City and landscape of remembering: The visual textual palimpsest of Alexandria in Lawrence Durrell's Justine and Balthazar

Abstract

Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria quartet is a tetralogy which explores the multi-perspectival nature of truth and reality. Using the first two novels, Justine and Balthazar, this article will briefly explore the palimpsestic surface traces of Alexandria and surrounding landscape as they are recalled through the memories of the character-narrator Darley. The inscription of these memories will be seen as many-coloured, prismatic, intangible and unstable, creating a city and landscape that are neither real nor unreal, but heterotopic. The article will examine how recall of the past visually and textually maps the city and its landscape through the stylistic use of metaphoric and painterly imagery within the palimpsest of memory.