An Exiled Expatriate’s Time Travel to Cosmopolitanism and his Living the American Dream: A Study with Reference to E.E. Cummings’ The Enormous Room

Abstract

The World War I was indeed a great shocker to the global consciousness. Though the war officially ended in 1918, the trauma it left in the psyche of the entire human race was surely going to take long to heal. The Central Powers were defeated and the Treaty of Versailles sealed the fate of Germany. It is however curious to note that apart from taking thousands of innocent lives, and leaving almost everyone disillusioned regarding the aura of the battle, the World War also stimulated the condition of transnationality. Today, as inhabitants of a cosmopolitan world, we may find E.E Cummings’ emphasis on the idea of ‘deterritorialization’ in his autobiographical novel The Enormous Room, to be of accentuating relevance. The novel depicts the author’s experience in a detention camp of France, where he and his friend William Slater Brown were held up under suspicion of treason during World War I. The room in which they were detained, united the prisoners of Dutch, Belgian, Spanish, Turkish, Arabian, Polish, Russian, Swedish, German, French, English and American origin. Having gained acquaintance with them, Cummings came to realize the false notions of superior national identity and uncritical patriotism. This paper intends to highlight how Cummings traces his transformation from an American expatriate to a French exile and finally to an individual who vindicates the paramountcy of humanity over national, patriotic and political interests. Moreover, Cummings’ imprisonment also gave him the opportunity to live the American Dream. In other words, the protagonist’s arduous journey to freedom can be seen as a metaphor of his liberation from restrictive nationalistic ideas, towards the celebration of a transnational identity which incorporates the idea of un monde un rêve to its fullest extent.