"Exile" refers to being outside, to a separation or distance from a place to which one feels a sense of belonging: city, country, territory, community. It comes from the Latin * exilium* and is usually associated with banishment and, therefore, can be linked to ostracism (from the Greek *ostrakismós *), with the condemnation that banishment for political reasons related to dishonor or unvirtuous behavior entails. The antecedent of *exilium* is *exsilire* ("to jump out"), which comes from the Greek *phügē* , meaning "flight," "escape" (also from a battle), and finally "exile." The term is almost identical in other related languages; see * exile * (English), *exilé* (French), *esilio* (Italian), or *Exil* (German).

We can then think of exile as circumstantial—ostracism usually had a time limit and was motivated by some specific behavior—and negative, since it prevents a person or group of people from being in the place to which they belong. This feeling of belonging, beyond its legal recognition, is crucial for our political culture. The very term "politics" is related to life in the city, to integration into a community called a polis, which is based not only—or not so much—on territory, but also on linguistic, cultural, moral, and ethical aspects. The well-known passage from Aristotle's Politics , in which he establishes that the nature of human beings is precisely to belong to a city, understood as a political community, is eloquent enough:

From all this it is evident that the city is one of the natural things, and that man is by nature a social animal [ politikón zôion ], and that the unsocial by nature and not by chance is either an inferior being or a superior being to man.

Like the one whom Homer reviles: without tribe, without law, without home, because he who is such by nature is also a lover of war, like an isolated piece in the game of checkers.

The reason why man is a social being, more than any bee and any gregarious animal, is obvious: nature, as we say, does nothing in vain, and man is the only animal that has speech.

For the voice is a sign of pain and pleasure, and that is why other animals also possess it, because their nature extends to experiencing pain and pleasure and indicating it to one another. But speech is for expressing what is beneficial and harmful, as well as what is just and unjust. And this is what is unique to humankind compared to other animals: to possess, alone, the sense of good and evil, of justice and injustice, and of other values; and the communal sharing of these things constitutes the home and the city.

By nature, then, the city is prior to the house and to each one of us, because the whole is necessarily prior to the part. (Aristotle, Polity, 1253a 3-13)

If we accept Aristotle's view, few things seem more serious than being excluded from participation in one's political community. Exile or banishment, however, can occur voluntarily for economic or military reasons, because the land or homeland one leaves has been occupied or offers no guarantees of survival: the exile or migrant departs, but a part of them continues to feel connected to their place of origin, which manifests itself as melancholy, nostalgia, or saudade.

Exile, or the condition of being exiled, can also refer to an entire community, perhaps organized around some other kind of political bond, but fundamentally held together by the possibility of returning to their homeland. Perhaps one of the clearest examples in our culture is that of the Jewish community, whose situation, curiously, is often described with a term of Greek origin, "diaspora." The turbulent political and economic reality of the globalized world has migration as one of its most prominent characteristics, so today the term could be applied to the millions of people who are forced to leave their place of birth or residence and who constitute a veritable world on the move. Countries like Australia or the United States could be said to have their origins in populations exiled from other parts of the world. Indeed, one of the canonical novels of contemporary American literature – The Grapes of Wrath (1939), by John Steinbeck – revolves around the journey to California of a farming family from Oklahoma who are forced to leave their land due to the ecological crisis of the 1930s known as the Dust Bowl , when successive dust storms, drought, overexploitation of the land and the progressive mechanization of agricultural practices pushed thousands of families into poverty .

At dusk, something strange happened: the twenty families became one, the children became everyone's children. The loss of their homes transformed into a single loss, and the golden dream of the West became a single dream. It could be that a child's illness filled the hearts of twenty families, of a hundred people, with despair; that a birth in a tent kept a hundred people stunned and silent throughout the night, only to be filled in the morning with the joy of the new birth. A family that the night before had felt lost and terrified would rummage through their belongings to find a gift for the newborn. As evening fell , seated around the campfires, the twenty became one. They integrated into the units of the camps, of the sunsets, and of the nights. A guitar appeared wrapped in a blanket… and the songs, which belonged to everyone, resonated through the nights. The men sang the lyrics, and the women hummed the melodies.

Every night a whole world was created, with all its elements: friendships were made and enmities sworn; a whole world with braggarts and cowards, with quiet men, humble men, kind men. Every night the relationships that make up a world were established; and every morning the world was dismantled like a circus. (Steinbeck, 2002, 280-281)

If we understand exile as a distance, it can also occur within one's supposed homeland, but not, as in the case we just cited, imposed more or less by economic reasons or those related to survival. Rather, there can be forms of exile that resemble a voluntary disconnection, a distancing that is sometimes more mental and experiential than physical. Certain philosophical movements, such as the Cynics or the Epicureans, can be interpreted as forms of voluntary exile by certain communities that are critical of their social group and choose to distance themselves from it. This finds its more contemporary counterpart in various currents—often significantly labeled "countercultural"—that organize themselves around the rejection of prevailing social conventions, develop their own codes, and construct their identity based on this exercise of self-exclusion, as can be seen in the Beatniks or the hippie movement and, on another level, in sects or urban tribes. Movements as diverse as the more or less organized bohemian scene, artistic avant-gardes, street gangs, certain mystical currents, or specific behaviors related to drug use can also be analyzed from the perspective of exile.

From the Romantic period onward, the figure of the individual who doesn't quite fit into society is celebrated and often becomes a prerequisite for being considered an artist. The Romantic hero, the dandy, the flâneur , the solitary traveler, the adventurer, the cursed poet, the intellectual, or the philosopher end up embodying a form of radical alienation, behaving as permanent exiles from the society of their time: the outsider , the individual who dissents or resists being assimilated by the social consensus, ultimately becomes the paradigm of a creative or interesting person. There is, however, a whole tradition of specific situations of expatriation linked to artistic production, such as the fertile Paris of the 1920s, teeming with Anglo-American exiles, so vividly portrayed by Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast (and from which Woody Allen draws inspiration for his film Midnight in Paris ), or the case of writers like Joseph Conrad, Gombrowicz, Samuel Beckett, and Nabokov, who built their careers far from their homeland and in a language that was not their own. In fact, the American cultural hegemony that emerged after World War II cannot be explained without the exodus of European intellectuals who found refuge and a home in that country, something that, in the field of visual arts, is aptly captured in Sergé Guilbaut's How New York Stole the Idea of ​​Modern Art . There would thus be a kind of pendulum swing between the United States and Europe that demonstrates the existing correspondence between exile and artistic creation.

The United States places strange demands on its fiction writers. Their art isn't enough; we expect them to provide role models, so intensely that we sometimes judge them more by their lives than by their work. We like it when they declare themselves part of a movement or a generation, because it simplifies how we plan to use them. If they present us with a manifesto, we take it as a legally binding contract.

Thus it happens that, at least since Henry James, Europe has been considered by Americans as a great source of inspiration and, whether actually carried out or not, expatriation sometimes becomes a duty. (Gifford, B. and Lee, L., 2006, 13)

We do not believe that we are dealing here with a phenomenon that is circumscribed locally and temporally, but rather that a good part of Western literature can be organized around exile as a theme, something that allows us to group together the Odyssey , the Aeneid , medieval poems such as The Wanderer , the Divine Comedy , 18th-century works such as The Sorrows of Young Werther , the rich tradition of travel literature and more contemporary variants such as Kerouac's On the Road , Krakauer's Into the Wild , road movies , or a not insignificant part of science fiction. One can also consider the biographical dimension of many writers who opted for some form of voluntary exile—as in the case of Thoreau or Tolstoy—but exile can also be seen as a compositional framework, almost as a condition of intelligibility underlying existentialist proposals or the so-called "theater of the absurd," as well as the work of authors like Hemingway, Pessoa , Kafka, Rilke, or Nietzsche. Isn't the self-proclaimed untimely nature of the latter's work a declaration of exile, an exercise in dissent or resignation from his country, his culture, his contemporaries, and his present? Isn't this sought-after and chosen distance almost a prerogative of the artist and of those who dedicate themselves to reflection?

Only those who possess more will than intelligence, or more impulsiveness than reason, participate in the real life of the world. “Disjecta membra,” said Carlyle, “is what remains of any poet, or of any man” (Pessoa, 2009, 41)

At this point, we might ask ourselves if exile isn't the inherent and definitive condition of humankind. This is certainly something that arises at the very origin of our culture, in compositions like the Epic of Gilgamesh or, even more clearly, in the expulsion from Paradise narrated in Genesis . Traditionally, humankind has viewed itself as an exception, as an element that doesn't quite fit into the same taxonomy as the rest of nature. Although this exceptionality has been questioned for some time now, seemingly disparate disciplines such as religion, psychoanalysis, and philosophy have built their approaches on this premise. Perhaps one of the most forceful proposals in this regard is that of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose ontological framework can be interpreted from the perspective of exile. Thus, for the author of Being and Time, the crucial aspect of human existence ( Dasein ) is precisely its condition of exile from Being ( Sein ), its character as a project thrown ( geworfener Entwurf ) into the world, something reflected in its mode of being, radically different from all other entities, since it is the only one that truly exists. Heidegger emphasizes this difference by manipulating the very spelling of the verb "to exist," speaking of human beings as "ex-sisting" and relating this to ecstasy, to being outside oneself. We can also connect with exile the positive assessment he makes of Marx's use of the term Entfremdung (usually translated as "alienation," but, for our purposes, perhaps "estrangement" is more relevant).

Seen in this light, exile would point not only to a passing circumstance motivated by a specific situation, but to a stable disposition, to an ambivalent anthropological constant that can become melancholy, estrangement and renunciation of what is most characteristic of human beings - which would be life in community - but from which some of our greatest achievements in the cultural, artistic and reflective sphere also come.

Bibliography

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Becker, H. 2018. Outsiders: Towards a Sociology of Deviance , Tres Cantos: Siglo XXI de España

Corominas, J. 1987. Breve diccionario etimológico de la lengua castellana , Madrid: Gredos

Gifford, B. and Lee, L. 2006. The Book of Jack: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac. Barcelona: Planeta

Guillén, C. 2007 (1998). Multiple Dwellings: An Essay in Comparative Literature , Barcelona: Tusquets

Heidegger, M. 2012. Being and Time , Madrid: Trotta

Heidegger, M. 2013. Letter on Humanism , Madrid: Alianza

Liddell, H.G. and Scott, R. 1983 (1843). A Greek-English Lexicon , Oxford: Oxford University Press

Royal Spanish Academy: Dictionary of the Spanish Language , 23rd ed., [online version 23.3]. https://dle.rae.es [13/10/2020].

Steinbeck, J. 2002. The Grapes of Wrath , Madrid: Cátedra

Index of illustrations:

Fig. 1: Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother , 1936. Image available from the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. Public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lange-MigrantMother02.jpg

Fig. 2: Dust jacket of the first edition of The Grapes of Wrath , 1939, by John Steinbeck. Design by Elmer Hader. Public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Grapes_of_Wrath_(1939_1st_ed_cover).jpg