon (New
Atlantis), and Andreae (Christianopolis), from the Reformation works
of Martin Luther, Jean Calvin, Melanchthon, Thomas Muentzer, and
Comenius, to the last Pansophist theotopia of Leibniz.
Our history would also consider works that may or may not
be usually classified as religious or secular utopias, but are never-
theless manifestations of the exilic-utopian imagination in its
most creative, artistic form, such as Homer’s Odyssey, Sophocles’
Oedipus at Colonus, Aristophanes’ The Clouds, Lysistrata and Peace,
Virgil’s Aeneid, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, the Hellenistic romances of
Heliodorus, Longus, and Achilles Tatius, Ovid’s Tristia and Epistulae ex
Ponto, Lucian’s True History, Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana,
Dante’s Divine Comedy, Bocaccio’s Decameron and Filocolo, Malory’s
Le Mort d’Arthur, Rabelais’ Gargantua et Pantagruel, Morus’s Utopia,
Sidney’s Arcadia, Spenser’s Fairie Queene, Castiglione’s The Courtier,
 EXILE AND UTOPIA AS PLAYFUL LIMINALITY 39
Neville’s The Isle of Pines, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Cervantes’ Don
Quijote and Persiles and Sigismunda, d’Urfé’s L’A strée, Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels, Marivaux’s L’Isle des esclaves, and Voltaire’s Candide, to mention
just the best-known ones.
In turn, political case studies could range from the countless
exiles in Antiquity to the popes at Avignon to the various emper-
ors and kings in exile all over medieval Europe to the émigrés of
the English and the French Revolutions; whereas prominent exilic
cultural figures could range from Dante Alighieri, Christopher
Columbus, and Niccolo Machiavelli to the exiled Greek scholars
who came to the Italian Peninsula after the Fall of the Byzantine
Empire in 1453, such as Basilios Bessarion, Demetrios Chalkondyles,
and John Argyropoulos; from Luther, Calvin, and Melanchthon to
Descartes, Voltaire, and Rousseau to Shelley and Byron. To these one
could add innumerable political examples from the 19th century,
including such notorious ones as Napoleon on Elba, Victor Hugo
on the islands of Jersey and Guernsey, or Marx in England. I shall
mention other examples, from the 20th century, in my discussion of
Modernism in Chapter 6 of the present study, but a comprehensive
history of the exilic-utopian imagination would have to wait for its
full unfolding in a separate volume. In the historical excursus of Part
II below I can only briefly trace its origins and identify its principal
themes in early antiquity, particularly the ones that will be taken up
again in Modernism.
 Part II
HISTORICAL EXCURSUS:
MODERNITY AND
THE EXILIC-UTOPIAN
IMAGINATION IN THE
ANCIENT WORLD
 4
THE BIRTH OF MODERNITY:
THE EXILIC-UTOPIAN
IMAGINATION IN ANCIENT
NEAR-EASTERN NARRATIVES
(THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH
AND THE PENTATEUCH)

In this chapter, I shall show that the idea of modernity is closely

intertwined with, and defined in part, by the exilic-utopian imagination,
and that both of them arose much earlier than it is commonly assumed.
Indeed, their origins can be traced back to an archaic, oral mind-frame and
its transition to a literate mentality. Furthermore, both the idea of moder-
nity and the exilic-utopian imagination have, more often than not, served
a mentality of power that has founded and held sway over most, if not all,
of the large human civilizations known to have existed on our planet. At
the same time, however, I shall show that the exilic-utopian imagination
can transcend a power-oriented mentality and move toward irenic sys-
tems of values and beliefs—a perspective that is equally present, if only in
a second register, in most of the ancient works I consider in this chapter.

4.1 Egyptian Narratives

There are a number of ancient works throughout the Mediterranean

region that exhibit a modern consciousness and are the product of
43
44 MODERNISM AND EXILE

the exilic-utopian imagination.1 One of the oldest such narratives is

“The Story of Sinuhe,” dating from the time of the Egyptian Middle
Kingdom (1958–1913 BC). It deals with the self-exile of the Egyptian
king’s servant-warrior who runs away when his master is killed,
possibly in a palace coup. Although Sinuhe is not guilty, he fears for
his life and takes refuge into Syrian Canaan. There he does very well
among the hill-land people or “barbarians,” but his eyes are perpetu-
ally fixed on Egypt, his homeland, which he idealizes, just as Ovid
does Rome, as both an immovable center and a lost paradise. This is a
story of exile, typical of a mentality of power, where the marginalized
hero pines after the center, on which he looks nostalgically, as a lost
golden age. After many trials and tribulations, however, he manages
to return to Egypt, as an old man. He thus regains the center, which
validates his heroic identity and confers on him the greatest honor
available in his culture—a state funeral in a pyramidal tomb. Sinuhe’s
story bears some resemblance to that of Joseph in the Pentateuch,
although the young Israelite travels in reverse, from Canaan to Egypt
and, being a nomad or “barbarian,” has no homeland to return to.2
Another Egyptian work, “Dispute between a Man and his Ba
(Soul),” also dates from the second millennium BC and equally
exhibits a well-developed modern consciousness. The unhappy,
world-weary man argues with his eternal soul over committing
suicide—a highly modern topic that could not have appeared in the
Old Kingdom, where the individual’s life belonged to the Pharaoh,
who was, in turn, the sole divine representative of the gods on earth
(these gods having removed themselves to the sky, once the earthly
kingdom of Egypt was founded). Even though the ba dismisses the
man’s arguments, the very fact that he could contemplate suicide
indicates the “dissociation of sensibility” (T.S. Eliot’s term) typical of
the modern temper. Furthermore, one could easily invoke, for this
period in Egyptian history, the “sacred canopy” argument that Peter
Berger and others make for the 18th and 19th centuries in Western
Europe, to explain the “modern” feeling of chaos, degeneration, and
decadence that is associated with the weakening of the traditional
religious/royal center of authority in ancient Egyptian society.

4.2 The Epic of Gilgamesh

From the standpoint of the exilic-utopian imagination, however, the

Near-Eastern ancient epics are the most interesting, because they
 THE BIRTH OF MODERNITY 45
exhibit a divided, double perspective typical of modernity. They are,
as a rule, written from the viewpoint of a median mentality, which
decries the older heroic order and its values based on “might makes
right,” but nevertheless looks back on it with nostalgia, as a golden
age. In this respect, the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh is no excep-
tion. Like the Iliad, it is a relatively “modern” reworking of much
older, oral material. It was recorded on tablet fragments in various
languages, such as Sumerian, Akkadian, old Babylonian, and Hittite,
and ranging in antiquity from the first half of the second millennium
to the seventh-century BC. The historical figure of Gilgamesh can
be traced even farther back, to the 3rd millennium, when a king of
the same or similar name is recorded (in the Sumerian King
List) to have reigned in Uruk, an ancient Sumerian city-state in
Mesopotamia, some time between 3000 and 2500 BC.
The bulk of the epic in its present form was, however, recon-
structed from 12 Akkadian-language tablets discovered at Nineveh
in the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal (668–627 BC), and
at least one of its authors is presumed to have been Sin-leqi-unnini,
a Babylonian priest. In this respect, the Gilgamesh epic in its most
extended, written form is not much older than the Iliad, which was
put together in Athens during the sixth-century BC, but contains
historical and legendary material that can be traced back to the
second millennium BC.
Gilgamesh himself allegedly tells the story as both a boastful
record of his great exploits and a cautionary tale. The narrative traces
his rite de passage through which he turns from the playful, careless
young king of the city-state of Uruk into a mature ruler who, con-
fronted with his own mortality, becomes aware of the limits of his
power, which now he channels into implementing massive archi-
tectural projects for his kingdom. Thus, the Babylonian epic—like
many of its later Greek and Roman relatives—symbolically traces
the transition of a certain community or culture from an archaic to
a median mentality, whereby the principle of might-makes-right is
replaced by the principle of right-supported-by-might. In the pre-
sent context, it also means that the epic already exhibits a tension
between the “traditional” (archaic) and the “modern” mindset.3
Gilgamesh is a fully modern, ambivalent figure. His ambiva-
lence comes from his divided nature (two-thirds god and one-third
human) and, consequently, his divided temporal consciousness. As
a young man he behaves like an archaic god, rejoicing in his enor-
mous power without caring about the havoc he wreaks among his
46 MODERNISM AND EXILE

subjects. He engages in the kind of violent play typical of pagan gods

and aristocratic warriors, challenging his peers to armed contest and
exercising his droit du seigneur with the virgin brides of his subjects.
He is given to spontaneous, self-indulging actions without consider-
ing their devastating consequences on his community.
In turn, Gilgamesh’s subjects never contest his right to behave
in this careless manner, appropriate for an all-powerful, rambunc-
tious young lion and, indeed, are proud of his prowess. Nevertheless,
they ask the gods to deflect it from their own community onto
others. The gods answer their prayers by creating a male playmate
for Gilgamesh, almost equal in power—Enkidu, with whom the
king will perform heroic exploits abroad, away from the kingdom.
Enkidu plays a very interesting role in the epic: no less than
Gilgamesh, he is a heroic archetype, divided between an “archaic”
and a “modern” mindset. Enkidu’s fate prefigures that of Gilgamesh,
but he is also the perfect embodiment of the modern fiction of the
birth of civilization out of savagery, with the ambivalent evaluation
of this moment: modern consciousness perceives it both positively,
as cultural advancement, and negatively, as cultural loss. On the one
hand, it regards it optimistically, as the onward march of progress
and, on the other hand, nostalgically, as the irretrievable passing of
a “golden age.”
Fashioned by the gods as a hairy, beastly creature, Enkidu gains
his humanity through a temple “harlot” (that is, a priestess serving
Ishtar, the goddess of Love and Conflict), sent by the gods to tame
him and teach him the ways of man and woman. Here the parallel
with Adam’s fall through Eve in the Genesis is obvious, and I shall
comment on it later on in this chapter. Suffice it to say that through
the priestess and her sexual skills (described in the epic with the
explicitness of modern pornography), Enkidu loses his innocence
and becomes a human, so that the wild beasts with whom he had
heretofore associated no longer recognize him as one of them and
flee from him.
At the same time, Enkidu, with his entrance into the world of
humans, gains a new, “modern” morality. His first and only fight
with Gilgamesh is over the king’s insistence on exercising his droit du
seigneur on the latest virgin bride. While the purpose of their trial of
strength is archaic in nature (the establishment of an order of rank
among heroes), its pretext is “modern”—Enkidu takes the side of the
weak against the strong, that is, the side of “right” against “might.”
 THE BIRTH OF MODERNITY 47
Nevertheless, after the two combatants establish that Gilgamesh
is the stronger of the two, they become inseparable friends (in older
Sumerian versions, master and servant—a difference of obvious
significance in terms of the double historical perspective, archaic
and modern, that I have proposed here). They proceed to perform
a number of heroic feats, including the killing of the sacred mon-
ster, Humbaba, and then of the Bull of Heaven, which Ishtar causes
to be sent in order to punish Gilgamesh for rejecting her amorous
advances. As her designs fail, she requests that Gilgamesh be killed,
but the other gods refuse, sentencing Enkidu to an untimely death
in his place.
Enkidu’s illness and unheroic death trigger a crisis of consciousness
in Gilgamesh, with highly modern overtones. He is reluctant to part
from the corpse of his beloved companion, until he sees a maggot
come out of Enkidu’s nose (again, a naturalistic detail not untypical
of modernist compositions). Gilgamesh now becomes aware of the
fact that he is one-third human and therefore subject to the ravages
of time: aging, death, and decomposition. As he himself explains
later on in the narrative:

Six days and seven nights I mourned over him

and would not allow him to be buried
until a maggot fell out of his nose.
I was terrified by his appearance,
I began to fear death, and so roam the wilderness.
.........
The issue of Enkidu, my friend, oppresses me,
so I have been roaming long roads through the wilderness.
How can I stay silent, how can I be still!
My friend whom I love has turned to clay.
Am I not like him? Will I lie down, never to get up again?4

Driven by his fear of death, Gilgamesh sets out in search of eternal

life, and it is at this moment that his rite de passage begins. He knows
of one mortal, Utnapishtim (or Utanapishtim), who has attained
immortality after surviving the Great Flood. So Gilgamesh under-
takes a dangerous journey to the abode of this immortal human in
order to learn how he can escape death. Significantly, as it is appar-
ent in the foregoing citation, most of his journey consists of roaming
through the wilderness, a liminal marker that recurs again and again
48 MODERNISM AND EXILE

in most religious (and nonreligious) narratives centered on exile and

utopia, including episodes in the Old and the New Testament.
When Gilgamesh reaches Utnapishtim, the latter tells him the
story of the Flood and gives him the name of a plant that will keep him
young, but unfortunately this plant can only be found at the bottom
of the sea. Undaunted, Gilgamesh plunges into the deep and culls the
plant. Subsequently, however, he grows careless and allows a serpent
to seize and run away with it (the parallel with the Genesis story of
the Fall is evident). So the hero must return to Uruk empty-handed.
Gilgamesh’s journey to Utnapishtim and back is highly suggestive
in terms of exile and utopia as ludic liminality. The immortal king
lives in exile on a utopian island, Dilmun, described as a beautiful
garden with trees and foliage of lapis lazuli, rubies, emeralds, and
other precious stones. It is the happy playground of the gods (similar
to the Garden of Eden in the Genesis and the Isles of the Blessed in
the Odyssey, where King Menelaus of Sparta is told he will go after
death). Like any utopian land, the island is nearly inaccessible, so
that Gilgamesh reaches it only after many trials and tribulations.
The geographical location of the island is also relevant: it is a limi-
nal place, situated at the point where the Sun rises, that is, nowhere.
To get there, Gilgamesh has to undergo another liminal, indeed,
cunicular experience: he has to find the mouth of the cave at the
point where the Sun sets and then to undertake a terrifying journey
through the tunnel that runs under the Earth to the place where the
Sun rises:

Along the Road of the Sun he journeyed—

one league he traveled ...,
dense was the darkness, light there was none.
Neither what lies ahead nor behind does it allow him to see.

The utterly dark tunnel, similar to a modern “black hole,” is the

liminal equivalent of the wilderness and again marks Gilgamesh’s
rite of passage into a new world. When Gilgamesh eventually
emerges on the other side, by the sea, he sees Dilmun gleaming in
the distance:

Eleven leagues he traveled and came out before the sun (rise).
Twelve leagues he traveled and it grew brilliant.
...it [the garden] bears lapis lazuli as foliage,
bearing fruit, a delight to look upon.
 THE BIRTH OF MODERNITY 49
But before reaching Dilmun, Gilgamesh has to undergo yet another
liminal experience. He must force Urshanabi, the boatman of
the gods, to ferry him across the sea and the “Waters of Death” —
the Babylonian equivalent of the Hellenic Styx—to the utopian
island-garden where he finally meets Utnapishtim, the immortal
former king of Shurrupak (a Sumerian city-state as ancient as Uruk).
What follows is the story of the Flood, another remarkable con-
struct of the exilic-utopian imagination, equally present in the Old
Testament.
The Great Flood provides Utnapishtim with the ultimate exilic
experience as he is severed not only from his kingdom but also from
the entire human race. For a time, the homeless king literally hangs
up in the air, with his ark perched on top of a mountain, in-between
two worlds: the world of humans, which has just been annihilated
and turned into a wasteland, and the world of the gods. But the Flood
also turns out to be a cunicular experience for Utnapishtim, because
it leads him to the utopia of Dilmun. The gods, who at first do not
quite know what to do with him, decide to make him immortal, after
all, and place him in their garden. Symbolically, then, Utnapishtim is
not only the equivalent of Noah in the Genesis, but also the antipode
of Adam, because he gains the utopian garden that the latter loses.
The last section of the Babylonian epic introduces a third pers-
pective, which does not belong to the world of power and, therefore,
transcends the agonistic dialectic of “tradition” and “modernity”
that defines Gilgamesh’s power-oriented mentality. In this regard, it
is relevant that it does not occur to him that he may be able to stay on
in Dilmun and thus become immortal. In other words, Gilgamesh
yearns for home, without fully taking advantage of his liminal posi-
tion as an exile. He is the man “who saw the Deep” or the “Abyss,”
but did not realize its liminal possibilities. In this sense, Gilgamesh
is the prototype for Hellenic Odysseus, who could also have gained
immortality on Calypso’s island, but chose instead to return home.
Furthermore, Gilgamesh reacts in typical modernist fashion to
his acute, negative consciousness of linear time and death, which
he does not conceive of as a liminal passage into another world, but
as the irrevocable end of his own. Although he has already crossed
the Waters of Death, he retraces his steps back to his former life, in
other words, he returns to the “center” that he has left behind. In this
sense, he does not learn the hidden lesson of Utnapishtim’s story:
the cunicular is a liminal passage that can lead into an alternative
50 MODERNISM AND EXILE

world where there is no center at all, because “center” and “margin”

have meaning only within a power-oriented frame of reference.
Utnapishtim has given up kingly power altogether and lives with his
family in a neutral space—the playground of the Gods—away from
the world of both divine and human affairs. But Gilgamesh elects to
go back to that world, resuming his kingly status and “heroic” way
of life.
His blindness to liminal potentiality may also explain why
Gilgamesh is so careless with the plant that could give him eter-
nal youth. Utnapishtim offers him one more opportunity to learn
his lesson by telling him of the plant that grows at the bottom of
the sea (another cunicular liminal passage), but Gilgamesh squan-
ders this opportunity as well. Instead, he returns home and seeks
the only type of “immortality” that the power-oriented, modern
consciousness can understand, that is, the grandiose architectural
projects that celebrate or “immortalize” the mightiness of their crea-
tors. The giant walls of Uruk described in the epic are reminiscent of
the modernist, mega-architectural style of our own age, and again,
it is suggestive that the tablets with Gilgamesh’s story are literally
hidden inside those walls:

Go up on the wall of Uruk and walk around,

examine its foundation, inspect its brickwork thoroughly.
…………..
Find the copper tablet box,
open the ... of its lock of bronze,
undo the fastening of its secret opening.
Take and read out from the lapis lazuli tablet
how Gilgamesh went through every hardship.

The hidden meaning of the narrative that was undoubtedly

encoded there by Sin-leqi-unnini and/or other Babylonian priests
who compiled the written version of the epic, is that peace and hap-
piness can be attained only if one is prepared to give up the system
of values and beliefs generated and perpetuated by a mentality of
power. This seems to have been the meaning of the various ancient
“mysteries” that had their origins in the tradition of perennial wis-
dom. Plutarch, for example, aptly formulated this meaning in terms
of the liminal-cunicular potentiality of exile and utopia. His spec-
ulations in De anima are worth citing at some length. Wondering
 THE BIRTH OF MODERNITY 51
why the “dread of death” is the “oldest of all fears” when the belief in
immortality is of equally “remote antiquity,” Plutarch refers to the
ancient mysteries, which, conceivably, may also serve the apotropaic
function of allaying such fears. He points out that when the soul
dies, it “has an experience like that of men who are undergoing ini-
tiation into great mysteries; . . . In the beginning there is straying and
wandering, the weariness of running this way and that, and nervous
journeys through darkness that reach no goal, and then immedi-
ately before the consummation every possible terror, shivering and
trembling and sweating and amazement. But after this a marvelous
light meets the wanderer, and open country and meadowlands wel-
come him; and in that place there are voices and dancing and the
solemn majesty of sacred music and holy visions. And amidst these,
he walks at large in new freedom, now perfect and fully initiated,
celebrating the sacred rites, a garland upon his head, and converses
with pure and holy men” (Plutarch, in Henderson 1976).
Plutarch’s is a precise description of the liminal, exilic-utopian,
journey undertaken by Gilgamesh in search of immortality, even
though the final goal eludes him, because, as Sin-leqi-unnini appears
to suggest, the mighty hero cannot understand the true meaning of
the ancient mysteries—a meaning that is profoundly alien to both
a “traditional” heroic mentality and a “modern,” equally power-ori-
ented, one.

4.3 The Pentateuch

In a parallel Near-Eastern tradition, the Old Testament equally

provides exemplary narratives in which the interrelated notions of
power as archaic contest, liminality, exile, and utopia figure promi-
nently. It is relevant to our present context that, although the first five
Books of the Old Testament known as the Pentateuch (the authorship
of which is traditionally ascribed to Moses) refer to historical and
legendary events of great antiquity, they were probably completed
in their present form during the Babylonian exile of the Hebrews
(587–538 BC). Consequently, the authors, who could be said to have
lived in a period of high modernity, might have been acutely aware
of the exilic-utopian imagination that is so prevalent throughout
these books; indeed, it would not be out of the realm of possibil-
ity that they might have introduced it in the Pentateuch and/or
52 MODERNISM AND EXILE

elaborated on it themselves. Here, I shall mainly focus my discussion

on the most striking instances of the exilic-utopian imagination as
a form of ludic liminality in the books of Genesis and Exodus, with
occasional references to the other three books as well.

The Book of Genesis The account of the Creation involves the idea
of radical liminality, conceived as undifferentiated dark and void,
“earth” and “waters”:

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon
the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the
waters. (Genesis 1.2)

Out of this dark and undifferentiated void (not unlike the apeiron
of Anaximander or the Pythagorean Unlimited), the cosmos, com-
prising the heavens and the earth, emerge through a divine ludic
act.5 This act consists of the interplay between the boundless and the
limited, as God “breathes in” the void, separating, circumscribing,
and setting limits to it. Thus, he divides and circumscribes the heav-
ens from the earth, light from darkness, dry land from the seas, and
so forth. Through the firmament or the “windows of heaven,” God
also divides the waters of the “great deep” into the waters below and
the waters above, even though he will occasionally allow them to
flood the earth by removing the boundary between them again, as
in the Great Flood (see Genesis 7.11).
As the text seems to suggest repeatedly, the Divine Artificer is at
play, enjoying and taking satisfaction in his creations: like a true art-
ist, he constantly surveys his work and judges it to be “good” and
“very good.”6 He decides to crown his creation with a human being,
whom he forms out of dust or unlimited, inchoate matter, on the
model of the divine beings God presides over, and then breathes life,
that is, his own divine spirit, into him, turning him into a “living
soul” (Genesis, 2.7).
This time God does not make any judgment about his creation,
which may suggest that He is performing an experiment, the out-
come of which He himself cannot quite foresee. This impression is
reinforced by the fact that He does not release man into the Creation
at large, but builds a special enclosure for him, the “garden of Eden,”
where He places him under observation. The garden is very much
like Dilmun, “the playground of the Gods,” that is, a liminal space
 THE BIRTH OF MODERNITY 53
par excellence. But Adam, unlike Utnapishtim, has not yet earned
it as his eternal abode. God puts him to the test by planting a tree
whose fruit Adam cannot touch or taste on pain of death (that is,
losing his immortality): the tree of knowledge of good and bad. He
also plants “the tree of life,” which He does not expressly tell Adam
and Eve not to partake of; in fact, God does not mention it to them at
all. Adam fails the test and is evicted from the Garden, together with
Eve who, beguiled by the serpent, had given him to eat of the tree of
knowledge of good and bad.
It might be intriguing to speculate what would have happened if
the “subtil” serpent had given Eve smarter advice than he actually
did: namely, to eat from both trees at the same time. This speculation
is not entirely gratuitous in view of the fact that God bars Adam and
Eve’s access to the Garden of Eden, lest they should eat of the tree of
life and become as powerful as He and his retinue are:

And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know
good and evil [or all things]: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take
also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
Therefore, the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, to
till the ground from whence he was taken;
So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the Garden of
Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword, which turned every way, to keep
the way of the tree of life. (Genesis 3.22–24)

The most obvious interpretation of this episode in Genesis would

be the one based on a mentality of power: God and his retinue of
angels and archangels do not want “man” to be as powerful as they
are. In other words, as in other archaic narratives (for instance, in
the Babylonian story of Gilgamesh, or the Hellenic narrative of Zeus
and Prometheus), the divinity sees its relationship with humans in
agonistic or competitive terms, and human actions as potentially
threatening to them. Hence, most interpreters of the Genesis have
construed Adam and Eve’s actions as “disobedience” and the divin-
ity’s action as “punishment.” God punishes them with perpetual
exile from the Garden of Eden, which thus becomes, in retrospect,
a (unattainable) utopia. One may add that Adam and Eve, as well as
their immediate descendants, become the first “modern” creatures
endowed with an exilic-utopian imagination and divided between
their tragic temporal consciousness and their nostalgic yearnings
for a lost Golden Age or euchronia.
54 MODERNISM AND EXILE

Yet, this interpretation discounts a key factor in the narrative:

“man” is given “free will” and, therefore, the injunction of not eat-
ing of the tree of knowledge ought to be construed as more of a
warning than an order. For God says: “Of every tree of the garden
you mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and
evil [bad], thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest
thereof, thou shalt surely die” (Genesis 2. 16–17). And Eve, in report-
ing his words to the serpent, adds: “Ye shall not eat of it, neither
shall ye touch it, lest ye die” (Genesis 3.3). Thus, God does not say
He will visit death upon them, but simply that they will lose their
immortality as a result of their action. The serpent counters by
doubting God’s words, and Eve chooses to believe him, rather than
the Creator.
The foregoing irenic interpretation is supported by the profoundly
generous, altruistic intent of the Creation as described in Genesis
1 and 2:

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he
him; male and female created he them.
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and mul-
tiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the
fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing
that moveth upon the earth.
And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed,
which is upon the face of the earth, in the which is the fruit of a tree
yielding seed; to you it shall be for meet.
And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to
every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have
given every green herb for meet, and it was so. (Genesis 2. 27–31)

In this key passage, much depends on the interpretation of the

words “subdue” and “dominion” which, in the line of Biblical exe-
gesis called “dominion theology,” acquire the strong meaning of
“domination,” or “harsh rule.” Yet, in the context of the entire pas-
sage, the Hebrew word rada might best be translated as “holding
sway” (Alter 2008); this translation would be in consonance with the
“stewardship theology” that can be inferred from another biblical
statement, according to which God “took the man and put him into
the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it” (Genesis 2.15), that is,
to take care of it. This and other statements show that man was cre-
ated in the image of a benevolent God who did not intend humans
 THE BIRTH OF MODERNITY 55
or other creatures to kill each other, not even for food. In fact, in the
beginning, all created beings were vegetarian and lived together in
harmony, under the stewardship of Adam and Eve. Or, at least, this
seems to have been God’s intention.
God places humans in charge of the Garden on a trial basis, in
order to test them and see how they will handle their freedoms and
responsibilities. Unfortunately, Adam and Eve eat from the tree of
knowledge of good and bad, just because the fruit is delicious to
the taste and because they want to be “wise” like the gods, without
pausing to consider what “wisdom” might entail and what the con-
sequences of their action might be.
By eating from the tree, Adam and Eve exercise their free will and
choose the world of “good and bad,” that is, choose to descend into
the world of power, where different sets of rules obtain, including
a tragic consciousness of time, violence, injustice, painful birth,
disease, old age, and death. Much like Gilgamesh, who fails to under-
stand the true meaning of the cautionary tale of the Flood and, thus,
misses not one, but two opportunities to gain immortality (the sec-
ond opportunity being wasted because of a clever snake as well),
Adam and Eve fail to understand that immortality can be preserved
only in a world that is beyond “good and evil” (or good and bad) and
beyond all of the other binary oppositions generated by a power-
oriented mentality.
At this point, one may infer that the priestly authors who redacted
the Biblical text of the Genesis wished to warn their Hebrew audi-
ence of the consequences of so-called “innocent,” that is, impulsive,
thoughtless or ill-advised actions. Just like the priestly author(s) of
the Gilgamesh epic, they ostensibly wanted to make sure that their
people understood their responsibility toward each other and their
world as a whole and that failure to gain such understanding and act
on it would have dire consequences.
In turn, God realizes that his experiment of giving humans the
gift of “free will” is in serious danger, because they have chosen the
world of power, where an ambiguous morality holds sway. God and
his entourage, when confronted with the choice between good and
bad, will always choose the good, but most humans do not possess
this kind of discernment, or, even if they do, they do not always act on
it. It now becomes clear that they who have been entrusted with the
stewardship of the Creation may endanger it by putting their knowl-
edge to improper uses, such as domination and arbitrary, violent rule.
56 MODERNISM AND EXILE

God attempts some “damage control” in order to mitigate the neg-

ative, unintended consequences of his experiment. He keeps humans
away from the tree of life not in order to punish them, but to limit
their ability to cause harm to each other and the rest of Creation.
Although they become mortal because they are barred from the tree
of life, they still have the choice of returning to immortality through
learning how to live according to their divine nature (being created
in “God’s image”), that is, according to irenic principles.
Although God is often exasperated and considers ending his
experiment for good, as in the narrative of the Flood, He can-
not bring himself to do so. He even gives Cain, the fratricide,
an opportunity to redeem himself by putting the mark of exile
on him, instead of allowing him to be murdered, which would
in turn have triggered the customary, endless chain of violent
revenge and retribution. Cain, through his ceaseless wandering
within the liminal space of wilderness, might come to understand
the enormity of his act, reform his violent ways, and “walk with
God” once more.
As in Cain’s and many other cases, God offers humans repeated
opportunities to return to their former, Edenic state. Noah and his
family have the greatest opportunity of all, since God literally washes
out or makes tabula rasa of the iniquities of the human species in
the Great Flood. Through the flood, he opens another liminal space
where humans can exercise their free will toward changing their for-
mer (self-) destructive ways of life. They can begin again, through
their new covenant with the Divinity, to live in “God’s image,” that is,
according to their irenic divine nature. They fail, however, to make
the right choice and fall back into the world of conflict, injustice, and
violence.
In fact, most of the Old Testament (and the New Testament for
that matter) is an account of God’s repeated attempts to steer human
beings toward an irenic mentality, and the humans’ repeated fail-
ures, when given the choice, to exercise their free will in the right
direction. It is in this sense that one can understand Jacob’s wres-
tling with the angel (Genesis 32:4–30), which gives him and his tribe
the name of Israel (meaning literally, according to this passage, “he
struggles/wrestles with God”). Coming face to face with God, Jacob
realizes that up to that moment he has mostly failed to live “in God’s
image” and that he must change by seeking spiritual, rather than
material well-being.
 THE BIRTH OF MODERNITY 57
The Book of Exodus In his second covenant with Israel, brokered by
Moses, God offers his people the Promised Land, “flowing with milk and
honey,” as a new Garden of Eden.7 His generous intention is to compen-
sate the heirs of Adam and Eve for their irretrievable loss and reverse
the permanent exile into which they have been thrown and which may,
at least in part, account for their erratic behavior. God appears to make
this reversal conditional on Israel obeying his “commandments,” and,
according to most theologians, the main theme of Exodus (and of the
rest of the Pentateuch) is “obedience” and/or “disobedience.” This is, in
any case, the traditional interpretation, which views the Divinity and
the Creation in terms of a mentality of power.
Admittedly, there is much material in Exodus to support such an
interpretation: for example, the story of God visiting calamities on
the land of Egypt in order to prove his divine power not only to the
Pharaoh, but also—and above all—to the Israelites. God engages in
a cruel power game with the Pharaoh. He “hardens his heart” into
not allowing the Hebrews to leave until the Egyptian king (and the
Israelites) get a full measure of his divine might. His strategy has
the desired effect, as the Hebrews are greatly impressed. Once they
are delivered from Egypt, and the armies of Pharaoh are vanquished,
they sing the praises of their Lord as a “man of war” (Exodus.15.1):
6. Thy right hand, O LORD, is become glorious in power: thy right
hand, O LORD, hath dashed in pieces the enemy.
7. And in the greatness of thine excellency thou hast overthrown them
that rose up against thee: thou sentest forth thy wrath, which con-
sumed them as a stubble. (Exodus 15)

Undoubtedly, this song bespeaks the archaic mentality of

might-makes-right that we also see in the saga of Gilgamesh and
other ancient epic narratives. The same mentality is evident in
the repeated, deadly punishments that God metes out among the
Hebrews themselves, when they begin to disobey their leaders,
Moses and Aaron. But, as in the Book of Genesis, there is an irenic
undercurrent in Exodus (and the other books of the Pentateuch)
that belongs to the perennial wisdom and is incommensurable
with this violent, power-oriented, understanding of the Divinity.
One could trace this irenic undercurrent by following the spiritual
development of Moses himself, who arrives at an irenic understand-
ing of the Divinity late in life, after a lengthy, direct communion
with God.
58 MODERNISM AND EXILE

Moses starts out as an “angry young man,” or a social revolutionary

who believes that one can put an unjust deed to right by commit-
ting another. Inflamed by this “revolutionary” sense of justice,
Moses kills an Egyptian overseer who mercilessly flogs a Hebrew
slave. As a result, he has to flee to the land of Midian. It is exile that
triggers his crisis of consciousness and, subsequently, the long pro-
cess of awakening to God’s irenic nature. To begin with, under the
impact of exile, his sense of justice extends not only to his Hebrew
brethren, but other people as well. He defends the daughters and
the flocks of Jethro, the priest of Midian, who accepts him as his
son-in-law, despite the fact that he is a “stranger in a strange land”
(Exodus 2.22). Thus, Moses begins to move from a “first-order”
morality, which prioritizes the nearest relations and the homogeneous
community, toward a “second-order” morality, which embraces all
human beings.
Moses’ first encounter with God also occurs while he is in exile.
As he wonders into the wilderness tending to the flocks of his
father-in-law, God appears to him in the guise of an inextinguish-
able “flame of fire out of the midst of a bush” (Exodus 3.2). Here one
should again emphasize that throughout the Biblical narratives,
just as in the epic of Gilgamesh, the wilderness or the desert is the
liminal space par excellence—a place where encounters between
the two incommensurable realities of the divine and the human
worlds occur. The burning bush marks precisely this “impossible”
meeting point, where a physical object no longer obeys the laws
of physics and can burn eternally without ever being consumed.
Furthermore, sacred spaces such as temples and their surrounding
land are liminal grounds where “paranormal” phenomena such as
burning bushes and disembodied voices can manifest themselves.
For millennia, liminal sacred spaces, where divine beings com-
mune with humans, have existed on Earth, and very often in the
same geographical locations, even as the nature of the religious
worship practiced in them has changed. In Exodus, God circum-
scribes and designates Mount Horeb as such a liminal, holy ground,
where He will appear to and commune with Moses and Aaron,
his priests, who must in turn convey his commandments to the
Hebrew people.
When God assigns Moses his mission of leadership on Mount
Horeb, the latter is very reluctant to take it on. Moses is fully aware
that this mission is not only very hard, but also thankless, given the
 THE BIRTH OF MODERNITY 59
experience he had with the contentious Hebrews in Egypt, after he
killed the Egyptian overseer:
13. And when he [Moses] went out the second day, behold, two men of
the Hebrews strove together: and he said to him that did the wrong,
Wherefore smitest thou thy fellow?
14. And he said, Who made thee a prince and a judge over us? Intendest
thou to kill me, as thou killedst the Egyptian?” (Exodus 2)

It is this experience that largely determines Moses to leave Egypt,

as he realizes that he cannot count on the sympathy or the solidarity
of his own people. By the time God appears to him on the mountain,
Moses has, under the impact of exile, given up his “revolutionary”
dreams and is content to live a quiet and peaceful life with his family,
without trying to change the world, but only himself. By now, per-
haps, he is also aware that the “revolutionary” task God imposes
on him—not only to liberate his people from the Egyptian yoke,
but also to guide them in building a just society—will require, as
is always the case with a violent revolution, a series of unjust, but
“necessary” actions, directed against those who oppose its objec-
tives. Here, then, we are presented with the archetypal choice of any
political exile: either follow the power-driven dialectic of the center
and margin, or opt out of this dialectic altogether.
Finally, God presents Moses with a third choice: the utopian pros-
pect of the Promised Land. The only trouble is that even this choice
involves violent conquest and dislocation of other people’s lands in
order to reach its objective. Thus, the pattern is set for the modern
mechanism of exile and utopia as an instrument of the will to power.
In turn, the exilic-utopian imagination is not given free rein; instead,
its vast liminal potential is harnessed and placed in the service of the
same will to power.
Yet, if we listen attentively to the second, irenic voice in the nar-
rative, a different interpretation of the exilic-utopian imagination
in Exodus (and the remaining books of the Pentateuch) begins to
emerge. In order to hear this submerged, second voice, we need again
to take into account that God has created “man” in his own (irenic)
image, endowing him with free will. Toward the end of his life, when
Moses gives the laws to his people, he makes it very clear that the
tribes of Israel need to accept the truth of God’s injunctions in their
“heart and soul” (Deut 26: 16–19); in other words, they need to accept
them of their own free will, not out of obedience, compulsion, fear,
60 MODERNISM AND EXILE

or duress. Embracing them is a proof of their freedom, rather than

of their bondage.
There is a very good reason, then, why the Hebrews must wan-
der for 40 years in the desert before they can enter the Promised
Land. They need plenty of preparation, especially in learning to
overcome their slave mentality, driven by fear, insecurity, distrust,
ressentiment, and rebelliousness, acquired over 400 years of bondage
in Egypt. The Israelites need to put their exile to good use and lever-
age it into self-emancipation and enlightenment, just as Moses has
done during his sojourn in the land of Median and will continue to
do throughout his wanderings in the desert, without ever reaching
the Promised Land himself.
The various punishments inflicted on the Israelites for their
“disobedience” only show that methods of violent compulsion are
always counterproductive and that spiritual awakening or renewal
can come only from within—not from without—the “heart and
soul.” Rejecting or straying from this inner path will cause further
separation from the Divinity and, consequently, more self-inflicted
punishment and suffering. Self-inflicted is the key phrase here: will-
fully or unwittingly moving away from the divine, irenic world,
based on love and harmony, rather than on jealousy and conflict,
is the cause of suffering and self-punishment, which will gradually
melt away as humans redirect themselves toward that world. It is
finally this irenic message that Moses leaves to his people—a mess-
age that later prophets will periodically take up and to which Jesus of
Nazareth will give full voice in the New Testament.
 5
MODERN CONSCIOUSNESS
AND THE EXILIC-UTOPIAN
IMAGINATION IN
THE HELLENIC WORLD:
SOPHOCLES AND PLATO

The ancient Hellenic world is another place where the exilic-utopian

imagination blossoms forth. I shall have to defer, for another occa-
sion, an extended analysis that would trace the development of this
imagination from the Homeric epic to Hesiod to the Presocratics to
Greek drama to Plato and Aristotle to the Hellenistic period. Suffice it
to say that it has the same double register that we have encountered
in the Near-Eastern narratives: on the one hand, we have an exilic-
utopian imagination that derives from and reinforces a mentality
of power; and on the other hand, we have the kind that turns away
from power and moves toward an irenic mentality. Here I can only
briefly record the presence of this double register in the works of two
very influential Hellenic authors: Sophocles and Plato.

5.1 Oedipus at Colonus

In Sophocles’s play, the exilic-utopian imagination with its ludic-

liminal features constitutes the very foundation of the plot. The
play presents blind Oedipus who has grown old wandering through

61
62 MODERNISM AND EXILE

Greece, homeless and destitute, shunned by everyone in horror.

He has lost not only his kingship and the support of his wife’s
brother, Creon, but also the loyalty of his two sons, Polyneices and
Etiocles, who have been fighting for the succession to the Theban
throne. Although Oedipus himself had appointed Creon as regent
in Thebes, the latter had shown himself ungrateful by sending his
blind and grief-stricken kinsman into exile. The only persons who
have remained loyal to Oedipus are his two daughters, Antigone
and Ismene. Indeed, Antigone has accompanied him throughout
his peregrinations, stoically sharing with him his wretched fate.
The play masterfully describes what one may call the pathos of exile,
with all the trials and tribulations that attend a person’s fall from
power—this will be the most common theme associated with exile
throughout Western literature and will, as we shall see in subsequent
chapters, have a special place in the modernist intellectual and literary
repertoire as well.
Yet, exilic pathos is only the starting point of Sophocles’s play.
The oracle from Delphi has now decreed that whoever offers aged
Oedipus a place of refuge will benefit greatly from his impending
death. As a result, he is being courted by the same relatives who have
abandoned him before, specifically by Creon, who wants him to
return to Thebes, for the city to reap the possible benefits of his death;
and by his elder son, Polyneices, who wants Oedipus to support his
bid to reclaim the Theban throne from his younger brother, Eteocles.
Revealingly enough, Creon does not offer Oedipus sanctuary in
the city itself but just outside the confines of the state. When Oedipus
finds out from Ismene that Creon is coming to see him, he asks her
what his purpose might be. His daughter replies: “To plant you near
the Cadmean land, so that they may have you in their power, while
you may not set foot within their borders.”1 When Oedipus asks
her what good he would be to them outside the country, Ismene
observes: “Your tomb contains a curse for them, if it should suf-
fer misfortune …. For this reason, therefore, they wish to get you
as their neighbor; but in a place where they will have you at their
mercy” (403–405).
As a skillful power player, Creon understands the opportunities
offered by Oedipus’s ambiguous position as an exile: he does not
wish to lose the benefits of Oedipus’s death near his home, should
the Delphi oracle prove to be true. So he attempts to hedge his bets
by keeping Oedipus in a liminal space or “limbo” just outside the
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION IN THE HELLENIC WORLD 63
Theban borders, where he could do no harm, in case the oracle turns
out to be false and the gods have in fact not lifted the parricide and
incest taboos against him. In other words, the liminal space offers
Creon the possibility of eating his political cake and having it too.
When Oedipus learns about Creon’s political machinations, he
exclaims: “Then never will they become my masters” (408). He equally
rejects the power bid of his two sons, Polyneices and Eteocles. When
Ismene informs him that her brothers found out about the oracle
and yet continue fighting for the Theban throne, instead of recall-
ing him to Thebes, he is enraged. His rage does not abate even when
Polyneices seeks him out to ask for his support. At the insistence
of Theseus and Antigone, he agrees to hear his son out. But it soon
becomes evident that Polyneices’ plea as an exile and a suppliant is
simply another crafty move in a power game—instead of asking
his father to mediate between him and his brother, Polyneices
attempts to persuade him to join his camp and justify the attack he
plans against Thebes. Oedipus decides not to help either of his sons,
leaving them to their fate:

Then may the gods not quench their fated strife, and may it fall to me to
decide this war on which they are now setting their hands, raising spear
against spear! For then neither would he who now holds the scepter and
the throne survive, nor would the exile ever return; seeing that when I,
their father, was being thrust without honor from my country, they did
not stop or defend me. (423–429)

Oedipus appears justified in his decision, because even after he

reiterates his prophecy to Polyneices that the latter and his brother
will kill each other if they engage in battle, Polyneices persists in
following his (self-) destructive course of attacking Thebes, despite
Antigone’s pleas. Although Oedipus also takes advantage of his lim-
inal position as an exile to play a power game, unlike Polyneices, he
plays this game wisely. On the one hand, he uses his liminal position
to thwart the underhanded machinations of his relatives and, on the
other hand, to reward Theseus, the king of Athens, for his true com-
passion and piety.
In turn, when Theseus finds out Oedipus’s identity, he imme-
diately decides to grant the wretched man safe harbor, not least
because he himself had known the hard life of an exile in his youth
and feels empathy for a fellow sufferer: “I know that I myself also
64 MODERNISM AND EXILE

was reared in exile, just as you, and that in foreign lands I wrestled
with perils to my life, like no other man. Never, then, would I turn
aside from a stranger, such as you are now, or refuse to help in his
deliverance. For I know well that I am a man, and that my portion of
tomorrow is no greater than yours” (560–568).
Theseus goes even farther: in addition to granting Oedipus sanc-
tuary, he makes him an Athenian citizen and protects him and his
daughters against Creon. These actions, Sophocles implies, are not
only generous but also pious, because they are in keeping with the
Hellenic law of hospitality (xenia, guest-friendship), decreed by Zeus
himself. The reward that Athens and her king might reap—victory
in a future war with Thebes—is a mere “by-product” of their piety.
Of course, in the contemporary context of the play, Sophocles’ sug-
gestion is hardly free of parti pris since it appears to proclaim the
moral superiority of the Athenians over the Thebans. Whereas the
Thebans (Creon and Oedipus’s sons) behave discreditably, Theseus,
the Athenian, behaves righteously and thus implicitly reaffirms
and validates the Athenian position of leadership among the other
Hellenic cities (leadership that, in reality, Athens had just lost in the
wake of the Peloponnesian war).
Conversely, however, the play may also be read as Sophocles’
implicit criticism of the “new,” democratic Athens who had come
to grief because of its imperialist policies, in contrast to the glori-
ous, old Athens from the time of the kings and subsequent Solonian
“good aristocratic rule” (eunomia). It was the old Athens that had
displayed great virtues, for example in leading the Hellenic cities
against the Persian invasions of the preceding age. In that light, the
play gains a utopian or “golden age” dimension, pointing to a high
traditional moral and religious standard, against which “modern”
Athens (at the close of the fifth century BC when Sophocles wrote
it), appears as corrupt and “decadent.”
Finally, one could also read the play from the irenic perspective
of the perennial wisdom, familiar to the Hellenes (and to Sophocles),
for example, from the Delphic Oracle, the Orphic mysteries, and
the Pythagorean teachings. In this light, the exilic-utopian imagi-
nation points to a radically different set of values, incommensura-
ble with those of the power-oriented world of Athens, Thebes, and
the other warring Hellenic cities. It is relevant that Oedipus declines the
king’s invitation to go to Athens and prefers to remain at Colonus.
The place is situated outside the city and thus has a liminal position
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION IN THE HELLENIC WORLD 65
as well. But, unlike Creon’s indiscriminate border location, this
liminal space is entirely appropriate for Oedipus, on various counts.
Sophocles, who was born at Colonus, has the Chorus describe it in
idealized, utopian terms, worth citing at some length:

Stranger, in this land of fine horses you have come to earth’s fairest home,
the shining Colonus. Here the nightingale, a constant guest, trills her
clear note under the trees of green glades, dwelling amid the wine-dark
ivy and the god’s inviolate foliage, rich in berries and fruit, unvisited by
sun, unvexed by the wind of any storm. Here the reveller Dionysus ever
walks the ground, companion of the nymphs that nursed him. And, fed
on heavenly dew, the narcissus blooms day by day with its fair clusters;
it is the ancient crown of the Great Goddesses. And the crocus blooms
with a golden gleam. Nor do the ever-flowing springs diminish, from
which the waters of Cephisus wander, and each day with pure current
it moves over the plains of the land’s swelling bosom, bringing fertility.
Nor have the dancing Muses shunned this place, nor Aphrodite of the
golden rein. (669–693)

Besides being a bucolic locus amoenus, indeed a Hellenic version

of the Garden of Eden, Colonus harbors the sacred grove of the
Eumenides, which is a neutral, liminal space where Oedipus is under
the protection of the gods, and not under any direct earthly author-
ity or power. Apollo had prophesied to him that this grove would be
the final destination of his sorrowful peregrinations and his eternal
resting place. It is symbolically appropriate that Oedipus should end
his life on earth in the grove of the Eumenides, who are the forgiv-
ing, gracious side of the Erinyes or the Furies.
Up to this point, Oedipus has been wandering blindly through
the world, pursued by the vengeful Erinyes and buffered back and
forth by the arbitrary, conflicting forces that make up the world of
power with its attendant misery, suffering, and death. The Chorus
drives this point home in the play’s most famous passage, which
Nietzsche, in the Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, saw as the
epitome of Hellenic tragic wisdom:

The Helper comes at last to all alike, when the fate of Hades is suddenly
revealed, without marriage-song, or lyre, or dance: Death at the end.
Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best; but when a man has seen
the light of day, this is next best by far, that with utmost speed he should
go back from where he came. For when he has seen youth go by, with
66 MODERNISM AND EXILE

its easy merry-making, what hard affliction is foreign to him, what

suffering does he not know? Envy, factions, strife, battles, and murders.
Last of all falls to his lot old age, blamed, weak, unsociable, friendless,
wherein dwells every misery among miseries. (1220–1240)

Oedipus’s exilic wanderings through the agonistic world of power,

of which his self-inflicted blindness is an apt symbol, can be seen as
a cunicular experience that will lead to his transfiguration through
death: the vengeful faces of the Erinyes (the Greek root of their names is
eris, conflict, competition) will now change to the kindly aspects of the
Eumenides (the “gracious” or “good” ones). In the grove, Oedipus has
arrived at the liminal eye of the storm, where peace and stillness reign.
At the same time, the grove of the Eumenides, just like Mount
Horeb in the Pentateuch, is a liminal or cunicular space where the
human and the divine intersect. Through mysteries to which the
play only alludes (see line 1525 and passim in the citation imme-
diately below), but which are probably not unlike those described
in Plutarch’s De anima (cited above in the Gilgamesh subsection),
Oedipus passes from the grove into the divine world. Hermes and
the “goddesses of death” (the Eumenides) are leading him as psycho-
pomps (see line 1549), while Theseus serves as a pious witness to his
apotheosis, fittingly accompanied by Zeus’s lightning and thunder.
Oedipus thus becomes a sacred figure with divine powers, to be
worshipped as a superhuman hero.
Yet, in an irenic register, Oedipus is also an example of the
nightmarish monstrosities produced by those who are “born of the
Dragon’s teeth” and live by the sword.2 Oedipus’ parting words to
Theseus serve as a warning not only to Athens (which, during the
Peloponnesian war, had committed terrible atrocities against cer-
tain Hellenic cities only because they would not join her league
against Sparta), but also to any power-oriented society throughout
the ages:

But as for mysteries which speech may not profane, you will learn them
yourself when you come to that place alone, since I cannot declare them
either to any of these people, or even to my own children, though I love
them …. In this way you will keep this city unscathed by the men born
of the Dragon’s teeth. Countless cities commit outrage even though their
neighbor commits no sin. For the gods are slow to punish, yet they are
sure, when men scorn holiness and turn to frenzy. Do not desire this,
son of Aegeus! (1525–1539)
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION IN THE HELLENIC WORLD 67
5.2 Plato’s Republic, Laws, and Seventh Letter

Platonic thought marks a crucial moment in the history of the

exilic-utopian imagination. Plato is not only the first theorist of play
in Western culture, but also the first thinker to understand the inex-
tricable link between play, exile, and utopia. He is also one of the
first thinkers who envisaged the possibility of carrying out his uto-
pian schemes into practice (the very first ones being, at least as far
as we know, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans who founded their
ideal communities in Croton, Taras, and Metapontum in Southern
Italy). Plato inspired his disciple Dion, exiled in Athens, to return to
Syracuse and institute a government based on the utopian principles
outlined in the Republic. Elsewhere I have discussed in detail Plato’s
concept of play related to his theory of education and his views on
poetry (Spariosu 1991, pp. 141–194). Here I shall draw on that discus-
sion to show how his concept of play extends to his idea of exile
and utopia. At the same time, I shall explore the multiple functions
that the exilic-utopian imagination plays in Plato’s philosophical
thought, mainly in the Republic (Politeia), with brief references to Laws
(Nomoi) and other dialogs, as well as to the Seventh Letter. I shall focus
on the major place that this imagination occupies in his theory of
knowledge and in his theology; his view of the “true philosopher”
as a self-exile in his city; his banishment of the poets from the ideal
state, only to recall those of them who would serve the utopian
program of the philosopher-king. Finally, I shall speculate on the
role that the exilic-utopian imagination played in Plato’s own life,
from the time of Socrates’ death, when he went into exile, to his
return to Athens in order to found the Academy, to Dion’s expedi-
tion to Syracuse.
In the Republic, Socrates develops a sociology and an anthropol-
ogy of play in which he seeks to replace the archaic ludic concepts,
rooted in the principle of might makes right, with the rational con-
cepts of play characteristic of a modern mentality, in which right is
separated from might, but is ultimately backed up by the latter. In
the process, Socrates develops the binary oppositions between bad
(violent) and good (peaceful) play, flippant and serious play, play and
gravity, fair and foul play, and so forth. We can find these opposi-
tions in most modernist theories of play, including, as we have
seen, those of Huizinga and Turner. Consequently, we can expect
that Socrates’ views of exile and utopia as ludic phenomena will be
68 MODERNISM AND EXILE

equally ambivalent in nature, bespeaking, mutatis mutandis, the same

divided consciousness (typical of a median mentality) evinced by
20th century modernist scholars.
The dialog itself begins as a verbal contest (agones logon) between
Socrates and the Sophist Thrasymachus over the nature of jus-
tice. Socrates gets the better of the Sophist but only by a Sophistic
sleight of hand that is described by his pupil Adimantus (Plato’s
older brother) in terms of a game of draughts. Socrates’ opponents,
Adimantus observes, being inexperienced in the game of question
and answer, are led astray bit by bit by the argument and “just as by
expert draughts players the unskilled are finally shut in and can-
not make a move, so they are finally blocked and have their mouths
stopped by this other game of draughts played not with counters but
with words; yet the truth is not affected by that outcome.”3
Socrates acknowledges that an inquiry into the nature of justice
is not best served by eristic (the art of winning adversarial debates).
He wishes to replace eristic by dialectic (Republic 5. 454a) or the art
of friendly conversation, aimed not at winning an argument, but
at discovering the truth. He implies that dialectic, unlike eristic, is
both serious and fair play, because it involves the players’ earnest
beliefs. He opposes this “good” play to the irresponsible competitive
game (or foul play) of Thrasymachus who, when Socrates asks him
whether he is expressing “his real opinions about the truth” or only
“mocking them,” replies: “What difference does it make to you …
whether I believe it or not [that might makes right]? Why don’t you
test the argument?”(Republic 1.349a4-10)
Consequently, Socrates proposes a peaceful game of legislation
in which the company would work out together the blue print of
an ideal state, based on ideal justice. While this utopian state is not
free of competition and violence, that is, from “bad” play, both these
behaviors are either channeled outside the city, into the warlike
activities of the ruler-guardians against the enemies of the state, or
strictly controlled inside it, through the education of the same group
of ruler-guardians.
Socrates considers most archaic poetry-music (mousike) to be
another form of bad play, precisely because it portrays, and thus
seems to encourage, violent contest and the mentality of might-
makes-right as a whole, especially in Homeric and Hesiodic epic
poetry. He therefore purges archaic mousike from his ideal city and
sends its practitioners into exile. At the same time, however, Socrates
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION IN THE HELLENIC WORLD 69
takes the beautiful fictions or “lies” of the poets, once they are purged
of their undesirable elements, and turns them into props for his “true
philosophy.”
The beautiful fictions that Socrates employs to elucidate his
philosophy include the “ideal state,” the “four ages of humankind”
(described by Homer and Hesiod), the “allegory of the cave,” and the
“myth of Er,” to mention just the ones that are directly related to the
exilic-utopian imagination. All of them are “good” forms of play and
imply an as if imaginative construct or simulation, or what Hans
Vaihinger, a 19th-century Neo Kantian thinker, calls an as if cognitive
fiction. 4 Such cognitive fictions are playful artifices through which
one attempts to solve particularly recalcitrant scientific or philosoph-
ical problems. They proceed as if a non-existent or indemonstrable
thing or state of affairs existed or were true, in order to learn more
about its conditions of possibility and thus advance overall knowl-
edge in a certain domain. This is precisely the kind of exploratory
play that sociopolitical utopia embarks on, as the Athenian of Plato’s
Laws proposes to Clinias, his Cretan interlocutor: “Suppose we apply
the parable to your city and try to model its laws in imagination, like
elderly men playing a boy’s game” (Laws 4.712b1-2).
Along the same lines, in the Republic, Socrates says: “Come, then,
just as if we were telling stories or fables and had ample leisure, let
us educate these men in our discourse” (Republic 2.376d6-7). And
later on in the dialog he observes: “A pattern, then, said I, was what
we wanted when we were inquiring into the nature of ideal justice
and asking what would be the character of the perfectly just man,
supposing him to exist …. We wished to fix our eyes upon them as
types and models …. Our purpose was not to demonstrate the pos-
sibility of the realization of these ideals” (Republic 5.472c4-d2).
Nevertheless, Socrates’ next step is precisely to explore “the possi-
bility of the realization of these ideals.” So, his beautiful fictions and
ideal patterns do serve a practical purpose. Socrates uses them to
get his audience to accept the idea of his utopian state as realizable.
To this end, he builds and skillfully manipulates not one, but several
political models or patterns. For example, in Book 2 Socrates pro-
poses to his interlocutors that in order to facilitate the inquiry into
justice or injustice they should proceed from state to individual, that
is, from a large-scale to a small-scale model (Republic 2. 368e8–369a2).
Yet, once he defines the state as an economy of exchange in
which individuals supplant each other’s needs, Socrates chooses
70 MODERNISM AND EXILE

the opposite method of proceeding, from the smaller to the larger

model, creating “a city from the beginning” (Republic 2. 369c9). But,
then, he reverses direction again. He builds up a large-scale state that
he calls “luxurious” only to pare it down until it becomes a just state:
“And by the dog, said I [Socrates], we have all unawares purged the
city which a little while ago we said was luxurious” (Republic 3, 399e5-
6). The “all unawares” comment is playfully disingenuous since
Socrates knows exactly what he has been doing all along.
In addition to manipulating his political models, Socrates
employs another effective strategy, Kenneth Burke’s “temporizing
the essence” (see Chapter 1 above)—a “serious” game that many
modernist practitioners of political utopia will adopt throughout
the 20th century. He historicizes his fictional models so that his
utopian state actually turns out to be an older, traditional form of rule:
an “aristocracy or the government of the best” (Republic 8.544e7-8),
superior to all the other traditional forms (timocracy, oligarchy,
democracy, and tyranny).
For example, in Book 3, Socrates proposes another poetic fiction,
the mythical analogy of the four ages of mankind (golden, silver,
brass, and iron), to persuade the rulers and the rest of the citizens
not only to observe the proper order of rank in his ideal state, but
also to accept the idea of a meritocracy or what today we would
call “upward social mobility” based on personal merit, rather than
heritage (Republic 3.415a-c). Then, in Book 8, he reuses this analogy
in order to present his constitutional forms as deriving from each
other, in regressive order, not only logically, but also historically
(8.544c–550d). Socrates thus employs the fictional construct of his
ideal polity in two ways: 1) to purge the Athenian democratic consti-
tution of the ills that he associates with democracy; and 2) to purge
the old aristocratic constitution (eunomia) of its undesirable elements
and install the philosopher-king as its guardian and executor. After
he effects this purification (katharsis), Socrates reintroduces his
utopian model into history as the original, unadulterated form of
constitution from which all the other forms have derived or, rather,
regressed.
In Critias and Timaeus (dialogs in which Socrates and his friends
continue their conversation about the ideal state begun in the
Republic), Plato uses the legend of Atlantis in similar ways. First, the
lost continent functions as a sociopolitical utopia, then as a dysto-
pia (having undergone fatal moral decay by the time of its sinking
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION IN THE HELLENIC WORLD 71
into the sea). At the same time, Socrates contrasts it to a utopian,
archaic Athens that defeats degenerate Atlantis, but only to experi-
ence, in turn, a similar moral decline. The dialogs then imply, just as
the Republic does, a return to an archaic, ideal Athenian state that had
never existed in reality.
Ever since Plato, therefore, sociopolitical utopia involves a ludic,
as if approach whereby one designs an ideal construct or “model”
with a double practical purpose: to criticize an existing, presumably
undesirable, state of affairs by measuring it against an imagined,
ideal one; and to propose the ideal model as a blueprint for reforming
the actual state of affairs or even replacing it altogether with a better
one.5 This is the ludic model followed by many a utopian writer, from
Thomas More (in Utopia) to Tommaso Campanella (in The City of the
Sun) to Francis Bacon (in New Atlantis); from Louis Mercier (Memoirs
of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred) to William Morris (in News
from Nowhere) to James Hilton (in Lost Horizon) to Ernest Callenbach
(in Ecotopia), to give just a few of the best-known examples.
One should, however, point out that one cannot separate Socra-
tes’ socio-political utopia from either his ontoepistemology or his
theology—all of them are inextricably linked and form what one
may call the Socratic theotopia. (It is the essential elements of this the-
otopia that Saint Augustine will later on adapt in designing his City
of God, which will in turn serve as a paradigm for many religious
utopias of the Middle Age and the Renaissance). As I have already
shown, Socrates acknowledges the poetic, fictional origin of philo-
sophical discourse, then consciously appropriates certain poetic
fictions and turns them into philosophical tools. He adopts the same
strategy in presenting his theology and ontoepistemology.
Socrates’ concept of divinity and the divine is both the founda-
tion and the pinnacle of his theotopia. His most important task, as
he sees it in the Republic, is to challenge and discredit the Hellenic
common view of the gods as being no less good or bad than humans.
His main quarrel with Homer and Hesiod is precisely over how they
present the gods. According to Socrates, the gods are far from being
jealous, arbitrary, and violent, as archaic epic poetry portrays them.
They are the exact opposite: just, rational, and peace loving. Even if
this were not the case, Socrates adds, this is the kind of beneficial
fiction or “lie” that the guardian-rulers and the rest of the citizens of
his utopian state should be taught from early childhood. As to the
ugly, violent stories about the gods, Socrates contends, “the best way
72 MODERNISM AND EXILE

would be to bury them in silence, and if there were some necessity of

relating them, only a very small audience should be admitted under
the pledge of secrecy” (Republic 2.378a3-5).
Socrates’ distinction between a pretty or good (kalos) lie and an
ugly or bad (kakos) one is equally based on a ludic, as if approach
to knowledge and truth, including the truth about the nature of
the gods. Because humans cannot know and, therefore, cannot
speak the truth, they can do the next best thing: they can attribute
this ability to the gods and then attempt to act as if it were given to
human beings as well. When Adimantus further presses Socrates
to name some “good” religious fictions, he playfully objects that
they are “founders of a state and are not required to compose
fables” (Republic 2.378e7–379a4). Since Adimantus insists, Socrates
presents a non-anthropomorphic picture of the gods that rejects
the archaic notion of divinity as an agonistic, violent, and arbitrary
play of power in favor of the rational, philosophical values of a
median mentality. (Republic 2.379–381)
Socrates adopts the same ludic, as if strategy in his ontoepistemo-
logy. The necessity of a playful as if approach to Being derives from
the fact that Being, unlike Becoming, is invisible and accessible only
to reason, and not to the senses. Therefore, nothing prevents the
philosopher-artist from building playful models of it in thought-
speech. The playful exchange between Socrates and Adimantus in
Republic 6.487e highlights the indispensability of this approach for
the Socratic theory of knowledge. In order to get out of the impasse
created by Adimantus’ doubt about the logical necessity of the
philosopher-kings, Socrates proposes to employ another heuris-
tic analogy or a parable (the so-called “ship of state”), but his pupil
derides him: “And you, of course, are not accustomed to speak in
comparisons” (Republic 6.487e2). Socrates playfully complains about
Adimantus’ raillery, but then proceeds with his analogy and adds
another one, right after it: the parable of the cave.
This new parable—partly a dystopia—can be seen as one of
the most compelling and most persistent creations of the exilic-
utopian imagination that would recur again and again throughout
the history of Western thought. In it Socrates compares the human
souls unawakened by true philosophy to prisoners in a cave who
are bound in chains and forced to face away from the mouth of the
cavern. Having their backs turned to their two sources of light (the
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION IN THE HELLENIC WORLD 73
sun and a fire lit behind them), the prisoners mistake true reality
for the play of figures cast on a wall before them, as in a shadow
puppet show. Whereas the sources of light represent true reality
or the world of Being, the shadow puppets represent the flitting,
insubstantial world of Becoming, which is only a pale reflection or
copy of true reality.
Socrates is well aware that such elaborate heuristic fictions
cannot be dispensed with as easily as eristic, because they are the
tools-in-trade of the true philosopher. He defines “true philosophy” as
that which “draws the soul away from the world of becoming to the
world of being” (Republic 521d3-4). This drawing process, moreover,
“would not be the whirling of a shell in the children’s game, but a con-
version and turning about of the soul from a day whose light is dark-
ness to the veritable day—that ascension to reality of our parable [of the
cave] which we will affirm to be true philosophy” (Republic 7.521c5-8).
Socrates’ concept of the immortal soul, implied in the parable
of the cave, is closely linked with his theory of knowledge and is
another example of the exilic-utopian imagination at work in Plato’s
dialogs. It has much in common not only with the Pythagorean
view of metempsychosis, but also with the Near-Eastern views of
humankind as fallen from divine grace and living in exile from the
Garden of Eden because of having made, and continuing to make,
all the wrong choices. According to Socrates, the immortal soul is
imprisoned or exiled in the body, and it is the task of true philosophy
to liberate it from the world of Becoming and to turn it again toward
the world of Being. In Phaedo, for example, Socrates observes: “Every
seeker after wisdom knows that up to the time when philosophy
takes it over his soul is a helpless prisoner, chained hand and foot
in the body, compelled to view reality not directly but only through
its prison bars, and wallowing in utter ignorance” (Phaedo, 82d7-e5).
The parable of the cave in the Republic is no more than an extension
of this analogy. Since the world of Being is transcendental, the soul
exiled in a human body has access to it only through the intellect’s
heuristic logical fictions, which, by Socrates’ own account, are ludic
in nature. In turn, true knowledge (rather than opinion) is simply a
recollection (anamnesis), on the part of the awakened soul, of the world
of Being or the ideal world of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful—
the pinnacle of theotopia—from which it has descended and where it
desires to return through the aid of philosophy.
74 MODERNISM AND EXILE

Finally, the parable of the cave refers to another essential

component of theotopia, the theory of Forms or Ideas, which also
relies heavily on the as if play of logical reasoning. In this regard,
Socrates, invoking another heuristic fiction—the analogy of the
divided line (Republic 509d–513e)—remarks: “By the other section of
the intelligible [on the divided line] I mean that which reason itself
lays hold of by the power of dialectic, treating its assumptions not
as absolute beginnings but literally as hypotheses, underpinnings,
footings, and springboards so to speak, to enable it to rise to that
which requires no assumption and is the starting point of all, and
after attaining to that again taking hold of the first dependencies, so
to proceed downward to the conclusion, making no use whatever of
any object of sense but only of pure ideas moving on through idea to
ideas and ending with ideas” (Republic 7.511b1-c2).
At the end of the dialog, in Book X, Socrates tells another beauti-
ful fiction or “lie,” the parable of Er, the young Pamphylian warrior
who dies in battle, but whom the gods sent back to life in order to
report the truth about the other, divine world. This fiction is the
concluding, as well as the crowning, piece of the Socratic theotopia.
Through the myth of Er, Socrates challenges the epic account of the
underworld and transvalues the meaning of the traditional heroic
trip to Hades, particularly as Homer presents it in the Odyssey. He
turns Hades itself into a liminal space or a Pythagorean halfway
station, where the souls have the possibility of reincarnating accord-
ing to free will, and not according to necessity or chance.
Earlier in the dialog, when Socrates attacks Homer for the “lies”
he tells about the gods (Republic 2.379c9-d2), he cites a passage in
the Iliad where Achilles consoles Priam by invoking the Hellenic
archaic belief that Zeus dispenses good and bad lots arbitrarily and
not according to merit (Iliad 24.527). In Book X, Socrates challenges
this archaic notion of necessity-chance, attempting to show that
cosmic events are ultimately determined not by an agonistic, arbi-
trary play of forces, but by a centralized, rational power.6 Whereas
this power oversees the distribution of the lots, the choice itself is
left to the individual soul about to be reborn. Socrates has a prophet
take the lots from the knees of Lachesis (one of the three Fates) and
cast them among the souls, proclaiming: “No divinity [daimon, guid-
ing spirit] shall cast lots for you, but you shall choose your own
deity [daimon] …. The blame is his who chooses. God is blameless”
(Republic 10.617e1-5).
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION IN THE HELLENIC WORLD 75
In the Socratic mythical version, therefore, the choice of a
bad lot does not come from chance as a divine agency, but from
an insufficiently examined life on the part of the chooser. In this
sense, true philosophy is a remedy against chance as ill fortune
(tuche): philosophical techne (art, technique, and know-how) greatly
reduces the effects of tuche. This ethical know-how belongs to the
perennial wisdom, also embodied in the injunctions of the Delphic
oracle: “Nothing in excess” and “Know thyself.” If men properly
understood Er’s divine message, Socrates concludes, when con-
fronted with choosing a new fate in the house of death, they would
not opt for a life of riches and royal power, but one that is “seated
in the mean.” They would “shun the excess in either direction, both
in this world so far as may be and in all the life to come, for this
[sophrosune, sobriety, level-headedness, serenity] is the greatest
happiness for man” (Republic 10.619a5-b1).
Now Socrates places Odysseus himself among the souls confron-
ted with the choice of a new lot. He has the Ithacan king renounce his
former heroic life and choose the life of a commoner. Even though by
chance (kata tuchen), Odysseus received the last lot and therefore had
to choose last, he shrewdly offset his disadvantage: “From memory
of [his] former toils having flung away ambition [philotimias, love
of time, fame, reputation],” Odysseus’s soul searched around a long
time for the “life of an ordinary citizen who minded his own busi-
ness, and with difficulty found it lying in some corner disregarded
by the others.” His soul gladly picked it, claiming that “it would have
done the same had it drawn the first lot” (Republic 10.620c5-d2). In the
myth of Er, then, Odysseus becomes the first philosopher-king, and
Socrates rewrites the journey to Hades from the Odyssey in order to
illustrate the new kind of poetic fiction required for the education of
children in his ideal polity.
The Platonic theotopia is also a theologia ludens. This is particularly
evident in the Laws, where the Athenian declares, in Book 1, that a
human being is “a puppet made by the gods, possibly as a plaything,
or possibly with some more serious purpose [spoudei tini]” (Laws
1.644d7-9). In Book 7 of the Laws, the Athenian takes up and elabo-
rates on this statement. The fact that man “has been constructed as
a toy for God,” he argues, “is the finest thing about him” and is cause
for joy rather than tragic lamentation. Even though humans may
think that they have been dealt a bad hand, it is up to them to play
it deftly (just as Odysseus does in the myth of Er): “All of us, then,
76 MODERNISM AND EXILE

men and women alike must fall in with our role and spend our life in
playing the most beautiful games [kallistas paidias]” (Laws 7.803c2-7,
trans. modified).
On the other hand, the Athenian excludes war from the most
beautiful games: “But the truth is that war can never offer us either
the reality or the promise of genuine play [paidia pephukuia], nor any
education worth the name, and these are the things that I count
supremely serious [spoudaiotaton] for such creatures as ourselves.
Hence it is peace in which each of us should spend most of his life
and spend it best [ariston, spend it nobly]” (Laws 7.803d5-e4, trans.
modified). Note, however, that the Athenian is no more of a pacifist
than Socrates was. War is acceptable as long as it is regarded not as
a playful or gratuitous activity (as the archaic mentality saw it), but
as a serious or useful one, for example, in matters of self-defense.
Although Platonic theotopia has its roots in the Hellenic perennial
wisdom, specifically in the Orphic mysteries and the Pythagorean
teachings, it is put in the service of the median mentality that
Socrates and, probably, Plato seem to choose for their ideal city.
This choice might have been faute de mieux, perhaps because
the ideal polity described in the Republic and Laws had a much
better chance of being implemented in a power-oriented world than
the Pythagorean one, which had already failed in several parts of
Southern Italy, a century before. Yet, the Hellenic median mentality,
which bears a strong family resemblance to the Western modernist
one, is equally based on power and will resort to violence whenever
its main tenets are threatened. Furthermore, it is constantly divided
between right and might, generating, as we have already seen in Part
I of this study, a whole range of asymmetrical binary oppositions,
logical and ethical contradictions, and other mental, emotional,
and behavioral inconsistencies, characteristic of Western moder-
nity in general.7
Socrates’ strategy of installing the philosopher-king as ruler in his
utopian state is another good example of this modern ambivalence,
following, as it does, the agonistic dialectic of center and margin that
is at the core of an exilic-utopian imagination based on a mentality
of power. To start with, Socrates purges his ideal state of the violent
mentality of might-makes-right, which, as we have seen, he claims to
be embedded, supported and perpetuated by most Hellenic poetry-
music (mousike). Thus, he sets up a binary opposition between “good”
and “bad” poetry—good poetry promotes the beautiful and useful
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION IN THE HELLENIC WORLD 77
fictions of true philosophy, while the bad one promotes the violent
and harmful fictions of archaic myth.
If a poet of the old school happens to stray into their ideal city,
Socrates argues, “we should fall down and worship him as a holy and
wondrous and delightful creature, but should say to him that there
is no man of that kind among us in our city, nor is it lawful for such
a man to arise among us, and we should send him away to another
city, after pouring myrrh over his head and crowning him with fil-
lets of wool, but we ourselves for our souls’ good, should continue
to employ the more austere and less delightful poet and taleteller,
who would imitate the diction of the good man” (Republic3.398a1-b3).
Although Socrates is seemingly joking about the worship that the
citizens of the utopian state should accord the “bad” poet, this joking
has ominous overtones, since such worship is also directed toward
scapegoats or sacrificial victims (both animal and human), who are
equally anointed with myrrh and decked with wool fillets, before
being led out of town and sacrificed.
Even as Socrates scapegoats the archaic poets and sends them
into exile, he deftly argues that, in the Hellenic cities of his time, the
present rulers are the bad educational products of these poets and of
the Sophists, whereas the true philosophers are nothing but exiles
and scapegoats themselves. Just as in the case of the poets, he sets
up a binary opposition between the good or true philosopher and
the bad or false one, declaring that the good one is the purveyor of
truth, whereas the bad one is the purveyor of opinion. According to
Socrates, the false philosopher prevails by far in the Hellenic cities,
including Athens, and accounts for the fact that philosophers as a
whole are held in very low esteem by the rest of the citizens. Under
these conditions, the true philosopher finds himself marginalized in
his community and, therefore, chooses self-exile.
As Socrates contends, “there is a very small remnant … who
consort worthily with philosophy, some well-born and well-bred
nature … held in check by exile.” Such a rare soul “would be as a
man who has fallen among wild beasts, unwilling to share their
misdeeds and unable to hold out singly against the savagery of all”
(Republic 6.496b1-e2). Consequently, the true philosopher “remains
quiet, minds his own affair, and, as it were, standing aside under
shelter of a wall in a storm and blast of dust and sleet, and seeing
others full of lawlessness, is content if in any way he may keep
himself free from iniquity and unholy deeds through this life and
78 MODERNISM AND EXILE

take his departure with fair hope [for the next life], serene and well
content when the end comes” (Republic 6.496b1-e2). In Socrates’
utopian polity, it is precisely this marginal figure that moves to the
center of power.
Socrates’ strategy, then, involves substituting the philosopher-kings
for the actual rulers of his time through two operations: 1) discredit-
ing and sending into exile the actual rulers as being the products of a
bad education offered by the old epic poets and the modern Sophists;
2) recalling from exile and moving the “true philosopher” into their
place, from the margin to the center of authority in his ideal state.
This is exactly the blueprint that Plato’s disciple Dion followed in
his attempt to turn the Platonic ideal state into historical reality at
Syracuse, with disastrous consequences for everyone involved.
Plato never expressed his views directly, but staged them in the
literary form of the dialog. Consequently, we have only “The Seventh
Letter” (which may, however, be a forgery) to piece together the
Syracusan episode and the determining role it played in his life. In
this letter, Plato allegedly explains his complex relationship with the
two Syracusan tyrants, Dionysius I and II, and with Dion, their rela-
tive, glossing over the disastrous role he and the Academy played in
Syracuse. Dionysius, the Younger and Dion, his uncle, were Plato’s
pupils and were responsible for his three (or, more likely, two) visits
to Syracuse. As we can glean from the letter, however, the story
begins much earlier, with Plato going into exile after his own teacher,
Socrates, was executed at the hands of the democratic faction that
had returned to Athens, unseating the bloody oligarchic rule of the
Thirty (led by Plato’s uncle, Critias).
During his peregrinations, Plato visits Southern Italy where he
befriends the Pythagoreans, particularly Archytas, the enlightened
tyrant of Taras (modern Taranto). It is Archytas and his Pythagorean
rule that most likely inspire Plato’s concept of an ideal polis, presented
by Socrates in the Republic. It is also through Archytas that Plato
meets Dion, the young brother-in-law of Dionysius I. Dion becomes
Plato’s disciple and, enthused by his mentor’s political philosophy,
invites him to visit Syracuse with the purpose of persuading Dionysius
I to translate this philosophy into reality in his own city.
After this project fails, Plato returns to Athens, where he founds
the Academy (also based on Pythagorean principles), as a greenhouse
for rearing the next generation of Hellenic leaders. He establishes the
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION IN THE HELLENIC WORLD 79
Academy (originally called Museon, just like Pythagoras’ school in
Croton) as what today we would call a “non-governmental organiza-
tion” (NGO), devoted to the worship of Apollo and the Muses, there-
fore as a liminal institution outside the political power struggles of the
city. Furthermore, Plato places it in a liminal space—the Gardens of
Hekademos—outside Athens, where the sons of the most prominent
Athenian families come together to play sports, independent of their
political beliefs or affiliations.
After Dionysius I dies, Dion invites Plato to return to Syracuse
and attempt to exercise his considerable influence on the old
tyrant’s son, Dionysius II (who has also been Plato’s pupil) in
order to carry out their original project of founding an ideal
state. Plato sails as far as Taras when he gets the news that Dion
has fallen into disgrace with his nephew and has been expelled
from Syracuse. Dion joins him in Taras, then mentor and disci-
ple return together to Athens, where the young exile becomes
a prominent member of the Academy. Meanwhile Dionysius II
keeps inviting Plato back to Syracuse, and the old philosopher
eventually accepts the invitation, hoping to bring about peace
between his two pupils. As Plato’s mission fails, Dion decides to
invade Sicily and depose his nephew.
Supported by other members of the Academy, but against Plato’s
wishes, Dion organizes and conducts a successful expedition, replac-
ing Dionysius’ tyranny with his own, allegedly more enlightened,
oligarchic rule. But he never manages to create the ideal republic
envisaged by his mentor: he becomes embroiled in a bloody civil war
and is assassinated at the hands of one of his closest friends and allies
from the Academy, Callipus, an ambitious and scrupleless Athenian
aristocrat who takes over the tyranny. In turn, Callipus is killed in a
battle with Dion’s surviving allies, and Syracuse falls back into civil
war. Dionysius II shortly regains power, but then is, in turn, deposed
by a Corinthian general, Timoleon, ending up his life as an obscure
exile. Plato never recovers from this tragedy, which is possibly
the reason why he never finishes his monumental work, Laws—he
begins it while in exile, returns to it, off and on, during later years,
but most likely abandons it after the Syracusan debacle as a useless
utopian exercise.8
This brief biographical excursus is relevant in the present con-
text, for at least two reasons. First, it reveals that Plato’s fateful life
80 MODERNISM AND EXILE

choices, and much of his writing, were driven by his exilic-utopian

imagination: his foundation of the Academy in a liminal place and
as a liminal institution, as well as his most important dialogs (which
belong to a liminal, literary genre), are clearly influenced by his
transformative exilic experiences—both positive and negative—
in Southern Italy. Second, it is an instructive story (or Socratic fable)
for all of the failed attempts, throughout Western history, to turn
sociopolitical utopias into actual states based on justice and fairness
for all of their citizens—it shows, above all, that such a state cannot
be created within the framework of a mentality of power, which will
always turn such social ideals as justice, fairness, and equality into
mere slogans that will serve its own purposes (i.e. self-preservation,
self-perpetuation, and self-enhancement). In Part III below, I shall
come back to this point in my discussion of modernist Western
colonialism and communism as two symmetrical, utopian manifes-
tations of the (political) will to power.
 Part III
EXILE, UTOPIA, AND
MODERNISM IN LITERARY
DISCOURSE
 6
THE EXILIC-UTOPIAN
IMAGINATION AND
LITERARY DISCOURSE
IN MODERNISM AND
POSTMODERNISM

We have seen that the exilic-utopian imagination is operative

during most of the historical periods that cultural historians associate
with early Western civilization, from the archaic period to classical
Greece. As I pointed out in Chapter 3, Section 3.3, a history of the
exilic-utopian imagination in subsequent ages would trace its avatars
within several cycles of modernity, including the Modern Age (since
1800), which I have called a phase of “high modernity.” Modernism
clearly belongs to such a phase. One can argue that the modernist
exilic-utopian imagination has played a significant role in, and has
in turn been stimulated by major sociopolitical developments dur-
ing the 20th century—one of the bloodiest periods in world history.
Among such sociopolitical developments one may cite the massive
human dislocations as a result of two World Wars; the division of
the political world into various antagonistic ideological camps in
the wake of these Wars; and, more recently, the breakdown and
fragmentation of the binary global power system that emerged after
World War II, where a number of postcolonial and fundamentalist
religious and nationalistic forces vie for local or regional hegemony
with the remaining “superpower.”

83
84 MODERNISM AND EXILE

In terms of political exile that has generated utopian schemes,

implemented with various degrees of (dubious) success, one could cite
numerous examples from the 20th century, among which the most
notorious are those in Bolshevik Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Ho Chi
Minh’s Vietnam, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Khomeini’s Iran.
A more successful utopian experiment after World War II, although
not devoid of ambiguities, is the State of Israel in the Middle East. The
most notorious political exiles include Lenin in Switzerland, Trotsky in
Mexico, Hitler in Germany, General de Gaulle in Great Britain, Ho Chi
Minh in France, Soviet Union and China, Menachem Begin in Lithuania
and Middle East, Yasser Arafat in Egypt, Ruhollah Khomeini in Iraq and
France, and Pol Pot in France. One should equally mention the count-
less European intellectuals who resisted Fascism and Communism,
becoming exiles in various countries of the “Free World”; religious and
humanitarian figures such as Mother Teresa in India, Albert Schweitzer
in Gabon, Mahatma Gandhi in England and South Africa; as well as the
present-day “boat people” and the leaders of sundry liberation move-
ments and other political and economic refugees around the globe.
Futhermore, one could cite illustrious writers, artists, and scientists
in exile or self-exile, such as Joseph Conrad, T.S Eliot, Max Born,
Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and more recently, Salman
Rushdie, in England; James Joyce in Trieste and Ezra Pound in
Italy; Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Nikola Tesla, Albert
Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Thomas Mann, Theodor
Adorno, Aldous Huxley, St. John Perce, Vladimir Nabokov, Czeslaw
Milosz, Mircea Eliade, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn in America;
Erich Maria Remarque, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Musil, Hermann
Hesse, and, again, James Joyce and Nabokov in Switzerland; Yevgeny
Zamyatin, Ernest Hemmingway, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco,
Emil Cioran, Constantin Brancusi, José Ortega y Gasset, Miguel de
Unamuno, Luis Buñuel, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Milan
Kundera in France, to mention only very few.
Finally, the increased self-consciousness of the modernist exilic-
utopian imagination in the 20th century has manifested itself in
scholarship as well, where the concepts of exile and utopia have
received a great deal of attention, particularly from scholars who
were exiles themselves. This past century, hundreds of studies
have been published on the topic, even though exile and utopia, as
both concepts and social phenomena, have been treated separately
and only rarely—if at all—in correlation, as I have already pointed
out. Among the works on utopia written by exiles stand out Karl
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION AND LITERARY DISCOURSE 85
Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia (German, 1929; English, 1936), Ernst
Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia (German, 1918; English, 2000) and The Principle
of Hope (German, 1938–1947; English, 1986), and Erich Fromm’s The
Sane Society (1955) and The Revolution of Hope (1968). In turn, interest-
ing accounts of European exiles in the United States include Robert
Boyers (editor), The Legacy of the German Refugee Intellectuals (1972),
Laura Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe
1930–1941 (1968), Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn (editors), The
Intellectual Migration, Europe and America, 1930–1960 (1969), Anthony
Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise (1983) and Helmut F. Pfanner, Exile in
New York: German and Austrian Writers After 1933 (1983).

6.1 The Exilic-Utopian Imagination in

Modernism and Postmodernism

In order to distinguish some of the main features of the exilic-

utopian imagination in Modernism from those of other historical
periods, I would like to go back, for a moment, to my “minimalist”
definition of modernity and modernism in Chapter 1 of the present
study: whereas “modernity” generally involves a specific perception
of and emotional attitude toward time, Modernism involves ever-
sharper reflexivity over this perception/attitude and, concurrently,
a deliberate, or even programmatic, cultivation—or repression—
of it. Consequently, the modernist exilic-utopian imagination will
also become increasingly self-conscious and will attempt to either
repress or, conversely, reassert itself aggressively, in some cases
pushing this reassertion to violent extremes.
Given the ubiquity of exile and utopia in the past century, it would
not be implausible to characterize some faces of high modernity such
as Modernism, but also Avantgarde, Futurism, and Postmodernism, as
products of an acute exilic consciousness that often seeks to generate
utopian social schemes in an attempt to compensate for its exacerbated
sense of ontological loss.1 This sense of ontological loss becomes ever
more acute not only with the growing modern trend toward seculari-
zation, but also with an increasingly negative perception of the void (or
what I termed “radical liminality” in Chapter 2 of the present study).
The fear of the void is one of the main features of what I have else-
where called the ethopathology of power (Spariosu 1997, pp. 237–260), to
which the modernist and postmodernist exilic-utopian imagination
equally belongs. This fear is very common in exiled individuals (but
86 MODERNISM AND EXILE

also in large sections of the Western populations in general) and

may be expressed as chronic boredom, existential anxiety, hypo-
chondria, and social alienation. In the modernist and postmodernist
mentality, moreover, the fear of the void is, as a rule, associated with
the fear of death, which often translates into obsession with one’s
own and other people’s extinction, and increased social violence as
a result of general devaluation of individual life.
Michel Foucault offers one of the best descriptions of the modern-
ist and postmodernist ethopathology of power centered on death
(with its attending negative emotions of horror, anxiety, dread,
despair, panic and so on) when he relates writing, speech, and lan-
guage in general to the modernist equation of death with the void:
“Writing so as not to die, as [Maurice] Blanchot said, or perhaps even
speaking so as not to die is a task undoubtedly as old as the world….
It is quite likely that the approach of death—its sovereign gesture,
its prominence within human memory—hollows out in the present
and in existence the void toward which and from which we speak.”2
Significantly, after linking death with the void, Foucault associates
the two concepts with what he calls “endless striving,” that is, with
the will to power: “Perhaps there exists in speech an essential affin-
ity between death, endless striving and the self-representation of
language. Perhaps the figure of a mirror to infinity erected against
the black wall of death is fundamental for any language from the
moment it determines to leave a trace of its passage…. In this sense,
death is undoubtedly the most essential of the accidents of language
(its limit and its center): from the day that men began to speak toward
death and against it, in order to grasp and imprison it, something
was born, a murmuring which repeats, recounts, and redoubles
itself endlessly” (Foucault 1977, p. 55).
For Foucault, as for many modernists and postmodernists, death
is a “black wall” as well as both “limit” and “center.” Thus, for the mod-
ern mentality of power, death is one of the most important taboos and
challenges of the will, or the self-constructed resistance most difficult
to overcome and therefore the most “productive” and “real.” No wonder
that Western modernist and postmodernist culture is so infatuated
with images of violence and death, creating a contradictory mystique
of horror, repression, and transgression around them (it is highly rele-
vant that Foucault devotes almost half of his essay to a discussion of de
Sade and successful 18th-century horror fiction). One may add that the
20th century has also seen a resurgence of the religious exilic-utopian
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION AND LITERARY DISCOURSE 87
track in the form of widespread apocalypticism, both in popular
fiction and in everyday life. In turn, this apocalypticism, which
attempts to deal with the same horror of the void as biological extinc-
tion, may take secular forms as well, for example, in the dire ecological
predictions of the end of the planet at the hands of evil, ecologically
incorrect, humans.
Foucault embraces this modernist and postmodernist view of
death without much reflection, as one could see from the essentialist
and universalist vocabulary of the foregoing citation (“as old as
the world,” “human memory,” “essential affinity,” “from the day men
began to speak,” etc.). This vocabulary is part of the tragic-negative
pathos of inevitability circumscribing any mentality of power and is
in striking contrast with, say, the Buddhist positive ethopathological
vocabulary of death in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, in which death is
regarded neither as a “black wall” nor as “center” and “limit” (margin),
but as an important, though not the ultimate, threshold, as a liminal
gap fraught with peril but also with endless opportunity.
Whereas fear of death is recognized as a bio-psychological fact
in both traditional and modern societies, the ways of dealing with
it differ widely from individual to individual, from community to
community, and from one historical period to another. We have
seen, for instance, that Plutarch counteracts the ancient human
fear of death with the equally ancient human belief in immortality.
Modernism has its own strategies of dealing with death, although
they are considerably more limited and less effective than those of
traditional and small-scale societies, precisely because in these soci-
eties fear of death is not expressly linked to (fear of) the void. One
very common strategy is symbolic transcendence of physical death:
the individual performs valuable services to his community, which
will in turn bring recognition or validation beyond the individual’s
lifespan, amounting to a transcendence of individual mortality.
This strategy is as a rule available to both archaic and modern socie-
ties, as we can see in the epic of Gilgamesh or in Homeric epic, for
example, in Odysseus’ choice of trading immortality for a long and
quiet life with his loyal family and subjects on Ithaca.
Apart from this traditional strategy, especially evident in the
monolithic modernist architecture, including the grandiose build-
ing projects of communist and fascist regimes (which claimed
that their massive public edifices would last, just like their rule, for
millennia), Modernism typically looks to materialist science to offer
88 MODERNISM AND EXILE

solutions in this regard as well. For example, there is the budding

science of cryonics that holds out hope for wealthy people to be con-
gealed into a state of suspended animation until medical science is
advanced enough to prolong their lives indefinitely. There are also
various contemporary scientific rationalizations of the fear of death
as evolutionarily useful and socially productive. Among them one
can mention the so-called Terror Management Theory (TMT),
which has its origin in the work of Freudian psychoanalysts such as
Ernest Becker and starts from the Freudian ideas about death; these
ideas can, in turn, be traced back to Nietzsche’s concept of the will
to power. Becker, for example, in Chapter 2, “The Terror of Death”
of his influential book, The Denial of Death, seeking the “causes” of
human heroism and heroes, states: “Here we introduce directly one
of the great rediscoveries of modern thought: that of all things that
move man, one of the principal ones is his terror of death.” Then
Becker adds: “heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of
death” (Becker 1973, p. 11).3
Whereas Becker is right as far as modernist mentality is concerned,
he misinterprets the archaic “heroic” mentality: this mentality
is driven by the will to power in its naked form (that is, not dressed
up in the garb of rationality), for which death is just another instru-
ment of self-affirmation and self-enhancement. Gilgamesh is driven
by his fear of death to seek—literally—immortal, not heroic, status.
He does not equate death with the void, but plunges courageously
into the “abyss” and goes beyond it. It is only after he comes back
empty-handed from his quest (because of his own blindness) that he
turns to the “modernist” strategy of building mega monuments to
preserve his memory. In turn, for Homeric heroes, death is mostly
a means of eliminating heroic competitors. They inflict death on
others without worrying too much about their own. Achilles, for
example, chooses death over a long, but undistinguished life, so he
is not motivated by his fear of death in the modernist sense, but fear
of tarnishing his time (fame, renown). In a heroic culture, Hector’s
behavior of running away from Achilles in battle is decried as
shameful—in the end he has to turn around and face his challenger.
In other ancient heroic cultures, such as that of the Getae, described
by Herodotus, death is a welcome passage into the world of the gods,
whereas birth is an unfortunate, deplorable event. We have seen that
the same attitude is displayed in Sophocles’s play, Oedipus at Colonus,
where the chorus regards death as a welcome deliverance from the
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION AND LITERARY DISCOURSE 89
sufferings of life (caused by the “endless striving,” as Foucault puts
it, of the will to power). The passages in Homer that refer to fear of
death belong to the median (and not to the heroic) mentality, which
I have mentioned in my discussion of the Gilgamesh epic and to
which the modernist mindset equally belongs. 4
More to the point are Nietzsche’s comments in On the Genealogy
of Morals where he links death to the will’s fear of the void, which
generates all meaning. In describing the “ascetic ideal,” for exam-
ple, Nietzsche argues that although this ideal signifies a will to
nothingness and a revulsion from life, it nevertheless remains a
will: “That the ascetic ideal has meant so many things to man, how-
ever, is an expression of the basic fact of the human will, its horror
vacui [horror of a vacuum], it needs a goal, and it will rather will
nothingness than not will” (Nietzsche 1989, p. 134). Here Nietzsche
reveals the central tautology of any thought that makes power its
grounding principle. For such thought, power must always con-
stitute its own raison d’être. No matter how perverted the ascetic
ideal may be, it is “justified” because it remains an expression of
the will. Indeed, it is a strong bulwark against what power abhors
most, the void or nothingness.

6.2 The Exilic-Utopian Imagination in

Modernist and Postmodernist Cultural Theory:
Two Case Studies

Since I have referred several times, in this study, to Modernism and

Postmodernism as two distinct aesthetic/intellectual and sociocul-
tural trends, at this juncture it may be useful to clarify my criteria of
distinguishing between them: for me, they are contemporary labels
for the very old contest between archaic and median values that
I have mentioned on several occasions in the course of this book:
what theorists have labeled cultural “modernism” often supports
median values, even though it occasionally presents these values,
especially in artistic works, in an ironic, parodic or problematic fash-
ion. At the same time, it casts a nostalgic look at the archaic values,
which it idealizes as a Golden Age of integrated individual intellect
and emotion with holistic community. In other words, Modernism
remains divided between two modernities, aesthetic and bourgeois,
often attempting to mediate between them.
90 MODERNISM AND EXILE

Postmodernism, on the other hand, often appears as a renewed

attempt to reaffirm archaic values in Western culture. In this respect,
Nietzsche is one of the first “postmodernists” who attempt to under-
mine the cultural authority of Western median values, including
the hegemony of Reason and middle-class morality. Likewise, in
the wake of Nietzsche, Postmodernism shifts its emphasis from the
world of eternal Being, necessity, continuity, and essence (which is
still operative, albeit in either a nostalgic or an ironic manner, in
Modernism), to the world of perpetual Becoming, chance, chaos, and
play of simulacra. The prevailing attitude or mood of Modernism is
cultural nostalgia, whereas the prevailing mood of Postmodernism
is Nietzsche’s “cheerful forgetfulness” and amor fati (in the sense of
an active acceptance and affirmation of the will to power in all its
manifestations, including violence, pain, and suffering, as all there
is—Foucault’s essay previously discussed is a good example of
the postmodernist mindset). Politically, Modernism often prefers
stable forms of power, such as democracy or enlightened monar-
chies, whereas Postmodernism tends to fluctuate between opposite
extremes of the political spectrum, that is, between oligarchic or
autocratic forms, including modern dictatorships (whether of the
right-wing type or the left-wing type), and unstable, ever changing
forms, such as “anarchy” and “perpetual revolution.”
From my point of view, then, what Roger Griffin calls “mod-
ernism” is not a reaction to the decay of modernity, but to “bour-
geois” modernity which, as I mentioned in Chapter 1 of this study,
certain 19th century artistic and intellectual elites (in the wake
of Baudelaire) declared bankrupt in order to establish their own
versions or “faces” of modernity. At the point where this “new”
or “revitalized” Modernism begins to reaffirm the “primordial”
values of an archaic period, idealized as an aristocratic Golden
Age (in which might-makes-right is the organizing principle of
hierarchical, social cohesion), it would be more properly called
“postmodernism,” especially in Italian Fascism, German National
Socialism, and Russian Stalinism, with their cult of absolute power,
worship of the charismatic personality of a “supreme” leader, and
Machiavellian ethics of “ends justifying means.”
Nor should one be deceived by the label “post,” thinking that these
two sociocultural trends supersede one another; rather Modernism
and Postmodernism coexist, being two faces of modernity at oppo-
site poles and yet engaging in feedback loops that support and
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION AND LITERARY DISCOURSE 91
nourish the mentality of power that has engendered them in the first
place. Indeed, they are yet another avatar of the by now old conflict
between aesthetic and bourgeois modernity which, we recall, was in
turn an avatar of the even older Quarrel between the Ancients and
the Moderns, with Postmodernism taking the position of aesthetic
modernity and Modernism, that of bourgeois modernity.
Modernism and Postmodernism also enlist the exilic-utopian
imagination for different purposes and interests. Modernism tends
to see exile as a negative or even tragic development, connected with
absence, death, and the void; in turn, it fluctuates between a positive
and a negative view of utopia (the negative attitude often producing
dystopias in literature). Postmodernism, on the other hand, tends
to have a positive view of exile, seeing it as an affirmative power
game that continually re-enacts the agonistic dialectic of center and
margin. Furthermore, Postmodernism deconstructs traditional and
modernist utopias, only to create its own golden age fictions, based
on a revival of archaic values, embodied, for example, in Nietzsche’s
superman (whose utopian society would, from the modernist
perspective, be a dystopian one).
Modernism has produced quite a few pathos-filled testimonials
of life in exile —see, among countless examples, Robert Boyers’s
collective volume, The Legacy of the German Refugee Intellectuals (1972)
or, from a reverse perspective, Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return (1934).
Here, I shall discuss only one recent example, Edward Said’s illumi-
nating essay, “Reflections on Exile,” which develops what one may
call a modernist ethopathology of exile, inextricably linked with the
ethopathology of power. I shall then briefly contrast it with Joseph
Brodsky’s equally illuminating essay on “The Condition We Call
Exile, or Acorns Aweigh,” which, while describing the same ethopa-
thology, does not display Said’s unhappy consciousness about it, but,
on the contrary, affirms it as a valuable, if painful, life experience
and, therefore, comes closer, in some respects, to a postmodernist
mindset (even though it points beyond it as well).
Said begins his essay by distinguishing between the various con-
temporary categories of exiles, refugees, expatriates, and émigrés,
observing that the term “exile,” unlike the others, evokes a “touch
of solitude and spirituality”5—this is so, I would suggest, because of
the term’s traditional literary associations (for example, in the works
of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio or, in more recent times, those
of Victor Hugo, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Saint-John
92 MODERNISM AND EXILE

Perse). Said draws a sharp distinction, however, between exile and

exilic literature, which turns out to be a distinction between “true”
(read: political) reality and its aestheticized or fictionalized versions.
Said does not believe that literature can do justice to the pathos of
modern exile. At best, it can be a palliative for an irretrievable loss;
at worst, it can be a vain attempt to hide a crippling, real-life expe-
rience under the mask of compensatory, utopian daydreaming. For
Said, exile is “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and
a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sad-
ness can never be surmounted; And while it is true that literature
and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant
episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to
overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. The achievements
of exile are permanently undermined by the loss of something left
behind forever” (Said 2000, p. 173).
Nor can exile today, in Said’s view, be made to serve notions
of humanism, because, on “the twentieth-century scale, exile is
neither aesthetically nor humanistically comprehensible” (Said 2000,
p. 174). Exilic literature reifies “an anguish and a predicament most
people rarely experience first hand.” To think of the exile presented
in this literature as “beneficially humanistic,” would mean “to banal-
ize its mutilations, the losses it inflicts on those who suffer them,
the muteness with which it responds to any attempt to understand
it as ‘good’ for us” (Said 2000, p. 174). Furthermore, the views of exile
not only in literature but also—and most importantly—in religion
“obscure what is truly horrendous: that exile is irremediably secular
and unbearably historical; that it is produced by human beings for
other human beings; and that, like death but without death’s ulti-
mate mercy, it has torn millions of people from the nourishment of
tradition, family, and geography” (Said 2000, p. 174).
Along the same lines, Said challenges the idea that “non-exiles
can share in the benefits of exile as a redemptive motif” (Said 2000,
p. 173). He acknowledges that a few exceptional exiled individuals
did “leaven their environments” (Said 2000, 173). Here he cites the
beneficial effects that the learned Greek slaves in the Roman Empire
or the medieval itinerant scholars had on their new cultural habitat.
Even modern Western culture, Said notes, has largely been produced
by exiles. In the United States, for example, “academic, intellectual
and aesthetic thought is what it is today because of refugees from fas-
cism, communism, and other regimes given to the oppression and
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION AND LITERARY DISCOURSE 93
expulsion of dissidents” (Said 2000, 173). And yet, if we look at the
phenomenon from “the bleak political perspective of modern mass
dislocations,” exiled individuals “force us to recognize the tragic fate
of homelessnesss in a necessarily heartless world” (Said 2000, 174).
Said then goes on to develop a physiognomy of the exile, based
on the pathos of existential displacement. The exile’s predicament
is “as close as we come in the modern era to tragedy” (Said 2000,
p. 183). His isolation and displacement generate a type of “narcissis-
tic masochism that resists all efforts at amelioration, acculturation,
and community.”(Said 2000, p. 183) The artistic works of exiles are
hardly known for their composure and serenity. Exiled artists, Said
writes, “are decidedly unpleasant, and their stubbornness insinu-
ates itself into even their exalted works.” He gives the example of
Dante, whose Paradiso, despite its beatific vision, “still bears traces
of the vindictiveness and severity of judgment” that are found in the
Inferno. “Who but an exile like Dante,” Said asks, “would use eternity
as a place of settling old scores?” (Said 2000, p. 182).
The exiled individual can “make a fetish of exile,” distancing
him from all connections and commitments. Because he is forced
to live as if everything around him were temporary and insignifi-
cant, the exile is prone to “fall prey to petulant criticism as well as
to querulous lovelessness.” He often experiences “a loss—of critical
perspective, of intellectual reserve, of moral courage.” Although he
can develop new affiliations and loyalties, he may also be pressured
“to join—parties, national movements, the state” (Said 2000, p. 183).
Later on in the essay, however, Said seems to endorse the opposite
view, which comes closer to what I have described as a postmod-
ernist position. The exile, he says, far from losing critical perspec-
tive, “cultivates critical detachment” (Said 2000, p. 185). Earlier, Said
deplored the exile’s tragic feeling of rootlessness, citing Simone
Weil’s observation that “To be rooted is perhaps the most important
and least recognized need of the human soul” (Said 2000, p. 183).
But now he notes, approvingly, that the exile “understands that in
a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional.
Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar
territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond
reason and necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought
and experience” (Said 2000, p. 185).
As one can see, Said’s notion of exile is ambivalent, partly because
it is rooted in a secular, materialist mentality of power, typical of
94 MODERNISM AND EXILE

Modernism and Postmodernism. The ending of his essay equally

shows this ambivalence. Said notes that some exiles may see a “sense
of achievement in acting as if one were at home wherever one happens
to be.” But to him this sense of achievement is either self-deceptive
or rooted in dissimulation. The life of the (intellectual) exile remains
forever insecure, unsettled: “the habit of dissimulation is both wea-
rying and nerve-racking. Exile is never the state of being satisfied,
placid, secure.” On the contrary, the exile’s life is “outside habitual
order. It is nomadic, decentered, contrapuntual; but no sooner does
one get accustomed to it than its unsettling force erupts anew”
(Said 2000, p. 186).
Said is aware that much identity formation is tied up with the
exilic experience and points out the link between exile, national-
ism and nation building. He does not mention, however, the major
role that utopianism plays in this process as well. In fact, like many
modernists and postmodernists, Said takes an anti-utopian or
dystopian stance in his essay (for instance, in his brief remarks on
exile in literature and religion), thus missing the utopian character
of nation building. He refers specifically to the nationalist projects of
the Jews and the Palestinians in our time, observing that such “recon-
stitutive projects as assembling a nation out of exile” are the work of
the collective imaginary—the exilic-utopian one, I would suggest.
These “imagined communities,” to use the apt phrase of Benedict
Anderson (Anderson 2006) involve “constructing a national history,
reviving an ancient language, founding national institutions like
libraries and universities” (Said 2000, p. 184). They yield ambiguous
results, generating “ethnocentrism, but also self-questioning and
self-awareness” (Said 2000, p. 184) which, one may add, are typical
for the modernist mindset.
In this context, Said might also have mentioned national, or ethnic,
or racial nostalgia, which equally belongs to the exilic-utopian imagi-
nation. The exilic imaginary of the nationalist, or ethnicist, or racist
type tends to idealize a state of affairs (for example, a “home,” “race,”
and “tribe”) that never existed, deploring it as an “irretrievable loss” and
turning it into a utopia that continuously looks both backwards
and forwards. Eurocentric, Afrocentric, and other protochronistic
projects equally belong to this imaginary. All of the foregoing obser-
vations, I should note, are valid for building national/communal
identity not only in our time or in the Middle East, but throughout
the ages and in many different places as well. Ancient Rome, among
many others, is a good case in point: the exilic-utopian imagination
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION AND LITERARY DISCOURSE 95
lies at the foundation of the Roman Empire as understood by Virgil in
the Aeneid, where Trojan Aeneas, after the destruction of Troy, leads
his people into exile in search of the “Promised Land” of Latium.
In turn, ancient Rome is subsequently mythologized as a utopian
model and origin for Napoleonic France in Nietzsche’s Genealogy
of Morals, for Italy in Mussolini’s speeches, and so forth. Likewise,
the mythical Camelot of the medieval Arthurian sagas served as a
utopian model for Elizabethan England in Spenser’s Fairie Queene,
or for the American presidency of John F. Kennedy, in the political
commentaries of his presidential circle.
Finally, I should point out that in developing his physiognomy of
the exile, Said blurs his initial distinction between exiles and refu-
gees. This physiognomy does not refer to the “average” economic, or
religious, or war refugee swept away in the “modern mass disloca-
tions,” but to the exiled intellectual or artist who may have the luxury
of those “touches of solitude and spirituality” that Said mentions at
the beginning of his essay. The refugees en masse of today, as well as
many an emigrant of yesterday, have totally different problems and
concerns (mainly connected with sheer physical survival) than those
of the typical intellectual or political exile. They often try to escape
the dire socioeconomic and political conditions at home, which they
as a rule exchange for relatively better conditions in the countries
willing to resettle them. Therefore, they often deliberately choose
temporary homelessness over their own “heartless” homes.
To give just one contemporary example, this is the situation of
tens of thousands of “boat people,” many of whom venture on the
high seas, at the peril of their lives, in search of a safer and more sta-
ble home. Indeed, from the vantage point of many of them (quite
different from Said’s), Crèvecoeur’s principle of ubi panis, ibi patria
(where there is bread, there is my home) applies. To them, Western
countries, and the United States in particular, function as enticing
utopias of a prosperous and free existence, worth endangering one’s
life for, just to reach their democratic shores.6 (That these utopias
may lose luster on arrival, or even turn into dystopias for some of
them, is another matter.)
Perhaps, then, it is bad faith to speak in the name of, and attribute
the same tragic pathos to both the exiled intellectual (or artist) and the
socioeconomic or war refugee. I should add that, not infrequently,
the former—specifically the exiled politician or ideolog—has caused
the plight of the latter and would not hesitate to plunge millions
more, with “necessary heartlessness,” into the dire condition of
96 MODERNISM AND EXILE

homeless refugees, in order to regain power and attain his political or

ideological goals.
Joseph Brodsky, on the other hand, is aware of this trap and largely
avoids it. He does begin his essay by evoking the same tragic pathos
of the modern mass dislocations. However, unlike Said, he sticks to
his distinction between the exiled artist or intellectual and the huge
mass of refugees brought about by modern geopolitical upheavals,
stating openly that he can speak only in the name of the former: the
intellectual exile’s unhappy or disgruntled condition can bear no
comparison with the existential plight of millions of refugees, who
“make it very difficult to talk with a straight face about the plight of
the writer in exile.”7 In the rest of the essay, Brodsky focuses on the
exilic experience of the writer—and the Soviet writer—in particular
(the topic he was asked to speak about). Admittedly, this experience
is not for the faint-hearted either, but Brodsky prefers describing it
not so much in tragic as in comic terms. Whereas Said is a master of
the exilic pathos that is so often encountered in modernist accounts
of intellectual exile, Brodsky deliberately seeks to tone this pathos
down: “If one were to assign the life of an exiled writer a genre, it
would have to be tragicomedy.”(p. 24)
According to Brodsky, the situation of the exiled (Soviet) writer
is, like much tragicomedy, fraught with irony: he is now free to voice
his political or any other views, but encounters the barrier of a for-
eign language and culture that renders him mute. Having landed in
a democracy such as the United States, he is now physically safe, but
socially insignificant. “And the lack of significance is what no writer,
exile or not, can take” (Brodsky 1995, p. 24). His “appetite for recog-
nition” makes him restless and oblivious to the material rewards he
might otherwise enjoy in his adoptive country (Brodsky 1995, p. 25).
He was accorded a lot of attention in his homeland, albeit negative,
but, for a writer’s ego, negative attention is better than none at all. In
fact, it has earned him the condition of (political) exile, which now
he cannot put to good account, precisely because, ironically, his ego
stands in the way.
Yet, if anything, exile ought to teach you humility. “Put down your
vanity, it says, you are but a grain of sand in the desert.” You ought to
“measure yourself not against your pen pals,” but against “infinity.”
You ought to speak out of that infinity, “not out of your envy or ambi-
tion” (Brodsky 1995, p. 25). Unfortunately, Brodsky notes, this exilic
call for humility remains unheeded (he does mention a few notable
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION AND LITERARY DISCOURSE 97
exceptions, such as Robert Musil and Czeslaw Milosz). The exiled
writer is “constantly fighting and conspiring to restore his signifi-
cance, his leading role, his authority; he also wants to rule the roost
in the malicious village of his fellow émigrés” (p. 26).
Here, Brodsky’s description seems to corroborate Said’s observa-
tion that “much of the exile’s life is taken up with compensating for
disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule” (Said 181); in other
words, many an intellectual or artist in exile remains entrapped in
a mentality of power, trying to reproduce, in the new environment,
the commanding political (or cultural) authority s/he has lost in the
old one. Whoever is familiar with émigrés’ circles, or has belonged
to one, has experienced this struggle for significance or relevance.
It often generates petty squabbles and backbiting among their
members, which Said chooses largely to gloss over, but which are,
indeed, tragicomic: comic, because of the fatuous self-importance
of inflated egos, and tragic (or just saddening?), because of the lack
of awareness of one’s true condition, or of the genuine opportunities
that exile may present for one’s self-development.
In this regard, Brodsky points out that exile is a “metaphysical
condition”: to ignore or not to confront it is “to cheat yourself out
of the meaning of what has happened to you, to doom yourself into
remaining forever at the receiving end of things, to ossify into an
uncomprehending victim” (p. 26). The “victim” mentality, so often
displayed in pathos-filled accounts of exile, needs to be transcended
if the exile is to take his destiny in his own hands. Before he does that,
however, he must become aware of what exile truly means: although
this condition “is famous for its pain, it should also be known for its
pain-dulling infinity, for its forgetfulness, detachment, for its terri-
fying human and inhuman vistas for which we’ve got no yardstick
except ourselves” (p. 33). In other words, exile is a metaphysical con-
frontation with infinity, the void, and death, which no self-aware
(modern) individual—exiled or not—can escape.
It is in this context that Brodsky introduces the notion of play:
the terrifying confrontation with infinity or the void can be seen as a
game in which each individual is free to choose the cards, or moves,
s/he wishes to play (although Brodsky does not mention it, the ludic
metaphor goes back to Plato’s beautiful game of life, in imitation of
the gods, in the Laws, or to the less beautiful game of chess, or back-
gammon, with Death, in medieval accounts). One of the least “win-
ning” ways of playing this game, Brodsky suggests, is choosing the
98 MODERNISM AND EXILE

“victim” card or move. Nostalgia (which, as we have seen, Said does not
mention in his essay) is another ineffective strategy. Even though
Brodsky acknowledges that (modern) humans are by nature “retro-
spective and retroactive beings,” looking back (and also, I should add,
forward) to states of affairs that never existed—a shorthand definition
of the utopian drive—exiles are especially given to this tendency. In
their case, however, nostalgia is often “a failure to deal with the realities
of the present or the uncertainties of the future” (Brodsky 1995, p. 30).
Thus, for Brodsky, proactive moves are the best strategy in the
existential game: “In the great causal chain of things, we may as
well stop being just its rattling effects and try to play causes. The
condition we call exile is exactly that kind of opportunity. Yet, if
we decide to remain effects and play exile in an old-fashioned way,
that shouldn’t be explained away as nostalgia. It has to do with the
necessity of telling about oppression, and our condition should
serve as a warning to any thinking man toying with the idea of an
ideal society” (Brodsky 1995, p. 34).
For Brodsky, the biggest role that an exile can play is that of a free
human being. He draws a distinction between a “freed” and a “free”
person, because “liberation is just a means of obtaining freedom,
not synonymous with it” (Brodsky 1995, p. 33). Indeed, all too many
(intellectual) exiles are engrossed in nostalgia, pain, political resent-
ment, reenacting the same old battles again and again, or, conversely,
in existential efforts to adapt and become “naturalized” in the new
culture, so that very few of them remain truly free. This kind of free-
dom, however, also involves the greatest risk, which the exile should,
Brodsky suggests, be ready to assume and accept: “If we want to play
a bigger role, the role of a free man, then we should be capable of
accepting or at least imitating the manner in which a free man fails.
A free man when he fails, he blames nobody” (Brodsky 1995, p. 34).
In the foregoing citation, with which Brodsky ends his essay, the
poet may have in mind Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between “freedom
from” and “freedom to” doing something, but he challenges his readers
to figure out themselves what this something might be. The “freedom
from” undoubtedly involves freeing yourself from oppressive attach-
ments, old and new, whether political, sociocultural, or personal (the
“three nets” of Steven Dedalus in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man—religion standing for the “sociocultural” in this particular
case) and from the “victim” mentality of blaming others and yourself.
The “freedom to” is much more difficult to figure out. If I were to guess,
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION AND LITERARY DISCOURSE 99
what Brodsky has in mind is freedom to write his poetry the best way
he knows how, despite doctrinal constraints and pressures (political,
ideological, economic, or critical), whether these pressures come from
within or from without him. And he reserves the right to fail in this
creative endeavor, without blaming anyone, not even himself.
For my part, I choose to regard “freedom to” in a metaphysical
way, as the joyous acceptance of and fusion with atopia—another
word for “radical liminality” or the “luminous void”—from which
all structures emerge and into which all structures dissolve, in the
eternal play of existential manifestations. In the exilic condition,
this radical liminality, which is the invisible background of our
existence, emerges, becomes visible and may be quite unsettling
for the (modernist) individual who does not recognize it as infinite
freedom, but as a terrifying, inescapable void. As Brodsky suggests,
it is easy to become “liberated,” but very hard to remain free. At
that point, the exile draws back from this radical freedom, instead
of fully embracing it, and attempts to cover it up again with such
palliatives as struggle for significance, self-importance, religious
conversion, nostalgia for a lost home, etc.
There actually is a hint of radical liminality or atopia (and the
proper attitude toward it) in Said’s essay, when the Palestinian scholar
cites Eric Auerbach, a distinguished, Jewish-German, exiled scholar
of the previous generation, who in turn cites Hugo de St. Victor,
a twelfth-century Saxon monk: “The man who finds his homeland
sweet is still a tender beginner, he to whom every soil is as his native
one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as
a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the
world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect
man has extinguished his” (Said 2000, p. 185).
Said does not make much of this observation, citing it only in pass-
ing, toward the end of his essay; instead, he returns to the “irretrievable
loss” of exile that he invokes at the beginning, which now “erupts anew”
with “unsettling force” (Said 2000, p. 186). Yet, St. Victor’s remarks
could have been the subject of his entire piece, if Said had not remained
entrapped in exilic nostalgia and pathos, be they “metaphysical” ones.
Through his words, Hugo de St. Victor means also to “extinguish” the
exilic-utopian imagination altogether, so that new mindscapes are
opened to the human soul.
I shall return to St. Victor and atopia later on in the present
study. For the time being, I should say that both Said and Brodsky
100 MODERNISM AND EXILE

display the divided feelings toward exile and utopia (without

explicitly connecting the two) that are characteristic of Modernism
and Postmodernism. Despite the fact that Said is generally con-
sidered a postmodernist thinker, I believe that in this essay, and in
much of his work as a whole, he displays a modernist temper (in
my sense of the term) at least as far as his nostalgic attitude toward
exile, his anti-utopianism, and his ideas of social transformation
go. Brodsky, on the other hand, seems closer to the postmodernist
affirmative attitude toward exile, perceiving it largely as a power
game that can be played in various, more or less productive, ways.
But, his open-ended conclusion may also point to ways of playing
the exilic game outside the mentality of power and its postmodernist
manifestations.

6.3 Modernism, Postmodernism, and

the Exilic-Imagination in Literature

Said presents literature, at least in his essay on exile, as an embel-

lished representation and surrogate of (political) reality. This
mimetic view (in Auerbach’s sense)8 is in line with Said’s denial of
the utopian value of contemporary exilic literature and is probably
meant to serve his strategic purposes only in this particular context,
without extending to literature as a whole. Here, his rhetorical strat-
egy seems to be threefold: first, Said denies the redemptive value of
exile altogether, dismissing literary accounts of it as purely pie in
the sky; second, he dismisses as mere dissimulation or bad faith the
positive attitudes toward exile displayed by certain postmodernist
academic exiles in the West, particularly in the United States, but
also in Great Britain—indeed, these “boutique” exiles, to coin a
phrase, are more often than not poseurs, coming mostly from
wealthy families in the so-called “Third World” and doing equally
well in the “First World”; and third, Said enhances, by contrast, the
tragic pathos of the millions of genuine political or socioeconomic
refugees from troubled geopolitical areas of the planet.
On the other hand, Brodsky’s view of the redemptive value of liter-
ature in general and of exilic literature in particular is just the oppo-
site of Said’s, serving, in turn, the strategic purposes of his own essay.
Although Brodsky does not believe in sociopolitical utopias or “ideal
societies,” having just been banished from one, he does affirm the
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION AND LITERARY DISCOURSE 101
crucial importance of literature as a utopian exercise. Since all other
social and political remedies have, in his view, failed, and despite the
repeated, unsuccessful attempts of the intelligentsia—and writers in
particular—to reform society, one must hold firmly to the (utopian)
belief that “literature is the only form of moral insurance that a soci-
ety has; that it is the permanent antidote to the dog-eat-dog principle;
that it provides the best argument against any sort of bulldozer-type
mass solution—if only because human diversity is literature’s lock
and stock, as well as its raison d’être” (Brodsky 1995, p. 23). “We
must insist,” Brodsky goes on, “that literature is the greatest—surely
greater than any creed—teacher of human subtlety, and that inter-
fering with literature’s natural existence and with people’s ability to
learn literature’s lessons, a society reduces its own potential, slows
down the pace of its own evolution, ultimately, perhaps, puts its own
fabric in peril” (Brodsky 1995, p. 23). It is probably in this sense that he
claims the right, at the end of his essay, to write his poetry in as free
a manner as possible (which, of course, remains, in turn, a utopian
desideratum).
Brodsky’s remarks are an excellent introduction to Part III of the
present study, which deals with Modernism and the exilic-utopian
imagination in literature. As it will be noticed from this Part’s title,
I have avoided speaking of “modernist” or “postmodernist” litera-
ture, because such critical labels are extraneous to the true nature of
literary or artistic discourse in general, or its relation to other types
of discourse. I should, perhaps, clarify my view on these issues,
before I proceed with an analysis of the literary works that I have
selected as case studies for the exilic-utopian imagination in an age
of high modernity, in the next four chapters.
In such analyses, I constantly keep in mind, and attempt to
negotiate, the gap between the work in itself and its various actu-
alizations over time through the aesthetic experience of its various
readers, including literary critics, theorists, and historians. Likewise,
I draw a distinction between Modernism as a sociocultural trend
and modernist or postmodernist ideas and attitudes that appear in a
certain work of art. In this regard, it may be true that Modernism has
its beginnings in literature and art in general—or, more accurately,
in the critical or theoretical discourse about them—spreading
then to the social and political domains, with the result that feed-
back loops are being generated through which literary/aesthetic
fictions and sociopolitical actuality reinforce each other. It may
102 MODERNISM AND EXILE

also be true that modernist ideas have often appeared and have
been debated for the first time in certain literary works. But, it is
equally true that what a critic may label a “modernist” literary or
artistic work may by far exceed a modernist cultural or political
program.
In this respect, major writers have consistently resisted any critical
labels, such as “modernists” or “realists” (Flaubert and Balzac are well-
known cases in point); even the artists who initiate or identify with
an aesthetic movement and write “manifestos,” such as the surrealists
or the Dadaists, only seldom strictly adhere to their own program-
matic tenets in their actual artistic productions—in fact, many such
manifesto-writers often turn out to be rather mediocre artists, their
“manifestos” being, as a rule, their most interesting works.
Furthermore, the dynamic interaction between literature or art
and other forms of human expression, specifically politics (to which
Brodsky—coming as he does from an oppressive communist regime
known for its strict censorship of literature and art—thinly alludes)
is hardly a phenomenon specific to one literary period, such as
Modernism, but goes at least as far back as Plato’s Republic. Thus, what
Theodor Adorno, for example, calls the modern “aestheticization of
the state” in Fascism, which he traces back to Friedrich Schiller (in the
Aesthetic Education of Man), could in fact be traced back to Plato (as we
have seen in the Republic and Laws), Virgil (in the Aeneid), Spenser (in
The Fairie Queene), Sidney (in Arcadia), and More (in Utopia), to mention
just a few literary models of ideal communities that feed back into the
sociopolitical reality of their time.
Nor is the relationship between a work of art and its sociocul-
tural context a representational or mimetic one, as Said implies in
his essay on exile, even though the literary or cultural historian may
extrapolate sociocultural attitudes and tendencies from it. Indeed,
enduring works of art, including literary ones, can be approached
from classical, romantic, realist, Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist,
modernist, postmodernist, philosophical, sociological, psychologi-
cal, ecological, or any other critical or theoretical perspective, yet
they will always exceed any and all of these perspectives, as well as
all critical labels. Oscar Wilde puts it best:

If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority

over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot
receive any artistic impression of it at all. The work of art is to dominate
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION AND LITERARY DISCOURSE 103
the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. The
spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master
is to play. And the more completely he can suppress his silly views, his
own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art should be, or
should not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the
work of art in question. (Wilde 1954, p. 1035)

In other essays, Wilde also inverts the traditional view of the

work of art as mimesis or imitation of reality, claiming, playfully,
that in fact life imitates art, rather than the other way around.9 He
deliberately formulates his remarks in provocative terms in order to
underscore the power-relationship that has been established between
aesthetic forms of expression and other sociocultural forms ever
since Socrates, in Plato’s Republic, banished the poets from the realm
of truth to the realm of fiction, declaring that philosophy-science was
the only reliable foundation of ontological and political reality and
that artistic works were, at best, only pale imitations of this reality.
But, it is precisely the age-old contest for cultural authority among
various cognitive fields that has turned literature into a privileged
locus of the exilic-utopian imagination.
Said, interestingly, cites Georg Lukacs’ theory of the novel, accord-
ing to which this literary genre is “the form of transcendental home-
lessness” (Said 2000, p. 181). This insight can be extended to literature as
a whole, despite the fact that Lukacs mistakenly contrasts the modern
self-consciousness of the novel to the “innocent” serenity of the clas-
sical epic—a cultural-theoretical “golden age” fiction that the Marxist
Hungarian exile inherits from the German Neoclassical humanist
tradition. In fact, as we have seen in Chapter 4 above, the epic conveys
the same sense of homelessness, derived from its “modern,” nostalgic
look at an imaginary, idealized past age—for example, the Aeneid, but
even the Iliad, where Homer often contrasts his own “puny” age to the
resplendent heroic one, in which men had twice or even three times the
physical stature and strength of the men of his day.
Be that as it may, Socrates’ banishment of the poets has triggered
a subtle dialectic of truth and fiction, which the various Western
mentalities of power have employed as an instrument of establishing
and perpetuating cultural authority throughout the ages. In this
respect, literature has often used its marginal or liminal position in
the realm of discourse in the same way that political exile and utopia
have used theirs in the sociopolitical realm: it either has questioned
104 MODERNISM AND EXILE

or has reinforced the ontological status of other forms of discourse.

By openly acknowledging its fictionality, literature has allowed other
linguistic constructs such as science, history, philosophy, ethics,
or religion to be invested with the authority of knowledge and truth;
or, by the same token, it has challenged their cognitive status as
truth and has helped replace them with other forms of authoritative
discourse.10
In other words, literary discourse has been able to offer fresh cul-
tural alternatives precisely because it is a ludic phenomenon—an as
if mode of activity and being in which the world of actuality and that
of the imagination become interwoven and create an intermediary,
liminal world separate from, yet contingent on, the other two. By
staging a real or imagined state of affairs and presenting it from various
perspectives, literature can contribute to a better understanding of
the existential choices open to a specific community and can play a
significant role in proposing modes of historical change.
Finally, I shall show that a literary or artistic work, because of its
ludic-liminal stance, can also emancipate itself from the dialectic
of truth and fiction, characteristic of a mentality of power, and can
assume a culturally transcendental position, going beyond its imme-
diate historical context of interaction with other modes of discourse,
including the political one. It can thus become a background suitable
for the creation and imaginative enactment of human values that
often are incommensurable with those embraced by the commu-
nity out of which the literary work arises and to which it is normally
addressed.

6.4 Dystopia and the Modernist/Postmodernist

Exilic-Utopian Imagination

My discussion of Edward Said and Joseph Brodsky has shown that

both authors display certain anti-utopian attitudes, which they
share with many modernist and postmodernist thinkers and artists.
These attitudes are quite understandable, given the fact that in our
troubled age, utopia, no less than exile, has assumed highly negative
if not sinister implications, because of two gruesome World Wars
and the no less gruesome communist and fascist utopian experi-
ments in social engineering that have now failed and are generally
discredited. Nevertheless, my discussion has also shown that the
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION AND LITERARY DISCOURSE 105
two authors cannot avoid utopian thought altogether, because the
exilic-utopian imagination is ingrained in our cultural subcon-
scious and will persist as long as we organize our lives around the
will to power. When this imagination will not engender utopias, it
will move to the antipode and generate dystopias, according to the
bipolar, conflictive pattern that governs cultural phenomena in
power-oriented societies.
The pendulum movement from utopia to dystopia is part of
the latest cycle of high modernity that began at the end of the 18th
century. The 19th century continued the previous century’s trend
of devising grandiose utopian social schemes, followed by a prolif-
eration of their small- and large-scale implementations all the way
into the first half of the 20th century. A number of such utopian
experiments were proposed in late 19th century works, many of
which were not necessarily political tracts, but literary or quasi-
literary productions, largely claiming a fictional status in order to
make their challenge to the sociopolitical status quo less threatening.
Among a veritable slue of such works (mainly socialist in orienta-
tion), one may cite the anonymous The Great Romance (1881), John
MacNie’s The Diothas (1883), Laurence Gronlund’s The Cooperative
Commonwealth (1884), August Bebel’s Woman in the Past, Present and
Future (1886), Edward Bellamy’s very influential Looking Backward:
2000-1887 (1888), Elizabeth Corbett’s New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the
Future (1889), Anna Adolph’s Arqtiq: A Story of the Marvels at North Pole
(1899), as well as the more familiar (and more ambiguous) Erewhon
of Samuel Butler (1872) and News from Nowhere of William Morris
(1890).11 A somewhat later, but noteworthy, example of a feminist
utopia is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s trilogy, serialized in her maga-
zine, Forerunner: Moving the Mountain (1911), Herland (1915), and With
Her in Ourland (1916).
As some of the turn-of-the-century modernist utopian projects
seemed likely to become historical reality, their unintended, disas-
trous consequences began to be highlighted as early as the end of the
19th century. They were mostly pointed out in a number of literary
works that staged the issue of social utopia and its pitfalls by imagin-
ing what several of its versions would actually look like in practice.
In the process, some of these works also explored the power-ori-
ented nature of the exilic-utopian imagination in the Western world
and underlined some of its negative sociopolitical manifestations,
such as colonialist, oligarchic, and totalitarian drives, but also its
106 MODERNISM AND EXILE

bioethical dangers, generated by the materialist, utilitarian, and

reductionist kinds of science and technology that are characteristic
of a modernist mentality.
Among the early dystopian works, written from diverse ideo-
logical positions, one may cite Anna Bowman Dodd, The Republic of
the Future, or Socialism a Reality (1887), William Harben, The Land of the
Changing Sun (1894), H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and The Island
of Doctor Moreau (1896), Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), E.M Foster’s
The Machine Stops (1909). Later dystopian works, published in the
wake of the two World Wars, include Zamyatin’s We (1921), Andrei
Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (partially published in the Soviet Union
in 1928), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931), Vladimir Nabokov’s
Invitation to a Beheading (1935–1936), Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here
(1938), Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One (1948), George Orwell’s Animal
Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit
451 (1953), William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), Ernst Juenger’s The
Glass Bees (1957), and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House Five (1969).
This dystopian trend has continued for the rest of the 20th cen-
tury and into the 21st century, leading to a considerable expansion
of the literary genre of dystopia—expansion that, in my view, consti-
tutes another salient feature of Modernism and Posmodernism. In
the last few decades, modernist and postmodernist “dystopias” have
continued to flourish, especially in United States, both along secular
lines, mainly in science fiction, and along religious lines, in apoca-
lyptic popular literature, the latter having its secular, mainly ecolog-
ical, branch as well. There are also a significant number of feminist
or anti-feminist utopias/dystopias, published mostly during the
1960s, 1970s and 1980s in the wake of the “women’s lib” movement,
some influenced by Gilman’s Herland, republished in 1979. Among
the most notable ones are Ursula Leguin’s The Left Hand of Darkness
(1969), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Doris Lessing’s
The Marriages between Zone Three, Four and Five (1980), and Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985).
Two of the literary masterpieces of the 20th century, Robert
Musil’s Man without Qualities (1930–1943), and Hermann Hesse’s The
Glasspearl Game (1943) deserve special mention as brilliant products of
the exilic-utopian imagination, although I can give them only pass-
ing attention here, because of space reasons. They are not properly
speaking dystopias, but they evince certain dystopian, in addition
to utopian, features. Musil’s novel, set in Vienna before World War I
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION AND LITERARY DISCOURSE 107
(and before the dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire), revolves
around the acute consciousness of the void at the core of (modernist)
human existence, dramatizing the various ways in which this con-
sciousness attempts to deal, largely unsuccessfully, with such void.
In the wake of the collapse of the Habsburg multinational empire,
Musil’s narrator casts a typically modernist look back at its disap-
peared world. This retrospective look is both nostalgic and ironic,
evoking Kakania—an “Austrian” utopia/dystopia or ambiguous
Golden Age, full of paradoxes and imperfections, all the more fertile
because of its liminal, indefinite qualities.
Under the “Austrian” guise, the citizen of Kakania epitomizes the
“hollowed out” type of the modernist individual (cf. T.S, Eliot’s poem
“The Hollow Men,” another iconic description of the modernist,
dissociated sensibility). Like any inhabitant of a modern country,
the Kakanian citizen has at least nine different identities: “a profes-
sional, a national, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a conscious,
an unconscious, and possibly even a private character to boot.”12
Although he seems to unite these identities in himself, they “actu-
ally dissolve him, so that he is really nothing more than a small
basin hollowed out by these many streamlets that trickle into it and
drain out of it again, to join other such rills in filling some other
basin” (Musil 1996, p. 30). This small basin can also be described as
an ever-elusive present moment—a “place anyone can have, on the
momentarily highest point reached by the pillar of time as it rises
out of the void” (Musil 1996, p. 245).
Because of the void at the core of his being, the “Austrian” indi-
vidual, like every other inhabitant of the modern world, has a tenth
identity or character as well, which is “nothing else than the passive
fantasy of spaces yet unfilled” (Musil 1996, p. 30)—another graphic
way of describing the modernist exilic-utopian imagination. The
consciousness of this unfulfilled space causes him not to take seri-
ously “what his at least nine other characters do and what happens
to them,” which means that he will never attain “his true fulfillment”
(Musil 1996, p. 30). In turn, the liminal interior space in question is
hard to describe, but it appears to be of “a different shade and shape
in Italy from what it is in England, because everything that stands
out in relief against it is of a different shade and shape.” (Musil 1996,
p. 30) Nevertheless, it is the same in both places: “an empty, invisible
space, with reality standing inside it like a child’s toy town deserted
by the imagination” (Musil 1996, p. 30).
108 MODERNISM AND EXILE

Paradoxically, it is also this empty inner space that accounts for

Kakania’s ludic, creative impulse, making it “unbeknownst to the
world, the most progressive state of all; a state just barely able to go
along with itself. One enjoyed a negative freedom there, always with
a sense of insufficient grounds for one’s own existence, and lapped
around by the great fantasy of all that had not happened or at least
not yet happened irrevocably as by the breath of those oceans from
which mankind had once emerged” (Musil 1996, p. 31). (Note, in the
last sentence, the allusion to the ludic, divine creation out of noth-
ingness in the Genesis, discussed in Chapter 4 above.)
And yet, the acute consciousness of the void proves to be
the Austrian Empire’s undoing as well, partially at the hands of
nationalist movements driven by social ressentiment and the ethnic
identity politics of the will to power. The patriotic “Parallel
Campaign” to prepare the celebrations for the seventieth anniversary
of Emperor Franz Josef’s coronation reveals a moral and intellectual
emptiness that myriad idealist and/or practical schemes struggle in
vain to cover up. Although it seems initially to favor a “Year of Peace,”
the Parallel Campaign eventually founders on this emptiness, and the
military-industrial establishment steps into the vacuum, thus setting
the stage for World War I.
On the other hand, Musil’s narrative follows one of the main char-
acters, Ulrich, through a whole gamut of existential experiments
designed to “joyfully forget” the feeling of nothingness gnawing at his
consciousness. Although the novel remained unfinished, Musil, who
died in exile in Switzerland toward the end of World War II, appar-
ently intended to have Ulrich progress from the Nietzschean principle
of living dangerously to an ecstatic, Buddhist, mystical existence, as a
way of moving beyond the nihilistic will to power and its horror vacui.
Whereas Musil’s novel analyzes the intellectual and psychologi-
cal components of the power-oriented mentality that contributed
to the outbreak of World War I, Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead
Game (completed in the early 1930s, but published only in 1943, in
Switzerland, because the Nazi regime censored its publication
in Germany) describes an uchronia/dyschronia set in the distant
future, in the wake of another devastating world war. Its tone is
equally nostalgic-ironic, exploring a utopian, tripartite organization
of a futuristic society where the three most important social agents
of Hesses’ time, the political, intellectual, and religious elites, even
though territorially and administratively independent, act in unison
to preserve the social balance of the whole state.
 EXILIC-UTOPIAN IMAGINATION AND LITERARY DISCOURSE 109
Hesse largely concentrates on Castalia, the independent province
where the intellectual, scientific, and scholarly elites are trained, and—
within Castalia itself—on the independent domain of the Glass Bead
Game players. This Game is an intellectual and artistic tour de force in
which the various elements of the best that has been produced on Earth
over millennia in terms of thought, art, and spirituality are skillfully
combined in an organic whole. In this, Hesse anticipates, as we shall see
in the Afterword of this study, Aldous Huxley’s view of the need to fuse
the best cultural and spiritual achievements of the West and the East in
a global civilization—a theme that preoccupied both the German and
the British writer through the second part of their literary careers.
The game’s purpose is not to have any direct practical use, but
is its own purpose (Hesse’s allusion to the modernist art for art’s
sake movement); nor is it designed to innovate (as art and thought
in modernism and postmodernism claim to do), but rather to
preserve the best cultural heritage of humankind. Nevertheless,
precisely because of its independence from the other domains of
human activity, it does have the crucial, liminal function of being
continuously drawn on by the other two components of the state,
the political and the religious, in reaching their most appropriate
decisions in the practical world.
In turn, Castalia is both a small-scale model and an integrative part
of the harmonious Platonic society that Hesse’ social utopia proposes.
As the Master of Music tells young Joseph Knecht: “Our Castalia is not
supposed to be merely an elite; it ought above all to be a hierarchy, a
structure in which every brick derives its meaning only from its place
in the whole. There is no path leading out of this whole, and one who
climbs higher and is assigned to greater and greater tasks does not
acquire more freedom, only more and more responsibilities.”13 Here,
the music master also suggests that the role of an elite is to serve the
community as a whole, not just themselves or the narrow interests of
their specific group. Appropriately, the last name of Joseph Knecht—
the Magister Ludi (Bead Game Master) whose career is traced in the
main narrative—signifies “servant’ in German.
The dystopian element in the main narrative is introduced when
Knecht begins to question the hierarchical structure of Castalia,
which, in his view, no longer functions properly, being distorted by
the will to power on the one hand and by excessive insularity (the pro-
verbial “ivory tower”), on the other hand. However, Knecht’s decision
to leave Castalia and dedicate himself to tutoring one student—the
son of a very influential member of the political elite—backfires when
110 MODERNISM AND EXILE

he attempts to follow the young man into a freezing lake for a swim
and drowns, presumably of heart failure. This ironical, dystopian
ending, which has been interpeted in several ways, suggests, at least
to me, that Knecht is equally enticed by the will to power, engaging in
a physical contest with his young pupil in order to gain his “respect,”
instead of showing the wisdom that he should have acquired through
his age and position as magister ludi. More generally, the narrative
seems to suggest that acts of rebellion such as Knecht’s only destabi-
lize the overall social balance even further and that the best course to
restore this balance is not to reject any of its main components, but to
reform each of them from within. We shall see that the literary works
I analyze in the following chapters will raise some of these issues as
well, particularly concerning the exilic-utopian imagination and the
position and role of the intellectual, the artist and the work of art in
general inside and outside his or her community.
The five literary masterpieces I have chosen as detailed case
studies were written at the zenith of Modernism. Only one of them,
Huxley’s Brave New World, is generally viewed as a dystopia per se.
But, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and
Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita also display significant dysto-
pian characteristics, even as they belong to mixed literary genres,
rather hard to define—perhaps a combination of confessional litera-
ture and Bildungsroman in the case of the first two, and a combination
of fantastic tale, theotopia and Kuenstlerroman in the case of the last
one. Finally, Mann’s Joseph and his Brothers is a retelling of the ancient
Biblical saga from a modernist, nostalgic viewpoint, and as such it is
a combination of theotopia and Buildungsroman.
I have chosen these five works for a number of reasons. First, they
were produced, just like Musil’s Man without Qualities and Hesse’s the
Glass Bead Game, at the height of the modernist period (first half of
the 20th century), addressing the most important intellectual and
social issues characteristic of this period. Second, these works, no less
than those of Musil and Hesse, despite being generally described as
“modernist,” actually challenge some of the modernist (and postmod-
ernist) sociopolitical assumptions, based on a mentality of power.
Third, all of their authors were exiles or self-exiles and, therefore, were
thoroughly familiar with the workings of the modern exilic-utopian
imagination from personal experience as well (pace Said). Last but not
least, all of the five works revolve around the acute modernist con-
sciousness of nothingness and its misguided attempts to deal with it.
 7
EXILE, UTOPIA, AND THE
WILL TO EMPIRE: CONRAD’S
HEART OF DARKNESS

Conrad’s short, but very complex, novel stages a particular instance

of the will to power manifesting itself as will to empire in the late
19th Century Belgian Congo. Of course, empire building is one of
the most common manifestations of the will to power in most his-
torical periods, so that the novel dramatizes its more general features
while addressing its specific modernist traits as well. In Modernism,
the will to empire, which constantly deals with otherness in its
ceaseless quest to overcome and appropriate (or annihilate) new
geocultural spaces, arrives at an impasse: the exilic-utopian imagi-
nation that drives it seems to have reached an acute state of crisis
so that when it is confronted with otherness, it often perceives it
as terrifying void, darkness, death, and nothingness. The will needs
thus to devise new strategies of using that selfsame terror in order to
accomplish its objectives. Since Conrad wrote his novel during a
time that Modernism was in full swing (late 1890s), he diagnoses the
crisis, presenting a compelling picture of the psychopathology of the
modernist exilic-utopian imagination. He also hints at a cure, with-
out resorting, however, to such modernist strategies as TMT (Terror
Management Theory), mentioned in the previous chapter, which
could eventually only aggravate the illness.
In order to achieve his purpose, Conrad employs the narrative
technique of framing (or “story within story”), with two unreliable

111
112 MODERNISM AND EXILE

narrators, which increases the complexity and ambivalence of what

is conveyed to the reader. Furthermore, the reader meets the central
character, Kurtz, in the “heart of darkness,” which is also the “heart” of
the narrative, only after s/he accompanies the second narrator on a
labyrinthine journey through time and space, connecting England
with Continental Europe and Africa, by way of the Thames and the
Congo Rivers. In what follows, I shall examine how Conrad uses the
two narrators to accomplish the thematic objectives of his novel
and then shall attempt to account for the complex reasons why he
“hides” behind them, leaving it to the reader to decipher the hidden
meaning of the story.
The first narrator, who remains nameless and whom one may
mistakenly take for “Conrad,” introduces the theme of empire from
the very beginning of the story. He describes the Thames River
as spreading out “in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to
the utmost ends of the earth,” having rendered “good service” to the
“race that peopled its banks.”1 The river “had known and served all the
men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John
Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled—the great knights-errant
of the sea.” There were also “the adventurers and the settlers; kings’
ships and ships of men on ‘Change; captains, admirals, the dark
‘interlopers’ of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned ‘generals’
of East India fleets” (Conrad 2012, p. 3). They were “hunters of gold
and pursuers of fame,” who had “gone out on that stream, bearing
the sword, and often the torch, messengers of might within the
land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had
not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown
earth! … The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs
of empires” (Conrad 2012, p. 3).
Despite its encomiastic tone, this description is highly ambigu-
ous. The narrator’s honor roll of dreamers and empire builders con-
tains a motley crowd of men with mixed motives and objectives, so
it is not clear to whom “greatness” should apply and in whom should
the nation take pride: the “hunters of gold and pursuers of fame,” the
“dark ‘interlopers’ of the Eastern trade,” or the “torch bearers”? The
“bearers of a spark from the sacred fire” might refer to those pro-
moters of Empire that saw themselves as having a lofty mission of
civilizing “savages” and bringing Christian religion to their shores.
But, this theme will be taken up by the second narrator, Marlow,
and undercut throughout the narrative. And the nameless narrator
undercuts his own bright utopian picture by the implied reference
 EXILE, UTOPIA, AND THE WILL TO EMPIRE 113
to Don Quijote’s mad sallies in the phrase “knights errant of the
sea” (Conrad 2012, p. 3). The “madness” theme will, moreover, run
throughout Marlow’s story, as he refers repeatedly to the “hollowness”
and futility of such utopian, “civilizing” projects.
The nameless, first narrator seems rather naïve and conventional,
being a typical, middle-class, Victorian Englishman, proud of his
nation’s achievements. His side role is to present the propagandis-
tic, idealized version of British colonialism that Marlow will then
indirectly challenge through his scathing indictment of its Belgian
counterpart. But he also has the important functions of introducing
the setting and tone of the novel, managing its two temporal frames,
and commenting on Marlow and his story. The setting of the novel
is particularly significant in terms of its main themes. The name-
less narrator and his companions have been sailing in a yawl on the
Thames River, and are waiting for the tide to turn, in order to go back
to London. Dusk is falling, and they find themselves between light,
toward the east and the open sea, and darkness, toward the west
and the city. The narrator describes London as particularly gloomy
and ominous: “further west on the upper reaches the place of the
monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding
gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars” (Conrad 2012, p. 3).
This description sets up the somber atmosphere of the novel and
introduces “darkness” as one of its recurring motives. It also provides
the first associative link between Britain and Africa or, more spe-
cifically, between the Thames and the Congo Rivers, when Marlow
exclaims, as if in response to the first narrator’s panegyric of the British
nation: “And this also … has been one of the dark places of the earth”
(Conrad 2012, p. 3). Marlow refers to the Roman conquest of Britain
almost two millennia before and imagines what the “civilized” con-
querors must have felt like when coming up the river through the
savage, desolate land where future London was to be built: “Sandbanks,
marshes, forests, savages—precious little to eat fit for a civilized man,
nothing but Thames water. No Falerian wine here, no going ashore.
Here and there a military camp lost in wilderness like a needle in a
bundle of hay—cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death—death
skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush” (Conrad 2012, p. 5).
But then Marlow draws a distinction between the Roman and the
British conquerors (and, implicitly, a distinction between the British
and the Belgian ones): “Mind, none of us would feel exactly like
this. What saves us is efficiency. But these chaps [i.e., the Romans]
were not much account really. They were no colonists; their
114 MODERNISM AND EXILE

administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect.

They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force ….
It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale,
and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a
darkness” (Conrad 2012, p. 5f.).
Marlow’s distinction is historically questionable, as the Romans
were well known for their administrative efficiency, their pride in their
legal system (versions of which are still used in much of Continental
Europe), and their ideal of the pax romana. His remark is the first
pointer to the reader that he might not be entirely trustworthy as a
narrator. Although Marlow is by no means as “naïve” as the first nar-
rator, he shares a number of the latter’s prejudices as an Englishman.
He mostly turns a blind eye when it comes to the colonial practices
of his own nation. In the next sentence, he makes a general statement
that applies to all conquest, regardless of the nation involved, but then
he draws another specious distinction, based on the “motives” that
drive such conquest: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means
the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or
slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you
look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the
back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish
belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before,
and offer a sacrifice too” (Conrad 2012, p. 6).
Yet, this distinction equally breaks down later on, when Marlow
describes the Belgian colonial practices in Africa (all the while
remaining blind to his British “exemptionalism”2) showing how the
utopian “idea” behind them has no redemptive value whatsoever,
but merely serves as a rationalization and justification of the will to
power (in its greedy and rapacious form). Note, also, his previous,
ironic, remark that men commit violence blindly, “as it is very proper
when they tackle a darkness.” Here Marlow identifies “darkness” with
the Unknown, as he will do in several other contexts and, unwittingly
describes the typical reaction of the will to power when facing such
“darkness”: either assimilate it to what it knows or, should it prove
inassimilable, seek to destroy it.
Marlow also points out that such dark spaces appear, ironically,
as white or blank spots on the maps of his time: “Now when I was a
little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South
America, or Africa, or Australia and lose myself in all the glories
of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the
 EXILE, UTOPIA, AND THE WILL TO EMPIRE 115
earth, and when I saw one particularly inviting on a map (but they
all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up
I will go there… I have been in some of them, and … well, we won’t
talk about that. But there was one yet—the biggest, the most blank
so to speak—that I had a hankering after” (Conrad 2012, p. 7).
The blank spaces on the map that in reality turn out to be places
of “darkness” are liminal spaces that the will to power, in the guise
of the will to empire, must needs fill up. Significantly, Christopher
Marlowe (Marlow’s namesake) in his play Tamburlaine (1587) has
the Mongolian conqueror engage in power fantasizing, inflamed
by the contemplation of global maps. Like any empire builder,
Tamburlaine is fascinated by geography and cartography. To him,
they are both a challenge and a measure of his conquests. They are a
challenge, because they project and sanction the power status quo:
before Tamburlaine’s appearance on the world historical scene, the
globe has already been divided up, and re-divided, many times over.
Maps mark territories that are firmly in the grasp of past and present
conquerors, territories that remain disputed, as well as uncharted or
“liminal” lands. Even on his deathbed, Tamburlaine calls for a map
and shows his sons what else is left to conquer, appealing to their
greed for fame and riches, so that they will finish the job for him.3
Under the guise of Tamburlaine’s will to empire, Marlowe
describes the power fantasies of his own Elizabethan period, to
which Conrad equally alludes through his first narrator, and for a
good reason. The age we refer to as the “Renaissance” today seems
to have marked the beginning of one of the periodical tidal waves of
Western empire building, with its drive toward the “New World” and
other, older, worlds that eventually resulted in the Western coloniza-
tion of large areas of the globe and may be seen as being at the root of
at least some of the globalizing trends today. Marlowe’s England had
just gone through its archaic, warlike phase (the War of the Roses
and other bloody feuds, such as religious ones) and was undergoing
a period of consolidation that would last for almost two centuries
before Great Britain could fully pursue and realize its imperial and
colonial dreams.
The global imperial model had already been worked out, however,
and used again and again, since the times of Alexander Macedon and
the Roman Empire, as Marlowe (as well as Conrad) was fully aware.
In his play, Marlowe makes direct (anachronistic) references to the
Americas, as well as to the would-be imperial contestants for global
116 MODERNISM AND EXILE

hegemony in the Renaissance, particularly Spain, Portugal, the

Venetian Republic, and England, whose budding hegemonic claims
largely depended on the building and/or continuing projection of a
credible naval power. Like Tamburlaine, Marlowe’s contemporary
soldier-navigators, mentioned by the nameless narrator in Heart of
Darkness, wish to conquer not only the known worlds, but also the
unknown ones in order to satisfy their power drive and to surpass
all other global competitors.
Although Marlow, Conrad’s second narrator, mentions curios-
ity and desire for exploration as his own motives in contemplating
maps as a little boy, he is fully aware as an adult that exploration,
conquest, and exploitation are all instruments of the will to empire
and go hand in hand. For example, later on in his narrative, he
overhears the conversation among the members of the Eldorado
Exploring Expedition, which he characterizes as “the talk of sordid
buccaneers; … To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was
their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there
is in burglars breaking into a safe” (Conrad 2012, p. 38). Even through
its name, the Expedition reveals the inextricable relation between
knowledge and the drives to power and wealth (as Francis Bacon,
one of Marlowe’s contemporaries, candidly declared 4). Furthermore,
Eldorado—the legendary/utopian land of gold—symbolically links
the Belgian colonial project in Africa to its earlier Spanish counter-
part in South America, thereby pointing to their common origin in
the will to power.
In Marlow’s case, the blank spot he “was hankering after” as a boy
was Africa and the Congo River in particular, which later on deter-
mines him to accept employment with a Belgian trading company as
captain of a steamboat operating on that River. This foreign company
deals in ivory, intending “to run an over-sea empire, and make no end
of coin by trade” (Conrad 2012, p. 9). It is headquartered in Brussels,
the royal capital of this empire, which appears to Marlow as a “whited
sepulchre” (Conrad 2012, p. 9)—a fitting, modernist association of
death and emptiness. The Company’s offices, ominously deserted,
except for a few clerks, a physician, and two women knitting black
wool, corroborate this association. The women have an “uncanny”
and “fateful” air about them. They are “guarding the door of Darkness,
knitting black wool as for a warm pall, one introducing, introducing
continuously to the unknown, the other scrutinizing the cheery and
foolish faces with unconcerned old eyes” (Conrad 2012, p. 11).
 EXILE, UTOPIA, AND THE WILL TO EMPIRE 117
The two women suggest the ancient Moirae or the Fates, weaving
(or “knitting”) mortal destinies, but Marlow also associates them,
ironically, with the Roman Caesars: “Ave! Old knitter of black wool.
Morituri te salutant [The dying ones salute you]” (Conrad 2012, p. 11).
Emperor Claudius’ legendary encounter with his gladiators refers us
back, by way of parody, to Marlow’s earlier description of the Roman
conquest of Britain, thus also establishing a link between the mod-
ern British and the Belgian colonial projects.
Marlow’s visit with his aunt in Brussels is equally suggestive:
to his aunt, Marlow appears “like an emissary of light, something
like a lower apostle” (Conrad 2012, p. 13). She sees him as a knight-
errant of modern commerce who will bring the sweetness and light
of Progress to the savages of Africa. As Marlow scathingly puts it:
“There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about
that time, and the excellent woman, living right in the rush of all that
humbug, got carried off her feet. She talked about ‘weaning those
ignorant millions from their horrid ways’” (Conrad 2012, p. 13).
This is the beginning of Marlow’s journey into the “heart of
darkness,” which is the anti-heroic version of the mythical journeys
into Hades, or Dante’s journey into the Inferno, to which Marlow
alludes when he arrives at the Company’s first station on the Congo
River: “It seemed to me I had stepped into the gloomy circle of some
Inferno” (Conrad 2012, p. 19). The “devils” he encounters there are
more evil than anything he has seen before: “I’ve seen the devil of
violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire …. But as
I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that
land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-
eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly” (Conrad 2012, p. 18).
From the previous remarks, it is clear that Marlow as second
narrator (and, later on, as character in his own story), has a complex
novelistic function as well: symbolically speaking, he is both the
“ancient mariner” of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
(but without the unambiguous lesson that the latter imparts to his
listeners) and Gulliver, Swift’s bitter, unreliable, and confused com-
mentator on the utopian worlds he visits. Much like Gulliver’s nar-
rations, Marlow’s yarn is a satirical dystopia, and Conrad’s preferred
satirical technique, much like Swift’s, is reversal of perspective. This
technique is already apparent at the beginning of Heart of Darkness, in
Marlow’s remarks about the Thames River and London at the time
of the Roman conquest. Conrad will repeatedly use this technique in
118 MODERNISM AND EXILE

order to expose the colonial pretenses of racial, cultural, and moral

superiority, particularly in his presentation and handling of the
character of Kurtz.
Before Kurtz appears “in person,” halfway through the novel, the
reader is given various bits and pieces of contradictory information
that s/he is expected to assemble in order to form a clear picture of
this enigmatic character. Furthermore, the information we gather
about him comes from three different, equally unreliable, sources: his
detractors (the other members of the Belgian trading company), his
admirers (the Russian youth or “Harlequin” who lives with him in
the “heart of darkness”), and Marlow (both narrator and protagonist
of Kurtz’s story). What emerges, therefore, is a highly ambiguous
figure that is up to the reader to decipher. It is evident, however, that
Conrad presents Kurtz as an archetype or a symbol of something,
as he does the other characters in the story, some of which remain
nameless and are identified only by their professions (The Director
of Companies, The Accountant and The Lawyer). This something
becomes somewhat more definite when Marlow notes: “The original
Kurtz had been educated partly in England and—as he was good
enough to say himself—his sympathies were in the right place….
All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” (Conrad 2012, p. 64).
Here, again, Conrad thinly alludes to British colonialism, although
Marlow himself remains blind to it, being flattered by Kurtz’s con-
fession that “his sympathies were in the right place.”
It soon becomes apparent that in his early career Kurtz stood
for the modern European colonial idealist who wishes to bring the
utopian humanist gospel to “savage” nonEuropeans. The reader
learns of Kurtz’ original, noble motives through the distorted lens
of his detractors’ cynical conversations. For example, the Chief of
the Middle Station spitefully remarks to his visiting uncle: “And the
pestiferous absurdity of his [Kurtz’] talk … ‘Each station should be
like a beacon on the road to better things, a center for trade of course,
but also for humanizing, improving, instructing.’ Conceive you—
that ass! And he wants to be manager!” (Conrad 2012, p. 41) Kurtz’s
ideal is that of the European Enlightenment: to bring modernity and
progress to the entire world, through love, humaneness, and justice.
Marlow further notes that the International Society for the
Suppression of Savage Customs had, “most appropriately,” asked
Kurtz to prepare a report “for its future guidance” (Conrad 2012,
p. 64). The report begins with the paternalistic argument that “we
 EXILE, UTOPIA, AND THE WILL TO EMPIRE 119
whites, from the point of development we had arrived at, ‘must
necessarily appear to them [savages] in the nature of supernatural
beings—we approach them with the might as of a deity …. ‘By the
simple exercise of our will we can exert a power for good practi-
cally unbounded.’” (Conrad 2012, p. 64) As Marlow was reading this
report, he confesses, it gave him the feeling “of an exotic Immensity
ruled by an august Benevolence,” making him “tingle with enthusi-
asm” (Conrad 2012, p. 64).
But then Marlow adds: “There were no practical hints to interrupt
the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the
last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be
regarded as the exposition of a method” (Conrad 2012, p. 64f.). This
method was “very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to
every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying,
like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: ‘Exterminate all the brutes!’”
(Conrad 2012, p. 65) This attitude is very typical of many a mod-
ern idealist or utopian reformer who, failing to impose his dream
on a stubborn state of affairs through “humanizing, improving,
instructing,” falls back on extreme, violent measures.
The report also allows the reader to trace Kurtz’ progress/regress
from an altruistic humanitarian reformer to a violent, primitive god.
Disaffected by the rapacious and abject behavior of his fellow trad-
ers, Kurtz relinquishes “civilization” and goes into exile, deep into
the wilderness. He goes native, builds the Inner Station, and buys his
freedom by sending back to the Middle Station more ivory than any
other company agent. Like many a modernist exile, Kurtz gazes into
his soul, and there he is confronted with the abyss or nothingness of
radical liminality. But, his horror vacui does not allow him to become
truly free. Nietzsche’s aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil describes his
situation perfectly: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in
the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long
into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”5
Unable to confront nothingness, Kurtz recoils from it, but instead
of reverting to his previous, European median value-system, he goes
even farther back to an archaic mentality, based on the naked will to
power. Thereby, he travels the genealogical path of the will to empire
in reverse. As a rule, empire building has two phases: an archaic
phase, in which the archaic mentality of might-makes-right prevails;
and a consolidation and preservation phase, during which this men-
tality gradually recedes into the background or moves away from
120 MODERNISM AND EXILE

the metropolis to the margins of the Empire, even as it remains the

foundation and guarantee of the latter’s growth and prosperity—
indeed, of its very existence. Coming as he does from the center
(Brussels), Kurtz brings with him the values appropriate for the
consolidation and preservation phase of the Empire, which clash
with the might-makes-right mentality that prevails at its margins,
albeit in its unheroic, meretricious form. Although he rejects this
perverted mentality as displayed by his fellow traders, he embraces
it in the “pristine” form found in his African worshippers.
Kurtz’s “tragedy” is that he does not go native all the way, but
oscillates between two worlds: he wants to be both worshipped
by “savages” and become a reformer-hero in his own society.
Nietzsche would diagnose his “sickness unto death” as modern
split consciousness and weak nihilism since Kurtz is finally unable
to embrace the gaia scienza of the archaic mentality and go “beyond
good and evil.” Had he dismissed his utopian, civilizing dream
with cheerful forgetfulness, he would have thrived among the “sav-
ages” as their powerful deity (on condition that he keep his former,
degenerate, tribe at arm’s length, by continuing to provide them
with ivory). As it is, Kurtz remains fatally divided, allowing himself
to be dragged back to “civilization,” after a half-hearted attempt to
escape his former colonial companions. The stakes with shrunken
heads that guard his compound symbolically suggest his divided
state: one of the grinning skulls is defiantly turned toward the
outside world, warning intruders to stay away, but the rest of them
are facing his station, as if to remind him of the horror of his new
existence.
Marlow, his chronicler, shows the same divided, modernist frame
of mind. He both hates and admires Kurtz. Unlike Kurtz, he does
not venture inland, largely staying on the river. The Congo River is
a liminal space, but Marlow is only vaguely aware of its liminal pos-
sibilities when he notes, for instance, that their boat is “clinging to
the skirts of the Unknown” (Conrad 2012, p. 44). For him, the river
signifies the margin of civilization, on the one hand, and the margin
of unknown Africa, on the other hand. He clings to the “skirts of the
Unknown” to the very end and never genuinely seeks to understand
this otherness. For him, the inland remains a place of darkness, the
“back of Nowhere” (Conrad 2012, p. 64), which he approaches in
terms of his own median cultural values and beliefs. In typical mod-
ernist fashion, he criticizes the colonial practices of the “white man,”
 EXILE, UTOPIA, AND THE WILL TO EMPIRE 121
but has an ambivalent attitude toward the natives. On the one hand,
Marlow idealizes the Africans as being closer to “true” human nature.
They are “simple people,” as the Russian Harlequin puts it (Conrad
2012, p. 68), that is, they do not hide their basic drives and motives
under the veneer of civilization. Here, we as readers are also referred
to the utopian topos of the “noble savage” that recurs in Western
letters from Montaigne to Voltaire to Rousseau to Fennimore
Cooper. Through a satirical reversal of perspective, Marlow uses this
topos in order to denounce the degenerate and corrupt state of his
own “civilized” society.
On the other hand, Marlow treats the African natives, no less than
Kurtz in his report, with typical colonial condescension, as being
“lazy” and “inept” in terms of British work ethic and technological
know-how. Even when he identifies with his dying helmsman, who
gives him a look that seems “like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in
a supreme moment” (65), Marlow comments to his listeners: “Perhaps
you will think it passing strange this regret for a savage who was of
no more account than a grain of sand in a black Sahara. Well, …. for
months I had him at my back—a help—an instrument …. He steered
for me—I had to look after him, I worried about his deficiencies, and
thus a subtle bond had been created, of which I only became aware
when it was suddenly broken” (Conrad 2012, p. 65).
What Marlow finds most unsettling, however, is that in these
“primitive” African cultures the will to power appears naked and una-
shamed. From the viewpoint of median mentality, which he largely
shares, this is the dark, submerged side of Western civilization, which
has taken centuries to beat into submission, but which rears its ugly
head whenever its members find themselves in a situation of cultural
crisis or stress, particularly at its margins. Hence, Marlow’s ambiva-
lent feelings toward Kurtz. He wavers between his modernist version
of Kurtz’s “tragedy” and the Nietzschean, postmodernist one (in my
sense of the term) that I have just described.
Marlow acknowledges that to him Kurtz was a mystery: “His
was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at
a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never
shines” (Conrad 2012, p. 90). Nevertheless, as Marlow witnessed the
agent’s illness and death, he attempts to explain to himself and his
listeners what he saw. And what he “sees” is through the perspec-
tive of his median mentality, which he shares, in part, with Kurtz
himself.
122 MODERNISM AND EXILE

From this median perspective, Kurtz appears to him as “hollow”

and “empty.” The shrunken heads, Marlow notes, “only showed that
Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts,
that there was something wanting in him” (Conrad 2012, p. 75). This
“something” is (median) moral stamina, understood as restraint from
the basic, violent drives of the will to power. But self-restraint or self-
control is only another guise of the will that may readily surrender
to the archaic form in the “wilderness,” that is, outside established,
median social norms. According to Marlow, “the wilderness had
found [Kurtz] out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance
for the fantastic invasion. … it had whispered to him things about
himself he did not know, things of which he had no conception till he
took counsel with this great solitude—and the whisper had proved
irresistibly fascinating” (Conrad 2012, p. 75). Since Kurtz “was hollow
at the core,” that is, had no solid moral anchor, the wilderness “echoed
loudly within him” (Conrad 2012, p. 75).6 Even when deathly ill, Kurtz’s
voice manages to hide “the barren darkness of his heart” in “magnifi-
cent folds of eloquence” (Conrad 2012, p. 89). His “unextinguishable
gift of noble and lofty expression” revolved around “images of wealth
and fame.” He spoke of “my Intended, my ivory, my station, my career,
my ideas,” (Conrad 2012, p. 89) and he wanted “to have kings meet him
at railway stations on his return from some ghastly Nowhere, where
he intended to accomplish great things” (Conrad 2012, p. 90).
Marlow is actually responsible, at least in part, for Kurtz’s death,
as it is he who takes him back by force to his fellow Belgian agents.
When Kurtz weakly pleads with him to let him rejoin his tribe,
Marlow replies: “You will be lost…. utterly lost.” Then he explains
to his listeners that he had wanted to “save” Kurtz from himself:
“I tried to break the spell—the heavy mute spell of the wilderness—
that seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of
forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and mon-
strous passions. This alone, I was convinced, had driven him out to
the edge of the forest, to the bush, towards the gleam of fires, the
throb of drums, the drone of weird incantations; this alone had
beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspira-
tions” (Conrad 2012, p. 86).
From the same median perspective, Marlow interprets the inner
struggle of Kurtz as “madness”: “But his soul was mad. Being alone
in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell
you, it had gone mad …. I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul
 EXILE, UTOPIA, AND THE WILL TO EMPIRE 123
that knew no restraint, no faith, no fear, yet struggling blindly with
itself” (Conrad 2012, p. 87). And Marlow diagnoses this madness
correctly (from the standpoint of a median mentality): “both the
diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated
fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emo-
tions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinction, of all the appearances
of success and power” (Conrad 2012, p. 89). At the moment of Kurtz’s
death, Marlow sees on his “ivory face the expression of somber pride,
of ruthless power, of craven terror—of an intense and hopeless
despair” (Conrad 2012, p. 91). Kurtz cries out twice, “a cry that was no
more than a breath—‘The horror! The horror!’”(Conrad 2012, p. 91).
On the other hand, in typical modernist fashion, Marlow admires
Kurtz for his tremendous will to power, not least because he trans-
gresses “the bounds of permitted aspirations.” He calls Kurtz a
“remarkable man” (Conrad 2012, p. 92) because he attempts to go
beyond Nietzschean good and evil. To him, the agent seems to be
“an initiated wraith from the back of Nowhere” (Conrad 2012, p. 64).
He also admires Kurtz because of his revolt in the face of death or
the void: “Since I have peeped over the edge myself, I understand
better the meaning of his stare, that could not see the flame of the
candle but was wide enough to embrace the whole unverse, piercing
enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness” (Conrad
2012, p. 92). Kurtz’ last cry “had a vibrating note of revolt in his
whisper, it had the appaling face of a glimpsed truth—the strange
commingling of desire and hate” (Conrad 2012, p. 92). Therefore,
Marlow interprets it as a “victory”: “Better his cry—much better. It
was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats,
by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a vic-
tory!” (Conrad 2012, p. 93)
Of course, the reader has other options in interpreting Kurtz’s
cry: for example, it could signify his despair at being unable to join
his tribe in the wilderness; or at being unable to choose between the
two worlds he has been enmeshed in; or at realizing that not just
one of them, but both of them are “horrific,” in which case it could
also mean that he renounces them both—a renunciation that could
indeed be construed as a victory of sorts. But, the expression on his
face, as described by Marlow, tells a different story. His “intense and
hopeless despair,” commingled with “somber pride” and “ruthless
power,” points to the horror vacui, characteristic of any modern men-
tality of power: at the moment of death, Kurtz is confronted again
124 MODERNISM AND EXILE

with the void or nothingness and the acute consciousness of no

longer being able to escape it. If such is the case, his cry can hardly
be seen as a victorious one; on the contrary, it marks a defiant, but
hopeless defeat. On his deathbed, Kurtz is stuck in the no man’s land
between two power-oriented worlds. He sees no way out, because he
remains, to the end, unaware of the liminal possibilities of his exilic
position, that is, unaware of the fact that at one time he did have the
option of turning away from both.
In turn, Marlow, through his own near-death experience, remains
equally unaware of this option. He is trapped in the same mentality
of power and is as nihilistic as Kurtz in his oulook: he defines life as
“that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose”
(Conrad 2012, p. 92). In Nietzschean terms, the difference between the
two men is that whereas Kurtz appears as a “strong” nihilist, Marlow
appears as a “weak” one (in my terms, this is also the difference between
postmodernist and modernist nihilism).7 Marlow disapproves of
Kurtz, but he also envies his unflinching will to power in the face of
“nothingness.” He contrasts Kurtz’s rebellious attitude to his own weak
nihilism, characteristic of a certain modernist temperament: “I have
wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine.
It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with
nothing around, without spectators, without clamour, without glory,
without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in
a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism, without much belief in your
own right, and still less in that of your adversary” (Conrad 2012, p. 92).
Marlow shows the same admiration toward Kurtz’ companion,
the Russian “Harlequin,” because of his vigorous, animal vitality,
and sheer spirit of adventure—the glamorous features of an una-
bashed will to power (in its ludic, archaic form). As Marlow remarks,
“[g]lamour urged him on, glamour kept him unscathed. He surely
wanted nothing from the wilderness but space to breathe in and
push on through. His need was to exist, and to move onwards at the
greatest possible risk, and maximum of privation. If the absolutely
pure uncalculating, impractical spirit of adventure had ever ruled a
human being, it ruled this be-patched youth. I almost envied him
the possession of this modest and clear flame” (Conrad 2012, p. 71).
The Russian youth is therefore an embodiment of Nietzsche’s idea
of living dangerously. In turn, the “Harlequin” is devoted to Kurtz
because, as he puts it, “this man has enlarged my mind” (Conrad
2012, p. 70) by becoming a god among the natives.
 EXILE, UTOPIA, AND THE WILL TO EMPIRE 125
Unlike Kurtz at the moment of death, Marlow is unable to defy
nothingness and begins to cover it up as soon as he gets back to
Europe. Despite his savage attack on colonialism, he is in bad faith. He
declares that he abhors lying, but then lies to Kurtz’ “Intended.” When
she asks him what her fiance’s last words were, Marlow tells her that
Kurtz died with her name on his lips. He justifies this lie as a Platonic,
“pretty” or “necessary” one, because telling her the truth “would have
been too dark, altogether too dark” (Conrad 2012, p. 102). This is in
keeping with the Victorian notion of the chivalrous gentleman and
with Marlow’s earlier statement that one should not involve women
in the dirty business of colonialism. It should be restricted to men, so
that women remain “pure,” because they are the only saving grace of
humanity (Conrad 2012, p. 13). Yet, both Marlow’s aunt and Kurtz’ fian-
cee are unwitting, or witting, participants in the great (self-) deception
and hypocrisy surrounding colonial predatory practices, which in a
colonialist society evidently profit both men and women.
The ending of the story takes us back to the liminal situation of
the beginning. No less than the Congo River, the Thames is a limi-
nal space, as we saw at the outset of the novel. The nameless nar-
rator, Marlow and their friends are on a private yawl in the middle
of the river, between London and the open sea. Furthermore, they
are at play, on a pleasure trip. Their liminal situation does not seem,
however, to have “enlightened” them in any way. Marlow’s yarn is
received in (uneasy?) silence, and the atmosphere has become even
thicker with gloom than earlier on. Whereas at the outset there was
still brightness toward the east and the open sea, now everything is
shrouded in darkness. They have missed the first turn of the tide, and
night has fallen on the river so that the “offing was barred by a black
bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the utmost
ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to
lead into the heart of an immense darkness” (Conrad 2012, p. 102).
The labyrinthine journey through time and space, from England to
Africa and back, seems to have no clear meaning, leaving the characters
(and the reader) completely in the dark, as it were. Indeed, as the first
narrator warns us at the outset, it seems to be “one of Marlow’s incon-
clusive experiences” (Conrad 2012, p. 6). And yet, we as readers can
learn the hidden meaning of the novel from neither him nor Marlow,
but through the two of them. In this respect, Heart of Darkness bears an
intriguing resemblance to the epic of Gilgamesh: it involves a journey
into the “Abyss” or “heart of darkness,” the purpose of which fails and
126 MODERNISM AND EXILE

whose lesson for its protagonists remains inconclusive. It employs a

framing device with two different narrators, suggesting that there is
a hidden meaning, in addition to a manifest one, in the narrative and
leaving it up to the reader to figure out what this meaning might be.
On the other hand, unlike the narrative of Gilgamesh, Conrad’s
story contains no utopia, no immortal Dilmun, where the hero could
take refuge, away from the incessant strivings of the will to power. On
the contrary, it is constructed as a relentlessly dystopian, anti-epos.
At the end of his labyrinthine journey into the Abyss, Marlow discov-
ers not Utnapishtim, the favored of the gods, but Kurtz, the Minotaur
or Monster of the modernist exilic-utopian imagination, damned
to perpetual darkness. Whereas the Gilgamesh epic has at least one
reliable narrator—the Babylonian priest who remains nameless—
in Heart of Darkness both narrators are unreliable, thus introducing a
third point of view, that of “Conrad.” This third viewpoint increases
the distancing effect of, and builds further structural irony into the
narrative—a kind of irony not atypical of dystopia as a literary genre
(Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four are masterful
examples in this respect).
Thus, Marlow is far from being Conrad’s “alter ego,” as some crit-
ics proclaim, even though the novelist did take a trip up the Congo
River in 1890 and witnessed some of the horrors that he has his
narrator report in Heart of Darkness. One should keep in mind that
Marlow is a Victorian Englishman, while Conrad was not—he was
a Polish exile, born in Ukraine and educated in Russia, who never
quite felt at home in England, or anywhere else in the world, for that
matter. Nor can he be fairly labeled a “racist,” as a prominent contem-
porary African writer would have it. Conrad does not identify with
Marlow or his occasionally racist pronouncements any more than
he identifies with his first, nameless narrator—another Victorian
Englishman, even more “true to type” than Marlow. Being a “natu-
ralized” British citizen and writing in the language of his country of
adoption, Conrad could not very well question directly the colonial
practices of his gracious hosts. 8 He could, however, do it indirectly,
through his two English narrators, showing their cultural limita-
tions, specifically their exemptionalist mentality, not uncommon
among citizens of other nations as well.
The secret meaning of the novel can be found in the nameless
narrator’s description of Marlow’s posture as he spins his yarn. It is
actually “hidden in plain sight,” as it were, because it is the opposite of
 EXILE, UTOPIA, AND THE WILL TO EMPIRE 127
what both the first narrator and Marlow seem to believe, belonging to
the third viewpoint—that of “Conrad.” At the beginning of the novel,
the first narrator notes that Marlow’s posture resembles that of “an idol”
(Conrad 2012, p. 2). A few pages later, however, he significantly modi-
fies his simile: now Marlow assumes the “pose of a Buddha preaching
in European clothes and without a lotus–flower” (Conrad 2012, p. 5).
The image is highly ironical, not least because the narrator is uncon-
scious of the irony. A Buddha in European clothes is an incongruity.
Furthermore, a Buddha with a Lotus Flower represents enlightenment,
that is, rising above the world of suffering and the delusions of the will
to power. Marlow is a “Budddha” without a Lotus Flower and, there-
fore, is far from having achieved enlightenment, despite his harrow-
ing experiences, which remain “inconclusive.” The most he has done
is indirectly point to the first task of the Buddha, namely, painting a
picture of human suffering, but without actually identifying its causes
and remedy. Nor is the first narrator anywhere close to enlightenment,
not least because he again associates Marlow with the Buddha, at the
end of the novel: “Marlow ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in
the pose of a meditating Buddha” (Conrad 2012, p. 102).
Ironically, however, the nameless narrator had it right the first
time, because Marlow can be seen more like an idol than a Buddha
or, rather, as a false Buddha (although this distinction would prob-
ably have been lost both on the narrator himself and on the aver-
age Victorian and/or Christian reader of his age9). Marlow deplores
the “strivings” of the will to power, but remains deeply immersed
in them, and so does the first narrator through his description of
their situation, at the end of the novel, as being in the “heart of an
immense darkness.” Although they do not have access to what the
Buddha represents, “Conrad” and the reader do. From this latter per-
spective, the image of the Buddha is crucial. It is the ethical standard
against which the novel’s modernist dystopian world is measured,
belonging to the irenic system of values and beliefs that, as we have
seen, ran as an undercurrent both in the Gilgamesh epic and in the
Pentateuch, and that are incommensurable with those shared by the
two narrators. It is understanding this ancient tradition of wisdom,
of which early Buddhism was a part, that would have turned Kurtz
and Marlow (as well as other modernists and postmodernists of all
stripes) away from their inner and outer “darkness,” enabling them
to see the void or nothingness as a great liminal opportunity, rather
than an insurmountable barrier to their misguided drive to power.
 8
UTOPIA, TOTALITARIANISM,
AND THE WILL TO REASON:
KOESTLER’S DARKNESS AT
NOON

We have seen, in Conrad’s novel, that the will to empire arrives at an

impasse, because the exilic-utopian imagination that drives it has reached
an acute state of crisis, manifesting itself especially at the margins of the
Empire. During the first, “archaic” phase of empire building, the will resolves
its confrontation with otherness by either annihilating it or assimilating it
by force. However, in later critical phases or periods of “self-doubt,” such
as Modernism, the will often perceives this otherness as terrifying void,
darkness, and death, drawing back from it. Consequently, it needs to devise
new strategies of accomplishing its hegemonic objectives, while turning
the terror of the void itself to “good” account whenever it deems it neces-
sary. As I have already suggested, what has been called “Postmodernism” is
precisely a strategy of returning to the will to power in its archaic, violent,
and unashamed form. As a rule, these “returns” happen during periods of
sociocultural stress, such as wars and revolutions. During such periods,
the instruments that a median mentality has devised to put the brakes on
archaic power will not only fail, but will also be made to serve precisely the
kind of violent excesses that they were meant to restrain. Thus, traditional
rationality and reasoning (as developed in Plato’s dialogs, for instance) will
now be twisted to justify political totalitarianism, the modern avatar of
the might-makes-right mentality. In turn, the exilic-utopian imagination
will be restricted and made to serve the same interests of naked power.
128
 UTOPIA, TOTALITARIANISM, AND THE WILL TO REASON 129
In Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler dramatizes the moment
when the Modernist type of Russian communism gives way to the
Postmodernist, totalitarian type, rejuvenated by the archaic will to
power, masquerading as Reason, Utopia, and the logical, irrevers-
ible “march of History.” Historically, this transition corresponds to
the collapse of the old Russian Empire and its reemergence, in the
wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, in the territorially diminished
shape of the Soviet Union. It would take Stalin several decades and a
new World War to reconstitute and enlarge the old empire under its
communist guise, by using even more “efficient” (violent and coer-
cive) methods than the latter had employed.
Koestler proposes to stage this Stalinist period of transition by
tracing the revolutionary career and evolving mode of thinking of a
single character, Nicholas Salmanovitch Rubashov, who represents
the revolutionary Old Guard turned “mellow,” once its bid for power
succeeds. A hero of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Civil
War, Rubashov falls victim to the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s,
being tried and executed as traitor of the Revolution and would be
assassin of the communist dictator, Stalin. In order to construct his
novel around its main theme, Koestler uses a less complex narrative
technique than Conrad, but no less effective, by combining limited,
third-person narration, in which Rubashov is the center of con-
sciousness, with the latter’s first-person, diary entries. Rubashov’s
viewpoint is no more trustworthy than that of Conrad’s two narra-
tors, however, so that the reader needs to be careful in winnowing
the chaff from the grain, as it were, separating the novelist’s position
from that of his main character.
The narrative begins with Rubashov’s arrest by the Soviet secret
police and with his interrogation by the examining magistrate,
Ivanov, who turns out to be one of his closest colleagues and friends
from the Civil War days. The arrest triggers in Rubashov several flash-
backs to significant moments in his career, as well as a harrowing
self-examination that leads him eventually to accept the trumped-up
accusations against him and to become a willing political scapegoat
in the name of party unity, under the brutal leadership of No.1 (as
Stalin is referred to in the narrative).
From the flashbacks and the exchanges between Rubashov and
Ivanov, the reader gets a full picture of Rubashov’s beliefs in the early
days of the Revolution and the Civil War. At that time, he shared
the “archaic” mentality of his fellow revolutionaries, who justified
130 MODERNISM AND EXILE

their ruthlessness against the enemies of the Revolution with the

Machiavellian precept that the political end justifies the means and
that the Communist utopia could not be implemented without an
interim period of blood shedding and repressive state control—the
so-called dictatorship of the proletariat that in practice amounted to
the dictatorship of the supreme leader.
After the Civil War, Rubashov spends a number of years abroad,
fomenting revolution through the Comintern (the Third Communist
International, founded by Lenin and Trotzky in 1919) in Western
Europe. He does time in Western prisons, and No.1 himself wel-
comes him home as a great hero of the Revolution. Rubashov quickly
becomes disaffected, however, with the atmosphere of suspicion,
witch-hunting, and terror that No.1 has created among the Party ranks
while he was abroad. Many of the members of the Old Guard who led
the Revolution to victory and who appeared in an old photograph he
remembers (with Lenin seated in the center, Rubashov beside him,
and Stalin somewhere at the end of the table) are now gone:

[Rubashov] had not been in his native country for years and found that
much was changed. Half the bearded men in the photograph no longer
existed. Their names might not be mentioned, their memory only
invoked with curses—except for the old man with the slanting Tartar
eyes [i.e., Lenin], the leader of yore who had died in time. He was revered
as God-the-Father, and No. 1 as the Son; but it was whispered everywhere
that he had forged the old man’s will in order to come into the heritage.1

Rubashov has a hard time recognizing the remaining bearded

men of the old photograph: they are now “clean-shaven, worn out
and disillusioned, full of cynical melancholy.” When No. 1 periodi-
cally reaches out for a new victim among them, they all beat their
breasts, repenting “in chorus of their sins” (Koestler 1968, p. 61). But,
during his years abroad, Rubashov himself has changed. Under the
influence of exile, he has come to share the self-doubts of other Old
Guard members who, while ruthless during the Revolution, have
now mellowed with age, favoring somewhat more gentle methods
of implementing their Communist Utopia. Like them, he is uneasy
about No. 1’s grab for absolute power. He becomes even more disaf-
fected when he has to explain the cynical, pragmatic policies of No.1
to his fellow communists in the West, or must hand the latter over to
the authorities in Hitler’s Germany, as demanded by these policies.
 UTOPIA, TOTALITARIANISM, AND THE WILL TO REASON 131
Back in the Soviet Union, Rubashov immediately requests
another assignment abroad, which arouses No. 1’s suspicion and
leads to his eventual recall and arrest. Now in prison and reflecting
back on this state of affairs, Rubashov does not object to the ruth-
less methods applied to the enemies of the Revolution. He objects
only to their being applied to Party loyalists like him. For example,
in an imaginary dialog with a White officer held in an adjacent cell,
Rubashov estimates that during the Civil War he must have ordered
the execution of anywhere between seventy and a hundred of the
officer’s comrades. “What of it?” Rubashov tells himself. “That was
all right; it lay on a different plane to a case like Richard’s [one of
the German communists he had to turn over to Hitler’s Gestapo];
and he would do it again today. Even if he knew beforehand that
the revolution would in the end put No.1 in the saddle? Even then”
(Koestler 1968, p. 55).
Despite his qualms, Rubashov admires No. 1 precisely because
of his unswerving will to power. Stalin is the perfect embodiment
of the might-makes-right mentality of the absolute ruler, who ruth-
lessly purges all of his former colleagues and potential competitors
in order to gain total and uncontested authority. Rubashov recalls,
approvingly, the rumor that the dictator has a copy of Machiavelli’s
Prince by his bedside. At the critical turning points of history,
Rubashov reflects, “there is no other rule possible than the old one,
that the end justifies the means. We were neo-Machiavellians in
the name of universal reason—that was our greatness” (Koestler
1968, p. 98).
Since Bolshevik revolutionaries have cast overboard the “bal-
last” of median values and the bourgeois morality of compromise,
decency, honor, and fear of God, the only guiding principle left
to them is belief in their infallibility as instruments of History. In
turn, they define History, in typical modernist fashion, as a rational
process that obeys universal laws, given not by God, but by the
movement of matter in Nature, or that of the “masses” in society.
Their so-called science of “dialectic materialism” claims to study
the direction of this movement, and he who interprets it correctly
may act in accordance with History and become the legitimate
leader of the masses.
Yet, there is no certainty that the dialectician’s interpretation is
correct, except by trial and error, which opens the way for arbitrary
action and the principle of might-makes-right. The horror that No. 1
132 MODERNISM AND EXILE

generated, Rubashov muses, consisted above all in the “possibility

that he was in the right, and that all those whom he killed had to
admit, even with the bullet in the back of their necks, that he con-
ceivably might be in the right.” No one could be sure, and all they
could do was to appeal to “that mocking oracle they called History,
who gave her sentence only when the jaws of the appealer had long
since fallen to dust” (Koestler 1968, p. 13).
Because no divine knowledge and no religious oracle can be
invoked in this case, the dilemma can be solved only by a deci-
sive act of the will, a fanatical faith in one’s “historical mission.”
Consequently, Rubashov envies No. 1 for his unshaken belief that
he, the supreme leader, is invariably right, being the only one who
understands correctly the twists and turns of History. As he notes in
his journal, “No. 1 has faith in himself, tough, slow, sullen and unshakable.
He has the most solid anchor-chain of all. Mine has worn thin in the last few
years … The fact is: I no longer believe in my infallibility. That is why I am lost”
(Koestler 1968, p. 101; italics in the original).
Rubashov calls his new habit of thinking through other people’s
minds an old, counter-revolutionary, “disease.” He has been infected
with it while in exile, causing him to waver in his decisions. As
Ivanov observes during an interrogation session, Rubashov’s main
problem is that he is beginning to develop a “conscience,” and a
conscience “renders one as unfit for the revolution as a double chin.
Conscience eats through the brain like a cancer, until the whole of
the grey matter is devoured” (Koestler 1968, p. 153). The greatest dan-
ger for a revolutionary, Ivanov adds, is to “regard the world as a sort
of metaphysical brothel for emotions. That is the first command-
ment for us. Sympathy, conscience, disgust, despair, repentance and
atonement are for us repellent debauchery” (Koestler 1968, p. 156).
During the interrogation, Ivanov employs their common revolu-
tionary reasoning rather than physical torture in order to persuade
Rubashov to sign a confession to crimes he has never committed. As
Ivanov tells his younger subordinate Gletkin, who advocates torture,
Rubashov will in the end sign the confession, not because of physical
duress, but because of the compelling force of revolutionary “logic.”
The magistrate engages Rubashov in a philosophical discussion of
the kind that the Russian intellectual revolutionaries used to have
before and during the early days of the Revolution. He throws back
at Rubashov their common revolutionary credo: “The principle that
the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political
ethics” (Koestler 1968, p. 159).
 UTOPIA, TOTALITARIANISM, AND THE WILL TO REASON 133
Conscience has no place in politics. “The greatest temptation for
the like of us,” Ivanov argues, is “to renounce violence, to repent, to
make peace with oneself. Most great revolutionaries fell before this
temptation, from Spartacus to Danton and Dostoevsky…. As long as
chaos dominates the world, God is an anachronism; and every com-
promise with one’s conscience is perfidy. When the accursed inner
voice speaks to you, hold your hands over your ears” (Koestler 1968,
p. 156). According to the Communist revolutionary credo, the greatest
criminals in history are not the likes of Nero and Fouché, but the likes
of Gandhi and Tolstoy. “Gandhi’s inner voice,” Ivanov claims, “has
done more to prevent the liberation of India than the British guns. To
sell yourself for thirty pieces of silver is an honest transaction; but to
sell yourself to one’s own conscience is to abandon mankind. History
is a priori amoral; it has no conscience” (Koestler 1968, p. 156).
According to Ivanov, there are two basic conceptions of human
ethics, situated at opposite poles. One is “Christian and humane,
declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules
of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units” (Koestler 1968,
p. 160). The other is based on the principle that “a collective aim
justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the indi-
vidual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the
community—which may be disposed of it as an experimentation
rabbit or a sacrificial lamb” (Koestler 1968, p. 160). These two con-
ceptions also appear, side by side, in the two epigraphs to the novel.
The first one is from Machiavelli’s Discorsi: “He who establishes a
dictatorship and does not kill Brutus, or he who founds a republic
and does not kill the sons of Brutus, will only reign a short time.”
The second one is from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: “Man,
man, one cannot live quite without pity.”
Ivanov claims that only political “humbugs” and “dilettantes” try
to combine the two conceptions, because in practice it is impossi-
ble to mix them. Leaders “burdened with power and responsibility”
soon find out that they have to choose, and they are “fatally driven
to the second alternative” (Koestler 1968, p. 160). If Rubashov had not
shared Ivanov’s views at this juncture, he could have pointed out that
his old friend is incorrect in saying that the two ethics are impossible
to mix. On the contrary, the will to power has mixed them through-
out the course of human history, whenever it serves its purposes.
Rubashov himself will mix them later on in the narrative.
The epigraph to Section 2, “The Second Hearing,” of the novel
shows, moreover, that the Christian Church itself, or at least some of its
134 MODERNISM AND EXILE

members, have often mixed the two ethics, despite Christ’s teaching,
which is incommensurable with both of them. The epigraph is a
citation from Dietrich von Nieheim, a 15th century German bishop:
“When the existence of the Church is threatened, she is released
from the commandments of morality. With unity as the end, the
use of every means is sanctified, even cunning, treachery, violence,
simony, prison, death. For all order is for the sake of the commu-
nity, and the individual must be sacrificed for the common good”
(Koestler 1968, p. 97). In fact, Russian communists under Lenin and
Stalin, despite their professed atheism, modeled their rigid organi-
zation and modus operandi precisely on past fanatic religious sects
that continue, unfortunately, to operate today, under the banner of
Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or other religion.
I should note that Ivanov is wrong also because the two systems
of ethics he describes are, actually, one and the same, being based on
the will to power in its archaic and median guise. As we have already
seen, there is a third conception of ethics, the irenic one, which is
espoused by Jesus of Nazareth and other teachers of humankind
such as Gautama Buddha, Lao-Tzi, and Pythagoras and which
equally appears in the Gilgamesh epic and the Pentateuch. This
ethics is not “opposed” to the other two, but is incommensurable
with them. Yet, the will to power often co-opts and distorts it, in
order to make it serve its own purposes, as it has done with Christ’s
teaching, for example.
In his self-serving, cynical arguments supporting Stalinist
pragmatism, Ivanov also mentions Dostoevsky’s novel, Crime and
Punishment and alludes to the parable of the Grand Inquisitor in Brothers
Karamazov. He believes that every copy of Crime and Punishment ought to
be burned, because of its “counter-revolutionary” message. He implies
that Raskolnikov’s reasoning in murdering the old miserly woman is
correct (despite the fact that he botches up his plan, confesses to the
crime, and accepts being punished for it). Thereby, Ivanov reclaims
Raskolnikov as one of their revolutionary forerunners (a common
reading of this character in 20th-century literary criticism) and dis-
misses the ending of the novel: “We cannot stick to the principle that
the individual is sacrosanct, and that we must not treat human lives
according to the rules of arithmetic” (Koestler 1968, p. 159).
Like Raskolnikov, Ivanov applies the rules of arithmetic and the
logic of numbers to their revolutionary movement. “Every year,”
he argues, “several million people are killed quite pointlessly by
 UTOPIA, TOTALITARIANISM, AND THE WILL TO REASON 135
epidemics and other natural catastrophies. And we should shrink
from sacrificing a few hundred thousand for the most promising
experiment in history?” (Koestler 1968, p. 164) He then invokes Nature
once more to justify their violent experiment in social engineering:
“Nature is generous in her senseless experiments on mankind. Why
should mankind not have the right to experiment on itself?” (Koestler
1968, p. 165)
The Party leaders, including Rubashov and Ivanov, display
the same cold, technocratic attitude toward death, which, as for the
archaic, “heroic” mind, is nothing more than an instrument in the
power contest, an efficient way of eliminating one’s adversaries. For
the Party, Rubashov muses in his cell, death “was no mystery, it had no
romantic aspect. It was a logical consequence, a factor with which one
reckoned and which bore a rather abstract character” (Koestler 1968,
p. 138). Among Party leaders, one rarely dwells on death, while the
word “execution” is almost never mentioned. Instead, one uses a tech-
nical term: (physical) “liquidation.” This word evokes the concrete
idea of stopping all political activity: “The act of dying in itself was a
technical detail, with no claim to interest; death as a factor in a logical
equation had lost any intimate bodily feature” (Koestler 1968, p. 138).
Needless to say, Hitler and his Nazi followers shared, with Stalin, this
mechanical, technocratic view of death, which resulted in the exter-
mination camps of World War II.
As Rubashov develops a “conscience,” that is, reverts to the “bour-
geois” or median mentality, he begins to doubt this cold revolution-
ary logic. In the past, the death of Arlova, his secretary and lover
whom he failed to defend in court, “had left him with a feeling of
strong uneasiness, but he had never doubted the logical rightness of
his behavior” (Koestler 1968, p. 145): he let her die because he was
more important to the movement than she was. Now, as he sees and
hears his old Communist friend, admiral Bogrov, being dragged
whimpering to the place of execution, “his past mode of thought
seemed lunacy” (Koestler 1968, p. 145). In fact, the thought of Arlova
inserts itself in the huge emptiness caused by his loss of faith in his
revolutionary credo: “If anything in human beings could survive
destruction, the girl Arlova lay somewhere in the great emptiness,
still staring with her good cow’s eyes at Comrade Rubashov, who
had been her idol and had sent her to her death” (Koestler 1968, p. 89).
Despite his pricks of conscience about Arlova, Rubashov is not
ready to abandon the revolutionary utopia that had given meaning
136 MODERNISM AND EXILE

to his life. If he were to do so, he would again be confronted with

the void or nothingness that the thought of Arlova’s self-sacrifice
could only fleetingly fill. He asks himself several times during his
self-examination for what he is actually dying. But, whenever he
asks that question he cannot find an answer and the feeling of “great
emptiness” returns. Consequently, Rubashov again employs Reason
to fill out his inner void: he works out a theory that justifies the
absolute rule of No. 1 in terms of “historical materialism” and the
“objective” movement of History.
In developing his new Marxist theory of the “relative maturity of the
masses,” Rubashov starts from the premise that there is always a lag
between technological progress, or the development of the means of
production, and the consciousness of the masses. This lag explains the
periodical swings of History from totalitarianism to anarchy: democ-
racy as a maximum amount of freedom is possible only in the middle
of the pendulum’s swing, when the consciousness of the masses has
caught up with the development of technology or the means of pro-
duction. (Koestler 1968, pp. 170–174) If you are not fortunate enough
to live in those times, Rubashov further argues, it is best to adapt
your convictions to the fateful march of History. When the masses
are not “mature,” humanitarian weakness and liberal democracy are
“suicide for the Revolution” (Koestler 1968, p. 194). By the same token,
a demand for liberal reform, “the abolition of Terror, and a loosen-
ing of the rigid organization of the Party are objectively harmful and
counter-revolutionary in character” (Koestler 1968, p. 194).
Rubashov is thus able to justify Stalinist totalitarianism as a
“historical necessity,” fulfilling Ivanov’s prediction that he will even-
tually confess to the crimes he is accused of. Since the only ethical
criterion communists recognize is that of social utility, “the pub-
lic disavowal of one’s conviction in order to remain in the Party’s
ranks is obviously more honorable than the quixotism of carrying
on a hopeless struggle” (Koestler 1968, p. 174). Unable to confront the
emptiness or “darkness” inside him any more than Kurtz and Marlow
could in Conrad’s novel, Rubashov cheers himself up without real-
izing he is in bad faith. He secretly hopes that his old friend Ivanov
will see the utility of the new theory for the Communist movement
and will not recommend the death sentence in his case, thus giving
Rubashov more time to develop it. But, Ivanov himself is “liquidated”
for counter-revolutionary opinions and attitudes, and Gletkin is put
in charge of Rubashov’s interrogation.
 UTOPIA, TOTALITARIANISM, AND THE WILL TO REASON 137
Gletkin is a peasant’s son, not an intellectual. He believes that
inflicting physical pain works much better than Ivanov’s refined
methods, based on logical reasoning. To Rubashov, Gletkin seems
a “brute” and a “barbarian of the new age” (Koestler 1968, p. 190),
or a “modern Neanderthaler” (Koestler 1968, p. 192), that is, some-
one closer to the archaic will to power than his own generation.
He calls Communist operatives of Gletkin’s ilk “inhuman,” forget-
ting his own callous treatment of Arlova and his foreign colleagues
from the Comintern. Over time and through physical torture (sleep
deprivation and relentless interrogation under blinding lights),
Gletkin does, however, get to Rubashov, precisely because of the
raw, primeval power that he exudes: “Massive and expressionless,
[Gletkin] sat there, the brutal embodiment of the State which owes
its very existence to the Rubashovs and the Ivanovs. … Rubashov
repeated to himself for the hundredth time that Gletkin and the new
Neanderthalers were merely completing the work of the generation
with the numbered heads” (Koestler 1968, p. 223).
In the end, Gletkin combines his rough interrogation methods
with Ivanov’s subtler strategy, using Rubashov’s own arguments to
persuade him to become a willing scapegoat in the service of the
Revolution: “Your task is simple. You have set it yourself: to gild the
Right to blacken the Wrong. The policy of the opposition is wrong.
Your task is therefore to make the opposition contemptible; to make
the masses understand that opposition is a crime and that the leaders
of the opposition are criminals. That is the simple language the
masses understand” (Koestler 1968, p. 243).
Rubashov recognizes this logic as his own. He muses on the fate
of the Old Guard, which he will equally share. The logic is simple and
pitiless: he who lives by the sword must perish by it. The old revo-
lutionaries “were too deeply entangled in their own past, caught in
the web they had spun themselves, according to the laws of their own
twisted ethics and twisted logic; they were all guilty, although not
of those deeds of which they accused themselves. There was no way
back for them. Their exit from the stage happened strictly according
to the rules of their strange game. The public expected no swan-songs
of them. They had to act according to the text-book, and their part
was the howling of wolves in the night” (Koestler 1968, p. 258).
Following the Stalinist script, Rubashov decides to play the role
of a scapegoat at his trial. This way, he reasons, he can at least give
some meaning to his life and death. He declares to his judges: “If
138 MODERNISM AND EXILE

I ask myself today, ‘For what am I dying?’ I am confronted with

absolute nothingness. There is nothing for which one could die, if
one died without having repented and unreconciled with the Party
and the Movement. Therefore, on the threshold of my last hour,
I bend my knees to the country, to the masses and to the whole peo-
ple” (Koestler 1968, p. 256).
Once his trial is over and his account is settled, Rubashov no
longer feels compelled to “howl with the wolves.” But, the question
that has obsessed him throughout his ordeal still persists: What is he
dying for? At this point, Rubashov starts thinking of what he calls a
“grammatical fiction”: the “I,” the “silent partner,” or the inner voice
he has ignored all of his life. According to the Party, the “I” was a
“suspect quality” that did not deserve recognition, so that the defini-
tion of the individual was a “multitude of one million divided by one
million” (Koestler 1968, p. 262). Nor did the Party recognize the state
that the mystics called “ecstasy,” the saints, “contemplation,” and
Freud, the “oceanic sense” (Koestler 1968, p. 260). In this state, “one’s
personality dissolved as a grain of salt in the sea; but at the same
time the infinite sea seemed to be contained in the grain of salt. The
grain could no longer be localized in time and space; it was a state in
which thought lost direction and started to circle, like the compass
needle at the magnetic pole….until it seemed that all thoughts and
all sensations, even pain and joy itself, were only the spectrum lines
of the same ray of light, disintegrating in the prism of consciousness”
(Koestler 1968, p. 260f.).
Rubashov once more re-examines his life and beliefs in the light of
this new insight. At the outset of the narrative, he felt that his actions
were “necessary and right” and that he would kill the enemies of the
Revolution all over again, if he had to. At that time, he asked himself
if one must also pay for righteous acts and if there is “another meas-
ure besides that of reason,” but he dismissed the thought as “a breath
of religious madness” (Koestler 1968, p. 57). He hated and despised the
White officer, imprisoned in the adjacent cell. Just before his execution,
however, Rubashov expresses gratitude to him for his compassion and
moral support in the face of death. This signals his (as well as the officer’s)
progress from a first-order to a second-order morality by the end of the
novel: Rubashov now sympathizes with the other inmates, irrespective
of their political beliefs, because of their common human plight.
As he looks back over his past, Rubashov realizes that “for forty
years he had been running amuck—the running amuck of pure
 UTOPIA, TOTALITARIANISM, AND THE WILL TO REASON 139
reason” (Koestler 1968, p. 263). For one, he has shared the mistaken
belief that “the central ill of humanity, the cancer which was eating
into its entrails” is material or economic in nature and that the only
solution was “the surgeon’s knife and his cool calculation” (Koestler
1968, p. 263). Another mistaken belief, related to the first one, is the
precept that the end justifies the means. It was this precept that
“had killed the fraternity of the Revolution and made them all run
amuck” (Koestler 1968, p. 265). Finally, he mistakenly believed in the
first-order morality that employed a double standard: one for the
Party and the other for the rest of humankind.
Rubashov now wonders if it is suitable for humans “to be com-
pletely freed from the old bonds, from the steadying brakes of ‘Thou
shalt not’ and ‘Thou mayst not,’ and to be allowed to tear along
straight to the goal” (Koestler 1968, p. 264). His false beliefs have
inexorably led to “the time of great darkness” (265) of the Stalinist
dictatorship, a darkness that Rubashov feels inside him as well. At
this point, darkness descends on Koestler’s narrative, just as it did
on Conrad’s fictional world, at the end of Heart of Darkness. Yet, as
we shall see in a moment, Koestler’s main character, unlike Conrad’s
two narrators, does not allow dystopia to win the day.
It has, hopefully, become evident from the foregoing discussion
that the exilic-utopian imagination drives Koestler’s narrative no
less than that of Conrad. Whenever exile is mentioned in the novel,
it is inextricably linked with utopia. As Ivanov tells Rubashov, “Each
step in one’s spiritual development is the result of definite experi-
ences. If you really want to know: I became a man at seventeen,
when I was sent into exile for the first time” (Koestler 1968, p. 86).
The leaders of the Old Guard worked out the theoretical and practi-
cal details of their Communist utopia while in exile. Rubashov notes
that “the most productive times for revolutionary philosophy had always been
the time of exile, the forced rests between periods of political activity” (Koestler
1968, p. 182; italics in the original).
Prison itself is a coercive form of internal exile that equally opens
a liminal space for the political prisoner who knows how to use it
shrewdly. It is in prison that Rubashov develops his theory of the
“relative maturity of the masses.” The principal Bolshevik leaders
used their exile, deportation, and imprisonment to stage a triumphant
return to Russia in order to start the Revolution that was to implement
their utopia. As Rubashov puts it, “Had not the old leader [Lenin],
shortly before the Revolution, used the services of the General Staff of
140 MODERNISM AND EXILE

the same country [Germany] in order to be able to return from exile

and lead the Revolution to victory?” (Koestler 1968, p. 222)
Rubashov also alludes, in his journal, to the wandering of the
Hebrews in the desert in search of the Promised Land, but only to
justify, again, neo-Machiavellian methods: “History has taught us that
often lies serve her better than the truth; for man is sluggish and has to be led
through the desert for forty years before each step in his development. And he
has to be driven through the desert with threats and promises, by imaginary
terrors and imaginary consolations, so that he should not sit down prema-
turely to rest and divert himself by worshipping golden calves” (Koestler 1968,
p. 99, italics in the original). Here Rubashov equates the Promised
Land with Communist utopia, implying that Moses and Aaron were
revolutionary leaders no less pragmatic than the Soviet ones and
that the “desert” represents the economic deprivation and politi-
cal repression that are “necessary” and “inevitable” during a period
of revolutionary transition. Although Rubashov does have a point
about Moses as a violent, young revolutionary, he ignores his subse-
quent development into an irenic, spiritual leader (see my reading of
the Pentateuch in Chapter 4 above).
Rubashov’s nostalgic description of the Old Guard’s utopian
dreams smacks of the Golden Age fictions typical of traditional uto-
pian fantasies: “They dreamed of power with the object of abolishing
power; of ruling over the people to wean them from the habit of being
ruled” (Koestler 1968, p. 60). At that time, Rubashov observes later on
in the narrative, “one believed that the gates of Utopia stood open,
and that mankind stood on its threshold” (132) For a while, it looked
like “[a]ll their thoughts became deeds and all their dreams were
fulfilled” (Koestler 1968, p. 60). Yet, where was the Old Guard now?
“Their brains, which had changed the course of the world, had each
received a charge of lead” (Koestler 1968, p. 60). The few remaining
members were exhausted “by the years of exile, the acid sharpness of
faction within the Party, the unscrupulousness with which they were
fought out; worn out by the endless defeats, and the demoralization
of the final victory” (Koestler 1968, p. 223). Their beautiful utopia had
turned into horrific dystopia or “darkness at noon.”
The title of Koestler’s novel is another Biblical reference, this
time to the New Testament. At the moment that Christ dies on the
cross, the sun is eclipsed and the light of noon turns into darkness.
Thus, God or Nature announces a time of great distress and pain-
ful trials for humanity. Through its title, the novel subtly (or not
so subtly) associates the Communist utopian project with Christ’s
 UTOPIA, TOTALITARIANISM, AND THE WILL TO REASON 141
utopian project of saving humankind (many a modern Communist
sympathizer argues that Christ himself was a “communist”). By the
same token, Stalin becomes “Judas”—the betrayer of the utopian
ideals of the Bolshevik Revolution.
One should, however, point out that the Old Guard’s utopian
dream was not discarded altogether, despite Rubashov’s nostalgic
lament. On the contrary, it was made to serve the interests of the
dystopian totalitarian State: the Communist utopia was postponed
indefinitely as the final goal post toward which society is moving
and which justifies any repressive, drastic measures in the interim.
The Soviet communists also adopted this strategy from the Church’s
book, which promises salvation in another life. Gletkin indirectly
points to it in the discussion he has with Ivanov, in which he advo-
cates physical torture: “We wanted to start at once with the flower
gardens. That was a mistake. In a hundred years, we will be able to
appeal to the criminal’s reason and social instincts. Today, we still
have to work on his physical constitution, and crush him, physically
and mentally, if necessary” (Koestler 1968, p. 104).
Nor can Rubashov, even in the twelfth hour, abandon his uto-
pian Communist dream that has turned into dystopia through No.
1’s unrestrained appetite for power. Just before his execution, una-
ble to confront the void, Rubashov theorizes that this dream can
be realized by combining Marxist economics and some of form of
spirituality (which he defines, vaguely, as Freud’s “oceanic feeling”),
that is, by changing “economic fatality” through a shift in human
consciousness: “Perhaps later, much later, the new movement would
arise—with new flags, a new spirit knowing of both: of economic
fatality and the ‘oceanic sense’. Perhaps the members of the new
party will wear monks’ cowls, and preach that only purity of means
can justify the ends” (Koestler 1968, p. 266).
The very ending of the novel, however, dissipates this dream as
well: Rubashov is shot in the head, and the last thing he is aware of is
the ocean: “There was the sea again with its sounds. A wave slowly
lifted him up. It came from afar and traveled sedately on, a shrug of
eternity” (Koestler 1968, p. 272). The last sentence of the novel is a
fine example of successful authorial intrusion, in which the view-
point no longer belongs to Rubashov, but to “Koestler.” It places the
Communist utopian projects and the Communist twisted notions
of “History,” “Power,” and “Class Struggle,” if indeed not all human
struggle, sub specie aeternitatis. From that perspective, they are nothing
but a ripple in the infinite ocean of stillness.
 9
EXILE, DYSTOPIA, AND
THE WILL TO ORDER:
HUXLEY’S BRAVE NEW
WORLD

If in Heart of Darkness and Darkness at Noon, Conrad and Koestler

stage the empire-building phase of the will to power, whether in its
colonialist or in its communist guise, in Brave New World Huxley
stages its postcolonialist and postcommunist phase. Huxley’s dys-
topian empire has now encompassed the entire planet and is called
the World-State, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the New World
Order envisaged by the multinational global elites of the late 20th
century, after the fall of Communism. Its watchword is no longer
the will to conquest, but “stability” or the will to order. Likewise,
the main instrument of the will to power is no longer the infliction
of physical and psychological pain, as in Darkness at Noon and in
Nineteen Eighty-Four; on the contrary, it is the “infliction of pleas-
ure” (Huxley’s phrase). This does not mean, of course, that the New
World Order will not resort to violence and massive pain-infliction
whenever global “stability” (read: its hegemony) is threatened, as the
current “war on terror,” oil proxy wars, and other local nationalist
and/or religious conflagrations amply demonstrate.
In Koestler’s novel, the end of the will to power still masquerades
as Communist utopia, be it in its modified version driven by the “oce-
anic feeling.” Rubashov still believes that power can be seized “with
the object of abolishing power,” and that “ruling over the people” can
142
 EXILE, DYSTOPIA, AND THE WILL TO ORDER 143
have as objective “to wean them from the habit of being ruled”; in
other words, that power’s end can ever be to put an end to itself. This
useful political fiction has been one of the most effective strategies
of the will to power, and has been invoked again and again through-
out human history, particularly by those “revolutionaries” who are
out of power and want to gain it by all means. What Rubashov does
not understand (but Stalin did) is that in the case of the will to power,
end and means coincide. This thinly veiled truth is rendered stark
naked in another brilliant 20th-century dystopia, Orwell’s Nineteen
Eighty-Four: the true end of power is, invariably, its own enhance-
ment, preservation, and perpetuation, by any means and at all costs.1
Plato and, in modern times, Nietzsche have well understood that
both pleasure and pain are instruments of power and that a social
engineer needs to manipulate both in order to achieve the desired
social goals, whatever these goals may be; and furthermore, that
manipulating pleasure through rewards often yields much more
effective and lasting results than punishment. Therefore, Brave New
World is, appropriately, a dystopia based on pleasure; and this kind
of dystopia is much more insidious than the kind based on pain,
as we can see from our own consumerist “culture of narcissism”
(Lasch 1979) As Huxley puts it in his Foreword to the 1946 edition of
the novel (the first edition having been published in 1931): “A really
efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful
executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a
population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they
love their servitude.”2
Orwell’s novel imagines a postmodernist, Nietzschean future
where archaic values return in full force, people being subdued and
controlled by sheer violence. This dystopian world is already a reality
in Stalinist Russia, as Koestler’s narrative brilliantly shows. By contrast,
Huxley imagines a subtle dystopian world that is equally driven by the
will to power, but achieves “stability” through a shrewd combination
and management of the two sets of power-oriented values: archaic and
median. The resulting society of Brave New World is made up of an
amusing hodge-podge of past utopian schemes, whether Platonic or
socialist, with postindustrial capitalism, socialist collectivism, sexual
promiscuity, and an artificial, genetically engineered, caste-system
thrown into the mix.
This preposterous social organization is rendered possible
through the support of reductionist science, and the kind of modern
144 MODERNISM AND EXILE

information and communication technology that was in its very

early stages of development at the time Huxley wrote the novel, but
has since become an ominous reality: current biotechnology will
soon be able to support massive social engineering projects through
the type of genetic manipulation described in the novel, while
cognitive psychology, brain research, Artificial Intelligence-based
electronic systems, and digital mass media have enabled mental and
emotional manipulation through conscious and subliminal meth-
ods on unprecedented scale. Political and commercial brainwashing,
mindless entertainment, and sexual promiscuity are some of the fea-
tures of the Brave New World that have become daily reality in our
own postindustrial, consumerist society, drifting toward what Huxley
aptly calls the “welfare-tyranny of Utopia” (Huxley 1998, p. xvii).
The plot of the novel is very simple, but Huxley fully achieves his
satirical purposes through an array of literary techniques such as
multiple centers of consciousness, ironical reversal of perspective,
and intertextual play. We are in Central London, in the year 600 of
Our Ford or Our Freud (AF) —a jocular reference to both Henry
Ford, the American industrialist who invented mass production,
and Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalyst who reduced all individual
unhappiness to dysfunctional family relations. Bernard Marx, an
Alpha-Plus male (whose unhappy physique and disposition are due
to a human error in the genetic manipulation of his embryo) and
his current sexual partner, Lenina Crowne, a better-adjusted and
happily promiscuous Beta-Plus female, undertake a pleasure trip to
the Indian Reservation of New Mexico, which has been transformed
into an amusement park for Brave New Worlders.
While on the Reservation, Bernard discovers a dark secret: many
years back, his boss, the Director of Hatchery and Conditioning in
Central London, had visited the place with his partner Linda, who
got lost in a storm and was left behind. Unbeknownst to the Director,
Linda had become pregnant, giving birth to their son, John, who
has now grown up as a “savage” on the Reservation. Bernard sees
his chance to humiliate his boss (who had threatened to move him
to some distant island, because of his malcontent nature) by bring-
ing Linda and the young man, John the Savage, back to civilization
with them.
The Director is duly humiliated and has to resign, while Bernard
Marx is lionized side by side with the Savage. In turn, Lenina falls
in lust with John, but he indignantly rejects her sexual advances,
because of his idealist notions of Neo-Platonic love that he derived
 EXILE, DYSTOPIA, AND THE WILL TO ORDER 145
from reading an ancient copy of Shakespeare’s works. The Savage
also tries to foment revolution among the lower caste of the Brave
New World, but they are impervious to his message of “freedom”:
violence breaks out when he tries to deprive them of their soma—the
stultifying drug that keeps them happy.
As a result of this disastrous public incident, Bernard Marx falls
into disgrace and is sent into exile on a distant island. In turn, the
disaffected Savage decides to withdraw to a place in the countryside,
where he seeks to live an ascetic life, away from what he sees as the
moral “filth” of World-State. He refuses to take soma by way of sol-
ace. Instead, he flagellates himself, in the manner of penitent monks,
in order to subdue his base, physical desires. But, he is pestered by
crowds of journalists and other curious visitors, including Lenina,
who throws herself at him, again. In a fit of anger and frustration, the
Savage starts whipping her. The Brave New Worlders interpret this act
as a preamble to a sexual orgy, in which they gleefully engage. John
succumbs to his repressed sexual desires and joins the Dionysian
frenzy. When he awakens the next morning, he is horrified by his
“shameful” and “lowly” behavior (which actually is highly appropriate
and conventional by Brave New World standards) and kills himself.
From this brief summary, it is evident that Huxley imagines a
fictional world in which, just as in Darkness at Noon, Reason “runs
amuck,” but this time in an attempt to eliminate or control violent
social conflict through relatively nonviolent means. Mustapha
Mond, one of the other principal characters in the narrative and
the World-Controller for Europe, explains the history and founding
principles of the new world order to a group of adolescent neophytes
who visit the Hatchery and Conditioning Factory, run on the Fordian
principle of mass production of embryos and on the Neo-Pavlovian
principle of emotional conditioning of infants. As a result of a dev-
astating Nine Years’ World War in the distant past, Mond points out,
humankind has made a choice between total destruction and world
control. Therefore, the 10 World-Controllers have been called on to
devise the best ways of creating the Brave New World.
Early on in the game, the Controllers realized that “force was no
good” (Huxley 1998, p. 50). As Mond puts it, government is “an affair
of sitting, not hitting. You rule with the brains and the buttocks,
never with the fists” (Huxley 1998, p. 49). Thus, the Controllers came
up with the “slower but infinitely surer methods of ectogenesis, neo-
Pavlovian conditioning and hypnopaedia” (Huxley 1998, p. 50). They
also came up with the World State, Ford’s Day celebrations, Community
146 MODERNISM AND EXILE

Sings, and Solidarity Services, all in the interest of global stability. As

the Controller insists, stability is the “primal and the ultimate need”
(Huxley 1998, p. 43).
In order to achieve social stability, one needs to deal effectively
with the causes of social conflict. One cause is social inequal-
ity. Whereas all utopias are aware of this problem, they have been
unable to offer a satisfactory solution to it: socialist utopias propose
socioeconomic equality based on sharing all means of production
and redistributing all income according to basic material needs;
the Socratic Republic proposes a caste-system with social mobility
between castes, based on individual merit, but does not solve the
problem of individual “happiness.” This happiness is frequently
defined, in power-oriented societies, as individual freedom, which
often amounts in practice to be able to gratify one’s senses and to
impose one’s will on others. In the Socratic Republic, this individ-
ual “happiness” must be sacrificed to the happiness of the entire
community.
To address such persistent dilemmas, inherent in any social
organization based on the will to power, the World Controllers have
preserved the caste-system, without the Socratic upward mobility,
but have genetically and psychologically preconditioned individu-
als to fulfill their social role and be happy with it. As the Director of
Hatcheries and Conditioning points out, in Brave New World “the
secret of happiness and virtue” is “liking what you’ve got to do. All
conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social
destiny” (Huxley 1998, p. 16) For example, through conditioning, the
lower castes will “grow up with what the psychologists used to call an
‘instinctive’ hatred of books and flowers. Reflexes unalterably condi-
tioned. They will be safe from books and botany all their lives” (p. 22).
Mass production of preconditioned children, doubled by mass
consumption for adults, constitutes the great engine of the Fordian
system. People’s activities, be it work, sex or other distractions, must
be incessant and undertaken in common. Citizens must constantly
be kept busy and not given occasion to be alone, to think, or to get
bored: no “crevice of time should yawn in the solid substance of
their distractions” (Huxley 1998, p. 55). There is no old age or suffer-
ing related to it: individuals are automatically programmed to die
suddenly and quietly in their sixties, and there is no public fuss or
lamentation over them. Should people accidentally be confronted
with an unpleasant experience or the void in their lives, there is
 EXILE, DYSTOPIA, AND THE WILL TO ORDER 147
always delicious soma: “a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for
a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon;
returning whence they find themselves on the other side of the
crevice, safe on the solid ground of daily labor and distraction …”
(Huxley 1998, p. 56).
Another cause of social instability is excessive feeling or emotion,
which needs, therefore, to be controlled and regulated. But, unlike
in Darkness at Noon or in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in Brave New World emo-
tion is defused, rather than repressed. As the Director of Hatchery
points out, “[i]mpulse arrested spills over, and the flood is feeling,
the flood is passion, the flood is even madness; it depends on the
force of the current, the height and strength of the barrier” (Huxley
1998, p. 43). The best way of dealing with such emotional floods is to
remove all barriers and provide instant gratification for desires that
cannot be eradicated through psychological conditioning: “Feeling,”
the Director observes, “lurks in that interval of time between desire
and its consummation. Shorten that interval, break down all those
old unnecessary barriers” (Huxley 1998, p. 44). Since sexual energy
is very powerful and can turn explosive when it is pent up, the
Controllers defuse it by allowing free and indiscriminate sexual play
between all citizens, starting in early childhood.
The World Controllers take a page from the socialist utopian
schemes of the 19th century (which in turn adopt Socratic utopian
ideas) that advocate free love and the abolition of the family and
parenthood. But they ensure the success of this new value-system
by inverting “bourgeois” morality and values. They take the anti-
thetical sense of words (analyzed by Freud in the wake of Nietzsche)
and flip over their poles of positive and negative meanings: what
was bad is good and vice versa. Thus, Brave New Worlders are pre-
conditioned to believe that “mother” and “father” are dirty words;
that promiscuity and polygamy are good; and that monogamy and
sexual/emotional loyalty are bad. To make sure any residue of dan-
gerous pent-up emotion is purged, the Controllers also introduce
the Solidarity Services—an avatar of primitive, Dionysian, religious
ritual called “orgy-porgy”—designed to provide release from excess
emotion and to achieve greater unity with Our Ford (or Our Freud).
(Huxley 1998, p. 84)
In order to achieve their goal of “universal happiness” through
order and stability, the Controllers also cultivate uniformity within
the social castes. Whoever does not conform to the preconditioned
148 MODERNISM AND EXILE

value standards of his caste is considered a misfit. Bernard Marx

is a case in point. He cannot “respond properly to conditioning”
(Huxley 1998, p. 88), because his embryo was mistakenly treated
with alcohol, so his mind and physique are below par for an Alpha-
Plus male. His “self-consciousness” is “acute and distressing.” He
constantly feels like an “outsider.” For example, during the Solidarity
services, he feels “miserably isolated” even after the orgy-porgy
session, because of “his unreplenished emptiness, his dead satiety”
He is “separate and unatoned,” while his mates are “being fused into
the Greater Being” (Huxley 1998, p. 86).
Bernard is the typical “revolutionary” (hence his last name, Marx)
who is disgruntled as long as the world pays no attention to him.
When he becomes “lionized” as the chaperon of the Savage, his
behavior changes entirely: “Success went fizzily to Bernard’s head
and in the process completely reconciled him (as any good intox-
icant should do) to a world which, up till then, he had found very
unsatisfactory. In so far as it recognized him as important, the order
of things was good” (Huxley 1998, p. 157). But, he continues to parade
a “carping unorthodoxy” before his superiors, which will, in due
course, get him into trouble. He criticizes the order of things as long
as he is not penalized for it, but when he is, he displays abject self-
pity. When faced with being sent into exile, he falls apart and begs
for forgiveness (Huxley 1998, p. 99).
By contrast, his friend, Helmholtz Watson is an Alpha-Plus
erroneously programmed with mental and physical abilities above
par. He is a “propaganda technician,” which is the equivalent of
an artist in Brave New World (or any other totalitarian state). But
Helmholtz is no happier than Bernard, although he is universally
admired and can get all the “pneumatic” girls he wants. His problem
is the same as Bernard’s: he stands out as an exception in a uniform
world that demands and rewards nothing but conformity. Being
either above or below your designated caste makes you conscious
of being an individual and “hence, unhappy” (Huxley 1998, p. 66).
Helmholtz has the instincts of an avant-garde or modernist artist
and derives no satisfaction from his job, which in our world is com-
parable to that of a hack writer for a television sitcom.
When John the Savage acquaints him with Shakespeare’s works,
Helmholtz is delighted and exclaims: “That old fellow… makes our best
propaganda technicians look absolutely silly” (Huxley 1998, p. 184).
To him Romeo and Juliet is a “superb piece of emotional engineering.”
 EXILE, DYSTOPIA, AND THE WILL TO ORDER 149
Helmholtz believes that Shakespeare was such a “marvellous
propaganda technician,” because he had “so many insane, excruci-
ating things to get excited about” (Huxley 1998, p. 185). To be a true
artist, Helmholtz explains in the manner of our modernist writers,
“you’ve got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can’t think of the
really good, penetrating, X-rayish phrases” (Huxley 1998, p. 185).
Although in Brave New World, conflicts between parents and chil-
dren will not do the trick since family problems have disappeared
together with the family, he reasons that artists “need some other
kind of madness and violence” (Huxley 1998, p. 185) to create power-
ful works of art.
Mustapha Mond, the Controller, agrees with Helmholtz, but
rejects Shakespeare for the same reasons that Socrates bans Homer
and the tragic poets from his ideal Republic, that is, precisely for por-
traying “madness” and “violence.” In a stable, uniform society one
does not need artists to stir up the powerful emotions that tragedy
aroused in archaic times: “You can’t make tragedies without social
instability,” Mond points out. “The world’s stable now” (Huxley 1998,
p. 220), and peace and stability do not make for good drama. Being
contented has “none of the glamour of a good fight against misfor-
tune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or
a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt.” Happiness, Mond concludes,
“is never grand” (Huxley, 1998, p. 221).
Consequently, Mond banishes not only Bernard, but also
Helmholtz to a distant island, where the latter can experiment
with literary form to his heart’s content. Banishment is, as we have
repeatedly seen in this study, an age-old, convenient way of deal-
ing with malcontents and troublemakers who cannot or refuse to
embrace the prevailing communal standards, whatever they may be.
In Brave New World, the people who do not respond adequately to
the biological and psychological conditioning of the World-State are
no longer “liquidated,” as in other totalitarian states, but are sent into
exile on remote islands. In the dystopian society based on pleasure,
therefore, the exilic-utopian imagination is just as strictly contained
and controlled or put to limited uses as the one in the dystopian soci-
eties based on pain.
It is in terms of exile and utopia that one can best understand
Huxley’s novel, and a comparative analysis of Brave New World and The
Tempest, from which Huxley draws the title of his book, would yield
interesting results. Like Huxley’s novel, The Tempest is a dystopian
150 MODERNISM AND EXILE

work despite its “happy” ending, which remains highly ambiguous.

Its main underlying theme is also the exilic-utopian imagination.
Prospero, the former Duke of Milan who now lives in exile on a
desolate island inhabited only by spirits, is planning his return
to power through magic. His servant, the spirit Ariel, engineers a
storm, bringing safely to shore Prospero’s brother Antonio, the pre-
sent Duke of Milan and his liege, Alonso, the King of Naples, together
with their retinues. Antonio had usurped his brother’s duchy with
the help of Naples. He had ordered Prospero with his little daughter,
Miranda to be cast at sea with no supplies, expecting them to per-
ish. But, Gonzalo, a righteous elderly adviser charged with executing
the order, mercifully provides their boat with food and water so that
Prospero makes it safely to the island where he has now brought his
enemies, after nine years of exile.
The island (not unlike Dilmun in the epic of Gilgamesh) is a magic
place. The witch, Sycorax, who had come from the African mainland
with her monster son, Caliban, half man and half fish, originally
held its indigenous spirits in bondage. In turn, Prospero who, unlike
Sycorax, is a “white,” not a “black,” magician, defeated her and took
dominion of the island and its spirits. With the help of Ariel and
other good spirits, he has now designed a scheme, whereby he will
wed Miranda to Ferdinand, the son of the king of Naples, and thus
secure the safe return of his duchy from the hands of his usurping
brother, Antonio. His scheme succeeds when the two young people
meet and fall in love. There is a general reconciliation, and they all
leave the island to sail back home. Prospero keeps his promise of
releasing the spirits and renouncing magic. (Therefore, the modern-
ist interpretation of the play as an anti-colonialist statement is not
very credible, unless we see the spirits as being “colonized,” first by
Sycorax then by Prospero, who frees them in the end.)
Shakespeare presents the island as a utopian, liminal space that
his characters use according to their individual natures. Gonzalo
realizes its ideal, utopian possibilities when he suggests to the king
of Naples how he should rule it: “I’the’commonwealth I would by
contraries/ Execute all things: for no kind of traffic/ Would I admit:
no name of magistrate; … No sovereignty …/ All things in com-
mon nature should produce/ Without sweat or endeavor. Treason,
felony,/ Sword, pike, knife, gun or need of any engine,/ Would I not
have; but nature should bring forth,/ Of its own kind, all foison,
all abundance,/To feed my innocent people. …/ I would with such
 EXILE, DYSTOPIA, AND THE WILL TO ORDER 151
3
perfection govern, sir,/ T’excel the Golden Age.” Gonzalo’s allusion
to the Golden Age (his description is partly taken from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses) sets up the ideal, utopian model that the King of
Naples should follow in organizing his commonwealth and against
which his and his subjects’ actions should be judged.
The derision with which the King and his companions dismiss
Gonzalo’s advice reveals their blindness to the liminal possibili-
ties implicit in their exilic situation. They learn nothing from their
ordeal, recreating on the island the dystopian state of affairs they
have left behind on the mainland. The King’s brother, Sebastian,
plots his murder with the help of an evil adviser (Gonzalo’s oppo-
site number). In turn, several other courtiers plot with Caliban
to kill Prospero, ravish Miranda, and take over the island. These
events, the play suggests, could well have come to pass without
Ariel. Although all ends well through divine agency, the irony of
Miranda’s exclamation on first setting eyes on the King and his reti-
nue is all but glaring: “O wonder!/ How many goodly creatures are
there here!/ How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,/ That
has such people in’t!” (Tempest, 5.1.180–185) Shakespeare makes sure
this irony is not lost on the spectator when he has Prospero reply:
“Tis new to thee” (Tempest, 5.1.191).
Judged against Gonzalo’s Golden Age standard, established at
the beginning of the play, Prospero’s own exilic-utopian imagina-
tion does not go beyond the boundaries of the will to power. Like
Gilgamesh, he is unaware of the liminal possibilities involved in
his situation: he could give up his claims to the duchy with all its
perils and “live happily ever after” on the island. Instead, he uses
exile, as any other ruler of his time would, to regain his former
position of power. Although he does learn the Christian lesson of
turning the other cheek and not seeking revenge on his opponents,
it is obvious that the latter are far from learning the same lesson
from their exilic experience. Hence the ambiguous ending of the
play, underscored by Prospero’s appeal to the audience to release
him from the stage and “this bare island” (Tempest, Epilogue 8). If
we are to believe, with contemporary scholars, that this was one of
Shakespeare’s last plays, after which he retired for the rest of his life
to the peace and quiet of his manor house in Stratford-upon-Avon,
the Epilog would illustrate the fact that the author was wiser than
his character, choosing to live in solitude, “far from the madding
crowd” of the Court in London.
152 MODERNISM AND EXILE

Huxley puts The Tempest to multiple uses, well beyond borrowing

Miranda’s words for the title of his novel. These uses range from
parody to dialogic engagement with its main themes to complex
characterization. Like Shakespeare, Huxley places the archaic
and the modern mentalities side by side, showing them to be two
faces of the same will to power. Brave New World coexists with the
“savage” world of the Indian Reservation, which it has converted
into a theme park for the diversion of its civilized citizens, but also
as a memento of their own “happy” condition. And yet, except for
the creature comforts and mindless self-indulgence, Brave New
World shares many things in common with the Reservation, includ-
ing the violence that lies at the foundation of both societies. Just like
Prospero on his island, Brave New World’s Controllers used force to
establish their rule, as it becomes obvious from the comments of the
pilot who flies Bernard and Lenina into the Reservation. He assures
them that the “savages are perfectly tame” and will not do visitors
any harm. “They’ve got enough experience of gas bombs,” the pilot
adds, “to know they mustn’t play any tricks” (Huxley 1998, p. 106).
In turn, Lenina recognizes in the religious rituals of the savages
(an irrational, violent combination of Christianity and pagan idola-
try) the same spirit that drives the orgy-porgy ritual of the Solidarity
Services. She likes the drums whose “deep pulse of sound” reminds
her “reassuringly of the synthetic noises made at Solidarity Services
and Ford’s Day celebrations. ‘Orgy porgy,’ she whispered to herself.
These drums beat out just the same rythms” (Huxley 1998, p. 113). In
the Reservation, we meet Marlow’s savages of the Heart of Darkness,
but entirely subdued and controlled, free to inflict pain only on
their own selves and each other. They do have alcohol and sex to
compensate for their otherwise miserable existence, reminding
the reader, at least in this respect, of the lowly conspirators in The
Tempest who even Caliban comes to despise: “What a thrice-double
ass/ Was I to take this drunkard for a god,/And worship this dull
fool” (Tempest, 5. I. 295–297).
Moreover, the Brave New Worlders, with the exception of
Helmholtz, are as power-hungry, vain, plotting, cowardly, and
abject as the courtiers of Shakespeare’s play, even if their strongest
desires are relatively muted through psychological conditioning,
drug dependency, and orgy-porgy. The elites of the two worlds
closely resemble each other, because the will to power varies little in
its manifestations across societies and cultures that are built around
 EXILE, DYSTOPIA, AND THE WILL TO ORDER 153
it. Mond himself indirectly alludes to the nature of power-oriented
elites when he mentions a past experiment the World Controllers
conducted on the island of Cyprus where they placed twenty-two
thousand of the most intelligent population of Alphas, allowing
them to manage their own affairs. The Alphas behaved exactly the
way the courtiers stranded on Prospero’s island did: they started
intriguing against each other so that “[w]ithin six years they were
having a first-class war. When nineteen thousand out of the twenty-
two thousand people had been killed, the survivors unanimously
petitioned the World Controllers to resume the government of the
island” (Huxley 1998, p. 223). Immersed as they were in their men-
tality of power, the Alphas could not take advantage of the liminal
opportunities offered by the island to find an alternative way of life
and social organization.
There are also parallels between some of the main characters
in Brave New World and those in The Tempest. Thus, John the Savage
is a composite of Miranda and Ferdinand, but he is also Caliban
in reverse—Huxley’s parody of the noble savage and the ingénue
figures, such as they appear, say, in Voltaire’s Candide. On the one
hand, John is the male counterpart of Miranda: he grows up among
the savages, just as she grows up with Caliban. Finding their envi-
ronment inadequate, they both dream of a different world. Miranda
learns about goodness, beauty, and truth from Prospero, but is con-
fronted with Caliban’s monstrous appearance and “base” instincts,
which the latter cannot control despite the humanist education
Prospero gives him; John acquires lofty humanist values from the
same source, by reading The Tempest and Romeo and Juliet. But, when
confronted with the real world, they turn out to be of no more use to
him than they are to Caliban.
John’s mother, Linda (who finds herself playing the ingrate role
of Sycorax both on the Reservation and in the Brave New World,
on her return) also fires her son’s imagination by telling him won-
drous stories about her lost home. These stories seem to him to be
confirmed by beautiful (“pneumatic”) Lenina, so that when Bernard
proposes that he go back with them, the Savage is delighted and echoes,
ironically, Miranda’s words on first seeing the King’s and the Duke’s
retinues, splendidly attired, but hollow inside: “O wonder!....How
many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is!”
“O brave new world that has such people in it” (Huxley 1998, p. 139).
Through John, Huxley imagines the subsequent story of Miranda,
154 MODERNISM AND EXILE

or at least one possible version of it, once she arrives in her “brave
new world” and finds out what this world is like in reality. Raised
on his mother’s stories of “the Other Place, outside the Reservation”
(Huxley 1998, p. 201) and on Shakespeare’s Neo-Platonic notions of
love, goodness, and beauty, John is shocked by the hollowness and
moral squalor of Brave New World.
On the other hand, John is the ironic counterpart of Ferdinand
who swears an oath of premarital chastity to Miranda’s father.
Yet, Lenina is no coy virgin, and John is particularly appalled by
her shallowness and “concupiscence” when he tries to play chaste
Ferdinand to her whorish Miranda. “Bound by strong vows that
had never been pronounced, obedient to laws that had long since
ceased to run” (Huxley 1998, p. 170), he attempts to court her
Ferdinand-style and asks her hand in marriage. In turn, Lenina,
conditioned by the erotic laxity of Brave New World, is puzzled
and hurt by his “queer” behavior in needlessly postponing instant
gratification. She is shocked by his marriage proposal, which to
her is a moral abomination. When she tries to seduce him, John
condemns her as a “harlot” in lofty Shakespearean language, being
completely obtuse to the ethical norms of his new environment,
which demand promiscuity, instead of sexual continence and
monogamy (Huxley 1998, pp. 194–195) By placing side by side and
pushing to extremes two value systems that seem symmetrically
opposed but actually are two faces of the same power-oriented
mentality, Huxley exposes the absurdity and irrationality of both.
John as a character shares a number of features not only with
Miranda and Ferdinand, but also with Caliban. Like the latter, he is
a liminal figure—a “monster” or a misfit. He does not feel at home
among the Reservation people any more than he does in Brave New
World. The American Indians dislike him because of his white com-
plexion (Huxley’s comment on racism of any color). In turn, the
New Worlders treat him like a new toy they will cast away as soon as
they get bored with it. If one is different, one is lonely. (Huxley 1998,
p. 137) John shares this feeling of isolation and solitude with Bernard
and Helmholtz, and it is on this basis that the three of them become
friends.
Moreover, not unlike Caliban who being rejected by Prospero
and Miranda turns against them, John rebels against his condi-
tion of outsider in the wake of his romantic fiasco with Lenina and
becomes a “revolutionary.” He will not let go of the utopian image of
 EXILE, DYSTOPIA, AND THE WILL TO ORDER 155
Brave New World implanted in his soul as a child, an image that has
now taken a life of its own, independent of and completely cut off
from the squalid reality that surrounds him. Like many an idealist
revolutionary, he stubbornly clings to “that beautiful, beautiful
Other Place, whose memory, as of a heaven, a paradise of goodness
and loveliness, he still kept whole and intact, undefiled by the con-
tact with the reality of this real London, these actual civilized men
and women” (Huxley 1998, p. 201). He attempts, Marxist-style, to
instigate revolt among the Deltas, the members of a lower caste (the
equivalent of the “proles” of Nineteen Eighty-Four) who constitute the
very foundation of Brave New World, being conditioned to perform
all of the menial tasks and fully like it.
Yet, the Savage’s rebellion, like Caliban’s, is equally destined to
fail. In the hospital where his mother has just died a very ugly death
(true to type for Sycorax, but entirely uncharacteristic for Brave New
Worlders), John encounters a large group of Deltas tamely cueing
up for their weekly ration of soma. Their pathetic sight inspires him
with revolutionary fervor, giving new meaning to Miranda’s excla-
mation, “O brave new world.” Up to this point, her words seem to
have “mocked him through his misery and remorse…Fiendishly
laughing, they had insisted on the low squalor, the nauseous ugliness
of the nightmare.” Now, however, they seem suddenly to trumpet “a
call to arms” (Huxley 1998, p. 210). Shouting, “I come to bring you
freedom” (Huxley 1998, p. 211), John seizes the Deltas’ soma rations
from the distributors and throws them out the window. This reck-
less action causes complete pandemonium among the workers who
attempt to kill him. Once the forces of order arrive on the scene, and
new supplies of the drug are provided, things return to “normal.”
John is brought before the Controller, who mildly chides him for
his futile attempt: in Brave New World, the conditions for the possibi-
lity of revolution have been eradicated. “People are happy,” says Mond,
“they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get; …
They are so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as
they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there is soma.
Which you go and chuck out of the window in the name of liberty,
Mr. Savage.” Then Mond adds with a laugh: “Liberty! …. Expecting
Deltas to know what liberty is!” (Huxley 1998, p. 220)
In turn, Mustapha Mond the Controller shares certain features
with Prospero, but also with Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who
has emerged as a model for many a postmodernist dictator within
156 MODERNISM AND EXILE

and outside the 20th-century fictional world (Huxley himself

mentions this Dostoevskian figure in his illuminating essay, “Brave
New World Revisited.”). Like Prospero, Mond was originally a natu-
ral scientist—the modernist equivalent of an alchemist-magician
in the Renaissance—who gave up his scientific pursuits to become
a World Controller (and thus also a “magician” of sorts). When
Helmholtz asks him why he does not go to an island himself, Mond
replies that in his youth he was indeed given a choice between exile
and joining the Controllers’ Council, but that he took the latter
option (just as Prospero opts, in the end, for worldly power).
Mond adds that there are times when he regrets his choice,
because he has lost his “freedom,” in other words he has sacrificed
his personal happiness for that of others. But, “duty is duty. One can’t
consult one’s own preference” (Huxley 1998, p. 227). Although he
likes science, as World Controller he must “carefully limit the scope
of its researches” (Huxley 1998, p. 227), not allowing it “to deal with
any but the most immediate problems of the moment” (Huxley 1998,
p. 228). It is for this reason that earlier on in the narrative he censored
a book on A New Theory of Biology as “the sort of idea that might
easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher
castes—make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign
Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere
beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the
purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some
intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of
knowledge” (Huxley 1998, p. 177).
According to Mond, one must combat the idea of certain ancient
scientists who believed that knowledge in itself “was the highest
good, truth the supreme value” (Huxley 1998, p. 228). Fortunately,
he notes, “Our Ford himself did a great deal to shift the emphasis
from truth and beauty to comfort and happiness through mass
production” (Huxley 1998, p. 228). “Our Ford” adopted the utilitarian
concept of happiness as the greatest (material) good for the greatest
number of people. This view resembles the Socratic notion of the
ideal state, but without the philosophical foundations of Socratic
theotopia. Like the Grand Inquisitor faced with the unexpected and
unwanted return of Christ to medieval Spain, Mond explains that
God (as well as theotopia) has become irrelevant in the modern
world. In this world God, even if he existed, “manifests itself as an
absence; as though he weren’t there at all” (Huxley 1998, p. 227). That
 EXILE, DYSTOPIA, AND THE WILL TO ORDER 157
this should be so, Mond adds, is the “fault of civilization. God isn’t
compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal
happiness.”
Truth and beauty, Mond claims, are equally incompatible with
universal happiness, based on mass production and consumerism.
Whereas universal happines “keeps the wheels steadily turning,”
truth and beauty cannot. (Huxley 1998, p. 228) Besides, happiness,
“particularly other people’s happiness” is a “hard master,” indeed
much harder than truth, and therefore people must be conditioned
into it. (Huxley 1998, p. 227) Conditioning means that they must sur-
render their free will, but this is an insignificant price to pay, because
free will is no more compatible with universal happiness than truth
and beauty are. At any rate, Mond concludes in the manner of the
Grand Inquisitor (and Ivanov in Darkness at Noon), even if God had
meant to give us free will, history has shown that freedom is “not
made for man—it is an unnatural state” (Huxley 1998, p. 232).
John the Savage is not persuaded by Mond’s arguments and wants
to “say something about solitude, about night, about the mesa lying
pale under the moon, about the precipice, the plunge into shadowy
darkness, about death” (Huxley 1998, p. 230). He is unaware that the
entire system of values of Brave New World is designed precisely to
avoid this personal confrontation with nothingness, darkness, and
death, which has led in the past to violence and conflict. In fact, the
void has become such a taboo that it appears only in the gravest oath
one Brave New Worlder can hurl at another, that is, sending him to
the “Bottomless Past” (Huxley 1998, p. 99), instead of hell. In the end
the Savage declares defiantly: “But I don’t want comfort. I want God,
I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness.
I want sin” (Huxley 1998, p. 240). Mond retorts that he is in fact “claim-
ing the right to be unhappy” and shrugs his shoulders when the Savage
affirms that this is indeed what he wants. (Huxley 1998, p. 240)
Like Shakespeare, Huxley offers his main characters the liminal
opportunities of an island (or, in the case of the Savage, a secluded,
island-like, place), where they could exercise their free will and, per-
haps, begin to develop an alternative way of life. But, even though the
three friends respond differently to this liminal opportunity, each
according to his specific nature, none of them takes full advantage
of it. The status-conscious Bernard becomes hysterical and grovels
before the Controller, abjectly begging on his knees to be allowed
to stay in London. It is, again, Mond who shrewdly comments on
158 MODERNISM AND EXILE

Bernard’ knee-jerk reaction to the exilic condition: “if he [Bernard]

had the smallest sense, he’d understand that his punishment is really
a reward. He’s being sent to an island. That’s to say, he’s being sent to
a place where he’ll meet the most interesting set of men and women
to be found anywhere in the world. All the people who, for one rea-
son or another, have got too self-consciously individual to fit into
community-life. All the people who aren’t satisfied with orthodoxy,
who’ve got independent ideas of their own. Every one in a word,
who’s any one” (Huxley 1998, p. 226f.).
Helmholtz, on the other hand, as the superior Alpha-Plus type
that he is, welcomes the opportunity of exile, where he can freely
express his artistic individuality. Although the sympathetic Mond
offers him a tropical island with a mild climate, Helmholtz turns him
down, requesting, instead, a spot with severe weather conditions,
plagued by strong winds and storms. He remains true to his belief
that great works of art are born from the artist’s and other people’s
physical and moral suffering. Mond approves of Helmholtz’s choice
and offers him the Falkland Islands: “I like your spirit, Mr. Watson.
I like it very much indeed. As much as I officially disapprove of it”
(Huxley 1998, p. 229). Helmholtz’s ill-considered choice represents
Huxley’s swipe at the Baudelairean modernist creed that art springs
out of the social “flowers of evil,” squalor, and misery.
The Savage in turn, having failed in his ludicrous attempt
to change Brave New World through revolution, now seeks to
change himself. He withdraws to a secluded spot in the country-
side, that is, he goes into voluntary exile. But, he is unable to take
full advantage of this liminal space, because he cannot conceive
moving beyond a mentality of power any more than his friends
can. Instead, he engages in another form of “lunacy”: asceti-
cism. As Nietzsche has brilliantly shown and Huxley was fully
aware, asceticism is just another manifestation of the will to
power, which, for lack of other interesting objects, turns on itself.
Predictably, this new project of self-transformation also fails, and
the Savage hangs himself.
Perhaps, the most important lesson one can learn from Huxley’s
novel is that the will to reason and its corollary, the will to order
are two of the most insidious instruments of the will to power, not
least because they seem to be indispensable—albeit abstract and
reductive—tools of constructing and organizing reality. Whereas
in philosophy, science, and art, the will to reason and the will to
 EXILE, DYSTOPIA, AND THE WILL TO ORDER 159
order appear innocuous enough, in the socioeconomic sphere they
can become downright problematic, because this is the sphere
where they can most easily be co-opted by the will to power. And
they are particularly lethal when they are made to serve scientific
reductionism and social utilitarianism. Huxley himself underscores
this point about the will to order in his brilliant essay, “Brave New
World Revisited”:
“It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics,
that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous. Here the theoreti-
cal reduction of unmanageable multiplicity to comprehensible unity
becomes the practical reduction of human diversity to subhuman
uniformity, of freedom to servitude. In politics the equivalent of a
fully developed scientific theory or philosophical system is a totali-
tarian dictatorship. In economics, the equivalent of a beautifully
composed work of art is the smoothly running factory in which the
workers are perfectly adjusted to the machines. The Will to Order
can make tyrants out of those who merely aspire to clear up a mess.
The beauty of tidiness is used as a justification for despotism.”4
Fortunately, however, as we can see in Brave New World, the will
to order as a utopian desideratum of both Reason and Necessity is
bound to fall prey to Chance, even when it is not being pushed to irra-
tional extremes, as it is in the pain-based totalitarian state. In turn,
Chance manifests itself, even in the most perfectly organized state, in
the form of human error. For example, Lenina forgets to immunize a
male embryo, causing the man’s death of an infectious disease some
three decades later (Huxley 1998, p. 187). Bernard is suspected of hav-
ing accidentally been injected with alcohol as an embryo, which
causes his “aberrant” behavior as an adult. Helmholtz’ abnormal
intellectual and physical superiority is equally due to a human error
in the biotechnological treatment of his embryo. Linda accidentally
gets pregnant with John despite the fact that she is armed to the teeth
with contraceptives.
Social over-organization is another lethal danger for the will to
order, driven by the will to power. As Huxley himself points out in
“Brave New World Revisited,” organization is indispensable because
“liberty arises and has meaning only within a self-regulating com-
munity of freely cooperating individuals” (Huxley 1960, p. 28). But
the kind of over-organization typical of the totalitarian state is fatal:
“Too much organization transforms men and women into autom-
ata, suffocates the creative spirit and abolishes the very possibility
160 MODERNISM AND EXILE

of freedom” (Huxley 1960, p. 28). The message of his book, Huxley

suggests, is that “the only safe course is in the middle, between the
extremes of laissez-faire at one end of the scale and of total control
at the other” (Huxley 1960, p. 28).
In his 1946 Foreword to the novel, Huxley points out that if he
were to rewrite the book, he would have John the Savage settle in the
liminal space between Brave New World and the Indian Reservation
where he could adopt the Middle Way, building a “sane” life for
himself, instead of committing suicide—“a possibility already actu-
alized, to some extent, in a community of exiles and refugees from
the Brave New World, living within the border of the Reservation”
(Huxley 1998, p. ix). In the novel’s present form, however, neither
John nor Helmholtz is ready to opt for “sanity” because, being
immersed as they are in their power-oriented mentality, they do
not allow full play to their exilic-utopian imagination. By contrast,
Huxley—himself a British self-exile in California—will give his
exilic-utopian imagination full play in his last and most impor-
tant novel—a social utopia significantly entitled Island (1962). But,
because this remarkable work goes well beyond the boundaries of
Modernism and Postmodernism, I shall defer a brief discussion of it
to the Afterword of the present book.
 10
EXILE, THEOTOPIA,
AND ATOPIA: MANN’S
JOSEPH AND HIS
BROTHERS AND
BULGAKOV’S MASTER
AND MARGARITA

The modernist dystopias mentioned so far in this study contain few

religious elements, given the fact that the modernist utopias them-
selves are preponderantly secular and tend to treat religion as just
another cultural institution that needs to be reformed and regulated,
if not eliminated altogether. In other words, theotopias have largely
gone out of style in modernist highbrow culture, following a steady
historical trend since the second part of the 19th century, already dis-
cussed in previous chapters. One of the most remarkable exceptions
to this modernist dystopian trend is Thomas Mann’s masterpiece,
Joseph and his Brothers. In turn, Bulgakov’s masterpiece of the 1930s
appears to follow the general dystopian trend, but it actually reveals
itself to be a theotopia in dystopian disguise. Both novels explore
the notion of atopia, but along somewhat different lines: whereas in
Joseph and His Brothers, atopia largely concerns the theotopian bridges
over the existential void, in Bulgakov’s narrative it also concerns the
role of art and the artist in creating what Aldous Huxley would call
an alternative, “sane” or healthy society.

161
162 MODERNISM AND EXILE

10.1 Joseph and His Brothers and Modernist

Theotopia

Thomas Mann bases his monumental tetralogy (composed between

1926 and 1943) on the Old Testament story of Jacob and his sons,
among whom Joseph is singled out for greatness. But before Joseph
fulfills his lofty destiny, he undergoes a series of trials, including
exile from his tribe. His father Jacob prefers him to his other sons
and showers special favors on him, including the famous “robe of
many colors,” so that Joseph’s older brothers grow envious of him.
Joseph thoughtlessly fuels their jealousy by telling them of two
dreams that predict he will be elevated to a very high station and will
rule over his bothers. (Genesis xxxvii. 2–11).
When Jacob sends Joseph to inquire after his brothers who are
pasturing the flocks in Shechem, they decide to kill him. Reuben,
however, takes his side and, in order to remove him from the fury
of the others, advises them to throw Joseph into an empty well.
(Genesis xxxvii. 13–24). He intends to rescue Joseph and return him
to their father later on. But when the brothers come back to the
well, Joseph is gone. A caravan of Ishmaelites has rescued him, tak-
ing him to Egypt and selling him as a slave there. In Egypt, Joseph
refashions himself anew, but then he is thrown in jail on the false
charges of seducing his master’s wife. The prison itself, however, is
only another temporary station through which Joseph rises even
higher in the Egyptian social hierarchy: he becomes the pharaoh’s
vizier, because of his ability to interpret dreams. In the end, Joseph
makes himself known to his father, who has thought him dead all
these years, and reconciles himself to his brothers.
My present discussion will focus on Mann’s handling of the
themes of exile, utopia, and ludic-liminal spaces through the motif
of the empty well that marks the most important crossroads in
Joseph’s life. This motif is at the heart of Mann’s tetralogy and is
established from the very beginning, in the Prelude to the narrative,
when the narrator has young Joseph reflect on his forefathers’ gene-
alogical line and run up against the notion of time as an empty, bot-
tomless well. As Joseph tries to retrace his ancestry, his brain begins
to reel, “just as ours does when we lean over the edge of the well [of
time]”; and … we may feel close to him and almost contemporary, in
respect to those deep backwards and abysms of time into which so
long ago he already gazed.”1
 EXILE, THEOTOPIA, AND ATOPIA 163
The narrator reasons that since Joseph is a human being no
different from us, he is, “mathematically speaking,” just as remote
as we are “from the beginnings of humanity (not to speak of the
beginnings of things in general), for they do in actual fact lie deep
down in the darkness at the bottom of the abyss, and we, in our
researches, must either stop at the conditioned and apparent begin-
nings, confusing them with the real beginning … or else we must
keep on being lured from one time-coulisse to the next, backwards
and backwards into the immeasurable” (Mann 2005, p. 10).
Here Mann’s narrator refers to the infinite regression characteristic
of modern linear temporality and to Kenneth Burke’s “temporalizing
the essence” (placing first in time things that appear to us of first
ontological importance), which, as discussed in Chapter 1 above, any
modern historian will run into. In this passage as elsewhere in his
comments, the narrator thus proves to be a modernist who conceives
of time as progressive, unidirectional movement. This concept prob-
ably was alien to Joseph and his tribe (they most likely shared a cycli-
cal notion of time associated with the alternation of day and night, the
seasons, and the recurring activities related to tending their flocks)
but not, as we have seen in Chapter 4 above, to the “modern” Hebrew
writers in Babylonian exile who compiled their saga in the Pentateuch.
On the other hand, the empty, bottomless well of time that the
narrator describes is what I have called radical liminality—the void out
of which all measurable time-space emerges. The collective memory
of a given community is the measuring standard that establishes a
beginning by fiat and builds a narrative bridge suspended over the
abyss of timelessness. In fact, any mythical or historical account of
origins, which spins genealogical yarns of various lengths and com-
plexity, is such a bridge from and to nowhere. It is what Musil’s narra-
tor similarly describes in Man without Qualities, as a (foundationless)
“place anyone can have, on the momentarily highest point reached
by the pillar of time as it rises out of the void” (Musil 1996, p. 245).
In turn, whenever an individual member or group becomes sepa-
rated, voluntarily or forcefully, from their community, the bridge
or pillar is broken, and the individual or group in question is again
confronted with the timeless abyss. At that juncture, they can either
embrace this abyss or defer it by joining another’s narrative bridge,
or by constructing their own.
Throughout Mann’s novel, Joseph bridges the void through
his unshaken belief that his community, as well as he personally,
164 MODERNISM AND EXILE

enjoys a special relationship with a universal, almighty God who

continuously interposes himself between the abyss and his chosen
people, creating order out of chaos. Therefore, Mann’s narrative is
constructed as a series of confrontations between his young hero
and the void or radical liminality, symbolized in the novel by the
well or the pit, which Joseph, unlike secular modernists and post-
modernist fictional characters such as Ulrich, Kurtz, Mustapha
Mond, or Rubashov, defers through hope and faith.
Joseph experiences the abyss for the first time when his brothers
tear his robe of many colors, beat him up, and throw him into
the dry well. Joseph spends three nights at the bottom of the pit,
undergoing a radical transformation. In the first place, he becomes
self-aware: he realizes that he has brought his brothers’ violent
behavior upon himself by being entirely self-centered, thoughtlessly
trampling on their feelings in the foolish belief that they loved him
more than they loved themselves. But Joseph also becomes aware of
the liminal, transformative quality of the pit, which will reappear at
other crucial moments in his life. He undergoes a rite of passage that
the Belgian anthropologist Arnold van Gennep describes in terms
of liminality.
As discussed in Chapter 2 above, Van Gennep distinguishes
three stages in a rite of passage, which Joseph equally undergoes:
separation, transition, and incorporation. In the first stage, the
neophyte is isolated from the rest of the community through a rite
that separates sacred from secular time and space; during the tran-
sition, which van Gennep calls “margin” or “limen,” the neophyte
goes through an ambivalent social phase or limbo. During the final
stage of incorporation, the neophyte returns to a new and relatively
stable position in the society at large. This is exactly the pattern that
Joseph’s life follows repeatedly, beginning with his exile and end-
ing with his reintegration, first in his adopted country, Egypt, and
finally in his own tribe.
Furthermore, a rite of passage, as Mann’s narrator is aware, has
many features in common with a sacrificial ritual, indeed it is a form
of this ritual. Victor Turner’s description of the transitional or limi-
nal stage of the rite of passage applies in Joseph’s case as well. During
this stage, the neophyte experiences a blurring of all social distinc-
tions or a “leveling” process. As Turner puts it, the young neophytes
“are stripped of names and clothing, smeared with the common
earth, rendered indistinguishable from animals” (Turner 1982, p. 34).
 EXILE, THEOTOPIA, AND ATOPIA 165
They become identified with “such general oppositions as life and
death, male and female, food and excrement, simultaneously, since
they are at once dying from or dead to their former status and life,
and being born and growing into new ones” (Turner 1982, p. 34).
All of these sacrificial elements are clearly present in the scene of
the pit in Mann’s novel, where the narrator identifies Joseph’s posi-
tion with that of a sacrificial victim associated with the seasonal
cycle and fertility rites: “‘Bor,’ the brothers had said. And the mon-
osyllable was capable of various interpretations. It meant not only
well but prison; not only prison, but the underworld, the kingdom
of the dead; so that prison and underworld were one and the same
thought … Again, the well in its property as an entrance, likewise
the round stone which covered it signified death; for the stone cov-
ered the round opening as the shadows cover the dark moon … It
was the abyss into which the true son descends, he who is one with
the mother and wears the robe by turns with her. It was … the king-
dom of the dead, where the son becomes the lord, the shepherd, the
sacrifice, the mangled god” (Mann 2005, p. 390).
As Mann’s narrator intimates, liminality is not only a confronta-
tion with the abyss, but also a potentiality. Turner likewise points
out that the liminal space opens the possibility of “standing aside not
only from one’s own social position but from all social positions and
of formulating a potentially unlimited series of alternative social
arrangements” (Turner 1982, p. 27). Thus, liminal situations are
seeds of cultural creativity, generating new models and paradigms
that in turn “feed back into the ‘central’ economic and politico-legal
domains and arenas” (Turner 1982, p. 28). Joseph himself becomes
fully aware of the potentiality implicit in his liminal situation, which
he associates, mythically, with that of the resurrected savior who
reemerges from the darkness of the underworld into the light. As
the narrator notes, this thought occurred to Joseph “at the moment
when the undreamed-of became reality; when his provocative con-
duct had called down punishment and he was tossed to and fro like
a toy among the brethren and they had torn the picture-robe with
their nails and teeth” (Mann 2005, p. 389).
To young Joseph, his brothers’ punishing action may be an occa-
sion for grief, but it is also one of hope and rejoicing, because he never
loses his faith: “It would be wrong to believe that under such deadly
serious circumstances Joseph had stopped playing and dreaming….
He was the true son of Jacob, the man of thoughts and dreams and
166 MODERNISM AND EXILE

mystical love, who always understood what happened to him, who

in all earthly events looked up to the stars and always linked his life
to God’s” (Mann 2005, p. 389). Although Joseph is terrified at the
confrontation with the void, the “dark terror of his soul” is alleviated
by “the pleasure of enlightenment, almost like a relief which laughter
brings” (Mann 2005, p. 389). He is joyful in his unshaken belief that
God will not forsake him in his hour of need.
The narrator speaks of Joseph’s daydreaming in terms of play,
associating it with artistic creativity, just as Sigmund Freud does
in his essay on “The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming” (1908).
Thus, Joseph’s dreams function as a form of theotopia, doubled, as
in Plato, by a theologia ludens. His certainty that he is exceptional in
the eyes of God, who has marked him out for great deeds, allows him
to be cheerful and playful, upholding him throughout his trials. He
realizes that he cannot return to his former life, but this realization
does not unnerve him: “The pit was deep; and return to his former
life was inconceivable—a thought as monstrous as that the evening
star might return out of the abyss wherein it was sunk, and the
shadow be withdrawn from the dark moon, that it should again be
full. But the conception of the death of the planet, the darkening and
setting of the sun … included likewise the idea of reappearance, new
light, resurrection. And therein Joseph’s natural hope that he might
live justified itself by faith” (Mann 2005, p. 391).
The narrator describes the Ishmaelites who pull Joseph out of the
pit as being liminal people as well: “They were traveling merchants,
at home neither here nor in the place whence they came” (Mann
2005, p. 393). They have ambiguous origins and an ambiguous iden-
tity; some call them Midianites, others, Egyptians, and yet others,
Ishmaelites. So, they are appropriate, liminal, vehicles of carrying
Joseph into exile in Egypt. Once there, Joseph prospers under his
Egyptian master until he is thrown in jail on false charges. The nar-
rator refers to this prison as a second pit, or a liminal station that
leads to another major transformation in Joseph’s life. And as in the
case of the first pit, this transformation is guaranteed and upheld
by Joseph’s faith in his divine exemptionalism: “Through the pit
[Joseph] had come into the land below, the land of the rigor of death;
now again the way went down into bor and prison, towards Lower
Egypt—lower it could not go. … He declined and died; but after
three days he would rise again. Down into the well of the abyss sank
Attar-Tammuz as evening star; but as morning star it was certain he
 EXILE, THEOTOPIA, AND ATOPIA 167
would rise up out of it. This we call hope, and hope is a precious gift”
(Mann 2005, p. 854).
Through the metaphor of the pit, Mann’s narrator describes
the process by which liminal situations become transformative in
people’s lives. They are crossroads or intervals “when the past is
momentarily negated, suspended or abrogated, and the future has
not yet begun, an instant potentiality when everything, as it were,
trembles in the balance” (Turner 1982, p. 40). But, liminality is not
just a passive, negative condition; it has positive and active qualities,
especially when the threshold is protracted and becomes a tunnel,
or as Turner puts it, “the liminal becomes the ‘cunicular’” (Turner
1982, p. 41).
My distinction between the marginal and the liminal, moreover,
is relevant to Mann’s novel as well. As we recall, the margin always
leads back to the center, while the liminal as the cunicular may often
lead away from it. Thus, marginality refers to an agonistic relation
between the center and the margins of a system and cannot provide
access to or initiate new worlds, whereas liminality can do both. In
Mann’s novel, we have many examples of both marginal and cunic-
ular kinds of liminal spaces. The pit into which Joseph’s brothers
throw him represents a cunicular type of liminality, since Joseph
is fully aware that he can no longer return to his father/community
and must go into exile. By contrast, the prison into which Joseph
is thrown in Egypt is an example of liminal marginality, because
he will move from the margins of Egyptian society to its center, as
pharaoh’s vizier.
Implicit in Mann’s novel is also the larger destiny of the tribes of
Israel, revealed in their subsequent history. The desert where these
liminal tribes roam freely is a no man’s land between various coun-
tries and empires such as the Assyrian and the Egyptian. They are
nomads and as such they are always transcending well-defined bor-
ders. At this early stage in their history, exile and utopia are concepts
alien to them, as they would be to any nomadic people who are in
perpetual movement or liminal state. At the same time, however,
these tribes are tightly knit communities with a well-defined center
and margin. Indeed, as God’s chosen people, the tribes of Israel are
the bearers and quintessence of centrality itself, embodied in the Ark
of God or the Covenant.
In anthropological terms, the historical trajectory of the Hebrew
tribes involves the common transition from a pastoral or nomadic
168 MODERNISM AND EXILE

existence to an agricultural, settled form of life (the narrative of Cain

and Abel is the Biblical archetypal narrative of this transition). At
this later stage, they conceive the idea of the Promised Land and
become perpetual exiles as they wander through the desert in search
of it. Once the tribes of Israel renounce their liminal, nomadic exist-
ence, moreover, they become “marginal” and thus engaged in the
agonistic dialectic of margin and center. Joseph can be seen as one of
the early Hebrew leaders who begin to transform the liminal status
of his people into an exilic condition. Joseph’s Egypt, while a uto-
pia in its own right, proves to be only a temporary place of refuge,
substituted by the loftier utopia of the Promised Land. Thus Joseph,
among others, activates the dialectic of margin and center, or exile
and utopia, which has haunted the tribes of Israel throughout the
millennia.
In subsequent ages, Moses is aware of the danger inherent in his
people’s losing their privileged liminal status, particularly since they
have just emerged from a marginal situation in which they were
slaves for centuries and therefore are ill-prepared to transcend the
power dialectics of margin and center. As we have seen in Chapter 4
above, Moses has the Hebrew tribes wander in the desert for 40 years
within sight of the Promised Land, without actually leading them
there: he hopes they will accept God’s irenic message in “their hearts
and minds” before they enter it. The latest avatar of the Promised
Land is, of course, present-day Israel, with all the ambivalences that
attend the actualization of a liminal, exilic dream into a less than
perfect utopia.
Needless to say, the fictional world presented in Mann’s novel
remains within the agonistic dialectic of center and margin, where
liminality largely functions as a mode of reversing the power
relation between the two opposing poles. When confronted with
radical liminality or the abyss, one can easily fall back on agonis-
tic worlds, based on this power-driven dialectic. As I have already
pointed out, one major feature that distinguishes Modernism from
earlier periods in Western cultural history is its exacerbated exilic
consciousness, for which it has tried to compensate by generat-
ing various utopian schemes. This acute sense of ontological loss
comes from a continuous confrontation with the abyss of radical
liminality in the absence of the faith and hope provided by the kind
of central religious narrative that sustains Joseph and his people in
Mann’s novel.
 EXILE, THEOTOPIA, AND ATOPIA 169
Mann himself was certainly aware that the historical, Christian
version of this central narrative had received a serious blow during
and after the English and French revolutions, when the traditional
Great Chain of Being was severed through the execution of the kings
who were God’s lieutenants on earth. Hence the ironical, but also
nostalgic tone of Mann’s narrator, retelling Joseph’s story, as he does,
from the modernist perspective of the 20th century. Shrinking from
the abyss, the modern temper can no longer fall back on the com-
fort of a divine plan and, instead, spins its own secular and scientific
bridges over the bottomless well of time.
Yet, Mann was equally aware that the modern narratives of radi-
cal rupture and historical progress founder invariably upon the
bottomless abyss and that falling back on the same old and tired
dialectic of center and margin in order to deal with it may be a thank-
less, Sisyphean task. As his novel seems to imply, perhaps the time
has come to recognize the endless potential of radical liminality and
construct different kinds of bridges over “the bottomless well,” that
is, communal narratives outside a mentality of power and beyond
the agonistic logic of exile and utopia. But that task belongs to an
irenic mentality, beyond Modernism and Postmodernism, willing to
learn how to take full advantage of the ludic-liminal nature of the
literary and artistic phenomena in general.

10.2 Exile as Atopia: The Master and Margarita

As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, modernist and post-

modernist theotopias are very rare, at least in highbrow fiction, and
Joseph and his Brothers is a notable exception. When they do appear
in the 20th century, theotopias mostly turn into dystopias. But The
Master and Margarita constitutes another brilliant exception, because,
while it seems to follow the general modernist trend, it hides a genu-
ine theotopia under its dystopian garb. It also introduces the concept
of atopia in the context of the artistic exilic-utopian imagination and
its potential role in building an alternative, healthy society.
Bulgakov’s novel is constructed along two parallel story lines,
converging in the end: On the one hand, Satan and his retinue visit
Moscow during the same Stalinist period alluded to in Koestler’s
Darkness at Noon, wreaking havoc among the Communist, atheistic,
cultural, and political establishment. On the other hand, the Master,
170 MODERNISM AND EXILE

one of the major characters in the Moscow story, writes a novel

about Pontius Pilate and his role in Christ’s Passion. Both stories
dramatize the rare historical moments of intersection between the
divine and the human worlds and the various human reactions when
confronted with such momentous liminal events.
As pointed out in Chapter 4 above, the divine and the human
worlds are incommensurable and can intersect only in certain
liminal spaces where the laws of matter (physics) are momentarily
suspended. Mount Horeb is one of these places, where Moses meets
with God. In Bulgakov’s novel, Moscow and Jerusalem become,
temporarily, such liminal grounds as well. In both cities, the initial
encounter between humans and divinity takes the dystopian form
of incomprehension, violence, and missed opportunity. After the
initial existential shock, however, humans either revert to “business
as usual” or experience a gradual, but profound inner transformation
that may radically alter the way they think, feel, and act in their world.
In the main story, the encounter between Satan (under the guise
of Woland, Professor of Black Magic) and the Muscovites takes the
ludic, carnivalesque form that Mikhail Bakhtin, one of Bulgakov’s
contemporaries, discusses in his book on Rabelais and His World
(1941). According to Bakhtin, the carnival is a ludic event—in my
terms, a ludic-liminal interval—during which the established social
order and the values that support it are temporarily turned upside
down. Many yarns of the “prince and pauper” type follow this
pattern of social reversal that allows those on the margins of the
system to move, for a strictly limited period, to its center. One
should, however, note that in the end the carnival does not upset the
original order but, on the contrary, reinforces it by providing tempo-
rary relief from social tension.
In Master and Margarita, the established social order is the atheistic
Communist one, and the promoted values belong to the so-called
“proletarian morality.” But Soviet society, Woland points out, falls far
short of this utopian desideratum. At the beginning of the show of
black magic that he and his assistants organize at the Variety Theater
in Moscow, the Professor studies the audience and wonders aloud,
to the discomfort of the Soviet officials present, if the Muscovites
have truly changed since his last visit in pre-revolutionary times.
Although they have obviously “changed outwardly,” acquiring modern
dress and modernist technology, “the much more important ques-
tion” is: “have the Muscovites changed inwardly?”2 The interaction
 EXILE, THEOTOPIA, AND ATOPIA 171
of Woland and his assistants with the theatrical audience, as well as
with the other Muscovites they have dealings with during their visit
reveals that the latter have not changed at all. “Proletarian morality”
has not caught on, despite intensive state propaganda.
Satan and his retinue act both as scourges or purifiers of the
corrupt Soviet establishment and as deliverers, if not of salvation,
at least of the opportunity for some nonconformist individuals
to exercise their free will. The epigraph of the novel, drawn from
Goethe’s Faust, gives the reader a hint that this is the light in which
Satan-Woland ought to be seen in the narrative. When Faust asks
Mephistopheles, “Say at last—who are thou?” the latter replies: “That
Power I serve/Which wills forever evil/Yet does forever good.”
Woland (whose name is also taken from Goethe’s Faust, where
Voland is a minor demon) is well aware that the Communist
doctrine of proletarian morality is nothing more than Christian
morality without its divine foundation (theotopia). Under its guise, the
Soviet regime attempts to impose a Puritan version of Christian ethics,
guaranteed by the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Consequently,
Communist utopia turns into a repressive state system, removing the
crucial element of free will from the Mosaic and the Christian mes-
sage to humanity: one needs to embrace the truth of God’s teaching
in one’s “heart and soul” (Deut 26: 16–19), out of one’s own free will,
not out of obedience, compulsion, fear, or duress.
Thus, the Soviet autocratic regime that claims to implement
Communist utopia can best be described by inverting Mephistopheles’
reply in Goethe’s play: “That Power I serve/ Which wills forever
good/ Yet does forever evil.” It is also Rubashov’s conclusion about
Stalinism in Darkness at Noon and can serve as a succinct definition of
any type of utopia based on the will to power, from Dion’s Platonic
regime in Syracuse to sundry Christian, Islamic, and other theocra-
cies, to the English and French Revolutions, to the Bolshevik and the
National Socialist Revolutions of the past century.
The carnivalesque, ludic quality belongs exclusively to the
Moscow story line and to Woland’s retinue. His assistants are
demonic variations on the traditional tricksters from Ukrainian and
other folklore, some of which appear in carnival festivities as well.
They expose the hypocrisy of the various Party officials and state
functionaries, as well as that of the Muscovite elite at large, who have
supposedly rejected the “decadent,” bourgeois mentality of selfish-
ness, crass materialism, greed, and debauchery of the ancien regime,
172 MODERNISM AND EXILE

adopting instead the Communist ethical ideal of the “new man”

(honest, chaste, unselfish, hardworking, and devoted to the greater
good of the community).
The demonic tricksters apply a particular rough treatment to the
Soviet intelligentsia, including its literary and critical establishment,
undoubtedly because, in Bulgakov’s view, they have betrayed their
traditional mission of educating/reforming Russian society and of
speaking truth to power. Unlike writers such as Gogol, Goncharov,
Lermontov, Pushkin, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky who had
fully assumed this mission in pre-revolutionary times, the large
majority of the Soviet writers have made a pact not with Woland,
but with the “real devil” (Stalin and his apparatchiks), in exchange
for material profit, professional accolades, and political power.
Just like Helmholtz in Brave New World, these Soviet artists have
been converted into mere propaganda vehicles for the regime.
MASSOLIT (The Soviet Writers’ Union) and other creative artists’
organizations are the avenues through which their members are
rewarded, not according to their talent, but according to how skill-
fully they sing the praises and promote the cultural policies of the
New Order. In turn, talented writers, such as the Master with his
ideologically suspect novel about the Passion (Soviet ideology cate-
gorically denied the historical existence of Christ, let alone God, being
predicated on the Marxist proposition that religion is “the opium of
the people”) are savagely attacked in print, and then marginalized
and shunned by their own colleagues. They are also often punished
or purged by the Secret Service, if they do not toe the ideological line
and treat of subjects that the Soviet authorities consider taboo.
Just as in the carnivalesque model, the Muscovite society is hardly
transformed after the demonic tricksters’ departure, reverting to the
status quo ante. The havoc wrought by Satan’s temporary break into
the Soviet, atheistic world is duly explained away or swept under the
carpet by the Secret Police, and things return to Soviet “normalcy.” On
the other hand, Woland does have some of the “Judases” among the
cultural elite punished and does offer a few deserving individuals the
opportunity of choosing a radical liminal path—that is, of moving
not from the margin to the center of the (Soviet) world, but to other
worlds altogether. It is this opportunity that distinguishes Bulgakov’s
narrative from a purely carnivalesque one, pointing to its theotopian
nature. By the same token, Satan and his assistants are “dystopian”
only in appearance, since they primarily serve theotopia as well.
 EXILE, THEOTOPIA, AND ATOPIA 173
The novel’s parallel story line, which describes Pontius Pilate’s
encounter with Yeshua Ha-Notsri (Jesus of Nazareth) offers the
reader a glimpse into Christian theotopia, but, again, in a mostly dys-
topian guise. The corrupt world of Jerusalem is not much different
from that of Moscow almost two thousand years later. Furthermore,
there are no carnivalesque features to relieve it, even temporarily,
of its sheer materialism, greed, and thirst for power. The break of
Christ into this world effects no visible transformation in the mental-
ity of the majority of the Hebrews, any more than Satan’s visit does
in that of the Muscovites. On the contrary, Christ’s message of love
and peace is met with incomprehension, jeers, and violence from the
crowds and swift, repressive action from the authorities.
Yet, the exilic-utopian imagination is at work in this second
narrative as well. Pontius Pilate, despite his powerful position as
Procurator of Judea, is an exile on the margins of the Roman Empire.
He hates the City of Jerusalem with its dystopian, petty squabbles,
and slavish ressentiment, but is equally unhappy with Caesar’s para-
noid, autocratic rule that demands unquestioned loyalty to a power-
inebriated mortal who masquerades as a god (here the allusion to the
Stalinist cult of personality seems obvious). Pilate’s wretched state of
mind manifests itself through acute, psychosomatic, migraines. His
painful isolation and solitude are alleviated only by his dog, Banga,
toward whom he is able to expresses the love that he cannot extend to
the people around him—love that the animal, unlike most humans,
returns unconditionally.
When Pilate meets Yeshua, he soon realizes that he is in the pres-
ence of someone from another, radically different world, hitherto
undreamed of. His migraines go away, not because Yeshua performs
a miracle, but because the Procurator senses there might be a way out
of his exilic predicament. This glimmer of hope immediately relieves
the unbearable pressure in his brain. Pilate’s instinct is to protect this
remarkable being from the dystopian world that surrounds them
and transport him safely to his secluded villa in Italy—a liminal locus
amoenus where they can engage in long philosophical conversations
about the meaning and purpose of existence.
Pilate thus has the choice of moving away from both the center
and the margin of the Roman Empire, venturing instead into the
cunicular, unexplored territories of Yeshua’s (theotopian) “kingdom”
of love and peace. Faced with this choice, however, Pilate recoils from
the radical liminal alternative and returns to the center, that is, to
174 MODERNISM AND EXILE

Caesar’s world of “endless striving,” misery and suffering. It is for this

reason that Yeshua’s statement, reported through Pilate’s Chief of the
Secret Police and equally recorded in Matthew the Levite’s parch-
ment, that “cowardice is one of the worst human sins” (Bulgakov
1992, p. 344) will haunt Pilate into eternity.
“Sin” in this context, should not be understood in the doctrinal
sense of trespassing against God, but as failure or lack. As we have
seen in the exilic experience of the Hebrews wandering through the
desert in search of the Promised Land, human suffering is largely
self-inflicted through departing from the divine, irenic principles.
The farther one moves away from God and his irenic message, as
St. Augustine understood so well, the deeper one goes into (self-)
exile, experiencing the dark despair of the void.
In turn, Pilate’s “sin” is failure to hear his inner voice that tells
him to protect and cherish Yeshua as a messenger from another,
better world. His fear of Caesar and his own enmeshment in the
world of power prevail: he still pines after Rome (not unlike Ovid in
his poetry) and does not want to compromise his advancement in
the Roman administrative hierarchy. Consequently, Pilate misses a
tremendous liminal opportunity and will subsequently experience
a feeling of agonizing loss at his separation from Yeshua and what
he represents—a feeling that will transform him, the way it did post-
lapsarian Adam and Eve, into a “modern” spirit.
Pilate attempts, moreover, to compensate for his failure the only
way he knows how. He misinterprets Yeshua’s words about cow-
ardice in terms of the archaic (both Roman and Hebrew) mentality
of “eye for an eye”: in an act of defiance of both the Hebrew High
Priest and Caesar’s spies, the procurator has Judas murdered and the
blood money thrown back into the garden of Caiaphas’ palace. But,
predictably, this vengeful act further removes him from Yeshua and
his message, aggravating, instead of alleviating, his anguish and
sense of loss. Lonely and desolate, accompanied only by his dog,
Pilate will remain suspended in limbo for almost two thousand
years, until the Master comes and releases him from exile, so he can
join Yeshua in the (theotopian) New Jerusalem.
Pilate’s temporary abode points to another crucial theme of the
novel: atopia or the empty liminal space or threshold in-between
worlds, where the rules that govern all of them are temporarily
suspended, and a brief interval is opened to exercise one’s free
will and make one’s next choice. In this regard, atopia is much
 EXILE, THEOTOPIA, AND ATOPIA 175
like the Buddhist bardo described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead
(see Chapter 3 above). At the end of Master and Margarita, Bulgakov
gives a perfect, metaphorical description of the various liminal
spaces that I have discussed in the present study, including atopia,
when he has the Master release his character, Pilate, from limbo,
calling out to him: “You are free! Free! He [Yeshua] is waiting for
you!” (Bulgakov 1992, p. 430)
As the Master’s voice turns into thunder, the “grim cliffsides”
around them crumble, falling into the abyss that has opened below;
only the platform remains with the stone chair where Pilate is seated,
his dog beside him. In turn, the platform is suspended between “the
black abyss into which the mountains had vanished” and an immense,
glowing city, “topped by glittering idols above a garden overgrown
with the luxuriance of two thousand years” (Bulgakov 1992, p. 430).
A path of moonlight stretches from the platform into the garden, and
the Procurator starts ascending it, with his loyal watchdog leading
the way.
This description is part of a mystical (Gnostic? Cabbalistic?
Masonic?) theotopia, with Pontius Pilate being the mystical seeker
who commits errors along the way, but ultimately finds the right
path toward universal Light and Love. In turn, the watchdog Banga
is his mystical guide who leads him unerringly toward his final
goal, because of his unconditional love and devotion. The city above
the yawning abyss is the theotopian New Jerusalem that equally
contains the lost Garden of Eden. The abyss itself, while abhorred
by the (modernist and postmodernist) will to power that often
construes it as dystopia, is the radical liminality out of which every-
thing emerges and into which everything disappears. In turn, the
moonlight paths are forms of atopia, or bridges built over the void,
toward various actual worlds or realities.
Satan himself follows none of the bridges and disappears into the
chasm, once he fulfills God’s request of him: “Then the black Woland,
taking none of the paths, dived into the abyss, followed with a roar by
his retinue” (Bulgakov 1992, p. 431). Thus, Satan—himself an eternal
exile—can freely move in and out of worlds. As the ancient Gnostics
and latter-day Romantics and Modernists believed, he has chosen
to reside in Darkness in order to make Light possible. Woland says
this much to Matthew the Levite: “Think now: where would your
good be if there were no evil and what would the world look like
without a shadow. Shadows are thrown by people and things …. But
176 MODERNISM AND EXILE

shadows are also cast by trees and living things. Do you want to strip
the whole globe by removing every tree and every creature to satisfy
your fantasy of a bare world?” (Bulgakov 1992, p. 405)
Bulgakov’s novel abounds in atopian spaces, for example, in the
form of meeting points between two incommensurable worlds, such
as Patriarch’s Ponds where Satan appears to Berlioz and Bezdomny,
Berlioz’s apartment where Woland and his retinue move after the
editor’s death, the Variety Theater during the performance of black
magic, etc. But the two most significant atopian intervals are the
liminal bridges over the abyss leading to alternative worlds, such as
the psychiatric ward and the work of art itself.
The psychiatric ward is the liminal space where two of the true
heroes of the Moscow story, the Master and the poet Ivan Poniryov
“Bezdomny” find refuge and undergo a spiritual transformation.
During the Stalinist purges, political dissidents or persons merely
suspected of ideological deviance, when not “liquidated” outright,
as in Darkness at Noon, were sent to prison, labor camp, or psychi-
atric ward—all forms of “internal exile” as we can see, for example,
in Solzhenitsyn’s work, which The Master and Margarita anticipates.
Oftentimes, the Soviet psychiatric wards, designed to function as
places of political exile, isolation, and punishment, had also the
unintended consequence of functioning as places of refuge where
the detainees could express their views freely and learn to put their
exilic experience to good use (Koestler depicts a somewhat similar
situation in the case of the Soviet prisons for political detainees,
through the humane character of the White Russian officer, incar-
cerated in a cell next to Rubashov’s).
The Master, who has written the story of Pontius Pilate and seeks,
unrealistically, to publish it in Soviet atheistic culture, is being per-
secuted both by the literary critics and by the authorities to the
point that he has a nervous breakdown and checks himself into
Stravinsky’s psychiatric clinic. This is a liminal space, significantly
located in peaceful surroundings outside Moscow; it constitutes his
place of refuge, where he will discover the truths that, despite his
literary talent, he has hidden from himself and others for most of
his life. The Master’s failure or lack is, like Pontius Pilate’s, a form
of cowardice. In the face of harassment from the powers that be,
he plunges into despair, loses faith in his novel and burns it. Even
worse, he abandons his faithful lover, Margarita, under the “noble”
pretext that he does not want her to share his wretched fate; in other
 EXILE, THEOTOPIA, AND ATOPIA 177
words, he also loses faith in the healing capacity of love, embracing
defeatism and self-pity instead.
The Master’s attitude is very common among Romantic and mod-
ernist writers who feel “misunderstood” if they do not achieve public
success and who, like Bernard Marx in Brave New World, reject their
society because it “rejects” them. In other words, as Joseph Brodsky
would say, the Master suffers from an inflated ego: he is still very much
enmeshed in the world of power to which he cannot imagine an alterna-
tive, despite the ironical fact that he could use his own creation, Yeshua,
as an ethical model in his own life. When confronted with adversity
and the void, the Master plays the victim game, in which the will to
power, in the absence of other available “victims,” turns against itself.
While in the psychiatric ward, the Master finally understands
that his cowardice consists chiefly in not exploring the world of
love opened to him through Margarita, as well as through his own
character, Yeshua. He experiences the same feeling of dreadful
anguish and loss that Pilate does, and is redeemed only through
the intercession of his faithful lover. Because of his cowardice, the
Master, as Matthew the Levite observes sadly, “has not earned light,
he has earned rest” (Bulgakov 1992, p. 406). Woland makes the
arrangements Yeshua requests of him through his messenger, send-
ing the Master and Margarita to another liminal space—a peaceful
cottage in idyllic surroundings. This space represents an atopian
bridge over the abyss where they can explore the world of love and
prepare themselves for entering the Light.
From this point of view, the Master is not the equivalent of Faust
in Goethe’s drama. Rather, Bulgakov draws from Faust mainly his
characterizations of Woland and Margarita. In a sense, then, “The
Master” in the title of his novel refers as much to Satan (who is always
addressed as “messier”—master—in the narrative) as to the author of
the story about Pontius Pilate. (Indeed, it is the latter character that
can be seen, because of his cowardice, as his creator’s alter ego). The
Master bears little resemblance to Faust, who does not symbolize
the artist, but the philosopher-scientist in Goethe’s drama, except
for the fact that he is redeemed through the love of a woman whom
he has abandoned.
On the other hand, Bulgakov’s Margarita does, just like Goethe’s
Gretchen, symbolize Das Ewig-Weibliche, the eternal feminine princi-
ple through which man does not lose, but, on the contrary, receives
grace. In the dystopian Soviet world of the Moscow narrative,
178 MODERNISM AND EXILE

Magarita assumes the form of an illicit lover and witch. On the

symbolic level, however, she symbolizes the mystical principle of
Light/Love, which has been abused and prostituted in the postlapsar-
ian world, but will eventually shed its dystopian guise and reemerge
in its original splendor. She shares the Master’s fate, not because
she could not already gain the Light, but because she chooses to
accompany him on the way to salvation, acting as his spiritual guide
toward unconditional love (she is, therefore, the mystical counter-
part of Banga in the Pilate section of the novel). In this specific aspect,
Bulgakov’s Margarita also resembles Dostoevsky’s Sonya from Crime
and Punishment, the “prostitute-saint” who accompanies her lover to
Siberia—another exilic liminal space where Raskolnikov will slowly
progress, with Sonya’s help, toward his spiritual awakening.
The other main character that profits the most from the liminal
space of the psychiatric ward is Ivan Nikolayich Poniryov. In Russian
his nom de plume, Bezdomny, means Homeless and therefore is
highly significant in terms of the exilic-utopian theme of the novel.
In fact, it is from Bezdomny’s viewpoint that The Master and Margarita
could be seen as a Kuenstlerroman, somewhat like Goethe’s Wilhelm
Meister, or Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, tracing the early
development and coming of age of a true artist.
In the first chapter of the novel, Bezdomny is an ignorant and
arrogant, but talented, poet who wrote a piece about Jesus of
Nazareth that made his hero very real, in spite of himself and the
official ideological line. As Berlioz, the Chairman of MASSOLIT,
instructs him, the point of the poem should have been that Christ
was a mythical figure without any historical reality whatsoever. But,
the encounter with Woland at Patriach’s Ponds radically changes
Bezdomny’s self-image and outlook on life. At first, he responds
to the “supernatural” with the knee-jerk reaction of a young
man weaned on atheistic Soviet ideology. He accuses Woland of
“murdering” Berlioz (who, as the Professor predicts, slips and falls
under a tramcar) and chases him in vain around Moscow in order
to arrest him. Faced with the “irrational,” Bezdomny behaves in the
most irrational way, becoming manic and violent, so that he ends up
in Stravinsky’s psychiatric ward. There he meets the Master, realizes
that Satan and, therefore, God exist and learns about the “true” story
of Pontius Pilate and Yeshua. He gives up poetry altogether, attends
the university, becomes a professor at the Institute of History and
Philosophy, and goes about his normal Soviet life.
 EXILE, THEOTOPIA, AND ATOPIA 179
And yet, at the time of the full moon (which, according to popular
belief, is itself a liminal interval when the “unreal” breaks into every-
day reality), he relives all of the events of the novel in his dreams,
waking up the next morning “a sadder and a wiser man” as Coleridge
puts it in his Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The implication is that
Bezdomny is actually The Master’s alter ego who has secretly writ-
ten the novel that the reader has just finished reading, according to
what his creative (exilic-utopian) imagination has revealed to him in
his dreams.
Through the Master’s and Bezdomny’s fates, Bulgakov’s novel
comments on the role of art and artists in their community. First,
it suggests that talented writers who see the truth, but do not have
the courage to tell it (to themselves and in their work), or fail to
stand by it, will not earn divine grace. At the most, they may go to
a liminal space in-between heaven, earth, and hell, where they may,
after a great deal of soul-searching, earn peace. Most interestingly,
however, Bulgakov’s novel suggests that literary discourse itself
should be valued as a form of atopia, rather than utopia or dysto-
pia, because of its ability to situate itself in-between other forms
of discourse, or in-between various systems of values and beliefs.
Although it belongs to the exilic-utopian imagination, it may point
to worlds outside it, and even though it belongs to neither light nor
darkness, it can point to both.
In turn, as Bulgakov seems, no less than Brodsky, to imply, crea-
tive writers should not claim, as Shelley does, that they are the
“legislators of mankind,” demanding special honors or laurels from
their communities; nor should they be crowned with wreaths of
thorns and chased out of the city as scapegoats. Instead, they should
be offered a liminal space, away from the “madding crowd” and its
material interests or politics, so that they can exercise their free will
in safety and peace in order to fulfill their social function of building
new bridges over the void, toward alternative worlds.
 AFTERWORD: THE END OF
EXILE: TOWARD A GLOBAL
EUTOPIA

In Part III of this study, we have seen how several major literary works that were
written during the modernist period actually question the main philosophical and
political assumptions of Modernism and Postmodernism. Although they are prod-
ucts of the exilic-utopian imagination, they question its co-optation by the will to
power, showing the need to emancipate it from this will and pointing to alternative
values outside their immediate cultural context.
On the other hand, there is obviously a huge bulk of literary and other aesthetic
productions that do not question, but support the Western mainstream, modernist
or postmodernist, values. Some of them have equally joined the utopian/dystopian
trend of the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century.
In the last few decades, such productions stemming from the exilic-utopian imagina-
tion driven by the will to power have flourished especially in popular literature and
culture. They run along both secular lines, particularly in science fiction, and religious
lines, in apocalyptic popular literature. Examples of the former are J. G. Ballard’s col-
lection of science fiction shortstories The Terminal Beach (1966), Harry Harrison’s Make
Room! Make Room! (1966), with its better known film version, Soylent Green (1973), and
John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968); whereas examples of the latter include the
apocalyptic “end times” or “Rapture” narratives of American popular fiction, such as
the Left Behind novel series (1995–2007) by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.
In turn, apocalyptic (and postapocalyptic) narratives have their secular, mainly
ecological, branch as well. In this connection, one may mention Ernest Callenbach’s
bestseller Ecotopia (1975): although not an apocalyptic narrative per se, the book is
nevertheless predicated on the threat of an atomic holocaust (a possible dystopic
“reality,” often described in ecological fictions of the 1960s and 1970s that imagine
postapocalyptic worlds). Ecotopia, a small country formed of Northern California,
Oregon, and Washington, secedes from the rest of the United States and builds its
own ecological, nonconsumerist society on the foundation of the Mutual Assured
Destruction doctrine (MAD) of the Cold War: its state government has developed a
credible threat of a terrorist nuclear attack on Washington, DC as a deterrent to a US
invasion. Although well intentioned, Callenbach’s book, like many such American
“ecologically correct” endeavors, can largely be read, retrospectively, as a typical
modernist yarn of the will to power that masquerades as “ecotopia” in the shadow
of the mushroom cloud.

180
 AFTERWORD 181
The apocalyptic frame of mind, supported largely by Western popular culture
and New Media and further stimulated by the millenarian fears around the year
2000, has mushroomed to such an extent that, according to certain philosophers
and theorists of culture, we are no longer living in a postindustrial or postmodern
society, but in an apocalyptic one (Bethea 2013). For example, a comparative study
of literary texts from the 1790s and the 1990s concludes that while the 1790s liter-
ary productions propose liminal spaces of eutopia and ideal living, 1990s literature
builds on apocalyptic projections (Bode 2001, pp. 157–182). To these one could now
add the wild apocalyptic speculations on cable television and the Internet around
the ancient Mayan calendar that presumably ended with our year 2012, or the scien-
tific, but no less apocalyptic, speculations of large meteorites on a collision course
with our planet.
According to some cultural critics, moreover, in the past two or three decades,
dystopia has all but disappeared from fiction and has turned up in our daily life.
Nowadays, the argument goes, “people perceive their environments as dystopic
and, alas, they do so with depressing frequency,” so that dystopia has come to bear
“the aspect of lived experience” (Gordin et al. 2010, p. 2). The wide circulation, in the
New Media, of highly negative emotions such as fear, panic, anxiety, anger, and hate
allegedly points to the apocalyptic, fatalist, character of contemporary societies,
although one can also make the opposite argument namely, that some elements of
the New Media deliberately promote this apocalyptic mindset for the opaque pur-
poses of the power circles that finance them. Be that as it may, all this pandering to
negative emotions proves that we are still living in a period of high modernity, with
all the problems, tensions, and contradictions associated with the modernist and
postmodernist temper.
On the other hand, one must recognize the fact that in the past few decades these
problems and tensions have been further aggravated as the prevailing Western
mindset has been generating and then engaging in ever more complex and intense
feedback loops with the new, electronic, information and communication technol-
ogies. The information age, together with the rapid transformations of globaliza-
tion, has dramatically increased the number of facts that humans must retain. But,
the understanding of the consequences of these facts has diminished or, in some
cases, has not even materialized. This, in addition to the dystopian and apocalyptic
turn of the modernist mindset, has created widespread anxiety and dread for the
future of our planet. It is highly significant that, in the past 15 years, the use of such
terms as “crisis,” “global crisis,” and “future crisis” in English and other Western lan-
guages has increased by 262% in populations over 50 years of age, by 176% in popu-
lations between 25 and 49, and by 456% in populations younger than 25 (source:
Schloer Consulting Group 2013). These figures surpass by far those of the early days
of the Cold War, when the nuclear missile crisis in Cuba suggested potential global
conflict in the early 1960s. They seem to suggest that significant segments of the
world population are very concerned about where our planet is going, but have no
idea how to change course.
In turn, our current local and global elites are being challenged more than ever
to find the right paths to a sustainable future. But, they are clearly overwhelmed
by the complexity and density of the problems they need to understand and effec-
tively address. Outdated and systemically flawed financial systems, the lack of
182 MODERNISM AND EXILE

clean and affordable energy, the diminishing supply of clean water, the imminent
global collapse of the food supply to a vastly expanding human population, the
rapid growth of pollution due to the increasing industrialization of large nations,
climate change issues, unequal access of many communities to natural resources
and affordable technology, and the impasse of philosophical and ideological differ-
ences, all of these are factors that decision-makers are called on to accept as reality
and find solutions to.
It is undeniable that humanity as a whole has never faced such serious problems
before. But, instead of spinning out endless apocalyptic scenarios and succumbing
to the will to power’s amor fati and infatuation with its own extinction, we should
recognize that at least seventy-five per cent of these problems are of our own
making and can, therefore, be solved by us. We should recognize that the current
global plight is just another consequence of our blind, unquestioned allegiance to
the will to power. Walking away from our various power-oriented mentalities on
a global scale would create a unique opportunity for further human development.
In the last two decades alone, we have made tremendous progress in devising
new, environmentally responsible technologies and novel methods of applying
traditional ones. Biology, physics, chemistry, and medicine lead this progress, side
by side with information and communication technologies. We have all the tools at
our fingertips to change this planet to a sustainable world. But we, as a global com-
munity, must be willing to develop and use these new tools in an intelligent manner.
Most importantly, we need to embrace science and technology as instruments for
our higher, ethical development, instead of abusing them for destructive purposes.
In other words, we need also to be willing to undergo a spiritual transformation,
a radical change in our present mentality. This is an existential, as well as a moral
imperative, not least because we have reached a new stage in the relationship with
our machines.
Indeed, up to this point, machines have co-evolved with us, but they are now
poised to surpass us in capacity of reasoning and action. We are for the first time
in danger of being superseded as a species, unless we teach our machines, and
ourselves, to co-evolve spiritually and ethically as well. If we continue on the pres-
ent course where our most advanced machines are being programmed for greed,
domination, and war, we will soon reach a global scenario that, although not
apocalyptic, would by far outdo any nightmarish fantasies devised by our science
fiction writers. For these reasons, the 21st century must become the Age of Global
Learning, in which we as a species must concentrate all of our efforts on what is
the hardest and most valuable of all sciences: the science of being human. 1 Such
a desideratum may sound like pie in the sky, especially to those members of our
elites who are enamored with power and who will dismiss it as one more wishful
dream of the exilic-utopian imagination. Fortunately, however, utopian think-
ing, despite dire warnings and prophesies against it, has not disappeared from
the Western contemporary sociocultural scene—it simply needs to be redirected,
away from the will to power.
An early warning against utopia was that of Nicholas Berdyayev, Joseph Brodsky’s
illustrious fellow Russian exile of an earlier generation, whom Aldous Huxley cites
in his epigraph to the Brave New World: “Perhaps a new age will begin, an age when the
intellectuals and the educated class will dream of ways in which to avoid utopias and
return to a non-utopian society, less ‘perfect’ but ‘freer.’” In this citation, Berdyayev
 AFTERWORD 183
refers, appropriately, to the communist and other utopias inspired by the will to power.
Yet, he conceives freedom as “freedom from,” specifically from utopian thinking
and action as such. His call for a “return to a non-utopian society” is neither possible
nor is it an act of freedom—the need for a “freer” society has generated the utopian
drive in the first place.
Furthermore, some anti-utopian attitudes go hand in hand with libertarian or
anarchical ones and often signify the desire of replacing another man’s utopia with
one’s own, or returning to an already rejected social status quo ante, which, chances
are, has also been someone’s utopia at a previous point in history. Oscar Wilde, again,
says it best: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glanc-
ing at, for it leaves out the country at which Humanity is always landing. And when
Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is
the realization of Utopias” (Wilde 1954, p. 1028).
Most recently, Michael D. Higgins, for example, argues for the value of utopian-
ism, estimating that now is the most propitious and relevant time for reflexivity and
analysis of our social systems, in the light of the future(s) that they imply (Higgins
2013). Clearly, a healthy dose of utopianism is greatly needed in the present context of
globalization, in which the balance between the three principal social agents of the
contemporary world, transnational corporations, nation-states, and civil societies,
is deeply skewed in favor of the corporations. Utopian actions should therefore be
undertaken, particularly by civil societies around the world, to restore the proper
balance. Such actions have become not only possible, but also effective, precisely
because of our advanced information technology and the Internet. For the first time
in human history (at least as we have recorded it), the old idea of creating independ-
ent, small-scale, like-minded, “intentional communities” linked through a vast
global network is technologically feasible. As Margaret Wheatley and Deborah
Frieze rightly point out, in our age of globalization, the emergence of local, small-
scale, utopian social experiments or intentional communities can synchronize in a
global trend of change from bottom up, through the use of digital communication
technologies and through the development of transnational relations. (Wheatley,
Frieze 2006)
We have seen that utopian communalism and intentional communities, reli-
gious and secular, have a long history in the Western world. Their in-depth study
should be of great interest, because of the re-emergence of such communities in the
second part of the 20th century, for example, the communes of the “flower children”
in California and in other parts of America and the Western world. Future utopian
associations can hopefully learn from both their positive and their negative experi-
ences. Small-scale utopian communities have traditionally been micro-systemic,
alternative lifestyle associations that organized themselves and behaved as closed sys-
tems.2 Over time, these enclosed micro-communities have failed, mainly because of
narrowly conceived self-interest and an insular, self-exilic mindset.
In turn, the recurrent fears of apocalypse can either trigger defensive, “survival of
the fittest” behaviors, for example, in the contemporary American and other surviv-
alist and preppers’ movements, based on the construction of group identity through
inclusion and exclusion. But, it can also bring people and communities together
in positive collaborative social projects. Here I can mention only one example of
such proactive utopian (re) configuration of the future (although there are many
others): the “Transition Initiative” or “Transition Town” movement, originating in
184 MODERNISM AND EXILE

Australia and the UK and currently spreading to various parts of the world.3 Even
though some of its members may occasionally start from apocalyptic fears and the
perception of life as a dystopian experience, they attempt to redirect such fears and
perceptions toward designing and implementing viable social models of worldwide
transition to a sustainable future.
Even more significantly, projects such as the Transition Town propose a model
of community that is an open system, interacting with outside systems and engaging
in extensive exchanges. This utopian model of sociopolitical action implies cooper-
ating with other communities (instead of shunning them) for the greater common
good. In this sense, they transcend the exilic mindset of the intentional communi-
ties of the past. The question remains open, however, if and under what conditions
utopian movements such as the Transition Initiative may be able to generate social
change at the macrolevel. Advanced technology and transnational networking are
certainly necessary, but not sufficient conditions for their ultimate success. In the
final analysis, it is the spirit in which such utopian initiatives are launched, that is,
the mentality that drives them. They could all too easily be co-opted, again, by the
will to power, as has often happened in the past.
At any rate, ultimately the issue is not to be pro-utopian, anti-utopian, or dys-
topian, but to go beyond the agonistic dynamic of utopia, dystopia, and apocalypse
in social thinking and action. Instead, one should create and/or adopt alternative
ideas, emotions, and behaviors—or systems of values and beliefs—that transcend
a mentality of power. I believe that the current projects of civil society would have
the greatest chance of being successful on a global scale if they adopted (and adapted
to contemporary conditions) the irenic values of the ancient tradition of wisdom.
Fortunately, this ancient tradition, known also as the philosophia perennis, has
returned in our age, just as it did during the Hellenistic period, when the conquests
of Alexander Macedon had the unintended consequences of bringing together the
various cultures of the West and the East. Here one may recall my observation, in
Chapter 7, that British colonialism had the unintended consequence of bringing the
ancient tradition of wisdom embodied in early Hinduism and Buddhism to the West.
In the past century, the Chinese Communist armies driving into Tibet in 1958 had
similar effects: many Tibetan Buddhist scholars, monks, and sages went into exile
to India, and from there slowly worked their way into Europe and the United States,
bringing with them an irenic mindset and irenic practices, which are incommen-
surable with the Western mentalities of power and which have now spread all over
the world.
Like James Hilton in Lost Horizon (1933) and Hermann Hesse in The Glasspearl Game,
Aldous Huxley is one of the first major Western writers who understood the sig-
nificance of fusing the spiritual traditions of the West and the East with the Western
technological and scientific advances, based on nonlinear complexity and emer-
gence, rather than on linear, reductionist principles. 4 In his remarkable novel, Island
(1962), which is a reflection on modernist utopia and dystopia while transcending
both of them, Huxley describes a small-scale, intentional community that is built
on the imaginary island of Pala in South Eastern Pacific. This community was initi-
ated in the 19th century by an open-minded and courageous Scottish physician and
a visionary local Raja who developed an alternative system of socio-political and
economic organization, healthcare, and education based on the irenic principles of
 AFTERWORD 185
love, compassion, mindfulness, and peaceful cooperation, rather than on cutthroat
competition, selfishness, greed, and excessive materialism.
Pala has thus flourished for over a hundred years but, because of its important oil
reserves, it has now aroused the interest of several multinational oil companies. By
the end of the novel, these companies manage to take possession of the island and its
rich natural resources, with the aid of the dictator of a neighboring country and the
power-hungry, Western-educated, young local Raja and his possessive mother who,
unlike their wise forerunners, believe in consumerist values, technological gadgets,
and a fake religious guru with universalist ambitions.
The novel also traces the spiritual development of Will Faranby, an opportunist
British newspaperman who works for one of the oil magnates. When he arrives on
the island, Faranby is a nihilistic modernist who “cannot take yes for an answer”
and is fixated on the “Essential Horror” of life (the typical modernist perception
of death and the void), to which he reacts in cynical and self-destructive fashion
(Huxley 2009, pp. 285–290). Under the influence of the Palean community, he slowly
regains his sanity and begins to value life for its simplicity, beauty, and goodness, just
as the neighboring dictator’s army lands on the island and installs the young Raja as
the strong man and puppet of the multinationals.
Huxley’s ironical, dystopian ending (not unlike that of Hesse’s in the Glassbead
Game) is not an abdication in favor of the nihilistic, Nietzschean amor fati. On the
contrary, just like Brave New World and several other dystopias of the 20th century,
it is a warning and a call to sanity, revealing the madness of organizing life on earth
exclusively in terms of the power principle. Moreover, Island does offer a viable social
alternative or an implementable blue print for building the kind of communities on
earth that go beyond the nihilistic cultures of death that the will to power has lately pro-
duced. As enlightened members of the Palean community point out in the novel, their
world is incommensurable with that of domination, exploitation, and greed, and no
amount of force can harm it, if their community remains spiritually and emotionally
impervious to the Sirens’ call of this will. Finally, it is a matter of individual and com-
munal choice, Huxley suggests, as to what kind of world one would like to live in.
Should world communities decide to follow such alternative blue prints, they
would need to disconnect the exilic-utopian imagination from the will to power and
move away from the agonistic dynamics of center and margin. In this regard, writers
and artists in general can play a crucial role in designing and proposing innovative
social models (of which Huxley’s Island is an excellent example), because such mod-
els may well need to display the kind of ontological flexibility and epistemological
inventiveness that has always been the mark of aesthetic creations. In turn, the art-
ists and thinkers called on to create the alternative social blue prints should be free
of partisanship and seek to place themselves in a no man’s land, in-between worlds,
in order to gain the distance needed to evaluate these worlds, including their own,
and to propose alternative ones. In “The Way to Write History” (168 AD), Lucian of
Samosata, an Assyrian-Greek polyglot, and perpetual exile, already expresses this
thought when he suggests that the historian should always seek to be “a foreigner
and stateless in his books.”5
On the other hand, whereas thinkers, writers, and artists in general should indeed
assume the liminal standpoint of the stateless and the foreigner in their work, they
should, at the same time, seek to feel at home every where on earth and beyond. And
186 MODERNISM AND EXILE

here, again, they would follow in the footsteps of another Hellenistic philosopher,
Diogenes of Oinoanda (c. 200 AD). Explaining why he inscribed the wall of an entire
public Stoa with his Epicurean teachings, Diogenes noted: “And not least we did this
[inscription] for those who are called ‘foreigners,’ though they are not really so. For,
while the various segments of the earth give different people a different country, the
whole compass of this world gives all people a single country, the entire earth, and a
single home, the world.”6
Finally, those of us who feel truly adventurous could take to heart Hugo de St.
Victor’s words: “The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner, he
to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the
entire world is as a foreign land.” St. Victor returns to Lucian’s maxim and transval-
ues it in the context of the entire human race: he takes it to the ultimate level of atopia,
understood as radical liminality. At this level, “the perfect man” has “extinguished”
all of his attachments and is able to contemplate, serenely, the infinite ocean of still-
ness, out of which everything emerges and into which everything dissolves.
Adopting the perspective of radical atopia would also spell the end of the
exilic-utopian imagination in its power-oriented guises. The modernist and post-
modernist imagination would undergo an essential transformation in the way in
which it experiences death and the void. Instead of perceiving them as negative and
threatening, it would see them as joyful explorations of the unknown, characteris-
tic of much ludic activity, opening up liminal interstices through which alternative
value-systems can emerge. In turn, these alternative values would belong to irenic
worlds, outside a mentality of power, being the most appropriate to adopt within a
global reference frame. Within that larger frame, one could then envisage, in a posi-
tive utopian manner, the end of exile and the transcendence of the exilic-utopian
imagination through the emergence of fully free and blossoming human communi-
ties that do not operate on a power mechanism of inclusion and exclusion, but on the
irenic principle of symbiotic cooperation and loving care for each other.
I should like to close this Afterword with Oscar Wilde’s witty response in antici-
pation of the skeptical reception of his own Christian utopian essay, “The Soul of
Man under Socialism,” which I believe equally applies to my call to emancipate our
exilic-utopian imagination from the will to power and open it toward alternative,
irenic worlds:

It will, of course, be said that such a scheme as is set forth here is quite unpractical
and goes against human nature. This is perfectly true. It is unpractical and goes
against human nature. This is why it is worth carrying out, and that is why one
proposes it. For what is a practical scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme
that is already in existence, or a scheme that could be carried out under existing
conditions. But it is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to; and any
scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The conditions
will be done away with, and human nature will change. The only thing that one
really knows about human nature is that it changes. (Wilde 1954, p. 1039)
 NOTES

1 Modernity and Modernism: Preliminary

Theoretical Considerations
1. See Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (1966), vol. VIII, p. 1211, Leipzig: Taubner.
2. See, among many others, Eliade Mircea (1965), The Myth of the Eternal Return:
Or, Cosmos and History. Trans. from German by Willard R. Trask, 2nd edition,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
3. See Jonathan Swift’s satirical essay “The Battle of the Books,” included in his
larger religious satire, A Tale of a Tub and Other Works (1704), Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
4. For the modern temper of Catullus and the poetae novi, see, for example, Charles
Martin (1992), Catullus. New Haven: Yale University Press.
5. A good example in this respect is Shelley’s own drama in verse that has this titan
at its center. See Shelley (2013), Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts,
with Other Poems, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
6. For an interesting discussion of Baudelaire’s concept of modernité, see, among
others, Paul de Man (1971), “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” in Blindness
and Insight, New York: Oxford University Press.
7. For a full treatment of the issue of the relationship between modernity and his-
tory, see Roger Griffin (2010), Modernism and Fascism. The Sense of a Beginning under
Mussolini and Hitler, Hampshire: Palgrave-Macmillan, pp. 50–54. Further page
references are to this edition.
8. See my distinction between Modernism and Postmodernism in Chapter 7 below.
9. See my discussion of the Socratic concept of utopia in Chapter 5 below.
10. See, however, Griffin’s excellent essay in an irenic key on Homo Humanistus:
Towards an Inventory of Transcultural Humanism, included in the collec-
tive volume on Exploring Humanity: Intercultural Perspectives on Humanism, edited
by Mihai I. Spariosu and Jörn Rüsen, Göttingen: V&R Unipress and National
Taiwan University Press (2012), pp. 45–65.
11. The same goes for “modernism” at least as far as Griffin’s maximalist definition is
concerned—one could argue that most of the “modernist” cultural phenomena
he describes (except for the causality he ascribes to them, such as the Industrial
Revolution or the French Revolution) can find their equivalents, mutatis mutandi, in
the Hellenistic period and, generally, in any major period of transition or “revolu-
tion” from one type of power-oriented society to another—a cyclical movement that

187
188 NOTES

Nietzsche calls the “eternal return of the same” (mentality of power), in different (dis)
guises. In this regard, one may say that a certain shift in the power-oriented men-
tality of a given society creates socioeconomic phenomena such as the Industrial
Revolution, and not the other way around (as Griffin, Habermas, and a large number
of neo-Marxist cultural historians appear to believe). The shift often occurs accord-
ing to the dialectic of center and margin, although there is mutual causality involved
in this dynamic process as well, with mental/psycho-emotional and physical/eco-
nomic/societal phenomena engaging in ever wider feedback loops, until the dynam-
ics of center and margin becomes reversed again.
12. For the Age of Biedermeyer, see Sengle Friedrich (1971), Biedermeierzeit: Deutsche
Literatur im Spannungsfeld zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1848, Stuttgart:
Metzler Verlag, and more recently, Nemoianu Virgil (1984), The Taming of
Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeyer, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
13. For a full argument see Mihai I. Spariosu (1991), God of Many Names: Play, Poetry,
and Power in Hellenic Thought, from Homer to Aristotle, Durham and London: Duke
University Press. I shall also briefly discuss this agon as it appears in the epic of
Gilgamesh and other ancient narratives in Chapter 4, below.

2 Play and Liminality in Modernist

Cultural Theory
1. For a full discussion of liminality and play, see Spariosu (1997), The Wreath of Wild
Olive: Play, Liminality and the Study of Literature, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, especially
pp. 31–72. Here I can only briefly consider the two concepts in the light of my
present topic.
2. See my discussion of Plato’s notion of play in Chapter 5, below.
3. For a full discussion, see Meir Lubetzki (1979), “The Early Bronze Age Origin of
Greek and Hebrew Limen, ‘Harbor’” in The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series,
Vol. 69, No. 3, 158–180.
4. Victor Turner’s theory, with its distinction between “liminal” and “liminoid,” has
been influential in modernist cultural anthropology and psychology, for exam-
ple, in explaining transitions to new social orders. See, among others, Maurice
Bloch (1992), Prey into Hunter, Cambridge University Press; and Mathieu Deflem
(1991), “Ritual Anti-Structure and Religion: A Discussion of Victor Turner’s
Processual Symbolic Analysis,” in Journal of the Scientific Study of Religion, 30.1.
Victor Turner himself also makes the link between “liminoidality” and “maze-
way and revitalization” theory, first developed by Anthony Wallace (1956),
“Revitalization Movements” and later included in Anthony Wallace (2003),
Revitalization and Mazeways. Essays on Cultural Change, Volume I, edited by Robert
Grumet, Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. This theory is equally
relevant to the exilic-utopian imagination, especially in its power-oriented
guises. “Liminoidality,” however, only confuses the issues in this context as well.
Nor do I believe that “revitalization and mazeway” theory adequately deals with
mechanisms of social “transcendence.” In other words, despite Griffin’s claims to
the contrary (in Modernism and Fascism, section on “Modernity and the Liminoid,”
 NOTES 189
pp. 109–114), the mechanism of revitalization through the “liminoid” takes place
only within, and not outside, a mentality of power and, therefore, does not tran-
scend the dialectic of margin and center. I shall return to this point several times,
in Part III of this book.
5. Aristotle refers to these terms in his discussion of the Pythagoreans in his
Metaphysics. Claiming that Philolaus and the Pythagorean circle around him
borrowed Anaximander’s notions of apeiron, the boundless or unlimited and to
peiron, the limited, Aristotle adds: “they plainly say that when the one had been
constructed, whether out of planes or of surface or of seed or of elements which
they cannot express, immediately the nearest part of the unlimited began to be
drawn in and limited by the limit.” According to him, the “Pythagoreans, too,
held that void exists, and that it enters the heaven from the unlimited breath—it,
so to speak, breathes in void. The void distinguishes the natures of things, since it
is the thing that separates and distinguishes the successive terms in a series. This
happens in the first case of numbers; for the void distinguishes their nature.”
I should add that this is also the case with the cosmos or the order of the universe.
When the limited “breathes in” the boundless, the undifferentiated whole of the
apeiron becomes a living whole of interconnected parts, which are both separated
and upheld by the void in-between. It is this “void” that I call radical liminality.
Thus, for the Pythagoreans, the cosmos, just as the continuum of numbers, arises
in the play of the unlimited and the limited, or emptiness and structure. We shall
see in Chapter 4 below that the authors of Genesis in the Old Testament share, to
a considerable extent, this cosmic view.

3 Exile and Utopia as Playful Liminality

1. In any case, my intention in this study is not to provide a comprehensive histori-
cal account of utopian works in Modernism (and Postmodernism), which does
not mean that writing this history would not be a worthwhile task. Given my lim-
ited space, however, in the present study I have focused on delineating the general
features of the “exilic-utopian” imagination, which appears in many other con-
texts, beyond narratives that are usually classified as utopias.
2. See Frank and Fritzie Manuel’s monumental book on Utopian Thought in the Western
World, Cambridge: Harvard University Press (1979), which covers Renaissance and
Reformation utopian literature and its antecedents at great length, even though
they link utopia to exile and play only incidentally.

4 The Birth of Modernity: The Exilic-Utopian

Imagination in Ancient Near-Eastern Narratives
(The Epic of Gilgamesh And the Pentateuch)
1. A good collection of these texts can be found in James Pritchard, editor (1950),
Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, Princeton, New Jersey:
Princeton University Press.
190 NOTES

2. See my full discussion of Joseph and the exilic-utopian imagination in relation to

Thomas Mann’s novel, Joseph and His Brothers, in Chapter 10 below.
3. For a full discussion of the transition from an archaic to a median mentality
in ancient Greece, see Spariosu (1991), God of Many Names, especially Chapter 1,
“The Hawk and the Nightingale: Play, Power and Poetry in Homer and Hesiod.”
I should, however, point out that in the epic of Gilgamesh, one may discern a third
perspective, which is probably that of the Babylonian priest(s) and which belongs
to the ancient tradition of wisdom encoded in the religious “mysteries,” going
beyond the systems of values and beliefs of both an “archaic” and a “modern”
mentality. Whereas this perspective is discernable in the Homeric epic as well, it
appears only sporadically and, in my view, is not central to the narrative (despite
some ancient, allegorical, Neoplatonic interpretations of Homer). See the conclu-
sion of my discussion of the Gilgamesh epic, immediately below.
4. The Epic of Gilgamesh, Academy of Ancient Texts at http://www.ancienttexts.
org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/; translated by Maureen Gallery Kovacs
from the Akkadian version with inserts from Old Babylonian; Electronic edition
by Wolf Carnahan, 1998. There are many English translations of the Gilgamesh
epic but I found Maureen Gallery Kovacs’s to be the most congenial to my own
view of the poem. Among other modern English translations, see those of
N.K. Sandars (1960), John Gardner, John Maier, and Richard A. Henshaw (1984),
Stephanie Dalley (1989), and Danny P. Jackson (1992). The present translation
omits Tablet XII, which is a later addition to the epic, so I shall defer commentary
on it for another occasion.
5. Cf. also note 7 above. Significantly, the Spirit of God moves upon the face of the
waters. This suggests that the Creation consists in the Spirit (which manifests
itself as breathing, which in turn conditions speech or the Word) shaping incho-
ate matter into cosmic order.
6. According to certain Cabbalistic readings, God himself is conceived both as
Ayin, Absolute nothingness or No-thing, and as En sof, Absolute All (things). The
Creation, in turn, is infinite God limiting himself or “retracting” in order to create
a liminal space within which the cosmos can emerge. So the cosmos itself can
be conceived as the playground of God (various versions of this ludic concept of
creation are known under the common name of theologia ludens). This view is in
striking contrast to the modern “big bang” theory that conceives of the universe
as a series of explosions and expansions, followed by contractions. The difference
is between a power-oriented view (“big bang”) and an irenic view according to
which creation emerges as an act of generosity—God restricts or limits himself
in order to allow the emergence of the material world. One may also mention the
belief of some Cabbalists that the Talmud is older than the Creation and that God
created our cosmos based on the “blueprints” of the Talmud. This view gains cre-
dence in the age of intelligent computers that has generated its own “Talmudic”
version in the so-called “simulation” theory of creation (Bostrom 2003), accord-
ing to which our universe would be a computer simulation by beings of a much
higher intelligence than our own or even by a highly evolved, future version of
ourselves.
7. I have deferred a discussion of the Joseph story (with which the Book of Genesis
ends) until Chapter 10, where I examine in some detail Thomas Mann’s literary
masterpiece, Joseph and His Brothers.
 NOTES 191
5 Modern Consciousness and
the Exilic-Utopian Imagination in the Hellenic
World: Sophocles and Plato
1. The Oedipus at Colonus of Sophocles, edited with introduction and notes by Sir
Richard Jebb (1889), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, line 400. Line num-
bers in subsequent citations will refer to this edition.
2. According to legend, Cadmus founded Thebes by sowing dragon’s teeth in the
ground, out of which armed warriors sprung up and started fighting with each
other. Sophocles alludes to it in the citation immediately below; the passage is
also an allusion to his Theban cycle, which presents that city’s mythical history
as an unending cycle of violence, where her kings are born, live, and die by the
sword. For a full treatment of this issue, see my analysis of Euripides’s play The
Bacchae in Spariosu (1991), God of Many Names, 117ff.
3. See Plato, Republic 6.487b3-c4. Translated by Paul Shorey, in E. Hamilton and
H. Cairns (eds), The Collected Dialogues of Plato (1961), Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press. Further citations refer to Shorey’s translation and are incor-
porated in the main text. Citations from other Platonic dialogs will refer to the
Hamilton and Cairns edition as well.
4. Hans Vaihinger (1911), Die Philosophie des Als Ob: System der theoretischen, praktischen
und religioesen Fiktionen der Menschheit auf Grund eines idealistischen Positivismus,
Berlin, translated into English by C.K. Ogden as The Philosophy of As If: A System
of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind (1924) London. For a full
discussion of the ludic aspects of Vaihinger’s philosophy of als ob, see Spariosu
(1989), Dionysus Reborn: Play and the Aesthetic Dimension in Modern Philosophical and
Scientific Discourse, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 246–258. Like Socrates,
Vaihinger makes a distinction between the “as if” cognitive method of scientific
and philosophical fictions and aesthetic/poetic fictions in terms of serious and
useful play: aesthetic fictions are entertaining ludic constructs, the utility of
which is dictated by their scientific and philosophical counterparts.
5. The “as if” utopian approach has also something in common with the computer-
modeling games utilized nowadays, both in the natural and in the social sciences.
In the case of such computer games, the scientist is content with a reasonably
accurate approximation of the actual state of affairs. Socrates makes a similar
point concerning his ideal state: “if we discover what justice is, are we to demand
that the just man shall differ from it in no respect, but shall conform in every way
to the ideal? Or will it suffice us if he approximate to it as nearly as possible and
partake of it more than others?” (Republic 5.472b).
6. For a full discussion of necessity and chance as ludic concepts in the archaic
Hellenic mentality, see Spariosu (1991), God of Many Names, Chapter 2, Section 2
“Necessity and Chance,” pp. 75–87.
7. As we have seen, Huizinga’s modernist notions of play discussed in Part I above
are beset by the same problems, which the Dutch scholar inherited from the
Platonic theotopia. But these problems are even more intractable within the mod-
ernist framework, because the Pythagorean tradition of perennial wisdom, still
present in Platonic theotopia, has faded entirely in our age of high modernity. For
further discussion of this point, see Chapter 6 below.
192 NOTES

8. This admittedly conjectural account is the point of departure of a historical novel

on Plato and the Academy that I published in Romanian in 2010, under the title,
Scrisoarea a S,aptea. O enigmă filosofică la Academia lui Platon (The Seventh Letter: A
Philosophical Enigma at Plato’s Academy), Bucharest: Humanitas. Dion’s story is
also included in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. Needless to say, Plutarch as a Neo-Platonic
apologete sees Dion in a positive light and seeks to exculpate the Academy and
Plato himself of any responsibility for the Sicilian debacle.

6 The Exilic-Utopian Imagination

and Literary Discourse in Modernism
and Postmodernism
1. Roger Griffin makes a similar point when he characterizes contemporary
secularizing modernity as a period of “permanent liminoidality” that con-
stantly (and unsuccessfully) drives ontologically insecure individuals to
attempt to find closure through utopian aesthetic or socio-political projects
(Griffin 2010, p. 109ff ). As I pointed out in Chapter 2 above, however, I believe
Victor Turner’s distinction between liminality and “liminoidality” is a distinc-
tion without a difference between small-scale and large-scale societies. As it
stands now, Turner’s liminoidality is both a “degraded” and a “superior” form
of liminality, evincing one of the typical modernist aporias to which I have
referred throughout the present study. Liminality has the same nature in both
“primitive” and “advanced” cultures, even though it is put to different uses and
it elicits different responses in each type of culture. While I agree with Griffin
in regard to the misguided modernist responses to (radical) liminality, I would
replace “permanent liminoidality” with “permanent crisis” (which Griffin
also mentions) or, perhaps, “chronic hollowness,” as in TS Eliot’s “The Hollow
Men.” See also my discussion of modernist “hollowness” in Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness in Chapter 7 below.
2. Michel Foucault (1977) “Language to Infinity,” in Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, p. 55, my emphasis. Further page references in the main
body of my text are to this edition.
3. For a more recent treatment of this subject, see Zygmunt Bauman (1992),
Mortality, Immortality, and Other Life Strategies, Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
4. For a full discussion of heroic values and death in Homeric epic, see Spariosu
(1991), God of Many Names, pp. 28–40.
5. Edward W. Said (2000), Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, p. 181. Further page references are to this edition and
are included in the main body of my text.
6. Incidentally, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur coins this adage in relation to the
“American Dream,” which he describes in Letters from an American Farmer (1782).
In turn, this Dream can be seen as a specific product of the popular exilic-uto-
pian imagination. It is based on the Latin adage ubi bene, ibi patria (where I can
 NOTES 193
live well, there is my home/country) and it is quite different from the Romantic,
nationalist exilic-utopian imagination, for which power-driven, ideological and
political considerations largely trump the practical concerns of the “average”
citizen. Ironically, this Romantic type of exilic-utopian imagination, whose ori-
gin can be traced back to late 18th and early 19th century, has led to the present-
day “identity politics” that Said unwittingly shares in this essay, despite the fact
that he deplores it in other contexts.
7. Joseph Brodsky (1995), “The Condition We Call Exile, or Acorns Aweigh” in On
Grief and Reasons; Essays, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, p. 23. Further page ref-
erences are to this edition and are included in the main body of my text.
8. See Erich Auerbach (2003), Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
9. See, for example, Oscar Wilde (1954), “The Decay of Lying” in The Works of Oscar
Wilde, edited by G.F. Maine, New York.
10. Modernist and postmodernist philosophy and social science have, in turn, employed
certain literary strategies in order to free themselves from the stringency of the
“truth imperative”; by going beyond the dialectic of truth and fiction, they have in
fact advanced knowledge in their fields. In this, they have often followed Socrates of
the Platonic dialogs who criticized the poets, while tacitly employing their aesthetic
and rhetorical strategies. Among outstanding thinkers who have revolutionized
the fields of 20th-century philosophy and science by rebuilding their foundations
on aesthetic principles, one may cite Nietzsche, Vaihinger, Heidegger, and Vattimo
in philosophy; Hayden White in history, for example, in Metahistory: The Historical
Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973); Paul Feyerabend in history of science,
for example, in Against Method (1975); Richard Harvey Brown in sociology, for exam-
ple, in A Poetic for Sociology (1989); and Clifford Geertz, Victor Turner, George Marcus,
Michael Fischer, and James Clifford in cultural anthropology.
11. For detailed discussions of the Anglo-American utopias and dystopias at the
end of the 19th Century, see Jean Pfaelzer (1984), The Utopian Novel in America,
1886–1896: The Politics of Form, Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press; and
Matthew Beaumont (2005), Utopia Ltd: Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England
1870–1900, Leiden: Brill.
12. Robert Musil (1996), The Man without Qualities, translated from the German by
Sophie Wilkins, vol. I, New York: Vintage Books, p. 245. Further page references
are to this edition.
13. Hermann Hesse (1969), The Glass Bead Game, translated from the German by
Richard and Carla Winston, New York: Holt and Company, p. 85.

7 Exile, Utopia, and the Will to Empire:

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
1. Joseph Conrad (2012 [1899]), Heart of Darkness, London, New York, Toronto:
Penguin, p. 2. Further page references are to this edition.
2. For the notion of exemptionalism (evident, e.g., in the admonition of certain
parents to their children: “Do as I say, not as I do”), see Spariosu (2004) Global
194 NOTES

Intelligence and Human Development: Toward an Ecology of Global Learning, Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, p. 97ff.
3. “Give me a map; then let me see how much/ Is left for me to conquer all the world,/
That these my boys may finish all my wants. … /Look here, my boys; see what
a world of ground/ Lie westward from the midst of Cancer’s line/ Unto the ris-
ing of this earthly globe,/ Whereas the sun, declining from our sight,/Begins
the day with our Antipodes!/And shall I die, and this unconquered? … /And
from th’Antarctic Pole eastward behold/ As much more land, which never was
descried,/Wherein are rocks of pearl that shine as bright/ As all the lamps that
beautify the sky!/And shall I die, and this unconquered?/ Here, lovely boys; what
death forbids my life,/ That let your lives command in spite of death” (Marlowe,
Tamburlaine pp. 253–254).
4. See Francis Bacon (1962), The Advancement of Knowledge, edited by G. W. Kitchin,
London and New York: Dent.
5. See Friedrich Nietzsche (1966) Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the
Future, translated by Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage, Aphorism 146.
6. As I have already mentioned, Robert Musil in Man without Qualities and T.S. Eliot
in “The Hollow Men” equally pick up on this “hollowness” to describe the mod-
ernist psychopathology of death, associated with the void and the will to power.
In fact, Eliot uses a citation from Conrad’s novel as the epigraph to his poem:
“Mistah Kurtz, he dead.”
7. For a full discussion of “strong” and “weak” nihilism in Nietzsche, as well as in
Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment, see Spariosu (1997), pp. 136–138.
8. The more recent case of a Russian writer, Alexander Solzhenitzyn, may show
the perils of displeasing one’s hosts. When the exiled novelist arrived in the
United States from the Soviet Union, he was the darling of the US Press as
long as he criticized the totalitarian practices of his native country. Once he
started criticizing his country of adoption, he became persona non grata,
being either ignored or treated like an ungrateful, old, and slightly daft,
curmadgeon.
9. But the distinction would certainly not have been lost on all of Conrad’s Victorian
contemporaries. One positive, unintended consequence of British colonialism
in India was the introduction and flourishing of Hindu and Buddhist studies in
England. There were also the “Victorian sages,” such as Matthew Arnold, John
Ruskin, and Oscar Wilde who were sympathetic to the irenic system of values
that I have in mind here. For an extensive discussion of these sages, see Spariosu
(1997), The Wreath of Wild Olive, pp. 263–302.

8 Utopia, Totalitarianism, and the Will to

Reason: Koestler’s Darkness at Noon
1. Arthur Koestler ([1941] 1968), Darkness at Noon, Translated by Daphne Hardy,
Toronto, New York, London: Bantam Books p. 61. Furher page references are to
this edition.
 NOTES 195
9 Exile, Dystopia, and The Will to Order:
Huxley’s Brave New World
1. For a full discussion of Orwell’s novel see Spariosu (1997), Chapter 6, Section 3,
“George Orwell and the Will to Power as Utopia/Dystopia,” pp. 244–260.
2. Aldous Huxley (1998 [1946]), Brave New World, New York: Harper, p. xiv. Further
page references are to this edition.
3. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 2.1.143–163, edited by Cedric Watts,
Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editons Ltd, 1994. Further citations refer to this
edition.
4. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, New York: Harper,
1960, p. 28. Further page references to “Brave New World Revisited” are to this
edition.

10 Exile, Theotopia, and Atopia: Mann’s

Joseph and his Brothers and Bulgakov’s Master
and Margarita
1. Thomas Mann (2005), Joseph and His Brothers: The Stories of Jacob, Young Joseph, Joseph
in Egypt, Joseph the Provider, translated by John E. Woods, New York: Everyman’s
Library, p.10. Subsequent citations refer to this edition.
2. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, translated from the Russian by
Michael Glenny, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, p. 135. Further page references
are to this edition.

Afterword: The End of Exile:

Toward A Global Eutopia
1. For a full discussion of these issues, see Spariosu (2004), Global Intelligence
and Human Development: Toward an Ecology of Global Learning. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, particularly Section III, Global Learning and Human Development,
pp. 199–249.
2. For detailed studies of “intentional communities,” see Charles J. Erasmus (1985), In
Search of the Common Good: Utopian Experiments Past and Future, New York: Free Press;
William James Metcalf, editor (1995), From Utopian Dreaming to Communal Reality:
Cooperative Lifestyles in Australia, Sidney: UNSW Press; and Tobias Jones (2007),
Utopian Dreams: In Search of a Good Life, London: Faber and Faber.
3. For the main objectives and activities of this movement, see, for example, the
website of Transition United States, at http://transitionus.org/ The US movement
is largely based on the concepts of “deep ecology” and “natural capitalism” of such
ecologists as Armory L. Lovins, Hunter Lovins, and Paul Hawken, for example in
their book, Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, Boston: Little,
Brown, (1999), as well as on the work of British and other ecologists and urban
196 NOTES

planners such as Bill Mollison, Permaculture, a Designer’s Manual (1988), Stanley,

Australia: Tagari Publications; David Holmgren, Permaculture:Principles and
Pathways beyond Sustainability (2003), Holmgren Design Services, London: Corgi;
and David Fleming (2011), Lean Logic: A Dictionary of the Future and How to Survive
It, Oxon: Court Farm House. For a discussion of some of these ecological issues,
see Spariosu (2004), particularly Chapter 5, “Toward an Ecology of Ecology,”
pp. 137–163.
4. Huxley’s turn toward the ancient tradition of wisdom of the East and the West is
also reflected in his valuable collection, The Perennial Philosophy, London: Chatto
&Windus, 1944.
5. Lucian of Samosata, “The Way to Write History, in The Works of Lucian of Samosata,
translated by Fowler, H. W. and F. G., Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1905.
6. Diogenes of Oinoanda, The Epicurean Inscriptions, Fr. 30, trans. Martin Ferguson
Smith, Napoli: Bibliopolis, 1992.
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 INDEX

Adolph, Anna, 105 Borges, Jorge Luis, 84

Adorno, Theodor, 84, 102 Born, Max, 84
amor fati, 89, 182, 185 Boyers, Robert, 84, 91
anamnesis, 73 Brave New World (Huxley), xviii, 142–160,
Anderson, Benedict, 94 172
apeiron, 27, 52 Brodsky, Joseph, 91, 95–101, 176, 182
Anaximander, 27, 52 Brown, Richard H., 193
Apollonius of Tyana, 26 Brancusi, Constantin, 84
Arafat, Yasser, 84 Brunner, John, 180
Aristotle, 8, 21, 61, 189 Bulgakov, Mikhail, xviii, 110, 161, 169,
Atwood, Margaret, 106 173–5, 177–9
Auerbach, Erich, 99–100 Buñuel, Luis, 84
atopia, xix, 30, 33, 99–100, 161, 169, 174–9, Burke, Kenneth, 12–13, 70
186. See also Utopia, Liminality Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 32
Butler, Samuel, 30, 32, 105
bardo, 22, 174–5. See also Liminality
barzakh, 23. See also Liminality Callenbach, Ernest, 71, 180
Babeuf, François Noël “Gracchus,” 36 Callimachus, 4
Bacon, Francis, 31, 36, 71, 116 Calinescu, Matei, 13–14
Bahtin, Mikhail, 170 Campanella, Tommaso, 35, 71, 105
Bailyn, Bernard, 85 Catullus, 4
Ballard, J. G., 180 Cioran, Emil, 84
Balzac, Honoré de, 101 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 117, 178
Baudelaire, Charles, 6, 90 Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas
Bebel, August, 105 de Caritat, 36
Becker, Ernest, 87–8 Conrad, Joseph, xviii, 84, 110, 111–27,
Beckett, Samuel, 84 128, 142
Begin, Menachem, 84 Cowley, Malcolm, 91
Bellamy, Edward, 105 counter-exile literature, 30, 31
Berdyayev, Nicholas, 182 culture of narcissism, 143
Berger, Peter, 7–8, 44
Berlin, Isaiah, 98 Dalí, Salvador, 84
Bernard of Chartres, 4 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 3–4, 9
Bethea, Rob, 181 Dante, Alighieri, 35, 92, 93, 117
Bildungsroman, 110 Darkness at Noon, 110, 128–42, 171
Blanchot, Maurice, 85 Dispute between A Man and His Ba (Soul),
Bloch, Ernst, 84 xviii, 44
Bode, Christoph, 181 Dietrich von Nieheim, 133

204

Diogenes of Oinoanda, 186
Dionysius the Areopagite, 26
Dodd Bowman, Anna, 105
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 133–4, 155, 172, 177
dyschronia, 33. See also Utopia
dystopia xix, 33, 104–6, 140–3, 149, 172,
180–1, 184. See also Utopia
Einstein, Albert, 84
Eliade, Mircea, 84, 187
Eliot, T.S., xviii, 44, 84, 92, 106–7, 194
Engels, Friedrich, 37
eunomia, 64, 70
exile, xv, 3, 28–31, 51, 67, 68, 76–80, 177,
91–100, 119, 138–40, 149–53, 161–9,
173, 180
internal, 29, 139, 176
as self-exile, 29–30, 67, 110, 119
pathos of, 61–2, 63–4, 91, 92
and atopia, 30, 33, 99, 161, 169, 174–9,
186
and utopia xv, xvi, xvii, 3, 31–34, 48–9,
57, 139–41, 149–55
and liminality, xv, xvii, 28–31, 48–9,
58, 62–3
and freedom, 28, 30, 31, 98–100
and Modernism, xvi, 51, 85, 91–100
and nostalgia, 44, 51, 94, 98, 100
and play, xvii, 28–31, 97–100
and power, xv, xvii, 28–31, 51–60,
76–80, 139
See also Exilic-Utopian Imagination,
Liminality, Power, Utopia
exilic-utopian imagination xv, xviii, 16,
33, 44, 51, 59, 61, 67–9, 72, 78–80,
83–9, 104–9, 128, 139, 151, 160, 173,
178, 182, 184–6, 193
history of, 34–9, 83–5
and irenic mentality, 57, 66, 126–7,
160, 184–6, 187
and literary discourse, xix, 100–2,
126–7, 160, 183–7
and modernity, xvi, 16, 44, 51
and Modernism, xvi, 124–26
and play, 52, 69–80
and power, 70–80, 159–60
See also Exile, Irenic Mentality, Play,
Power, Utopia
INDEX 205
Fermi, Enrico, 84
Fermi, Laura, 84
Feyerabend, Paul, 193
Flaubert, Gustave, 101
Fleming, Donald, 84
Foster, E.M., 105
Foucault, Michel, 85–6, 88–9
Fourier, Charles, 36
freedom, 25, 54–5, 98–9, 155–6, 171
and exile, 28, 30, 31, 98–9
and liminality, 25–26, 98–9, 144, 155,
183
and play, 25–6
See also Exile, Irenic Mentality,
Liminality, Power
Freud, Sigmund, 6, 84, 87, 141, 144, 147,
165
Fromm, Erich, 84
Gaulle de, Charles, 84
Gandhi, Mahatma, 84, 133
Garnier, C.G.T., 36
Genesis, xvi, 17, 51–4, 56, 161
Gennep, Arnold van, 21–22, 164
Gilgamesh, the Epic of, xvi, 15, 17, 44–51, 85,
88, 125, 127, 149, 190
Gilman Perkins, Charlotte, 105
Glass Bead Game, The (Hesse), 108–10
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 37, 170,
177
Gogol, Nikolaï Vassilievitch, 172
Golding, William, 106
Goncharov, Ivan Alexandrovich, 172
Gordin, Michael, 181
Griffin, Roger, 10–2, 90, 187, 192
Gronlund, Laurence, 105
Guillén, Claudio, 30–1
Habermas, Jürgen, 8, 10, 13
Harben, William, 105
Hardy, Thomas, xviii
Harrison, Harry, 180
Hartlib, Samuel, 32
hamistagan, 23 See also Liminality
Heart of Darkness (Conrad), xviii, 111–127,
128, 142
Heilbut, Anthony, 84
Hemmingway, Ernest, 84
206 INDEX

Heraclitus, 21 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 37, 84,134

Hesiod, 68, 71 Lermontov, Mikhail Yuryevich, 172
Hesse, Hermann, 106, 108–9, 184–5 Lessing, Doris, 106
Higgins, Michael D., 183 Lewis, C.S., 32
Hilton, James, 32, 71, 184 Lewis, Sinclair, 32, 106
Hitler, Adolph, 37, 84 Lilburne, John, 36
Ho Chi Minh, 84 Liminality, xv, 3, 21–7, 26, 51, 161–79
Homo Ludens (Huizinga), 18–21, 24, 26, 67 definition of, xvii, 22
Homer, 49, 68, 71, 74, 87–8, 103 ludic, 27, 28, 48, 52, 158–9, 162, 169
Horowitz, Vladimir, 84 radical, 26–7, 52, 85, 99–100, 119, 175,
Hugo, Victor, 92 186, 189
Huizinga, Johan 18–21, 24, 26, 67, 191 as luminous void, 26, 98
Huxley, Aldous, xviii, 105, 108, 110, 143, as translucent darkness, 26
182, 184–5 and atopia, xix, 30, 33, 99–100, 161, 169,
174–9, 186
Iliad, 21, 74 and Buddhism, 22–3, 26, 87, 126–7,
Ionesco, Eugène, 84 174–5, 184–5
irenic mentality, xix–xx, 12, 15, 43, 49–50, and dialectic of center and margin,
54, 56–60, 126–7, 134, 140, 168–9, 25–6, 28, 50, 59, 62–3, 76–8, 119–20,
173–9, 184–6, 187. See also philosophia 170–3
perennis and exile, xv, xvii, 28–31, 48–51, 58,
Island (Huxley), 160, 184–5 62–3, 76–8, 173
and freedom, 25–26, 98–9, 144, 155, 183
Jenkins, B. Jerry, 180 and limen, xvii, 22, 164
Johnson, Samuel, 6 and liminal experience, 23, 48–51, 58,
John of Salisbury, 4 174–5
Joseph and His Brothers (Mann), xviii, 110, and liminal spaces, 48, 52–3, 56, 58, 62,
161–9 65–6, 85, 114–5, 120, 169, 175–9
Joyce, James, xviii, 84, 92, 98 and liminoid, 188–9, 192
Jünger, Ernst, 106 and power, xv, 21–7, 48, 62–4, 114–5,
149–53
Kabbalah, 190 and utopia, 31–4, 48–51, 114–5, 142–60
katharsis, 70 and the void, 50, 85–6, 119–26, 189.
Khomeini, Ruhollah, 84 See also nothingness
Kline, Otis Adelbert, 32 and wilderness, 48–9, 56, 58, 119–26
Koestler, Arthur, xviii, 110, 128, 130–45, See also, Exile, Freedom, Play, Power,
169 Utopia
Koselleck, Reinhart, 9, 10, 13, 16 literary discourse, xviii, 100–4
Kubrik, Stanley, 32 and exilic-utopian imagination, xix,
Kundera, Milan, 84 100–2, 126–7, 160, 183–7
and liminality, xix, 103–4
LaHaye, Tim, 180 and dialectic of center and margin,
Lane, Mary, 32 xix, 76–8
Lasch, Christopher, 143 and Modernism, 148–9
Lawrence, D.H., xviii and play, xix, 76, 100
Laws (Plato), 75–7 and power, xix, 76–8
Leguin, Ursula, 106 London, Jack, 105
Lem, Stanislaw, 32 Lovejoy, Arthur O., 8
 INDEX 207
Lucian of Samosata, 32–3, 185–6 faces of, 13–14, 17, 90–1
Lukacs, Georg, 103 and Christianity, 7–8
Lull, Ramon, 35, 38 and death, 47–48, 50–1, 53, 85–86, 88–9
and dissociation of sensibility, 44
Macedon, Alexander, 184 and exilic-utopian imagination, xvi,
Machiavelli, Niccolò di Bernardo dei, 131, xviii, 7, 16, 44, 51–2
133, 139 and dialectic of center and margin, 5, 7
Macnie, John, 105 and Modernism, 85, 89–91
Man Without Qualities, The (Musil), 106–8 and nothingness, 8, 50, 173
Manuel, Frank, 36 and power, xv, 5–8, 12, 53, 76
Manuel, Fritzie, 36 and temporal consciousness, 12, 15–17,
Mann, Thomas, xviii, 110, 161–9 45, 49
Mannheim, Karl, 84 and tradition, 14, 49
Mao Zedong, 84 See also Modernism, Exilic-Utopian
Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain Imagination, Play, Postmodernism,
de, 31 Void
Marx, Karl, 36, 37 More, Thomas, 31, 33–36, 102
Marxist theory, 135, 141, 172 Morris, William, 32, 71, 105
Marlowe, Christopher, 114, 194 Mother Teresa, 84
Master and Margarita (Bulgakov), xviii, 110, Musil, Robert, 106, 107–108, 163
161, 169–79 Mussolini, Benito, 37
Mather, Cotton, 37
Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 9, 71 Nabokov, Vladimir, 84, 105
Milosz, Czeslaw, 84 Nemoianu, Virgil, 188
Mimesis, xv, 4–5,15, 99–100 neoterikoi, 4
Modernism, xv, xvii, 3, 10, 17, 48, 50, Neville, Henry, 31
84–89, 93, 100 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7–8, 10, 21, 65,
as period concept, 10–17 87–90, 107, 117, 121–4, 142, 185
definition of, 10–11, 12–13, 17, 85, 89–91 nothingness, 8–9, 52, 85, 89, 138. See also
and modernity, 3–17, 85 Power, Modernism, Void
and death, 86–9
and dystopia, 161 Odyssey, 49, 74–5, 87
and exile, xvi, xvii, xviii, 3, 51, 85, 91–100 Oedipus at Colonus, xviii, 61–6, 88
and the exilic-utopian imagination, Ortega y Gasset, José, 84
xviii, 7, 91, 110 Orwell, George, xviii, 106, 126, 143
and nihilism, 120 Overton, Richard, 36
and play, 3, 18–21 Ovid, 30
and Postmodernism, xvii, 89–91 Owen, Robert, 36
and power, 128–9, 130–2
and the void, xix, 50, 85–6, 119–20 Pentateuch, xvi, 51– 60, 134
See also Modernity, Exile, Nothingness, Perse, Saint-John, 92
Power, Utopia Pfanner, Helmut F., 84
Modernity, xv, xvi, xvii, 6–7, 12, 49 Phaedo (Plato), 73
as period concept, 3–12 philosophia perennis, xv, xix–xx, 12, 15, 26,
as transhistorical mindset, 12–17, 51 43, 49, 50–1, 54–6, 59–60, 65–6, 76,
aesthetic, 6, 89 134, 168–9, 173–9, 184–6, 187. See also
bourgeois, 6, 89 Irenic Mentality
definition of, 12–13 Picasso, Pablo, 84
208 INDEX
Piercy, Marge, 106
Plato, xvi, 21, 22, 29, 34, 35, 38, 66–79, 97,
102–103, 142, 144
Platonov, Andrei, 105
play, xv, 3, 18–21, 26, 67–80
definition of, 18
archaic, 19, 21, 67
median, 21, 67–8
as agon, 19, 21, 68
and exile, 48, 70–80, 97–100
and the carnivalesque, 158–9, 170
and exilic-utopian imagination, 67
and freedom, 25–7, 97–100
and liminality, 25–7, 52
and literary discourse, 100–4
and Modernism, 18–21, 52
and power, 20–1, 48–51, 67–78
and rationality, 19–21, 67–8
and utopia, 68–78
Plutarch, 50–1, 66
Poe, Edgar Allan, 32
Pol Pot, 84
Pope, Gustavus W., 32
Pope Pius X, 7
Postmodernism, 10, 93, 100, 143
definition of, 84–91
and Modernism, 10, 84–91
Pound, Ezra, xviii, 92
power, xv, xviii, xix, 8, 15, 80, 183
archaic, 43, 45–52, 68, 76, 88–9, 117–24,
128–39, 190
median, 45–52, 68, 76, 89, 117–24,
129–39, 190
mentality of, xv–xvii, xviii–xx, 8–9, 12,
28, 43, 49–50, 53, 55–6, 57–9, 61–63,
76–8, 85, 100, 110–25, 128–39, 174,
180–2, 184, 187
ethopathology of, 85–7, 91
will to, 8–9, 59, 80, 84–9, 104, 108–9,
114, 116, 119–21, 121–8, 130, 131–9,
142–3, 146, 151–2, 158–9, 171, 175–6,
180, 182–6
and dialectic of center and margin,
5, 7, 15, 25–26, 44, 50, 59, 62–3, 67,
76–8, 167, 173, 187
and exile, xv, 3, 53, 61–3, 75–8,
and liminality, xv, 3, 114–5
and Modernism, 128–9, 130–2
and nothingness, 8–9, 52, 85, 89, 138
and play, xv, 3, 67–78, 158–9
and Postmodernism, 128–9, 130–2
and rationality, 90, 128–40
and the void, 52, 85–9, 119–20, 128, 135,
179, 189
and will to empire, 111–7, 128
and will to order, 52, 142–3, 145, 146–8
Pushkin, Alexander Sergeyevich, 172
Pythagoras, xvi, 26, 27, 38, 52, 67, 76, 134,
189, 191
Remarque, Erich Maria, 84
Republic (Plato), xix, 35, 69–78
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 6
Rubinstein, Arthur, 84
Rushdie, Salman, 84
sacred canopy, 7–8, 44
Said, Edward W., 91–103, 110
Saint Augustine of Hippo, 38, 71, 174
Saint Simon, 36
Saint Victor, Hugo de, 99, 186
Schiller, Friedrich, 102
Schweitzer, Albert, 84
Sengle, Friedrich, 188
Seventh Letter (Plato), 67, 78–80
Shakespeare, William, 31–2, 148–51, 153, 157
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 5, 179
Sidney, Philip, 102
Sin-leqi-unnini, 45, 51
Sinuhe, Story of, xviii,
Socrates, 26, 67, 69, 71–3, 103, 145, 148
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 84, 176
Sophocles, xviii, 61–6, 88
Spariosu, Mihai I., 21, 23, 67, 85
Spenser, Edmund 102
sub specie aeternitatis, 141
Sutton-Smith, Brian, 23
Stalin, Joseph V., 37, 129–35
Swift, Jonathan, 3, 32, 117, 126
techne, 74
Teller, Edward, 84
Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 149–52
temporalizing of essence, 13–14, 70
terror management theory (TMT), 87
Tesla, Nikola. 84
 INDEX 209
theologia ludens, 75 Vaihinger, Hans, 191
Tolstoy, Leo, 133, 172 Vairasse, Denis D’Allais, 36
Trotzky, Leon, 37, 84 Verne, Jules, 32
Trungpa, Chogyam Rinpoche, 22–23 Virgil, 102
Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich, 172 void, 8–9, 49, 189
Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques, 36 and horror vacui, 119–20
Turner, Victor W., 23–26, 31, 67, 164 and power, 52, 85–9, 119–20, 128, 135,
179
Unamuno, Miguel de, 84 See also Nothingness, Modernism,
Utopia, 31, 67, 70–80, 118–25, 136–7, 139, Power
140, 149–52, 159–160, 161–183 Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet de, 32,
as Golden Age, 19, 33, 45, 52–3, 64, 70, 35–6, 37, 38, 153
139, 150–51 Vonnegut, Kurt, 106
as euchronia, 33, 57
as eutopia, 33, 57–60, 65, 183–86 Wallace, Anthony, 25, 37,
as theotopia 33, 71–6, 161, 162–79, 174–175 Walwyn, William, 36
and intentional communities, 37, 183, 196 Waugh, Evelyn, 106
and atopia, xix, 30, 33, 99–100, 161, 169, Wells, H.G., 32, 105
174–9, 186 Wheatley, Frieze, 183
and dystopia, 72, 104–6, 119–20, Winthrop, John, 36
128–41, 142–60, 170, 181 Wilde, Oscar, 102, 183, 186
and exile, xv, xvi, xvii, 3, 31–4, 48–9, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 28, 84
52–3, 57–60, 73, 139–41, 149–55 Woolf, Virginia, xviii
play, 71–6 White, Hayden, 193
and power, 109–10, 118, 128–41,
142–160, 181 Yeats, W.B., xviii
See also Atopia, Dystopia, Exile,
Exilic-Utopian Imagination, Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 84, 105
Liminality, Modernity, Play, Power Zinzendorf, Ludwig von, 37