Politics & Power Quote by John C. Hawkes

Not feeling like an exile is a provocative claim precisely because Hawkes was the kind of American novelist whose work could make “America” feel like a hostile genre. The line has the clean, declarative chill of a passport stamp: no drama, no grievance, no romance of the outsider. That restraint is the point. Hawkes is rejecting the familiar expatriate mythology in which leaving the country doubles as a moral position and the artist performs alienation as proof of seriousness.

The subtext is less patriotic than aesthetic. For Hawkes, “America” isn’t merely a geography that can be exited; it’s a set of pressures, images, and tonal habits that cling to the writer wherever he goes. Saying he doesn’t feel exiled implies that the material is portable: the psyche, the violence, the comedy, the noise. It’s also a quiet rebuke to the idea that cultural legitimacy must be earned abroad, as if Paris were a finishing school for American sentences.

Context matters: Hawkes’s reputation sits closer to the avant-garde than the mainstream, a novelist admired intensely by other writers, not reliably embraced by the market. The “exile” he refuses may be less about national belonging than about literary belonging. He’s insisting that marginality isn’t the same as banishment, that being out of step with American taste doesn’t mean being outside America. It’s an assertion of ownership: he can be elsewhere and still claim the country’s imagination as his native terrain.