Forever Flowing by Vasily Grossman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Experience of Exile

Homer got it wrong in the Odyssey, at least for modern folk. The real suffering and trauma of exile occurs not in the time away from one’s homeland but upon return. Living with fixed memories, no matter how accurate, means disappointment in proportion to the time away, for both the traveller and the keepers of the hearth. Stay away long enough, say thirty years or so, and whatever commonality that existed is dissipated by the winds of unshared experience. No energy remains in old relationships. What does remain is a designation empty of any real meaning - countryman, neighbour, friend, relative have no pragmatic import.

Thus whatever it was that ‘kept one going’ in the trials of exile, voluntary or not, is a self-preserving fiction. It may be necessary for psychic survival but it becomes more false by the day. The quantum of change is too small to be noticed on a trip away from home to the shops or the daily commute to work; but the effect emerges into the macro-world when things seem different at home upon returning from holiday or visiting from university. The rooms seem smaller, the conversations less interesting, the family squabbles more annoying. These are not inaccurate sensations. They are the result of becoming incrementally more objective about life. The rooms are small, the conversations banal, and the family insufferable, just as the returning prodigal appears alien and incomprehensible.

The trauma of return is therefore not just experiential, it is existential. Exile may threaten one’s life; return compromises one’s identity. Survival is likely to be a matter of physical endurance; psychic integrity is more likely to depend on entirely unrecognised and unused aspects of character. The home-comer is a threat to those he returns to because they imagine how they appear to him; they thereby become marginally more objective about themselves. This is never flattering. Weaknesses ignored, guilt denied, knowledge of betrayals suppressed, all bubble into consciousness.

The returning exile can also see what others can’t, the lost potential of not just the people he knows but of an entire society. Unknown even to him, he has been creating expectations, extrapolating improvements. None of these have materialised. His insight about lost opportunities causes everyone pain. He therefore must be kept in exile even at home. This is something Odysseus apparently never was forced to endure. Grossman’s Ivan, that is to say Grossman himself, is the truly tragic modern figure of those for whom home has disappeared entirely.

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