Alexandria Quartet Research Articles

Blind Medusa: The Portrayal of Liza Pursewarden in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet

In Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, the major female characters, Justine and Clea, each have their own eponymous books. However, minor female characters in the novels have notably received more limited scholarly attention. This article will consider one of these marginal female characters, Liza Pursewarden, who appears in both the novels Mountolive and Clea. I will argue that the portrayal of Liza, by David Mountolive, her brother Ludwig Pursewarden and the character L. G. Darley, moulds her into a Gothicised fetish object onto which they project their fear of castration and lack.

Durrell Re-read: Crossing the Liminal in Lawrence Durrell's Major Novels by James M. Clawson

Reviewed by: Durrell Re-read: Crossing the Liminal in Lawrence Durrell's Major Novels by James M. Clawson Anthony Hirst (bio) James M. Clawson, Durrell Re-read: Crossing the Liminal in Lawrence Durrell's Major Novels. Lanham, MD: Farleigh Dickinson University Press. 2016. Pp. 176. Cloth $78.00. James M. Clawson invites us to see Lawrence Durrell's twelve major novels as a unity, an oeuvre—or opus, as he prefers to call it—but also as a process, a development. The twelve novels are The Black Book (1938), The Alexandria Quartet (1956–1960), the novel pair Tunc and Nunquam (1968 and 1970, known collectively as The Revolt of Aphrodite) and The Avignon Quintet (1974–1985). [End Page 576] Clawson starts from Durrell's own plan of the opus, announced in 1945 in a letter to T. S. Eliot and based on modern critics' debatable view of the structure of Greek tragedy: agon, pathos, anagnorisis. At the time, only The Black Book (the agon) had been published; later the Quartet was identified as the pathos and the Quintet as the anagnorisis. To account for the Revolt, Richard Pine later proposed—and Durrell concurred in this—the missing fourth term sparagmos (Pine 2005, 53). The scheme, however, is not a reliable basis for understanding the opus, since, as Clawson does not quite acknowledge in his endnotes (18nn6–8), Durrell misunderstood the meaning of two of the terms (Chamberlin 2019, 70n4); but then Clawson makes little further use of the scheme. We should not ignore the Greek context of much of Durrell's writing. Leaving aside his semi-fictional accounts of periods of residence in Corfu, Rhodes, and Cyprus, and restricting ourselves to the opus, we can note that, although he is writing mainly of an earlier part of his life in London, the primary narrator of The Black Book is writing on a remote Greek headland in the Ionian Sea (and the narrator's and/or author's timeline on the last page refers to Koloura in Corfu); in the Quartet, again, the primary narrator, Darley, trying to recreate on paper his past life in Alexandria, is doing so on an unnamed Greek island in the Aegean, which he leaves in Clea (the fourth volume, 1960) to return to Alexandria, though the novel (and the Quartet) concludes with him back on the island, for few weeks only, contemplating an uncertain future; much of Tunc is set in Athens and other parts of mainland Greece, though the focus is shifting towards Istanbul (the principal location of the companion novel Nunquam)—a rather Greek Istanbul regularly referred to as "Polis." Only in The Avignon Quintet is Greece left behind, as the title suggests; but by then Durrell himself had long been settled in France, though he still hankered from time to time to return to Greece, where he had spent six formative years (1935–1941) that were followed by two years on Rhodes, not then a part of Greece (1945–1947), and three years in Cyprus (1953–1956). I read Clawson's book with an almost uninterrupted sense of intellectual unease. But, to be fair to Clawson, it was the same unease that I always experience in reading eight of the twelve novels involved—that is, all but the four novels of The Alexandria Quartet, where my unease is only occasional. Most of Durrell's major characters, and especially his narrators think too much, and tell us too much about what they think; and most of them think in the same way, obsessed with the relation of "reality" to fiction and with the nature of being an "artist." Much of their thinking could be described by the derogatory term opinionated. Darley, the narrator of three of the four novels of the Quartet, is not exempt from this, but his agonizing and posturing are tempered by the focus [End Page 577] on his own fallibility and the presence of a supposedly superior intellectual and artist in the novelist and diplomat Pursewarden, the principal thinker—and least convincing character—in the Quartet, which is (except for the third-person omniscient narration of the third volume, Mountolive) essentially a Bildungsroman or, to use the more precise...

Lessons from literature for psychotherapy practice and research1.

Insights from the study of literature can inform and clarify concepts to guide psychotherapy practice and research. The author offers instances from narrative fiction (Durrell's Alexandria Quartet) and poetry (Hopkins, Baudelaire) to illustrate how the formulation of experience in words that are evocative (vs. ordinary), original (vs. trite), and precise (vs. approximate) are able to capture attention, move the emotions, and challenge beliefs; and how linkages among experiences, vividly and precisely expressed, create and enhance narrative meaning-revealing the inherent relativity of individual meanings and the need to consider the aggregate of relevant perspectives in every interpersonal situation.

The mutilated Gothic heroine: The figure of Clea in Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria quartet

ABSTRACTThe Gothic heroine is generally depicted as innocent, morally blameless, beautiful and often blonde. Threatened by a powerful and villainous male figure, she is enclosed in a confining space, whether a house, a castle or an abbey. In Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria quartet, the character Clea is portrayed as just such a Gothic heroine. Like any good heroine, Clea is threatened by the powerful and evil desire of a Gothic villain whose death seemingly results in his spectral and vengeful return from the dead into the world of the living. Through a close textual reading of the Quartet, I shall examine how Clea’s transgression of her role as blameless, doll-like heroine results in the forcible fragmentation of her body and her reconstruction as a mutilated and prosthetic Gothic other.

Modernism: Keywords by Melba Cuddy-Keane, Adam Hammond, and Alexandra Peat

Melba Cuddy-Keane, Adam Hammond, and Alexandra Peat. Modernism: Keywords. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. xviii, 266. $112.95. Modernism: Keywords opens with a direct gesture to its predecessor, Raymond Williams's 1976 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, while also marking out its principal differences: the narrower focus on modernism, the integration of digital technologies used in a manner loosely akin to Moretti's distant reading, and a rich hyperlinking (in print) of the thematic nodes of each alphabetized entry. That is, the print book adopts the curatorial and editorial elucidation of each topic that would be expected from a tertiary source while drawing inspiration from the humanities computing scenarios in which alternate relations might emerge through digital technologies. The accomplishment here is akin to the prospects of the Linked Modernisms project that is being developed from the metadata of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. The comparison is not opportunistic. It points to the most valuable element of Modernism: Keywords: the relational work it is likely to provoke as readers follow its various suggested connections through overlapping keywords across the book. The prospect of a modernist choose your own adventure scenario seems too good to be true, and the invitation to the reader's agency calls back to later works like Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet or Julio Cortazar's Rayuela--again, it is not an opportunistic comparison, pointing as it does to readerly organization of narrative and complex interpretive responsibilities that shape the relations among the texts. The reader may move across the volume or dip into specific keyword entries, but in each entry there are gestures to further work through the specific invitations to follow more deeply into the scholarly references or across to other entries. For example, the keyword entry on Sentimental, Sentimentality points in its closing to other linked entries, most productively to Form, Formalism and Woman, New Woman but also in its references out to other important relationships to the Harlem Renaissance through Alain Locke's Enter the New Negro and the High Modernists via E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence. An additional benefit of this associative method, or what Henry Miller would have called spiral form (yet again, a purposive gesture), is that it draws in a cast of figures too often sidelined from the New Modernist Studies. While Ezra Pound, H.G. Wells, Woolf, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Forster, and T.S. Eliot are ubiquitous across the entries, there are also passing inclusions of the too often overlooked H.D. in Reality, Realism; John Cowper Powys in Queer, Gay and Shock, Shell Shock; and Mulk Raj Anand in Personality, Impersonality. More extensive recuperations across several entries occur for Eugene Jolas, Robert Graves, Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B. Du Bois, Laura Riding, and Jean Toomer while Rebecca West, Dorothy Richardson, I.A. Richards, and Mina Loy are as extensively integrated across the volume as any of the High Modernists. Cuddy-Keane, Hammond, and Peat describe the method for developing each quasi-encyclopedic keyword entry by recognizing Research on such a grand scale depends on massive (xv) such as online digital repositories of primary texts such as digitized book projects (ranging from Project Gutenberg through Internet Archive), historical periodical collections in proprietary and open access resources (JSTOR to the Modernist Journals Project and beyond), and the expected scholarly resources of bibliographies, repositories of secondary scholarship, and traditional print library holdings. The implications are akin to Moretti's distant reading in that searches across such a large pool of resources can enable connections and understandings unavailable to a single reader in a lifetime of reading, but the forms of distant reading through digital technologies for which Moretti's project has garnered wide attention do not play the same kind of role here. …

The Urban Gothic City in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet

Although the city in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet has received a great deal of scholarly attention as an urban space and place, there has been limited engagement with the Gothic tropes located in Durrell’s representation of the city. I will examine how urban Gothic themes such as a sense of claustrophobic enclosure, the active agency of the city, and the haunting return of the past are significant to the representation of Durrell’s Alexandria. In addition, the concept of abjection, detailed by Julia Kristeva in her work Powers of Horror (1982. New York: Columbia University Press), will be central to my exploration of Durrell’s Alexandria as an urban Gothic space, one that is at once menacing and inviting. The abject produces an effect of horror, specifically one that is uncanny in its disruption of the familiar, threatening the certainty of the self, and creating a sense of dread and anxiety. In The Alexandria Quartet, this disruption is caused not only by the uncanny, but also by the Gothic, and is accompanied by a sense of something loathsome, and a compulsion to repeat the experience. Consequently, my contention is that Durrell’s city is an active urban Gothic space, which functions as an uncanny mechanism of return.

Modernism: Keywords by Melba Cuddy-Keane, Adam Hammond, and Alexandra Peat

Reviewed by: Modernism: Keywords by Melba Cuddy-Keane, Adam Hammond, and Alexandra Peat James Gifford Melba Cuddy-Keane, Adam Hammond, and Alexandra Peat. Modernism: Keywords. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014. xviii, 266. $112.95. Modernism: Keywords opens with a direct gesture to its predecessor, Raymond Williams’s 1976 Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, while also marking out its principal differences: the narrower focus on modernism, the integration of digital technologies used in a manner loosely akin to Moretti’s distant reading, and a rich hyperlinking (in print) of the thematic nodes of each alphabetized entry. That is, the print book adopts the curatorial and editorial elucidation of each topic that would be expected from a tertiary source while drawing inspiration from the humanities computing scenarios in which alternate relations might emerge through digital technologies. The accomplishment here is akin to the prospects of the Linked Modernisms project that is being developed from the metadata of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. The comparison is not opportunistic. It points to the most valuable element of Modernism: Keywords: the relational work it is likely to provoke as readers follow its various suggested connections through overlapping keywords across the book. The prospect of a modernist “choose your own adventure” scenario seems too good to be true, and the invitation to the reader’s agency calls back to later works like Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet or Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela—again, it is not an opportunistic comparison, pointing as it does to readerly organization of narrative and complex interpretive responsibilities that shape the relations among the texts. The reader may move across the volume or dip into specific keyword entries, but in each entry there are gestures to further work through the specific invitations to follow more deeply into the scholarly references or across to other entries. For example, the keyword entry on “Sentimental, Sentimentality” points in its closing to other linked entries, most productively to “Form, Formalism” and “Woman, New Woman” but also in its references out to other important relationships to the Harlem Renaissance through Alain Locke’s “Enter the New Negro” and the High Modernists via E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence. An additional benefit of this associative method, or what Henry Miller would have called “spiral form” (yet again, a purposive gesture), is that it draws in a cast of figures too often sidelined from the New Modernist Studies. While Ezra Pound, H.G. Wells, Woolf, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Forster, and T.S. Eliot are ubiquitous across the entries, there are also passing inclusions of the too often over-looked [End Page 244] H. D. in “Reality, Realism”; John Cowper Powys in “Queer, Gay” and “Shock, Shell Shock”; and Mulk Raj Anand in “Personality, Impersonality.” More extensive recuperations across several entries occur for Eugene Jolas, Robert Graves, Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, Laura Riding, and Jean Toomer while Rebecca West, Dorothy Richardson, I. A. Richards, and Mina Loy are as extensively integrated across the volume as any of the High Modernists. Cuddy-Keane, Hammond, and Peat describe the method for developing each quasi-encyclopedic keyword entry by recognizing “Research on such a grand scale depends on massive resources” (xv) such as online digital repositories of primary texts such as digitized book projects (ranging from Project Gutenberg through Internet Archive), historical periodical collections in proprietary and open access resources (jstor to the Modernist Journals Project and beyond), and the expected scholarly resources of bibliographies, repositories of secondary scholarship, and traditional print library holdings. The implications are akin to Moretti’s distant reading in that searches across such a large pool of resources can enable connections and understandings unavailable to a single reader in a lifetime of reading, but the forms of distant reading through digital technologies for which Moretti’s project has garnered wide attention do not play the same kind of role here. Nevertheless, the curated nature of the volume, reflecting the care and attention of expert readers in the field, means that readers are invited to connect entries in unexpected ways drawn as much from word frequencies as from the interpretive expertise of the project authors. While the entry on...

The Ancient Egyptian Context of The Alexandria Quartet

The Ancient Egyptian Context of The Alexandria Quartet

Waterscapes as Other Spaces in Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet

SummaryThe mirage with its disruptive and deceptive phantasmagorical features is an image repeated in many of the numerous waterscapes located in Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet. Viewed through memory, the topographical reality of the Quartet’s water- scapes becomes a space of illusion and yet, at the same time, a real space perfectly ordered, except that it seems to remain outside of time. Hence, Durrell's water- scapes ambivalently play between the real and unreal of Other spaces in a single space. This essay examines selected waterscapes in The Alexandria Quartet through the theoretical and imaginative lens of Michel Foucault's conceptualisation of the heterotopia. It is contended that the mirror of the heterotopia, with its distortion of time, offers an important theoretical entry into reading Durrell's waterscapes as Other spaces. However, related to this, the article argues that Durrell's excessive and uncanny representation of these waterscapes, as remote and unreal places, acts to disturb a sense of reality, thereby establishing these Other spaces as both heterotopic and Gothic loci.

Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive

Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive

The flâneuse and the City as uncanny home in Lawrence Durrell’s <i>The Alexandria quartet</i>

The concept of the home is not something that can be readily associated with Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria quartet. Generally, the word home is defined as a place where one lives, a house or dwelling. The idea of home is associated with the architectural construct of the house, as both a place and a space. With this in mind, I approach the conceptualisation of the house as representative of safety and happy remembrance from a somewhat different premise, exploring Durrell’s representation of Alexandria as an enclosing womb-like home that voraciously consumes her inhabitants. Although Durrell’s Alexandria has been considered by scholars from many angles, I propose my position represents a rather different approach to the manner in which the city has previously been examined. Durrell’s city, as uncanny home, will be shown to create her residents as fragments of her own consciousness, and this is particularly true of the character Justine. The narrator Darley’s memories of Justine moving through the streets of the city evoke her in the guise of a flâneuse and this flânerie, I go on to suggest, establishes a symbiosis between herself and the city, setting up an interplay through which Justine becomes the proxy for the city as unhomely home.

Femme fatale: A visual/textual reading of the figuration of Justine in Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria quartet

This article considers the themes that shape the female character, Justine, in Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria quartet. Adopting a feminist Gothic position, I shall consider how Justine's portrayal as a femme fatale makes her a vehicle for Durrell's articulation of a misogynistic perspective throughout his tetralogy. Throughout the article, my contention will be that Durrell's deployment of certain Gothic motifs, in this instance the vampire, automaton, marionette and doll, alongside the trope of the femme fatale, fashion Justine's embodiment as a monstrous-feminine Other and the locus of masculine fears. My reading will also adopt the rather unconventional position of reading art images into Durrell's narrative, in order to become a critical interpreter of his textual-visuality.

British Literary Responses to the Suez Crisis

By the 1950s, the Suez Canal was crucial for Britain's trade in the Middle East, for its communication with overseas dependencies and for its containment of Soviet influence in Africa. The sudden nationalisation of the canal in July 1956 by Gamal Abdul Nasser, and the obstruction of British military intercession by the United States, struck a blow to the prestige of the nation that resonated in the work of British novelists for decades to come. This essay examines the discursive responses to the Suez Crisis in such texts as John Fowles' Daniel Martin (1977), Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet (1957–60) and Olivia Manning's The Levant Trilogy (1977–80), analysing its links to orientalism, anti-Americanism, Cold War hostilities and fears about British national decline.

The City and its Ontology in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet

Durrell situates his version of Alexandria on a cosmogonic site as limned by Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu. For more than twenty years, Durrell had been studying these Taoist philosophers whose ontological views opened new doors for him so that he could write about the self in the way he wished.

Introduction

Introduction Dawne McCance Even my New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought betrays some ambivalence about the meaning of “modernity.” The book (which does not include an entry on its title word “modern”) defines “modernity” as a term “sometimes used to refer simply to recent times,” but increasingly to denote “a phase in societal development”; also “sometimes seen as dating from the Enlightenment of 17th and 18th century Europe, sometimes from the development of industrial society in the 19th century” (540). A similarly fluid “modernity” emerges from this issue, not as a term defined but as significant nonetheless to the discussion undertaken in at least three of the following essays. In “Hiding in Plain Sight: Problems of Modernist Self-Representation in the Encounter Between Adolf Loos and Josephine Baker,” for instance, Christina Svendsen remarks that Das Andere, or The Other, the journal founded by Loos, “performs an exhortatory celebration of modernity.” At the same time, for Loos, “modernity is a fragmented, diachronic space inhabited by individuals from vastly different time periods who can nonetheless cross paths with one another and even communicate—albeit with predictable misunderstandings and conflicts.” Working through a number of sources in “Realism and the Discursive Dynamics of the Popular Periodical, 1900–1930,” Janet G. Casey mentions modernity’s “alienating effects,” advertising’s “paradoxical role ‘as both apostle of modernity and buffer against the effects of modern impersonalities of scale,’” and the camera, with its supposed [End Page v] objectivity, “‘as one of modernity’s most powerful emblems of the subjectivity of perception and of knowledge.’” And what of modernity and melancholia? Banu Helvacıoglu’s “Melancholy and Hüzün in Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul,” adding to the diversity of this issue’s “modernity,” suggests that “Pamuk yields to the depressive mood of melancholy/hüzün, but at the same time, by contemplating his mood in an aesthetic and historical context, he transforms collectively experienced resignation into a creative endeavour to understand the specific historicity and spatiality of Istanbul. This understanding makes it possible to explore how melancholy in aesthetic production transverses with melancholy as a historical condition of modernity and with melancholy as a cultural condition.” In the process of elaborating this thesis, Helvacıoglu offers a rich reflection on mourning and loss, not only in Pamuk’s own writing and in the works of the Turkish writers he analyzes, but also in Western modernity. The essay closes by noting a number of intersections in Pamuk’s narration, “between the historical and the timeless, between the Istanbullu and the imaginary Western traveller and between black mood and sweet melancholy,” each “tailored such that the reader is left with life-affirming choices and a deep sigh by which to remember death.” And, following from this life-death “intersection,” allow me to close by alerting Mosaic readers to an international, interdisciplinary conference, A matter of lifedeath, to be held at the University of Manitoba from October 1–4, 2014. A conference Call for Papers can be found on page 179 of this issue and on the journal’s website (www.umanitoba.ca/mosaic). The conference will feature five outstanding keynote speakers—Andrea Carlino, Françoise Dastur, David Palumbo-Liu, H. Peter Steeves, Elisabeth Weber—and promises to be an extraordinary event. Don’t miss it! Dr. James Raymond Morrison, whose essay “The City and its Ontology in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet” is published in this issue, passed away in Vancouver on February 22, 2013, after a brief illness. With Dr. Morrison too ill to do so himself, his nephew, Tom Mahaffey, guided the essay through the pre-publication copy-edit, telling us that it was a frequent topic of conversation between them prior to his uncle’s death. Mosaic wishes to acknowledge Dr. Morrison’s expertise on Lawrence Durrell and to express our sincere condolences to his family members, who now look forward to seeing his essay in print. Works Cited Bullock, Alan, and Stephen Trombley, eds. The New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought. 3rd ed. London: HarperCollins, 1999. Print. [End Page vi] Google Scholar Copyright © 2013 Mosaic

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

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.

The Alexandria Quartet : A Reconsideration

The Alexandria QuartetA Reconsideration Frank Kersnowski (bio) As I remember, and lived, the fifties were not nearly as dull as much of the fiction of the time depicted them. Not everyone aspired to middle-class mobility and morality: from an apartment in the city to a ranch house in the suburbs to a mock Tudor in a subdivision in the country. And not everyone was angry because such a trajectory was impeded by moral slips such as adultery or public intoxication. Tax loopholes, after all, could eventually cover such lapses. But finding fiction occupied with other concerns was difficult. This is why I am indebted to Herbert Howarth. As a graduate student in the Irish Studies Program at the University of Kansas (Kansas was also a great deal livelier than its usual depiction), I was fascinated by Yeats, Joyce, O’Casey, and O’Brien. The real change for me occurred when Herbert Howarth came to talk with us about his new book, The Irish Writers, 1880–1940. His most animated talk was devoted to a series of novels by his friend Lawrence Durrell—The Alexandria Quartet. Howarth and Durrell had served abroad for King and Country; but, while Howarth dutifully slogged away, at the desk next to him, Durrell was nonchalant about his official duties and spent most of his time working on the novels that would bring him fame. To exist in separate realities was intrinsic to Durrell’s life and writing, and not simply because he was bipolar, though that duality is immeasurably important. Perhaps being Anglo-Indian gave him a sense of conflicting realities, or maybe it was because he was smarter than anyone else and chose not to go to university. Whatever the cause, he had a magician’s understanding of the world: give the audience (or the lover) something to concentrate on while creating the reality that is really important. Ah, misdirection. And the reality he gives us in the Alexandria of his narrator Darley is fascinating as much for the justification of the place and people as for what actually occurred. From the beginning of the [End Page 381] beginning that is the opening of Justine, we are told that we are not in the literature of the suburbs anymore: Five races, five languages, a dozen creeds: five fleets turning through their greasy reflections behind the harbour bar. But there are more than five sexes and only demotic Greek seems to distinguish among them. The sexual provender which lies to hand is staggering in its variety and profusion. You would never mistake it for a happy place. The symbolic lovers of the free Hellenic world are replaced here by something different, something subtly androgynous, inverted upon itself. The Orient cannot rejoice in the sweet anarchy of the body—for it has outstripped the body. I remember Nessim once saying—I think he was quoting—that Alexandria was the great winepress of love; those who emerged from it were the sick men, the solitaries, the prophets—I mean all who have been deeply wounded in their sex. At this point one could easily say, except for the penchant for orientalism, Durrell could be writing about Lawrence, Kansas, in 1959. But there is the orientalism, perhaps stained deep in the psyche, and certainly in the prose style, of a man who never forgot his birthplace in the Himalayas and who would return to write about the Levant with all the fascination of someone watching a catastrophe so extensive that only martial law could regain moral order. And armies don’t impose moral order. In fact they seem to relish the absence of a moral order or the presence of one so estranged from their own as to seem nonexistent. In the exotic estranged culture of Alexandria, Durrell allowed his narrator Darley to tell his version of its flora and fauna, those who thought they lived and loved without the restraint of local customs, who thought they were protected by their wealth or by their protective coloration as expatriates, people who could be ignored even if they thought the sun was theirs and theirs alone. Their world is a small one in which everyone has a...

Color, space, and creativity: art and ontology in five British writers

This study of color, space, and creativity focuses on texts by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Joyce Cary, Lawrence Durrell, and A. S. Byatt. author examines Woolf's structural use of color in To the Lighthouse and Lawrence's colorful visualizing of place in Sea and Sardinia and the Letters. Lawrence interprets the creative process in Apocalypse, tracing spiral rhythms that culminate in vision, while Cary, in The Horse's Mouth, dramatizes an artist's vision of 'the world of colour'. Durrell expands the power of color through metaphor in his islandscapes and in The Alexandria Quartet distills the city's ethos in a 'cyclorama' that fuses sensations and memories.The final four chapters focus on Byatt's novels, starting with the creative-critical dialectic of The Shadows of the Sun and hyper-intense perception in The Virgin in the Garden. Painting comes to full bloom in Still Life, where Van Gogh's study of a breakfast table inspires a surrogate writer to compare words and paint. In The Matisse Stories Byatt improvises on the artist's color combinations and compositional philosophy. Highlighting interactions of color, space, and creativity that take on ontological dimensions, Stewart's study will lead to ongoing reflections on the roles of color and space in modernist texts. Jack Stewart is Professor Emeritus at the University of British Columbia.

Günter Grass's 'Danzig Quintet': Explorations in the Memory and History of the Nazi Era from 'Die Blechtrommel' to 'Im Krebsgang' by Katharina HallConstructing Authorship in the Work of Günter Grass. (Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs) by Rebecca Braun

MLR, 104.3, 2009 921 G?nter Grass's 'Danzig Quintet': Explorations in the Memory and History of the Nazi Era from 'Die Blechtrommel' to 'ImKrebsgang. By Katharina Hall. Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang. 2007. 215 pp. ?29. ISBN 978-3-03-910901-2. Constructing Authorship in the Work ofG?nter Grass. By Rebecca Braun. (Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs) Oxford: Clarendon Press. 2008. ix+i97pp. ?55. ISBN 878-0-19-954270-3. Grass's literary career, as it approaches its inevitable end, resembles the finale of a professional firework display. You never quite know which will have been the ultimate surprise and when it will be time to startapplauding. These two fine,bright books are both responses towhat must by now be nearly the entire spectacular event. In their complementary ways theyboth take the long view ofGrass's development, and if theywere both taken by surprise by the publication of Beim H?uten der Zwiebel, theydo theirbest not to show it. Katharina Hall's book links themost recent fiction by Grass, Im Krebsgang (an other,Die Box, has appeared since these studies were published), with his earlier fictions, theDanzig Trilogy (as it was baptized by JohnReddick in the sixties, enlist ing the erotic-aesthetic frisson of Lawrence Durreli's then controversial Alexandria Quartet), and ?rtlich bet?ubt, which, if it isnot set inDanzig, is significantly about remembering it.This makes up theDanzig Quintet, now seen as a lifelong project devoted to the subject ofmemory. (Given the popularity ofmemory studies in the humanities in recent decades, it isodd thatHall takes no account of the central con tributionmade to them by Janand Aleida Assmann.) The identification of these five texts (two novels, twoNovellen, and something inbetween) as a significant grouping is timely and persuasive. One critical gain is the re-evaluation of ?rtlich bet?ubt, which, as a transitional text, had come to be overlooked. More fundamentally, the shape ofHall's argument brings out how Grass's recent return to first-person narrative, to the travails of remembering, and to the kaleidoscopic effects of how autobiography and history interact, does indeed point up how immersed he had been fordecades in the contemporary world, and how far thathad taken him from his poetic wellspring in remembrance. Hall makes a strong distinction between memory as testimony and memory as representation. Her lucid analyses of Grass's texts are guided by this distinction, which she anchors in Freudian and especially Lacanian psychoanalytical categories. These are explained for the reader with exemplary patience and clarity in an early chapter, and successfully focus her strong line of argument. Memory as testimony is responsible and socialized: it is Symbolic. Memory as representation is Imaginary. It is ego-controlled but irresponsible. This enables Hall to classify the different memory practices employed byGrass in the elaboration of his fictions, and subtly to expound authorial emphasis and evaluation. The results are thoroughly illuminating, providing an anatomy ofGrass's ability towrite wayward magic' fiction at the same time as confronting guilt and shame more creatively and honestly thanmost other authors of his generation writing inGerman. One justwonders whether a Habermasian moral agenda (although Habermas is 922 Reviews not mentioned) has not been smuggled in behind the psychoanalytical terms, such thatSymbolic (as in: the ability todeal with complexity and lack) isalways good, and Imaginary (as in: coloured by the subject's drives) is always bad. The deployment of psychoanalytical terms drags with it therapeutic evaluations: you need to grow up and livewith difference; a dose of 'die schwarze K?chin' is good foryou.While an analyst needs to help his or her clients in certain situations tomake adjustments in relation to symbolic and imaginary identifications, and while Habermas should certainly be admired for his moral clarity in relation to the German historical identity,one thingGrass isnot writing about inhis fiction?not, in any case, in any simple way, inmy view?is moral psychology. Hall might be misunderstood to be asserting thathe is.On the other hand, her use of an analytical system deriving from Lacan should by no means be underestimated as a critical tool. Itworks very well. Nor indeed can one dismiss the imputation that, somehow, Grass's influence upon...

A Smile in His Mind's Eye: A Study of the Early Works of Lawrence Durrell (review)

Reviewed by: A Smile in His Mind’s Eye: A Study of the Early Works of Lawrence Durrell Julius Rowan Raper Ray Morrison. A Smile in His Mind’s Eye: A Study of the Early Works of Lawrence Durrell. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2005. xii + 529 pp. Like Walt Whitman, Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) contained multitudes, an expansiveness reflected by the body of his work. For starters, his fiction contains the Egyptian world of The Alexandria Quartet with which many readers are familiar, the French world of the Avignon Quintet that fewer have visited, plus the largely forgotten [End Page 912] worlds of his early poetry, his minor works, and three pre-World War II novels that range in setting from Bangladesh and Greece to London. It is chiefly to the third group, the often forgotten work, that Ray Morrison limits his immense study. In its roughly 275,000 words, his book similarly contains worlds—or at least the materials for four monographs. Even though the size of Morrison's investigation may dictate that it will most often be used as a reference work read one large chapter at a time as students of Durrell investigate individual novels or groups of poems, the various parts do develop a unified vision of the poet-novelist as he evolved from a neophyte symbolist into a post-World War II master novelist who embraced the vision of Taoist thinkers Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu. In fact, Morrison's title plays on Durrell's own brief Taoist-informed autobiography, A Smile in the Mind's Eye (1982). Morrison's argument runs as follows: that all Durrell's work was one single "book" (21) and that "during the first part of his literary career" (38–39), his apprenticeship, his "major influence" was French symbolism (63). Like Paul Verlaine, Durrell, in the early poems, privately printed as Quaint Fragment: Poems Written between the Age of Sixteen and Nineteen (1931), seems to reject any naturalistic grounding as "all that garlic from the lowly kitchen" (52). The poems pursue the loftiness of music, symbols and dreams (52–53) and are less metrical than musical. But theirs is an elusive music to "convey the hidden spirit of the world" (66–67). Morrison's suggestions will help any reader who has struggled to find in these verses a clear setting, character, action or even theme to pin them down and render them accessible. Morrison's symbolist approach appears less helpful when he turns to Durrell's apprentice fiction, Pied Piper of Lovers. Here he quotes, then ignores, symbolist critic Anna Balakian's warning, in Critical Appraisal, "that 'the symbolist novel is a contradiction in terms' . . . for the symbolists rejected all narrative forms." Morrison, nonetheless, goes in quest of what Balakian termed "certain vestigial aspects of symbolist technique in the novel" (79), a search that produces a 40,000 word decoding of Durrell's largely autobiographical novel into ideas found in the works of Remy de Gourmont and Arthur Schopenhauer. One problem with this approach is that, since all words are symbols, a novel unlike a poem contains far too many possible signs for interpretation. Another difficulty is that because the key symbols of a novel are its characters, settings, action, structure, and recurring images, an analysis has to focus primarily on these naturalist dimensions. One could argue that Morrison spends too few words on the latter elements and too many on possible allusions to the ideas of Gourmont and Schopenhauer, especially since he must later admit [End Page 913] that Durrell both "remains strangely quiet about the influence of Gourmont on his own work" and maintains his "silence on the impact of Schopenhauer" (439). Consequently, Morrison's book remains less an influence study than a collection of parallel readings of Durrell, Gourmont, Schopenhauer and the Taoists in the form of an influence study. In defense of Morrison, we must remember that Durrell later disowned his first two novels and that he was famously playful in his treatment of ideas and that having played, he moved on. Gourmont and Schopenhauer may have become tools and toys he left behind. Despite the limitations of Morrison's method, it produces numerous helpful...