I once skimmed through a book by Hana Pichova titled The Art of Memory in Exile. The book is specifically about Vladimir Nabakov and Milan Kundera. It begins with analysis of a novels by each author written while in exile (Nabokov’s Mary and Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting), and the second half looks at the pivotal novel in each writer’s career (Nabokov’s The Gift and Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being). From the idea of exile, Pichova delves into ideas of personal and cultural memory and how these impact the works of these authors. I’m sure there’s much more to the book, and hopefully one day I will read it and tell you, but this is just from my vague memory of a brief perusal in the downtown library several years ago.
What brought the book to my mind today was something John Fowles says in his foreword to the 1976 revised version of The Magus: “I already knew I was a permanent exile from many aspects of English society, but a novelist has to enter deeper exiles still.”
I wonder what exiles a novelist must enter. The argument in the movie Orange County (among other more reputable sources) is that the best writers have conflicted relationships with their pasts/their homes. (The examples in that movie were James Joyce and William Faulkner–one who stayed, one who left.) But I imagine Fowles means something more than the literal idea of exile from home, or even more than a mental exile/feeling of separateness from the land you still live in. I imagine any form of creation is a journey and as such, you end up far from where you started and can never (truly) go home again. But I don’t know that this is what he means either. My biggest question, however, is not what he means by exile, but when. Must an artist feel exile in order to create? Or does the creation process cause a feeling of exile? A chicken/egg proposition to be sure, but I’m curious what was in Fowles’ mind in particular when he said this.