Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile. - book reviews

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 23, 1994 | by Dana Gioia

In his new book, Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile (Princeton Univ Press, 311pp), David Bethea outlines the important facts of the Leningrad-born poet's life. One could searcely ask for a more culturally significant story. A bohemian high-school dropout banished by Soviet authorities for "social parasitism," Brodsky survived forced labor and exile to win the Nobel Prize in literature and become the only foreign-born author to be appointed U.S. poet laureate.

What interests Bethea, however, are not the public aspects of Brodsky's eventful career but the deeper imaginative and moral connections between the poet's life and art. He focuses on one aspect of Brodsky's existence, the poet's status as an outsider -- first inside the Soviet Union as a dissident, then in exile from his language and his homeland.

In studying Brodsky as a literary exile, Bethea explores one of the most fascinating general subjects of modern literature. An astonishing amount of the century's greatest literature has been written by emigres. Some of these writers were voluntary exiles -- James Joyce, W H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound, TS. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence. More often they were political refugees banished by the authorities or fleeing personal danger -- Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Czeslaw Milosz, Hannah Arendt, Milan Kundera, and Brodsky.

Discussions of literary exile often focus on the political or sociological aspects of emigration. Bethea capably addresses those important issues, but his interest lies in the imaginative transformations of these circumstances into an individual poetic identity. He wants to understand the creative and spiritual aspects of exile. "At what point," Bethea asks, "does a writer of verse become |the Poet' ... where and how does an individual come to see that he has a contractual relationship with Fate?" Brodsky grew into the fullness of his artistic identity, Bethea answers, by consciously accepting his destined place in the tragic and heroic history of his homeland. Under Soviet totalitarianism, Brodsky had "to become a victim" to become a major poet.

Bethea carefully examines a number of poems to develop his thesis, but his central text is the famous exchange between Brodsky and the Leningrad judge who sentenced the poet to five years of hard labor in the far north.

Judge: Who included you among the ranks of the poets?

Brodsky: No one. And who included me among the ranks of the human race?

Judge: Did you study this?

Brodsky: What?

Judge: To be a poet? You did not try to finish university where they prepare ... where they teach ...

Brodsky: I didn't think you could get this from school.

Judge: How then?

Brodsky: I think that it ... comes from God.

It is perhaps excessive to hold an American critic to the same standards of courage as a Russian poet, but reading Bethea's thoughtful study, I wished he more openly displayed Brodsky's unabashed confidence in poetry's freedom from institutional authority. If there is one minor but persistent flaw in this study, it is that the estimable Bethea lives in terror of literary theorists. He constantly feels the need to defend even his most sensible observations by justifying himself to potential objections by followers of assorted ideological camps. Bethea's constant critical shadowboxing with Edward Said, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and other such fashionable eminences

quickly becomes wearying. His cogent rebuttals ultimately will convince no hard-core theorist.

A sufficiently sensitive reader will see that there are two books coexisting between the covers of Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile. On the surface, there is a masterful analysis of Brodsky's position as poet and cultural icon. It is a scrupulous study both in command of the complicated facts of the Nobel laureate's problematic case and responsive to the concerns of contemporary theory.

But underneath that skilled critical performance is another volume -- a highly confessional testament, the muted cri de coeur of a traditional humanist scholar who still believes that poetry matters in an academic environment dominated by ideology. Bethea openly worries about "the death of poetic language in our own culture." His careful readings of Brodsky's poems as literature rather than coded political tracts may appear neolithic to the more modish members of the Modern Language Association, but to a general reader interested in Russian literature, they will seem superbly reasoned and researched. Few living poets will see so profound and sympathetic a study of their works.