Politics & Power Quote by Harry Mathews

A sentence that pretends to be small talk but actually performs a quiet severing. Harry Mathews frames departure not as a dramatic break with a homeland, but as an administrative fact: his "relationship to America" was "very limited". The wording is pointedly impersonal. Not "I felt alienated" or "I was fed up", but relationship, as if citizenship were a contract, a correspondence, a set of mutual obligations that can lapse. It undercuts the expected romance of exile and replaces it with cool accounting.

That coolness fits Mathews's larger sensibility: a writer shaped by Oulipo constraint and by a taste for sidestepping confession. The subtext is that attachment is not inevitable; it is constructed, maintained, or neglected. "At the time I left" matters because it refuses the audience's desire for a permanent stance. He's not issuing an anti-American manifesto. He's describing a historical moment in a life, the way you might describe a job you once had and outgrew. The effect is almost deadpan, but the deadpan carries its own critique: if a person can leave a country with only a "limited" relationship, what does that say about the country's ability to claim him?

It also gestures toward the mid-century American artist's dilemma: a nation loud with identity claims, and a cosmopolitan literary world increasingly centered elsewhere. Mathews makes the exit sound mundane, which is precisely the provocation. The shock isn't that he left. It's how little leaving had to mean.