Resisting the Place of Belonging

Uncanny Homecomings in Religion, Narrative and the Arts

Daniel Boscaljon, Daniel Boscaljon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317065012
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Essays

People often overlook the uncanny nature of homecomings, writing off the experience of finding oneself at home in a strange place or realizing that places from our past have grown strange. This book challenges our assumptions about the value of home, arguing for the ethical value of our feeling displaced and homeless in the 21st century. Home is explored in places ranging from digital keyboards to literary texts, and investigates how we mediate our homecomings aesthetically through cultural artifacts (art, movies, television shows) and conceptual structures (philosophy, theology, ethics, narratives). In questioning the place of home in human lives and the struggles involved with defining, defending, naming and returning to homes, the volume collects and extends ideas about home and homecomings that will inform traditional problems in novel ways.

PART I:
Uncanny Homecomings

Chapter 1
Knowing for the First Time

David Jasper

I begin with some words of the twelfth-century monk Hugo of St. Victor:

It is, therefore, a source of great virtue for the practised mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about invisible and transitory things. So that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.¹

When I was 22, I had been living and working as a school teacher for two years in rural North West India and I was looking forward with an aching heart to my return home to London and to my family, whom I had not seen in all that time: a long time for a young man of 22. Arriving in London’s Heathrow Airport—that most transitory and solitary of places—I was embraced by my mother and father and drawn back into the home and the familiar streets of which I had dreamt so often. There was the sound of Big Ben and the sight of my beloved cat. But my first night in my own bed, in the familiar room in which I had grown up, was a sleepless one, for already I was yearning for India, for the little room which I had shared for so long with my Keralan friend Babu Koshi, for the loneliness even, the being on my own. I missed the absurd hospitality of the Bankipore Club in Patna, its smoky lounge peopled by former officers of the Indian Army with magnificent handlebar moustaches and their vision of an England that never existed or had its origins in the lonely imaginations of English expatriates in the Colonial Service before 1947, some of them the sad men and women of Paul Scott’s novel Staying On—people without a home or even a country to call their own. But part of me longed to join them. The London to which I now returned had changed—or, more precisely, I had changed—and home was no longer entirely home. My own family, in their very love for me, could have no access to that part of me which had grown used to being in exile, to being different and which had lived in a subjectivity that was suspended between extremes of selfishness and selflessness. When I much later came to read Adorno’s Minima Moralia, subtitled “Reflections from Damaged Life,”² I understood exactly, though in my own way, what he meant by that fragile term “home” and the irony of his conclusion that “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.”

Like Adorno, though for quite different reasons, I found refuge in texts and writing. Across enormous, almost limitless, spaces of human experience, my little period of voluntary exile in Bihar gave me a glimpse into the literature of displacement and a sense of something which might have remained incomprehensible to me if it had not been for that first sleepless night at home in Westminster, London. Years later, the last page of Imre Kertész’s novel Fateless came to haunt me. It tells the story of Gyuri, a 14-year-old Hungarian Jewish boy who survives Auschwitz, finally returning to his family in Budapest and to his “uncontinuable life.” In my own pale way I knew exactly what he meant, though without his ghastly experience. He says:

My mother was waiting, and would no doubt greatly rejoice over me. I recollect that she had once conceived a plan that I should be an engineer, a doctor, or something like that. No doubt that is how it will be, just as she wished; there is nothing impossible that we do not live through naturally, and keeping a watch on me on my journey, like some inescapable trap, I already know there will be happiness. For even there, next to the chimneys, in the intervals between the torments, there was something that resembled happiness. Everyone asks only about the hardships and the “atrocities,” whereas for me perhaps it is that experience which will remain the most memorable. Yes, the next time I am asked, I ought to speak about that, the happiness of the concentration camps. If indeed I am asked. And provided I myself don’t forget.³

What is that we save of our experiences when we return “home?” Sometimes they are all that we have and the homecoming is tragically impossible, the barrier to it unforgiveable. Yet there is the presence, impossible as it might seem, of a “happiness” that seems ineradicable, even in the inevitable betrayals of homecoming or the miseries of the death camp. Is it, perhaps, the sense of life itself that endures, in spite of everything, even beyond the possibilities of forgiveness?

In another novel of the sufferings of the Second World War in Europe, Julia Franck’s The Blind Side of the Heart, Peter, a seven-year-old German boy, is unaccountably abandoned by his loving mother on a railway station in 1945, just as hostilities have come to an end. Years later she returns to him in the home of his aunt and uncle where he has been living. But he knows that there is no going back and he refuses to see her and hides in a shed:

Peter would have liked to climb down and take a look, but it was too risky … What had his mother imagined? She wanted to see him—so then what? Did she by any chance want to ask him to forgive her? Was he supposed to forgive her? He couldn’t forgive her, he’d never be able to do that. It wasn’t in his power; even if he had wanted to.⁴

In all homecomings there is a background of separation and walking out on something that has come to an end—childhood, war, marriage. And there is therefore inevitably always the element of betrayal and a rejection of what we have become, so that sometimes the damage is irreparable. It is the risk we take every time we leave home.

Exile can be voluntary (as in my case), enforced (as in the plight of refugees or the victims of war), or the mysterious severance that happens when we desert one another under the pressure of overwhelming circumstances. This last severance cannot be healed (as in Julia Franck’s novel), and so we can find ourselves in circumstances which plunge us into a lethal mixture of betrayal, resentment, and cynicism that even love itself cannot heal. We bear responsibility, but to what extent can we be said to be at fault?

In Simone Weil we see the complexity of the exilic predicament, described by Edward Said as “the sheer fact of isolation and displacement, which produces the kind of narcissistic masochism that resists all efforts at amelioration, acculturation, and community.” And yet it is not all loss—in the complexity and the displacement there is another voice that is less tragic and perhaps ultimately religious in its tenor. More recently we have grown used to the post-colonial, exilic voices of Said and Homi Babha, the latter with his oft-repeated call to the city of Bombay (as he insists on calling it still), “I want to go home.” It is a call which demands dialogue, both within the self and between selves. Babha recalls us to the “unsatisfied voice” of Adrienne Rich, hesitantly affirming—I am … I am—and the “insistent questioning” of the Mumbai Dalit poet Prakash Jadhav—Who am I? What am I?—and from them he asserts the right to be heard (even by oneself), the right to speak either at home (wherever that is) or abroad (or reverse the two):

You are part of a dialogue that may not, at first, be heard of heralded—you may be ignored—but your personhood cannot be denied. In another’s country that is also your own, your person divides, and in following the forked path you encounter yourself in a double movement … Once as a stranger, and then as a friend.⁵

The word “home” has such heavy meaning. Coming back from India, “home” was too much for me—something almost bovine in its security, its lack of risk. The danger then is that one begins to long always for that which is lost, the stranger within one picking quarrels with home (like Joyce did with Ireland) to sustain the vision of the other. And Paradise itself can then seem oppressive: as Said has suggested of The Divine Comedy, “even the beatific peace achieved in the Paradiso bears traces of the vindictiveness and severity of judgement embodied in the Inferno.”⁶ I think I had always suspected this, though I never dared to admit it. Perhaps Dante also knew the sharp edge of the contrary vision that we find later in Blake—and for me, its consequences? That is, that it is only by contraries that we can ever progress—not contradictions, but sometimes painful paradoxes and the being caught between unreconciled alternatives. There is the sense then, perhaps, of the necessary transitoriness of what we call home and that dialogue between the stranger and the friend in each of us, our pilgrim selves, the ever new realization that the place known as home is always barely known as if for the first time, a place ever realized anew in each visit on our journey through time and space—like a sacrament. I think back to another time of brief exile in my life, a short period of solitary retreat in the Texas desert, and I look back to my notes made then: “I am where I am, touching base. This is my home for the time being, and it does very nicely.” Well—perhaps that, at least, is a start.

“For the Time Being”—this takes me back to that most matter-of-fact of poets, W.H. Auden, who is not, perhaps, much in fashion these days. For the Time Being, Auden’s “Christmas Oratorio,” begins with the calling of Advent and whose narrative of birth is haunted by the cross. The eternal presses itself upon the creatures of time, making us restless even at Christmas, the most homely of all Western Christian festivals—Auden, it must be said, loved Mr Pickwick and the innocence of Dingley Dell. Yet our sense of well-being is oppressed, and even around the Christmas hearth we are not quite at home, strangers to ourselves:

We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?⁷

And at the end of his poem, Auden captures precisely the sense at the end of Christmas, even its failure perhaps, in our fallen world:

Stayed up so late, attempted—quite unsuccessfully—
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away…⁸

But the coherence in pilgrimage which eludes these familiar homely admissions is found mysteriously in the liturgical rhythms of another work—Auden’s poetic sequence, which is based on the canonical hours of monastic discipline—Horae Canonicae. A meditation in seven parts on the mystery of the cross, upon fallenness, forgiveness, and restoration in coinherence (the word is deliberately taken from one of Auden’s mentors, Charles Williams),⁹ the poem explores the necessary complexity of our being at home in the world—at once the stranger and the friend, the one who returns like the prodigal son, finding forgiveness and yet feeling drawn back to exile in a far country, the soul rescued from hell yet still longing for the “home” of this provisional and fallen world which, as at the end of Paradise Lost, in spite of all is the world we want and love—even in the unthinkable happiness of the concentration camps. And so we can find ourselves saying with David Daiches that “God is justified, in a way that might perhaps have surprised him.”¹⁰ Or, as Auden tentatively puts it in “Nones,” “It would be best to go home, if we have a home.”

Horae Canonicae begins and ends at dawn in “Prime” and “Lauds” with the half world between sleeping and waking in the early morning:

Recalled from the shades to be a seeing being,
From absence to be on display,
Without a name or history I wake
Between my body and the day. (“Prime”)
__________________________________

Among the leaves the small birds sing;
The crow of the cock commands awaking:
In solitude, for company.
Bright shines the sun on creatures mortal;
Men of their neighbours become sensible:
In solitude for company. (“Lauds”)¹¹

And so we begin our worship at the break of day, in solitude for company. At home in exile and in exile at home, we are divided creatures, the joining of two parts seeking an impossible solidarity in our “unhomely” (unheimlich) selves, caught, in Hannah Arendt’s words, in the rent between “things that should be hidden and things that should be shown,” discovering with what pain “how rich and manifold the hidden can be under conditions of intimacy.” With our dearest ones we ache to share that which we dare not or cannot articulate to them, in solitude, for company.¹²

In Auden’s meditation—he was never demonstrative in his religion—this finds its focus in his most deeply Christocentric and private/public acts of worship, in the Christ of the Passion and in the sacrament of the Eucharist caught between absence and presence in what he calls “an operation beyond our comprehension but not beyond our attention.” In the rhythms of the daily offices, we finally turn away from our participation in what Auden describes as the “crowd,” which is, in his friend Bishop Peter Walker’s terms, “almost no more than a perverted way of seeing things: ‘it looks on or it looks away,’” to a being in communion, oneself with the other and the other as oneself.¹³ Here one is never more deeply alone and yet at the same time never more deeply at one with all—at home in one’s very unhomeliness, taught us first and most excruciatingly and profoundly in the cry of Christ on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”:

Can poets (can men in television)
Be saved? It is not easy
To believe in unknowable justice
Or pray in the name of a love
Whose name one’s forgotten: libera
Me, libera C (dear C)
And all poor s-o-b’s who never
Do anything properly… (“Compline”)¹⁴

The words lodged in the p...