The End of Exile— The End of Return?

Abstract

?n her discussion of Joseph Brodsky’s refusal to return to Russia, Susan Sontag described where the poet chose to live as “elsewhere” and Russia as “the great elsewhere to which he could not, would not, out of pride, out of anger, out of anxiety, ever return.”¹ At home between two elsewheres, Brodsky’s determination to remain in a home situated out of place may be construed, in part, as his unwillingness to unravel his hard-won exilic discourses and construct a rhetoric of return. To return is to confront issues of home and exile, familiarity and difference, and belonging and displacement all over again. It entails the arduous task of discursively reconstructing the narrativizing self and the grounds for its existence. It also entails subjecting one’s work to cultural processes that organize the rhetorical structures of the writing of return in ways over which one may have little control.