Cultural tradition works differently in American and European cultures.
Malcolm Cowley speaks, for instance, of the lost generation in terms of a con-
temporary cultural outlook.^32 If they revolted against an ongoing tradition,
it was because they were “taught to regard culture as a veneer, a badge of class
distinction as something assumed like an Oxford accent or a suit of English
clothes” (Ibid. 33). Both education and tradition, as advanced through uni-
versity grounding, tended not to bring them closer to a reality that increas-
ingly made itself visible through wars and conflicts. Their world had nothing
to do with that hard reality, for it “was the special world of scholarship—
timeless, placeless, elaborate, incomplete and bearing only the vaguest rela-
tionship to that other world in which fortunes were made, universities
endowed and city governments run by muckers” (Ibid. 30). Hence, their
reaction took a Romantic rebelliousness emanating, first, from a sense of
difference. Cowley succinctly describes their outlook: “We were like others,
we were normal—yet we clung to the feeling that as apprentice writers we
were abnormal and secretly distinguished: we lived in the special world of
art; we belonged to the freemasonry of those who had read modern authors
and admired a paradox” (Ibid. 22).
Cowley accepts Gertrude Stein’s “lost generation” appellation insofar as it
is applicable to their chosen uprootedness. It was “schooled away and almost
wrenched away from its attachment to any region or tradition,” unprepared
for the postwar period, driven by desire “to live in exile,” free from “older
guides,” and in “a period of transition from values already fixed to values that
had to be created” (Ibid. 9). Unable to contribute to any specific vision or
worldview, those writers “were seceding from the old and yet could adhere to
nothing new” as they “groped” for some “undefined” path (Ibid.). Not sur-
prisingly, then, they laid their first proclamations against Humanism, and
“they had an antithesis” for each of the “Humanist virtues,” explains Cowley
(Ibid. 35). Dismayed that the “composite fatherland for which [... they]had
fought was dissolving into quarreling statesmen and oil and steel magnates”
(Ibid. 46–47), they plunged into a bohemia, a mapless realm where “the
artist can break the puritan shackles, drink, live freely and be wholly creative”
(Ibid. 61). For an Arab exile, like the Palestinian Ma.mnd Darwlsh, there is
a tradition of many paths and positions, which he recollects and identifies
with while accepting acculturation:
I’ve got nothing left but my ancient armor
And my saddle worked in gold.
I’ve got nothing left but a manuscript by Averroes,
The Necklace of the Dove, various works in translation.^33Nonetheless, Cowley’s expatriatism signifies a stance of some influential
impact in the literature of modernism. It also retains an amount of undecid-
ability conjoining it to postmodernist attitudes and deconstructionist
ENVISIONING EXILE