Description
What is the relationship between realism and exile? Many twentieth century realists faced exile as a core biographical experience. And yet, beyond a generalized pessimism, exile’s effect on realism is not well understood. I argue that, for transatlantic realists, the idea of exile was both a key rhetorical device and an aspect, usually undiagnosed, of their relationship to ideology. First, the experience of exile allowed European realists in America to present themselves as sources of foreign wisdom, before elite American audiences. Here, exile was a source of status. Second, however, exile was a recurring tacit feature of how they interfaced with political ideologies. Lacking a vision of the good life of its own, realism has had an ambivalent relationship with mass ideological projects. Realists and their antecedents have successively attached themselves to European imperialisms, fascisms, American liberal anticommunism, leftist anti- interventionisms, and others besides. They have done so to access to political power and speak their truths to it. However, realists’ discomfort with utopianisms later drives them to reject these ideologies. Thus, none has become a durable ideological home. This recurring cycle of ideological exile has inscribed the exile experience in realism’s political ethos. In this sense, I argue, the realist experience of exile is not just an aspect of realist biographies, but a persistently constitutive feature of the intellectual project of realism itself.
