n the hundredth chapter of Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River (1935), the autobiographical protagonist experiences an epiphanic moment in a small-town café in southern France. Eugene Gant sits alone looking out on “an old, worn, rutted curiously dirty- looking street, haunted by the trunks of immense and dusty-looking trees”: “He had never been here before, the scene was strange and haunting as a dream, and yet it was instantly and intolerably familiar” (882). The young American’s strong impression that he had seen these very trees before evokes verbal response in the language of the land where he found himself: “Ces arbres—” he stammers to a puzzled waiter, “J’ai— j’ai— mais je les ai vu—
avant—” (882). Far from home, Wolfe’s Eugene struggles to connect remembered scenes with what lies before his eyes:

Struck by the haunting familiarity of these plane trees of Provence, Eugene feels “intolerably, that the place, the scene, the great wreathed branches of the trees, were something he had seen before—that he had seen it here from the same spot where now he sat—but when, when, when?” (882–83). Then comes “a thrill of recognition that flashed across his brain like an electric spark”: “he saw that he was looking at the same trees that van Gogh had painted in his picture of the roadmenders at their work in Arles, that the scene was the same, that he was sitting where the painter had sat before” (883). Eugene now identifies the “tall, straight, symmetrical” trees that he sees before him with the remembered painting’s “great, tendoned trunks that writhed and twisted like creatures in a dream” (883). Inspired by his memory of “the great vinelike trunks” of van Gogh’s “demented trees,” he “could not forget them, nor see this scene in any other way than that in which [the artist] had painted it” (883).

Vincent van Gogh, Dutch, 1853–90. Large Plane Trees, 1889. Oil on canvas, 73.4 x 91.8 cm. ©The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the Hanna Fund, 1947.

Eugene’s recollection of van Gogh’s painting triggers realization of the transformative power of art and the importance of that power for the young man’s future practice of his recently discovered narrative vocation. Significantly, this lesson and those that lead up to it take place in a country far from Eugene’s homeland. It culminates a series of insights achieved from that vantage point of “outsideness” that, according to M. M. Bakhtin, confers vision (7). By the time Eugene sits where van Gogh had sat, he has long since torn himself away from mother and motherland and undergone successive stages of instructive exile. Thomas Wolfe’s second major novel traces his autobiographical protagonist’s progress through a series of sojourns first in the American North and then in England and France. Eugene’s metafictional journeying takes him at last to provincial France where he finds his form, his voice, and his subject. In Of Time and the River, Wolfe embodies in his protagonist’s experience important links between expatriation and education, between exile and the artist’s imagination.

“Exile,” as defined by Timothy Weiss in his 1992 study On the Margins, “is a division between self and others; it is the loss, or the renunciation, of close ties with the others—family, community, society—among whom one lives or has lived” (5). Artists, theorists, and critics commonly acknowledge that injury and loss may both cause and result from expatriation. Julia Kristeva, for instance, posits “[a] secret wound . . . [that] drives the foreigner to wandering” (3). Weiss, on the other hand, focuses on effects: “Exile can result in the self’s fragmentation, yet it can also lead to a syncretism of old and new aspects of identity. The exile feels the pain of leaving home, yet goes forward into a world of possibilities” (5).

Such paradoxical mingling of pain and pleasure is perfectly rendered in the opening chapter of Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River. The novel takes up the story of Look Homeward, Angel’s Eugene Gant at the moment when he bids farewell to family and native earth. The scene of the protagonist’s departure from home makes clear the need for escape. Conversation on the Biltmore railway platform is inclusive, intrusive, and loud. Eugene’s mother and sister exert powerful pressures to prevent son and brother from getting away. At last, however, the rescuing train arrives:

Eight hundred thirty-two pages later, Eugene Gant finally puts pen to paper and begins turning out the narrative prose through which he will imaginatively recapture those time-far hills that once held him thrall. Before he can write, however, he must endure the trauma of separation and the tutelage of exile.

In the initial phase of expatriation, Eugene discovers the limitless possibilities of a new land, but he also finds himself “ignorant of all defense in a tumultuous world”: “He was nothing, nobody—there was no heart or bravery left in him; he was conscious of unfathomable ignorance . . . he was lost” (112). Subsequent evocations of Eugene’s chronic homesickness make clear his real and bodily suffering. The “bitter and intolerable loneliness” that afflicts him is

This explicit rendering of Eugene’s symptoms anticipates Amy Kaminsky’s observation in After Exile: Writing the Latin American Diaspora (1999): “Exile and all the processes related to it have a material component, and that component is felt, experienced, and known through the body” (xi). “Without the emplaced human body,” Kaminsky insists, “there is nothing to know or represent about exile and its aftermath” (xi).

Wolfe’s descriptions of Eugene’s pangs recall the psychological associations of loss, including the deprivations of exile, with the pain (and liberation) of separation from the mother. An individual’s (and especially a man’s) struggle to establish identity requires such separation, and in the case of male exile writers, as Kaminsky reminds us, the metaphoric association of homeland with woman and mother “has become so common . . . as to have become almost predictable.” The masculine “maturing process” necessarily involves “separation from mother / homeland,” as well as control over the “infantile desire to return” (6). Clearly, the rupture with mother and home involves physical and psychic suffering. In Eugene Gant’s case, significantly, the only remedy for painful homesickness is to “hear the voice and see the face again of some one he had known,” in this case his Uncle Bascom, brother to his mother and a fellow exile from “the hills of home” (176).

When the death of his father brings Eugene Gant home, the struggle resumes between son and mother. Whatever pains he has suffered in his New England exile, he has also tasted freedom, and a visit home makes clear the threat of recapture. Commenting upon the separation of the “foreigner” from his mother, Julia Kristeva articulates the ambiguities of situations like that of Eugene: no matter how painful, exile can confer an intoxicating independence. “To be deprived of parents,” Kristeva ponders: “[I]s that where freedom starts?” (5). Eugene’s father is dead, and his hopes of making his mother “understand his life, his purpose, and his heart’s desire” are soon dashed (403). Bidding her a last good night, he steels himself to withstand the imagined appeals of all “the lost, the vanished people . . . whispering to him as he went down the old dark hall there in his mother’s house” (404). Finally, Eugene hears “the wailing cry of the great train, bringing to him again its wild and secret promises of flight and darkness, new lands, and a shining city” (404):

Thus Eugene wills his own (re)birth as man and artist, expelling himself from the enclosing walls of home and making his way to a “shining city” that seems “stranger than a dream, and more familiar than his mother’s face” (412).

With Eugene Gant’s second and more successful attempt at escape, trauma begins to give way to enlightenment. Now he takes refuge in the largest and most mythic of American cities where he learns to see more clearly both the new world in which he is a stranger and the people and places he has left behind. “In order to understand,” M. M. Bakhtin asserts, “it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. . . . In the realm of culture, outsideness is a most powerful factor in understanding” (7). Making his case for the necessity of expatriation to education, Bakhtin underscores the contrast between the “little world” of nature, family, and tradition, and what lies beyond its restrictive boundaries: “. . . a great but abstract world, where people are out of contact with each other, egoistically sealed-off from each other, greedily practical; where labor is differentiated and mechanized, where objects are alienated from the labor that produced them” (234). Just such a world confronts Eugene Gant in New York. Overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of the city, he exults in the dynamism of the metropolis but recoils in horror from the “million faces” of the crowd: “the faces dark, dingy, driven, harried, and corrupt, the faces stamped with all the familiar markings of suspicion and mistrust, cunning, contriving, and a hard and stupid cynicism” (416). Wolfe’s hyperbolic revulsion at the physiognomy of City Man is matched by his disgust at the cacophonous “City-Voice”: “one strident snarl, one twisted mouth of outrage and of slander bared forever to the imperturbable and immortal skies of time, one jeering tongue and rumor of man’s baseness . . .” (417).

Alienated by urban sights and urban sounds, Eugene perceives the city with “the heart, the eye, the vision of the everlasting stranger” (412–13). Far from family and familiar territory, he can now consider family and territory with new perspective. Now he can engage “the million memories of his fathers who were great men and knew the wilderness, but who had never lived in cities.” Instinctively, Eugene identifies with nature and earth, with those “three hundred of his blood and bone, who sowed their blood and sperm across the continent” (413). He comes to associate the city with rock and iron and to view it as a mirage that deceives the hopes of youth rendered powerless by its impervious might: “Gigantic city, we have taken nothing—not even a handful of your trampled dust—we have made no image on your iron breast and left not even the print of a heel upon your stony-hearted pavements” (509).

As Eugene settles into expatriation, he comes to associate the frustration of his youthful dreams, not only with the unnatural harshness of the urban environment but also with barriers of class and privilege. Book 4 of Of Time and the River records Eugene’s visit to Joel Pierce’s family estate on the Hudson, and the account makes clear the lessons he learns. He quickly realizes that the seductive and gloriously unreal “world of moonlight, magic and painted smoke that ‘the river people’ knew” was not for him. Reluctantly, he reclaims “his father’s earth of blood and sweat and stinking clay and bitter agony” (595). In so doing, he comes to terms with the vitality of the urban incarnation of the common man, as the train bears him “forever out of magic to all the grime and sweat and violence of the city, the unceasing city, the million-footed city, and into America” (598).

The concluding books of Of Time and the River recount a third stage of educational expatriation: Eugene Gant’s 1924–25 European journey, toward the end of which he begins to write the narratives that would be his life-work. Having left behind the metropolitan eastern United States for Europe, Eugene encounters resident Britons and traveling Americans who have no good word for New World culture. Overseas, and specifically in France, however, Eugene eventually comes to productive terms with history and homeland by viewing them from the enlightening triangular perspective constructed by complementing “North”and “South” with “Abroad.” As Thomas Wolfe also did, Eugene Gant transcends binary oppositions and takes on the task that Timothy Weiss assigns “the exiled artist”: “to transform the figure of rupture back into a figure of connection” (x). Having found doors inexorably closed against him in England (despite consanguinity and a shared language), Eugene comes to Paris. The channel crossing is marked in Of Time and the River by a catalog of names of French writers. Because of rather than despite the foreignness of the language, Eugene insists on buying and deciphering books and more books, “tearing desperately at the contents of unnumbered volumes, with a tortured hunger of frustration, an aching brain, a dictionary in one hand, and one of these slick and flimsy little volumes in another” (656– 57). His virtual ignorance of French renders him helpless in interactions with Parisians, and it is one of two circumstances that force Eugene (as they did Wolfe) to “start over” in this new land. The other was the theft of the manuscript of his play, the work upon which his hopes as a writer were based. Its loss forces him to rewrite and rename the lost drama, and leads eventually to a conversion to narrative.

Thus Eugene’s initial relationship with France is linguistic and literary. Imagining the intellectual life of Old-World artists to be easier than his own tormented struggles for knowledge and expression, Eugene begins to look back toward a homeland less gifted than legendary France: “[F]ar, far away from all this certain grace, this ease of form, this assured attaining of expression—there lay America—and all the dumb hunger of its hundred million tongues, its unfound form, its unborn art” (660).

The frustrations of life abroad tempt a homesick Eugene to retreat, but expatriate experience also prompts him to think hard about the state of American literature. Journal entries dated from November and December 1924 and interpolated into Of Time and the River’s retrospective narrative reveal Eugene’s immediate if theoretical conclusion: “Instead of whining, that we have no traditions, or that we must learn by keeping constantly in touch with European models, or by keeping away from them, we should get busy telling some of the stories about America that have never been told” (669–70). Having already noted the hypocrisy, lies, and falseness of his native land, as well as its “cruelty, savagery, horror, error, loss and waste of life,” Eugene has come to a most illogical realization:

Eugene’s yearning for home is allayed when, on New Year’s Eve 1924, he encounters Francis Starwick from Harvard and his Bostonian traveling companions. A touristic interlude spent in the company of these jaded compatriots postpones the imaginative return that Eugene has longed for and hinders his efforts to absorb French literature, art, and language. Rebuked by the sophisticates for tiresomely asking for translations, Eugene defends himself: “. . . If I don’t ask, how am I going to find out?” (696). In the company of Starwick, Elinor, and Ann, Eugene Gant gains ironic insight into the affectation of assumed cultural superiority. Judgments previously passed implicitly on supposedly less enlightened regions of America now fall explicitly upon the whole of the nation. Despite Eugene’s apparent complacence, the text encodes his resistance to disparagement of American language and life. Inevitably, Eugene quarrels with these companions and parts company with sneering sarcasm and parasitic existence.

Outside Paris, Eugene experiences a different France and passes to a new stage of the education offered by expatriation. “Although exile begins with a split,” as Timothy Weiss observes, “it carries the possibility for new exchanges and connectedness: the understanding of one’s self, culture, and society through the lens of other persons, cultures, and societies” (5). The first chapter of book 6, tellingly entitled “Antaeus: Earth Again,” has Eugene on a train traveling from Paris to Orléans. After some tentative overtures, an old peasant undertakes to teach him French:

The old man continues his work, very slowly and patiently teaching Eugene two more words: “la pluie” and “la terre.” At last:

In a foreign country and through a foreign tongue, Eugene learns lessons essential to his development as an artist. Starting fresh, he learns again to use language and to develop his own voice. He learns too of the need to connect with the natural world, with sun, rain, and earth.

The south-bound train has yet another lesson in store, this one not about earth but about people. Eugene’s “good-natured” fellow-passengers all “seemed to know one another, if not actually by name, with the even completer familiarity of race and kind and region” (803). Among them, “[o]ne man in particular dominated the whole train with his jolly energy, his vulgar and high-spirited good nature. . . . The voice, to a foreigner, was at once inimitably strange in accent, quality and intonation, and yet familiar as all life, all living.” This man’s voice, the narrative tells us, would long remain with Eugene: “A thousand times thereafter the tone of that rich voice would return to him and reverberate in his memory. . . ” (803). The Frenchman’s jokes and irreverent commentaries operate to trigger memories from Eugene’s own past. He recalls the raucous interchanges that took place at “a little country town in the South at which, on his way to and from college, he had stopped a dozen times at just this hour” (804):