What Is the Difference Between Exile and Exiles?

Close to forty years ago, Derek Walcott wrote something scathing about V.S. Naipaul. The two writers—both from the Caribbean, both Nobel laureates—were still alive then. Walcott wrote the following about Naipaul’s “retreat” in the bucolic peacefulness of Wilshire, “far from the Britain of Paki-bashing, or of the race riots of Brixton”:

If the narrator’s only companion was work, the hermitage is made admirable, but only in the way legends are—by a concentrated selfishness, by that self-canonization of the dedicated writer in a hostile world, the misunderstood, the displaced, the exiled, all of whom are becoming as corny as Dickensian orphans, because either every writer is an exile (not only this narrator-Naipaul) or no writer is. (137)

Walcott was not writing about people in general, but about writers of fiction specifically, and about a certain sense of self-aggrandizement that sometimes afflicts us. I write “us” because, after many years of writing academic books and articles, I’ve just written my first novel* in which it happens that “exile” is front and center.

“Exile” carries in its wake a sense of smaller numbers, even a heroically political quality, an aura of unthreatening sparsity.

A quarter century after Walcott’s derisive verdict, the term “exile” could indeed seem dated. It could even appear obsolete, in any case only applicable to very specific and restricted numbers. Aren’t there thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people who have left or are leaving their homeland, that patch of earth delimited by a frontier where they were born and where they had lived a good number of their years? This, I think, is part of the point Walcott was making all those years ago: Mass migratory movements, resulting from any number of causes—economic imperatives, political strife, war and genocide, or any number of combinations thereof, and, more recently, climate change and the all-englobing term, globalization—have muddied the waters, as it were.

“Exile” carries in its wake a sense of smaller numbers, even a heroically political quality, an aura of unthreatening sparsity.

There is a quaint quality in the idea of being “kept away from [one’s] village” (to quote the Cambridge Dictionary definition of the word) echoing for me Socrates being given the choice of swallowing the hemlock or being exiled from Athens, which in fact only meant living beyond the limits of Ithaca but still within the territory of the Hellenes; admittedly a peculiarly restricted kind of “exile.” Still, even when they are not forced to be very far away from the homeland, philosophers, poets and presidents, kings and kingpins, may make spectacular exits and become prominent exiles, but, in their reduced numbers, they can hardly budge the needle of what I would like to call “population stability.”

A short scene from Martin Scorsese’s film, Casino (1995), in which a “mafioso” and a “cowboy” are meeting in the former’s office overlooking the gambling tables of the casino in question will help me illustrate the implications and repercussions of the term “population stability.”

Casino is based on actual events, and the scene that interests me here involves Sam Rothstein, a Jewish-American and a gambling expert appointed by Chicago mobsters (read “Italian Americans”) to manage the Tangiers Casino in Las Vegas. Rothstein has just fired Don Ward, an ineffectual hire the outfit likely had to make to placate the local authorities. Rothstein is getting ready for a visitor; his brilliantined hair is combed back. He is wearing a powder-blue shirt and tie, powder-blue undershorts, and powder-blue shoes over white silk socks that reach up to his knees. He slips on an immaculately creased grey sharkskin suit and sits behind his desk, now ready to receive.

Enter a lean, amply mustachioed older man, dressed in jeans and red shirt, snakeskin cowboy boots, silver and turquoise belt buckle, and bolo tie, cowboy hat adorned with what looks like a native American bird head and feather, who has come to plead his brother-in-law’s case. The old cowboy, an avatar of the Marlboro man, with intimations of the frontier, the pioneers, the West, the “real America,” is facing this strange new breed come to open casinos in the desert. At first, he reminds the casino manager that his brother-in-law is “a well-liked man in this town, he’s got lots of friends in this town, a nice family and their money goes back many, many years,” and invites him to reconsider, while admitting that his brother-in-law “is as useless as tits on a boar…”

You ain’t home and, it follows, I am.

When it becomes clear that Rothstein will not reconsider, the hard and fast decree is delivered: “Mister Rothstein, your people will never understand how things work out here, you’re all just our guests, but you act like you’re at home. Lemme tell you somethin’ partner—you ain’t home, but that’s where we’re gonna send you if it harelips the governor.*”

You ain’t home and, it follows, I am. Even Chicago and New York seem to belong to alien territory in this pronouncement. A longstanding and very much operational divide in American politics and culture: those who emblematize “the real America” and those who are just not home. In this scene between older and newer arrivals, the active agent is Time: the old cowboy and his people—and their money—go back “many, many years,” so many years that their own arrival and presence on the land has become the stable, burnished, and authentic origin, not to be disturbed or sullied by those who have (more recently) come from the outside.

The movement of populations has always been there, constant, from one group’s quest for fire, and before, to today’s “illegals,” but all it takes—making abstraction here of the forces, both violent, and not, at work—all it takes is for a certain amount of time to pass before a given population living in a given space for its claims to origin to be rationalized, and for the claims and privileges of “blood and soil” to emerge.

The fluidity of capital, the fluidity of populations: We are not in Kansas, or Las Vegas anymore. The numbers have changed, and the speed has increased.

Conversely, all it takes is a look backwards for the work of sedimentation and accretion to become apparent; sometimes, a quick look backwards is all it takes for the relative, even if momentarily powerful, status of any group claiming the rights of “blood and soil” to be laid bare. In the scene from Casino, that look backwards may be found, among other places, in the Native American—maybe Paiute?—bird and feather on the old cowboy’s hat, perhaps once a powerful instrument or symbol of origin and stability, now a mere ornament, a trinket, the trace of an older past.

Sam Rothstein ultimately falls out of favor with his Chicago-based employers, even if he is allowed to live. However, he and his former employers all become victims of passing Time: The Mafia moves out of the casino business, many of the old casinos are destroyed and new ones are built (with  money from junk bonds and managed with the most cutting-edge corporate methods). The fluidity of capital, the fluidity of populations: We are not in Kansas, or Las Vegas anymore. The numbers have changed, and the speed has increased.

Exiles belong to a world of smaller numbers; exiles don’t disturb “population stability,” or the fluidity of capital, and all that those entails. At most, exiles are exotic, in the sense that they are countenanced as rare and contained manifestations here at home of the world out there. Migrants, boat people, refugees, displaced people, illegals, undocumented immigrants, illegal aliens, aliens tout court: those are the ones whose sheer numbers make them targets of those who bemoan what they see as the disappearance of a more stable and “greater” world.

Exiles, then, as Walcott proposed, may be a term that belongs to the past, displaced and rendered inoperative by the sheer multiplication and visibility of “big numbers.” When considered individually, they may not be “as corny as Dickensian orphans,” as Walcott proposed, but the term does seem to belong to another world, another time.

Yet, I’ve written a novel in which exile and exiles occupy a central place. Is my novel, The Delicate Beast, even the novel genre itself, something with the poignant charm of things about to disappear, already an ornament, a trinket, a thing of the past? I obviously don’t think so.

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The Delicate Beast by Roger Celestin is available from Bellevue Literary Press.