AS HE ENTERED THE FIFTH YEAR of his London-based exile, Bulgarianborn Austrian writer Elias Canetti (1905–94) jotted down a reflection that positioned him squarely within a tradition of exile as old as history itself: “Erst im Exil kommt man darauf, zu einem wie wichtigen Teil die Welt schon immer eine Welt von Verbannten war” (Only in exile does one realize the significant extent to which the world has always been a world of refugees). Of course the erudite Canetti was acquainted with the works of such exiles as Ovid, Boethius, Dante, and Heine well before he was forced out of Austria following the 1938 Anschluss. Yet it was his own experience of exile that brought into focus the world as a place of exile, its history an uninterrupted narrative of banishment. At least, this was one way human history could be understood, and the exile might not be able to resist the temptation to bend the past to fit his particular needs. It was exhilarating to see, Canetti wrote,

History is turned into a database containing stories and people to be appropriated to give credence to one’s own worldview and to buttress the edifice of one’s life, especially a life challenged by as existential a crisis as exile. How, then, does the exile approach history, which Canetti frames as largely exilic? And does the exiled writer liaise with those who shared the fate of banishment before him?

In his seminal—and polemical—1988 conference address “The Condition We Call Exile,” Russian-American poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky (1940–96) answers this last question in the affirmative. Yet he is quick to point to the reality-denying danger that resides in what he calls the exile’s “retrospective machinery”: