The first story of exile in our tradition is the story of Adam and Eve.
Özgür ÖĞÜZ Jeffrey SCHNEIDER Comm.101, May 6, 2002 The first story of exile in our tradition is the story of Adam and Eve. No matter how we interpret the story of their expulsion from the Garden of Eden--original sin or not--we may be certain of one thing: there is no way back to paradise. After that fatal bite of the apple, the return to pure innocence was cut off forever. The exile of Adam and Eve is the mark of maturity, the consequence of growing up. An adult can only recall the state of childlike innocence in his imagination. The sign of this realization is the melancholy knowledge that we can never return to Eden, like Meursault could not return to his ex-life, or Master Bedii. Once you bite the apple, there is no turning back; you become an exile. But what does the word ‘exile’ mean, and who is an ‘exile’? Exile means banishment, and disorientation which involves displacement, fragmented identity. Now it is exile that evokes the sensitive intellectual, the critical spirit operating alone on the margins of society, a traveler, rootless and yet at home in every metropolis, a tireless wanderer from academic conference to academic conference, a thinker in several languages, an eloquent advocate for ethnic and sexual minorities--in
short, a romantic outsider living on the edge of the bourgeois world (Bruma, Ian). Even though Meursault and Master Bedii don’t fit to all these features, they are both living on the edge of this world. They can not make the adjustment, instead preferring to remain outside the mainstream, unaccomodated, unco-opted, resistant because of exile as Edward Said’s point of view. They are never fully adjusted to the outside world, Meursault never obeys to the society’s rules and never lies, and Master Bedii never gives up what he believes, and continues his making of mannequins as he wants. They both ...
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short, a romantic outsider living on the edge of the bourgeois world (Bruma, Ian). Even though Meursault and Master Bedii don’t fit to all these features, they are both living on the edge of this world. They can not make the adjustment, instead preferring to remain outside the mainstream, unaccomodated, unco-opted, resistant because of exile as Edward Said’s point of view. They are never fully adjusted to the outside world, Meursault never obeys to the society’s rules and never lies, and Master Bedii never gives up what he believes, and continues his making of mannequins as he wants. They both feel outside the chatty, familiar world inhabited by normal people. So Meursault almost always prefers to be silent, and Master Bedii ceases to talking when he realizes that the outside world wants him to be someone else, as they do. For this sense, exile is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others. You can not go back to some earlier and perhaps more stable condition of being at home; and you can never fully arrive, be at one with your new home or situation (Said, Edward). In addition to this, Theodor W. Adorno, who was an intellectual, and fought the dangers of fascism, communism, and Western mass consumerism, says: “Dwelling, in the proper sense is now impossible. The traditional residences we have grown up in have grown intolerable: each trait of comfort in them is paid for with betrayal of knowledge, each vestige of shelter with the musty pact of family interests,” and continues “…It’s part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” So if you once leave your home you have to believe yourself and go on what you believe. Meursault leaves his home when he murdered the Arab, and after all this he couldn’t turn back, and so he did not because the home he left behind was not the one he wanted to be, therefore he could not feel at home in one’s home. Because the society wants Meursault and Master Bedii to live the way they do not believe, and also because they both know “wrong life cannot be lived rightly,” as Adorno states, there is no more a real escape for them. As Heidegger notes, “to say that mortals are is to say that in dwelling they persist through spaces by virtue of their locations” (his italics) (157). Because the homeless are without shelter or a location through which they can persist, a connection to society is lost. The homeless cannot “be” since there is no dwelling for him/her to “persist through” and be defined through. Therefore ,maybe, Meursault does not want to live anymore without any identity, and also Master Bedii stops making mannequins when he realizes there’re no more identities outside which resemble his mannequins. Maybe all of them are the attempts to turn back to Garden of Eden of their own which is maybe the only home. Therefore the actions of Master Bedii can be understood more clearly that we mustn’t forget what makes us ‘us’, thus we can find the road of the Great Home, wherever it is, and whatever it is. Also Meursault, maybe, is trying to say, while he refuses to lie, we were not like that so we mustn’t be like that. Meursault and Master Bedii see that the society, the home in their situation does not have the meanings that they both demand. They both want to remain who they are whereas society needs changes on gestures, and even sins. For another instance, Dante, himself an exile from Florence, believed that the hero never really wanted to remain at home. Dante's Ulysses was a kind of eternal student who loathed the idea of domesticity, with a wife and children and a nice little dog. Who needed that kind of responsibility? It was all too boring. First he would "win experience of the world"-- hitchhike to India, as it were--and have many women and, above all, gather knowledge. Just as Eve could not resist that bite of the apple in Eden, Dante's hero thirsts for knowledge, with the risk of getting burnt.(Bruma, Ian) Albert Camus’s hero Meursault thirsts for the absolute, and truth, and Orhan Pamuk’s hero Master Bedii thirsts for remaining who you are, knowing what makes us ‘us’. They both bite the fatal apple, and become strangers, outsiders, and so exiles. Exile means banishment, not loneliness, and it is the stage of disorientation that you couldn’t feel yourself at home ever. Exile also involves dislocation, the fragmented identity, and uncertainty as the author Eva Hoffman, a Pole in exile via Canada, states. According to Edward Said, the worst wrench was to leave his mother, who never ceased to remind her son how "unnatural" it was to be living apart. He can still feel the loss today, "the sense that I'd rather be somewhere else--defined as closer to her, authorized by her, enveloped in her special maternal love, infinitely forgiving, sacrificing, giving--because being here was not being where I/we had wanted to be, here being defined as a place of exile..." . “Who am I?” is an age-old question of the world that has its roots in Greek philosophy, but the exile also asks “Where am I?” Everyone is, in a sense, a stranger. Citations Said, Edward. Intellectual Exile: Expatriates And Marginals Pamuk, Orhan. Master Bedii’s Children. The Black Book. Camus, Albert. The Stranger Buruma, Ian. The Romance of Exile Stephen Grossman & Danıel Tschaen. Exıstence 2 ,ftp.etext.org/pub/philosophy/metaphysics
