Exiles, Outcasts, Strangers

Exiles, Outcasts, Strangers represents a departure from Mary Jo Muratore's substantial body of work on French Neoclassical literature. Not only does this latest effort move into the second half of the twentieth century, it also navigates between several national literatures (French, Spanish, and English). Written in the classic comparative style that characterized the field before the onset of post-structural theory, this is a literary study refreshingly free of an overelaborated theoretical apparatus. In a series of short chapters, Muratore develops readings of the work of nine authors united by their shared concern with the theme of alienation: Albert Camus, Ernesto Sábato, Jean Genet, Richard Wright, André Langevin, Gisèle Pineau, V. S. Naipaul, Norbert Zongo, and Elie Wiesel. Beginning with Camus, who in many ways provides the model from which the other authors deviate, she intertwines biography and literary interpretation to argue that the characters presented in these novels are derived from their respective authors' often-painful personal experiences with exile and alienation. This is perhaps the richest and most captivating element of this study, because Muratore avoids the simple overlay of artist and art, and instead concludes that there is a fundamental tension between an author's exile and the attempt to communicate this experience in an aesthetic document. As Muratore suggests at the conclusion of her study, these authors resemble Camus's emblem of inescapable self-estrangement, Sisyphus, in their drive to write novels for an audience from which they are exiled, even as this exile provides the source of their expressive language.Despite these genuine strengths, it is unlikely that Exiles, Outcasts, Strangers will be as rewarding for the specialist of Jean Genet, Richard Wright, Elie Wiesel, or the other major authors discussed here. The brief chapters (about fifteen pages each) and the almost-exclusive focus on a single work by each author curtail the discussion, leaving the reader wanting a more fully developed exposition. Aside from the briefness of each encounter, Muratore's book suffers from a common problem in traditional comparatist investigations by making what seem to be rather arbitrary choices in her material. The theme of exile and alienation is so broad that it is difficult to pin down a representative body of texts. The chapters dealing with Pineau's L'Exil selon Julia, Naipaul's Guerillas, and Zongo's Le Parachutage, for example, introduce an interesting discussion of the relationship between exile and postcolonialism, but this leads one to wonder why these three authors were chosen when this is so clearly a theme that pervades a much broader canon of writing about the postcolonial experience. Similarly, I could well imagine a section dealing with the social displacement of queerness in postwar Euro-American culture that would address authors like James Baldwin, W. H. Auden, or Monique Wittig, all of whom created exiled characters resonant with biographical overtones. Such a rich topic deserves more attention, but here we are only given a tantalizing suggestion of a broader theme, making this study feel incomplete at times.In sum, Exiles, Outcasts, Strangers is a vigorous set of brief, general studies that engages with a fascinating and evocative theme, but in the end it lacks a coherent center. The opening investigation of Camus's L'Étranger fails to draw an interpretive thread strong enough to unite the diverse material tackled in this book, and the plurality of thematic elements (from existential angst to postcolonial exile to intergenerational trauma in Elie Wiesel's Le Cinquième Fils) tend to make the book feel dispersed over too wide a field of study. Without an organizing line to draw the work together, the book's avoidance of a unifying theoretical approach becomes a liability rather than an asset. Muratore's concerted interest in the post–World War II context, and her emphasis on the failure of language, might have been honed with a discussion of Maurice Blanchot or, in a different vein, Roland Barthes, but these figures (writers of the experience of exile and alienation in their own right) do not even garner a mention. At the same time, this absence of a theoretical focal point has not been replaced with the close textual analysis that might have drawn out related motifs from one point of investigation to the next. Instead, Muratore emphasizes each novel's development of the central characters and the particular biographical elements that connect author to character, leaving little opportunity to draw these nine heterogeneous texts into a common orbit.For all of these shortcomings, Exiles, Outcasts, Strangers is a unique work of ambitious scope that opens onto an immensely rich area of exploration. In demonstrating the relationship between exile, alienation, and literary self-representation, it brings together an original constellation of related issues that offers a fresh approach to the familiar genre of exile literature. For these reasons, it will undoubtedly appeal to the general reader or the student with a burgeoning interest in one or more of the authors treated here

Alienation · Art · Art history · Biography · Element (criminal law · Emblem · Interpretation (philosophy · Literature · Narrative · Style (visual arts · Theme (computing · Wright · History · Law · Literature and Culture Studies · Philosophy