The Ideal City: Heterotopia or Panopticon? On Joseph Brodsky’s Play <i>Marbles</i> and Its Fictional Spaces

In 1972, Joseph Brodsky, the renowned Russian poet expatriate, the Nobel Prize winner, the Andrew Mellon Professor of Literature at Mount Holyoke College, began his exilic ‘‘quest for significance,’’ since the democratic state, the place of his e´migre´ inhabitant (America), provided him with ‘‘the physical safety but render[ed] him socially insignificant. And the lack of significance is what no writer, exile or not, can take’’ (Brodsky, ‘‘Condition’’ 4). For Brodsky, this quest was a welcome one. He understood exile as a lesson in humility that teaches one existential essentials and puts one’s journey ‘‘into the longest possible perspective’’ (5). For Brodsky, exile became a pursuit in creativity, a spiritual and aesthetic expedition, and a condition that generated new energy and ideas. Brodsky’s expulsion became a creative paradigm rather than a state of constant suffering, disorientation, and displacement. It caused an expansion of his artistic interests when the Russian poet not only willingly embraced his forced bilingualism but also found it stimulating to think, to write, and to teach in English. Moreover, the exilic condition necessitated his investigation of the forms of writing that he had regarded as ‘‘foreign’’ when living at home. Thus his life in distant lands made Brodsky not only write in a new language but also explore the artistic challenges of composing prose and drama not poetry. These other venues became Brodsky’s new creative territories, the manifestation of his adaptability and hybridization, the creolization if not of his everyday then of his artistic tongue. Accordingly, this article discusses Joseph Brodsky’s play Marbles (1982) and argues that the play offers a representation of the Platonic city – a modern version of the ideal metropolis, based on the tendencies of geopathology and nostalgia, and the crossroads of exilic narratives registered within cityscapes from the period of the Enlightenment on. It becomes an exilic writer’s projection not only of his past experience with the state but also of his understanding of how his adopted country, a model democracy, is, in fact, treating its citizens.

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