[ilds] Somewhere moment

[slighcl]

On 6/3/2008 10:12 PM, Bruce Redwine wrote:

>             I guess Borges has come up because the first paragraph of
>             Reflections could pass off as one of the Argentine's
>             "ficciones."


I believe that Bill originally put Borges on the table because of 
Durrell's "anatomy" of his /Reflections/, which he says might evoke
>
>
>                 "notes and studies put together against books unwritten"
>
But beyond that we might also consider Durrell's use of Gideon and his 
"note-books."  The imaginary Gideon's imaginary note-books are certainly 
an interesting sort of make-believe fulcrum to get things rolling, 
something like the way that Borges uses an apocryphal or "delinquent" 
printing of an encyclopedia as a make-believe fulcrum to begin spinning 
out the history "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (1940):

>         I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror
>         and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a
>         corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia;
>         the encyclopedia is fallaciously called /The Anglo-American
>         Cyclopaedia/ (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent
>         reprint of the /Encyclopedia Britannica/ of 1902. The event
>         took place some five years ago. Bioy Casares had had dinner
>         with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast
>         polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first
>         person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and
>         indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few
>         readers - very few readers - to perceive an atrocious or banal
>         reality. From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror
>         spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable
>         in the late hours of the night) that mirrors hare something
>         monstrous about them. Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of
>         the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and
>         copulation are abominable, because they increase the number or
>         men. I asked him the origin of this memorable observation and
>         he answered that it was reproduced in /The Anglo-American
>         Cyclopaedia/, in its article on Uqbar. The house (which we had
>         rented furnished) had a set of this work. On the last pages of
>         Volume XLVI we found an article on Upsala; on the first pages
>         of Volume XLVII, one on Ural-Altaic Languages, but not a word
>         about Uqbar. Bioy, a bit taken aback, consulted the volumes of
>         the index. In vain he exhausted all of the imaginable
>         spellings: Ukbar, Ucbar, Ooqbar, Ookbar, Oukbahr... Before
>         leaving, he told me that it was a region of Iraq of or Asia
>         Minor. I must confess that I agreed with some discomfort. I
>         conjectured that this undocumented country and its anonymous
>         heresiarch were a fiction devised by Bioy's modesty in order
>         to justify a statement. The fruitless examination of one of
>         Justus Perthes' atlases fortified my doubt.


I believe that I am correct in recalling he cocktail party at which 
Durrell and Borges met did not go so well.  Both writers were wary for 
whatever reasons and kept to their corners.   I may be remembering 
darkly or engaging in an apocryphal distortion, but I believe that bit 
of biography came from the biographer himself in a conversation while I 
was preparing the text for Durrell's "Minor Mythologies" essay.

Regarding Durrell on Middleton:  I have absolutely no doubt that Durrell 
knew his Middleton, Dekker, Kyd, and many more of his "beloved 
Eliza's."  Those plays and playwrights were his school and his solace 
for so many decades.

Charles

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

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