[ilds] Great Tonal Register of Historical Dreams

[slighcl]

On 11/19/2007 9:36 AM, Bruce Redwine wrote:
> Kudos to Charles for noting the importance of dreams and reverie in Durrell.  I agree completely.  I too recall those small passages with great delight and am mystified by their magic.  They stud the narrative like garnet intrusions -- gem-like, with a bow to Charles's beloved Pater.
>
>   
I am happy that you also noted and marveled at these moments, Bruce.  
Just to rehearse, these reverie moments occur when a distraught 
Balthazar recalls his parents flight in the sledge; when a dying and 
remorseful Cohen imagines himself floating with Melissa on the lake; 
when a talkative Scobie recollects the deaths of his parents and a 
brother; and when an increasingly fragmented Nessim experiences his 
historical dreams.  Usually they are connected to trauma.

Are these reveries the signs of Darley's storytelling art?  After all, 
whatever the conceit of Darley reading others papers and diaries and 
letters, Darley is the one rehearsing (creating?) the strangely numinous 
details of the dream-reveries.  That is, the characters may have 
experienced these dreams and memories, but surely the tone and the style 
seem to be Darley's.  I wonder?

These dream-reveries are all instances from /Justine/.  Are there other 
examples of equal import from the other works?

I will note also that the dream-reverie is another way in which Durrell 
communicates deep character without routine dramatic plot.  Another 
method that he uses prominently in /Justine /is to communicate character 
by means of rooms and the inanimate objects in the rooms.  (I believe 
that we discussed this point when we read /Justine/.)  The analogues of 
this character-by-room technique are various for me.  I think of Pater 
("The Child in the House"; /Marius the Epicurean/); I think of Proust 
(who had read his Pater and his Ruskin); and I think of Georges Perec's 
/La Vie mode d'emploi /(1978), a late OULIPO work that inventories the 
different flats at a Paris address to tell the stories of the occupants 
via inanimate objects.  Finally, Nabokov:

>         When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its
>         situation, the very act of attention may lead to our
>         involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. 
>         Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to
>         stay at the exact level of the moment.  Transparent things,
>         through which the past shines!

Durrell is particularly masterful with his use of Balthazar's (lost) 
signifying object--i.e., the father's timepiece.  That incident and that 
reverie are so suggestive and economical.

Charles

**********************
Charles L. Sligh
Department of English
Wake Forest University
slighcl at wfu.edu
**********************

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.uvic.ca/pipermail/ilds/attachments/20071119/6f365661/attachment.html