Exile Theory

When I was 16, I took part in a screenwriting crash course that was held at my future college, given by writer Stephen Walsh. Towards the end of the 3-day course, Stephen told us a story about how the last time he taught this course he was assaulted by a student.

The student had sat through the entire length of the course, 3 full days, and, with only minutes left, as Stephen was giving a concluding summary of what it takes to be a screenwriter, finally erupted. This student went on a deranged tirade, convinced, absolutely convinced, there was a secret to get a script produced; that there was a secret code or phrase that you had to include in your script to show you were part of “The Club,” demanding that Stephen tell them this secret. Stephen, obviously surprised and unnerved, had to break the bad news; there was no secret. Sometimes success in writing comes down to taste, timing, demand, and, often, luck.

Stephen was attacked by the disgruntled student using a 2-litre bottle of Fanta Orange they had been drinking in the class.

I, like Stephen, don’t believe there are secrets. Had the student listened, however, really listened, and not obsessed over a Hollywood conspiracy, they would have realised that Stephen was showing not the secrets but the patterns of good stories. I believe everyone has a piece of the puzzle when it comes to life. Everyone is right about at least one thing, and it’s up to us to try to notice. Again, it’s the pattern that matters; the obvious, overlooked stuff. Who needs secrets when no one notices the obvious?

When you look to the lives and work of great thinkers, certain patterns appear. Often, they’re well-read, or they have a wide range of interests, or they’re plagued by personal demons. Interestingly, when you start to notice these patterns, you find one is not only surprisingly common but seems to also have a correlation with the cultural impact and global reach of the writer. The trait in question is exile.

Whether enforced or self-imposed, there is an interesting and frequent history of writers who, for a myriad of reasons, had to leave their homes, live in near isolation for long periods, and used their exile as an opportunity to reflect, and finally express themselves, uncompromised. Examples include;

Machiavelli: A civil servant, diplomat, and political scientist in 16th-century Florence, then a republic city-state. Despite his aptitude for diplomatic work and his acute sense of bipartisan deal-making, Niccolo Machiavelli was stripped of his title, tortured, and exiled to a farm by the Pope, Spanish forces, and the rich Medici family who sought to crush the republic breaking away from papal control. Free from pressure to keep the peace, and embittered by his humiliation, Machiavelli wrote honestly, bluntly, and controversially in “The Prince,” a guidebook for how politics truly work, stripping back the veneer of morality and performative pleasantries of politicians and wealthy donors. This was so radical that “Machiavellian” is synonymous with political underhandedness. Cruelly ironic considering he was the one wronged and calling out examples of political ruthlessness he witnessed in his career.

Dante: A fellow Florentine of Machiavelli’s, though approximately two hundred years his senior, Dante Alighieri was another Republican intellectual who suffered the Pope’s ire and was banished from Florence by threat of death. Enraged by the overreach of the Church, even as a devout Catholic, Dante penned “The Divine Comedy”, a depiction of the afterlife so detailed that it has ironically been informally accepted by many Catholics, Christians, and others as the definitive representation of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. In true bitter fashion, Dante made sure to show all the people who’ve ever wronged him, including the Pope, suffering in Hell.

Victor Hugo: Political tensions seem to be a given at this point, so it’s unsurprising when the staunchly libertarian Victor Hugo objected vocally and aggressively to Louis Napoleon’s successful coup d’état in France, dissolving the French Assembly and declaring himself emperor. Jobless, having been a representative in the Assembly, and to protect his family from royal retribution, Hugo ping-ponged around Europe before landing, literally, on Guernsey, an island in the English Channel that was the perfect middle-ground; close to France but technically a British territory, protecting him from any French forces storming the island to extradite him. Having spent his life in politics defending the poor, and having been displaced by political turmoil, Hugo set to work on Les Misérables (informally, Les Mis), a scathing indictment of societal rot, apathy, and the inevitable uprising that it will summon. Les Mis is a marvel of literature and is the source material for possibly the world’s most famous musical.

James Joyce: France also seems to be another throughline, as we’ll see with the next couple of writers. Joyce famously spent time away from his native Ireland, which he found intellectually restrictive, overly conservative, and uninterested at the time with modernist literature, preferring to encourage the Celtic Revival popularised by the likes of W. B. Yeats. In France, and later Switzerland, Joyce found cultural peers, including other ex-pat writers like American Ernest Hemingway. Finally free from criticism and encouraged by like-minded contemporaries, Joyce wrote Ulysses which, besides being considered a masterpiece of modernist literature, was written in such a way that Dublin’s streets are accurately recalled by a man who hadn’t walked them in decades. Every year on Bloomsday, June 16th, fans read the book and follow the walk the character of Leopold Bloom takes in the book.

James Baldwin: A bisexual Black civil rights advocate has no place in America in the 1940s and 1950s, or so James Baldwin believed. He described his self-imposed exile as an act of self-preservation. While in France, Baldwin was not only free to explore his homosexual attractions without judgement, but he got a sense of what it meant to be treated as an equal. With the distance, the cultural comparison, and the freedom from needing to censor himself, he wrote “Go Tell It on the Mountain,” which explored race and religion, and later “Giovanni’s Room,” which explored sexual and intimate fluidity between men, all topics that would have been taboo in America, even among his Black peers. Baldwin returned to America as a respected genius and vocal activist, debating against staunch conservatives like William F. Buckley (and winning).

Henry David Thoreau: It is easy to forget that a country like America wasn’t always the semi-theocracy Baldwin fled from. American Transcendentalism is an underwhelming subject yet had many practitioners, notably Henry David Thoreau. Wishing to find inner peace away from the dogmatic teachings of American churches, the dehumanising effects of cities, and the shallowness of common communities, Thoreau went into the woods and constructed and maintained a cottage, living alone, mostly eating what he could hunt or forage (though he did receive rations from visitors). Despite being considered a hermit and mocked by locals, his memoir “Walden”, named after the lake he settled nearby, reads like a unique mix of anarchist philosophy, wilderness survival guide, and minimalist meditations. A precursor to “Into the Wild,” Walden is the inspiration for the pop-culture image Americans have of a romantised, simplified, and abundant homesteader lifestyle, now more popular than ever with the rise of “cottagecore”, “trad life”, and prepper communities. For better or worse, Thoreau shaped what it means to be an outdoorsman.

Mary Shelley: Three very strange things happened to Mary Shelley in quick succession in 1816. Famed poet and fuckboi Lord Byron fled England for Switzerland to avoid paying his debts. Percy and Mary Shelley, the relatively newly married literary couple, were invited to spend the summer with Byron, his former lover (and Mary’s stepsister), and Byron’s doctor/drug dealer. They said yes. Then, approximately 12,000 kilometres away in Indonesia, Mount Tambora had its largest volcanic eruption in 1,300 years, causing a volcanic winter which was felt worse in Europe the following summer. With the unseasonably bad weather trapping the Shelleys inside a Swiss chateau with a drug-addled horny poet, his pusher, and his side piece, a challenge was set by Byron for their entertainment; try to come up with scary stories to frighten each other with. The third and final strange occurrence happened one night during their prolonged holiday; Mary awoke from a nightmare about a reanimated corpse staring down at her as she slept in bed. Though disturbing, this vision had significance for Mary. A little over a year earlier, Mary had given birth to a premature girl who died weeks later; a tragedy she would have been expected by uptight British high society to suppress and maintain her composure. A struggle only heightened by her placid acceptance that her husband had taken a mistress. Trapped miles from home, with her adulterous husband, his irresponsible friend, his friend’s enabler, and his friend’s part-time lover for company, it’s no surprise Mary wrote Frankenstein, a story about a self-absorbed genius, the dangers of hubris, and the unintended consequences of a man’s selfish and irresponsible acts. In a single book she invented modern Gothic, Horror, AND Science Fiction.

I really didn’t expect this list to be as long as it already is, and I could keep going. Samuel Beckett left Ireland to follow in Joyce’s footsteps (literally, he was briefly Joyce’s assistant) and created French absurdist theatre. Dostoevsky was sent to labour camps in Siberia, which later became the inspiration for “Crime & Punishment”. Hemingway famously travelled the world fighting fascists and becoming a socialist-minded intellectual icon in Cuba. Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, wrote the Tao Te Ching in a single sitting just as he was leaving China forever, disappearing from the annals of history. So many writers fled the Nazis and created great works in exile that the Germans have a whole genre for them; “Exilliteratur” (Exile Literature). While I don’t think you HAVE TO sequester yourself to write, I think there are three reasons that exile has proven to be ironically beneficial for so many.

Trauma: Once the initial shock wears off, and you can digest what has happened, exile flips your worldview upside-down. You realise how much of life is not in your control, how easily someone can determine the course of your life. They can take your home, your job, your stability. From this sudden shake-up comes something invaluable; perspective. Whether it’s cynical, manic, bitter, or absurd, experiencing cruel fate gives you both a unique perspective to write from and the motivation that tells you to write exactly what you want and how. If your life can be ruined at any second, you might as well not hold back.

Distance: Obviously writing is mentally and temporally taxing, both to create and receive. While any creative art form takes time, writing is unique in that it can take nearly just as long to absorb. A song can take days to create, but only minutes to listen to. A painting can take months to finish but can be glanced at and understood in an instant. Writing and reading almost have a 1:1 ratio of time required; time that exile affords. With the physical distance from your home, your family, and those who forced you into exile, you now have nothing but time to think, to reflect, to plan. Distance gives you clarity, away from the former modes of thinking that kept you trapped. Sometimes you can only see the details by standing as far back as possible.

Inspiration: In case you haven’t noticed yet, it’s interesting how despite the strange set of circumstances that led to each writer’s exile, they never wrote about exiled writers. Hugo wrote of prisoners-turned-mayors and revolutionaries. Baldwin wrote of ministers and lovers. Shelley wrote of scientists and corpses. Dante wrote of angels and demons. It would have been understandable, almost expected, if they wrote more autobiographically, both to capitalise on their emotions and as a record of the injustice they suffered. But instead, they found inspiration as far away from their circumstances. Exorcising misfortune indirectly allows writers to make sense of their lives, reshaping them not as victims of others but as part of a larger, more structured narrative. We’ve seen something similar with how many writers survived war but never wrote about them. Tolkien, Vonnegut, and Dahl served in war, yet they wrote of hobbits, aliens, and Oompa-Loompas. Exile is such a rare and drastic life-changing event that it can’t help but inspire in new and original ways.

I heard a story about a Buddhist monk who said the dumbest thing someone can do is sell all their worldly possessions, travel halfway across the world, and become a Buddhist monk. Only when you do all that, put all that effort and sacrifice into it, will you realise it didn’t change anything; you’re still unhappy.

You shouldn’t wish to suffer like these writers. They didn’t wish for it. They simply found themselves in terrible situations and, with nothing else left, they did the only thing they could. They wrote.

I don’t think exile is the secret to great writing. I don’t think there are any secrets. I think believing in secrets leads you to savagely beating people with a 2-litre bottle of Fanta Orange. What I do think is that it’s inspiring just how often people can go through sudden whirlwinds of change, have their fortunes turned completely upside-down, and see it not as an opportunity to give up, but as a chance to stop giving a damn, throw themselves into their work, and make the best of an unimaginably terrible situation.

#HI