The Face of Exile: Autobiographical Journeys. By Judith M. Melton. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1998. xx, 225pp.

Reviewed by Cynthia Merrill

Since its earliest appearance in the spiritual confessions of Augustine
and others, Western autobiography has been preeminently a genre of exileboth a manifestation of and resistance to loss and estrangement. If Augustine wrote of mortality itself as banishment from the stillness, plenitude, and perfection of unearthly existence, Romantic autobiographers transformed his sense of spiritual exile into a longing for a prelapsarian organic wholeness from which they had been ousted by the tyranny of Enlightenment reason. In the twentieth century, of course, political upheaval, social disruption, war, and genocide drove people into flight on an unprecedented scale; at the same time, the notion of exile was widely appropriated to express a distinctively modern sense of alienation and metaphysical homelessness. In fact, the very ubiquity and promiscuity of the exilic trope in twentieth-century critical discourses has often tended to elide the intense, historically specific experiences of those literally driven from their native lands. It is one of the virtues of Judith M. Melton's The Face of Exile: Autobiographical Journeys that it takes as its starting point--and compels us to recognize--the existential, political, and geographic, as well as psychological and linguistic, dimensions of exile as it is remembered and transfigured in autobiographical texts.

Melton's extensively researched and timely study introduces its readers to autobiographical writing by those who experienced the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s and suffered the ensuing persecution, flight, banishment, and mass migrations of the period. Tracing the contours of this rich body of literature, Melton conceives of autobiography broadly, introducing dozens of texts, as various as memoirs of internment, escape, immigration, and resettlement; portraits of untroubled childhood and the pleasures of the European intelligentsia; collected oral testimonies; Witold Gombrowicz's polemics from Kultura; Thomas Mann's novel Doctor Faustus; Mircea Eliade's two-volume Autobiography and even more voluminous diary; Christa Wolf's postmodern confession of her girlhood under the sway of the Führer and the fatherland, Patterns of Childhood; and Charlotte Salomon's haunting watercolors, produced to fend off madness and despair as the Nazis closed in. Melton's overview of this field is imbued with both a sympathetic responsiveness and a faith in the restorative power of narration. "Writing an autobiography, reestablishing connection with a lost

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world," she declares in the book's Introduction, "salvages the feeling of loss and discontinuity for the exile. Whether this writing takes the form of a work clearly delineated as a personal memoir or falls into the category of imaginative literature, the writing process itself transforms and helps heal feelings of disruption" (xix). Within this general autobiographical impulse among exiles, Melton distinguishes between two more specific motivations. Some exiles, she notes, feel compelled to serve as a "witness to history," to testify publicly to experiences that might otherwise remain unknown and unknowable. Other autobiographers, particularly those who compose long after the chaos of flight, write in response to dislocation and loss, in a spirit of recuperation; reconnection; intellectual transcendence; or, indeed, refusal of the psychic rupture occasioned by a violent uprooting. Drawing on these dual motivations to structure her study, Melton thus endeavors to examine both the way, as reportage, autobiography documents the dilemma, events, and terrors of exile and the way, as "self-story," it serves as a symptomatic or transfigurative symbolization of the experience and its aftermath.

The first section of The Face of Exile surveys what Melton refers to as "focused memoirs," texts that recount dramas of persecution and flight during the rise of the Third Reich. Following an introductory chapter, three chapters focus in turn on narratives of escape to and internment in France; Jewish flight and survival tactics; and the experiences of immigration, resettlement, and adaptation to exile after the war's end. Taken together, Melton remarks, these autobiographies constitute "a mosaic of a time when the world seemed to be shifting on its axis" (7). Her discussion draws attention to several less known aspects of the period, including escapes by children. The scope of this section, as well as its attention to the historical context and particularities of the exile experience, will make it especially useful to readers who primarily seek in first-person accounts information about this cataclysmic episode in European history. However, despite Melton's delineation of the problems of such an approach to autobiography, there is little attention to such complexities in her discussion of individual texts. Melton acknowledges that memoirs are shaped not only by historical events, but by narrative paradigms, literary plotting, ideological investments, the caprices of memory and forgetfulness, and the psychic needs of their writers; she is interested, she explains, not only in "examining the forces of exile through autobiography," but in "the interplay between history and autobiography" (13). With this claim, she follows the critical lead of Paul John Eakin, who, as she notes, explores in Touching the World (1992) "the complex relationship between the autobiographer who lives in history and the narrative the

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autobiographer constructs regarding that history" (10), yet in her own references to particular memoirs in this first section of the book, Melton tends to treat autobiography as an unfiltered window on the past. To be sure, her wide-ranging discussion precludes extended analysis of individual texts, and in this section of her study she may have been at pains to accord these exile autobiographers the kind of reading she claims they seek: as authentic witnesses to personal suffering the world needs to confront. Still, Melton's own introductory engagement with the debates over autobiography's status as historical documentation may make some readers wish for a more nuanced reading of some of these texts, one that illuminates the discursive re-shaping of experience and, perhaps, likewise acknowledges the status of "history" itself as a creation of competing and overlapping discourses. From this perspective, these autobiographies, and The Face of Exile itself, contribute to an evolving, multifaceted history of this period, the complexities of which we have only just begun to face.

Literary critics and theorists of autobiography will likely be most interested in the second, longer section of the book, where Melton treats autobiography as an effort to re-imagine and symbolize the past, thereby healing a "displaced self." Melton first situates her discussion amidst long-standing debates about the nature of autobiographical subjectivity. She reviews the oft-cited tension between humanistic faith in an integrated, autonomous self, the producer of autobiography, and the post-structuralist contention that the self is generated by language, a textual production constituted and constrained by available linguistic resources and prevailing cultural forces. For Melton, the issue is ultimately less one of ontology than of psychology. What for the theorist may be an outworn illusion is for the exile, Melton insists, a sustaining and necessary fiction. She concedes the intrinsically metaphoric and cultural nature of the self, but notes that it is a necessary by-product of identity formation. Drawing on the work of Erik Erikson and Robert J. Lifton, she argues that the debilitating legacy of exile is a profound disruption of identity, a disintegration of one's internal "self-schema" (80), which depends on the continuity provided by memory, native tongue, familial and cultural supports. Indeed the "psychic numbing" induced by trauma impairs what Lifton refers to as the necessary "process of creating viable inner forms," resulting in a kind of "desymbolization" (qtd. in Melton 79). Imaginative return to the past, narrative patterning, nostalgic mythologizingall enable the exile autobiographer to reconstitute, if only provisionally, the coherent and encultured image of self shattered by psychohistorical dislocation. "The exile autobiographer's task," Melton writes, "is precisely to transpose a (past) reality symbolically, creating a self-story that is a fiction, but

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comforting and self-affirming fiction. These self-stories are therapeutic in that they reestablish continuity for the self that was disrupted when propelled into exile" (65). Melton does not significantly re-orient or shed new light on what are by now fairly well-worn debates about autobiographical subjectivity. But the particular value of her argument is that she reminds us of the stakes in plotting such theoretical positions by situating the autobiographies under discussion firmly on the historical and psychic ground--the site of trauma--that produced them. Doing so prompts her to take a different tack than postmodern theorists of exilic identity who gaily embrace fragmentation; instead, she endorses the psychic value of textual integration.

Unfortunately, Melton's thesis tends to recede into the background in the subsequent chapters, where she anatomizes the variety of strategies by which autobiographers have responded to exile. These chapters focus, in turn, on representations of childhood; intellectual responses to the exilic condition; the creation of personal mythologies; the trauma of being thrust into a new language; and the reconstruction of postmodern identities. Melton is comprehensive in her survey of relevant issues and often imaginative in her grouping of texts; what is missing is a demonstration of how these writers textually restore continuity and a stable identity. And in some chapters she seems to abandon the central premise I've outlined above altogether--or at least to complicate it in ways she does not fully acknowledge.

For instance, in Chapter Seven, "The Intellectual Response," she faults Stefan Zweig for creating in The World of Yesterday a "sham persona," a reprised version of his reputation as a leading writer: "Unable to cope with the realities of his life in exile, he tried to re-create the world he believed in" (130). The World of Yesterday is thus "more a self-serving memoir than an autobiography" (122); to see "the real Zweig" we must turn to other documents (123). I don't quarrel with Melton's assessment here, but when we juxtapose it to her earlier comments about autobiographers of childhood, such as Vladimir Nabokov, Elias Canetti, and Susan Groag Bell, some crucial questions arise. Of these writers, she remarks, with considerably more sympathy: "They recreate images of another time and place where they were protected children in an effort to heal their altered identities in the present" (110). She readily notes the mythic quality of these re-created, often idyllic pasts but suggests that this quality only testifies all the more fully to their psychological authenticity. For example, she comments on a passage by Klaus Mann: "Even if he consciously mythologizes the image, connecting it as he does to the trope of the German Romantic forest, the intensity of his yearning for this petrified picture strikes the reader as real" (93). There is, certainly, considerable difference between cre

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ating a mythology of one's childhood and perpetuating a mythological public persona. But when should we consider a self-affirming fiction to be restorative and when merely evasive? If an illusion of self-wholeness is "vital psychologically" (83), when is it delusional or even ideologically dangerous? In a subsequent chapter, Melton refers to critiques of the unified ahistorical self by feminist autobiography scholars such as Shari Benstock and Susan Stanford Friedman, who argue that a refusal of contingency and otherness (both without and within the subject) is not only the privilege of the culturally central, but a symptom and a cause of both repressive and oppressive practices. Given the historical context of these autobiographies, the fascism that prompted the exile, might we read Zweig's "self-serving" denial of his terror at rupture and marginalization as suggestive of the dark side of faith in the bounded, humanistic self?

It is this dark side, specifically of the German artist, Melton argues, that Thomas Mann explores in Doctor Faustus: The Life of a German Composer, Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend, a fiction she refers to as "the autobiography of Germany, of at least [Mann's] Germany, the philosophical and cultural traditions of his milieu" (131). Endeavoring to discover how such enlightened traditions could have led to Nazi barbarism, Mann drew on his own intellectual and personal life to create a fiction about a musical composer, "the representative artist who gives into the alluring dark side of German spirituality" (138). At the heart of Mann's analysis of Germany's tragedy, Melton contends, was his belief that "German mentality" was essentially asocial, apolitical, and "inward"; National Socialism, according to Mann, was a "mythical substitution" for the social (qtd. in Melton 13738). "But he is quick to point out that `in the political realm, the fairy-tale becomes a murderous lie'" (137). In Germany, as in Leverkühn's music, irrationality lurks just below the sophisticated surface. But if Mann "indicts Germany," Melton claims, "he also indicts himself" (142). It is difficult to grasp how such a reading of Doctor Faustus, intriguing in itself, establishes the text as a personally rehabilitative response to rupture and disillusion; here and elsewhere in The Face of Exile, Melton seems torn between her argument about the exilic autobiographical subject and an urge toward a comprehensive critical anatomy of the field.

In addition, her delineation of Mann's critique of German asocial and spiritual "inwardness" jostles in unexamined ways against her account of the Polish Witold Gombrowicz's belligerent rejection of social and intellectual fetters in quest of his hubristic "Me" and against the Romanian Mircea Eliade's more gentle, erudite construction of a personal, ahistorical mythology, ensuring a "secret" return to the lost

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paradise. This grouping of texts prompts us to question the relations between home, culture, intellectual tradition, and nationality in the formation and re-formation of identity. In the case of those exiled from a nation plunged into atrocity, like Mann or Christa Wolf, must these dimensions of subjectivity be pried apart before they can be--selectively--reconstituted? It is a strength of The Face of Exile that it provokes such questions, thereby suggesting the richness of the material to which this study introduces us and the adroitness of Melton's choice of texts. Yet one often wishes she had more fully pursued such issues and integrated her discussions of individual texts both with each other and with her theoretical framework.

Melton's thesis is played out most effectively in her final chapter, "Reconstructing the Self: Identity and Reflections of the Postmodern," one of the most engaging sections of the book. Here she focuses on autobiographers for whom exile is profoundly destructive psychologically, who therefore display "discontinuous selves" that might be termed postmodern, and who reconstruct themselves through a "renewal" of language. She returns to several writers--Saul Friedlander, Eva Hoffman, and Christa Wolf--whom she also discusses in her chapter on portraits of childhood, and one senses that their autobiographies are the emotional core of the book and a driving force behind the theoretical claims of this second section (particularly since the two treatments of them frame the section). The pairing of Hoffman and Wolf is especially provocative. Hoffman's deliberate use of the Edenic trope in imagining her Polish childhood in Lost in Translation contrasts sharply with Wolf's dilemma in Patterns of Childhood, where she labors to recount a "happy, normal" German girlhood that she must now disavow. Yet, as Melton persuasively shows, there is a haunting similarity in their exilic estrangement from languagelanguage with which to name the self and language with which to establish a felt connection to both internal and external worlds. Reclaiming a coherent autobiographical "I" is, Melton concludes, the narrative struggle and the achievement of both of these texts. Certainly, both autobiographers long to thread the maze of their past and present identities, to silence or harmonize what Wolf calls "the voices" (406) and Hoffman refers to as "the Babel of our multiple selves" (275). However, these autobiographies may underscore the fragility, even impossibility, of such a "oneness of self" even more than Melton acknowledges (Olney qtd. in Melton 80). In a sense, Wolf's and Hoffman's dilemma--their mingled desire for unity and acceptance of dispersal--is echoed in Melton's critical emphasis on autobiographical therapeutics even as she closes her study with a look at postmodern incoherence and fragmentation. Dominick La Capra has suggested that the Holocaust was one of the crises that

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fractured modernity, rendering its premises untenable. To what extent, this final chapter prompts us to ask, have the widespread phenomena of exile and dislocation in the twentieth century generated the intellectual and cultural movements of postmodernism? And is the recent turn to autobiography by writers and intellectuals of all sorts a recognition, unconscious perhaps, of autobiography as the genre born out of the pain of exile of all sorts? In The Face of Exile, Judith Melton maps a body of autobiographical writing important to historical investigation, to an understanding of modern and postmodern subjectivity, and to a consideration of the psychological work performed by life-writing. Her study suggests myriad directions for further inquiry, reminding readers all the while of the psychohistorical ground from which this writing springs.

University of California, Los Angeles

Works Cited

• Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. New York: Penguin, 1989.
• Wolf, Christa. Patterns of Childhood. Trans. Ursule Olinaro and Hedwig Rappolt. New York: Noonday, 1980.