578
PARTISAN REVIEW
sense as much as in the purest transcendental form. So I, still agonized
and bewildered, stumbled along the Berlin Wall terrified of the in–
evitability of exile. Was it because of the fear of freedom? For the mature
adult, exile tardily reformulates the premise of initiation and becoming,
reopens the gate of life's extreme risks and potential, calls into question
all one's past experience. Moreover, for those prematurely traumatized,
for those never truly free from the psychosis of the provisory, the threat
of being thrown once again into the chaos of the unknown, exile
suddenly brings out all the old, hidden fears.
One does not so much lose a precarious and dubious stability as dis–
cover oneself to be even deeper in the abyss of never-ending instability,
for which apprenticeship in the school of life proves, as ever, insufficient.
The writer, always a "suspect," as Thomas Mann said, an exile par excel–
lence, conquers his homeland, his placenta, through language. To be ex–
iled also from this last refuge represents a multiple dispossession, the most
brutal and irredeemable decentering of his being, a tragic end . As Primo
Levi said about the experience of the concentration camps, " to accept
the eclipse of the word signaled the approach of definitive indifference."
That is why, in the spring of
1988,
at my first meeting with an American
writer who later was to become a close friend, I pompously declared:
"For me, another Holocaust has just begun."
In
me, there was a burning
that reached all the way to the center of my being, my language, the
fathomless depths of creativity.
Five years have passed since I felt that burning, and I must confess
that I now feel not only the curse, but also the privilege, of being an
exile. I have finally accepted this honor, doing so in the name of all that
is suffering and epiphany, in the name of loneliness and challenge, of all
the doubts and never-ending apprenticeship it implies, for its emptiness
and richness, for the unfettering of myself and the clash within myself.
And also, and first of all, for the wounds of liberty. If I have the strength
to repeat Dante, "L'esilio, che m'e dato, onor mi tengo," "I hold in
honor the exile I was given," then I am probably in sympathy with our
centrifugal century.
Camus's stranger Meursault is estranged not only from his country,
religion, and family, but also from the world and himself. He is not part
of an ethnic or political persecuted minority; his loneliness is a way of
bringing the absurdity of the human condition to the level of conscious–
ness. The shot that definitively consecrates the expulsion of the
stranger called man is nothing but the indifferent explosion of an
impersonal sun gone crazy in the absolute banality of an ordinary
sumn1er afternoon.
The accursed
K.,
Kafka's double, the always-guilty innocent, forever
ready to justify the absurdity of an invisible and imp lacable justice, is the
