[ilds] Great Tonal Register of Historical Dreams

[James Gifford]

I like this approach by Bruce and Charles, and it's a trait right across 
Durrell's works.  I also like how Charles has blurred the dreams in the 
novels with the inanimate objects -- again, both are recurrent.

_Pied Piper of Lovers_ relies on a number of significant dream sequences 
to forward its thematic content, and while the protagonist is made silly 
by the narrator for his poor Freudian autoanalysis, the dreams show a 
narrator more in control of those materials.  The paired traumas of 
Walsh's confrontations with mortality and his split between Father 
England and Mother India are the main tropes I see in the dreams there, 
and the materials repeat across the novel.

I've also very recently been struck by the role of objects in the draft 
of _The Placebo_, which went on to become _Tunc_ and _Nunquam_.  It 
happens in the Quintet too, and the remainders left over after life 
certainly play a major role in _Monsieur_.  Everyone seems to be 
constantly shifting through someone else's posthumous papers -- I was 
deeply struck when I found myself reading through the variant of the 
first chapter of _Livia_ in which the protagonist is doing the same 
while wondering what future scholar might try to riddle out the puzzle. 
  In other words, the text in hand had become another such object.

But, for the topic here, I do find Nessim's historical dreams intriguing 
not only because of their 'deep' characterization but for the 
interpretive opportunities (and responsibilities).  Here we have a 
character dreaming in allusion to the Anabasis, about travels through 
Persia in war, and that's what signals my question about Nessim's 
relationship to the King, whom he is suspected of wanting to "capture."

Perhaps we should be most struck by the fact that Darley does not dream 
in _Justine_, even though he's the one engaged in the Freudian "talk" of 
that first epigram...

Best,
James

slighcl wrote:
> 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.
 >
> 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
> **********************
> 
> 
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