[ilds] unexpectedly quoting cavafy

[csligh]

James Gifford wrote:
>
> Is Darley really in the position to say "It wouldn't have lasted long 
> anyway -- the experience of years makes that clear"?  He's had years, 
> but I doubt the experience.  The Freud and Sade quotations at the outset 
> strike me as saying "Yes," our narrator is aware.  Yet, Cavafy's 
> narrator is still giving up "the experience of years" in an instant for 
> "and echo" of the impermanent.  Darley, I think by proxy, is caught 
> between "talk" of the analysand and "something of the fire" of his "days 
> given to sensuality."  Darley purports to believe in the 'talking cure,' 
> but the most important part of the talk is still censored from the text 
> he translates from Cavafy...  He's still in Sade's noose rather than on 
> Freud's couch.
>   

That note flushes out a hornet's nest of interesting difficulties. 

As I think you indicate, I read Darley as much more ready to write in 
the world-weary voice of romantic experience than to actually show the 
wisdom of experience.   The fact that Darley leaves out a significant 
part of the Cavafy poem which speaks to his situation highlights the 
difficulties for which we should watch.

The intricacies and frustrations of Darley's voice are usually hard for 
first time readers to catch.  And reviewers of /Justine/ past and 
present have been thrown by what to make of that voice.  

I suspect that newbies and positive and negative reviewers of /Justine/ 
are guilty of the same honest oversight.  In /Justine/ Darley's voice is 
complicated.  Darley writes lines and recounts incidents from views that 
are differing moments consummately polished, ludicrously costumed, 
insightful, and incredibly naive.  (We thrashed out many of these lines 
and narrated incidents way back when we worked through /Justine/ on the 
listserv.)  The reader's mistake would be to take it all as "much of a 
muchness"--that is, to think that Darley's voice is stable and 
trustworthy--or that Durrell's ideas about Darley's voice and Durrell's 
writing in the /Quartet/ did not change a great deal over the period of 
writing.  I really do not think Durrell ever came to a settled view of 
how the /Quartet/ "works."  Durrell was mercurial, if anything, ever 
happy to change his mind and place a new revising frame around what he 
had previsouly written.  That lack of determinacy is virtue, not a flaw. 

By the end of the /Quartet/ the emphasis of the work has shifted to the 
importance of constant revision of understanding.  It is not only Darley 
who has found it necessary rethink his life.  Durrell himself has 
changed his understanding of Darley's voice and style, as well as the 
import of the whole /Quartet/.   The rise of Pursewarden in the work has 
something to do with all of this change, I think.  In the early 
notebooks for the /Quartet/ I can point out any number of proto-Darley 
or proto-Arnauti (Faber, Macon, &c.) voices writing away endless recto 
pages in that self-indulgent way.  Pursewarden moments do not appear 
until later in the notebook process.  There is perhaps a reason for this 
late appearance.  Pursewarden's ironic view of Darley's deficiencies in 
literary merits and worldly wisdom tends to strike me as the Ironist 
Durrell looking back over all of the earlier dead-ends in the notebooks, 
chuckling away and jotting on the verso pages of the notebooks little 
barbs about the preciosity of the Romantic Durrell.  Although today I 
tend to gravitate to ironic Pursewardian readings of the /Quartet/, I 
have come to understand that readings capable of suspending disbelief 
and indulging the moon-calf Darley are just as necessary.   I adore 
those opening paragraphs of /Justine/.  And yet. . . .

Keep reporting about the Folio /Justine/.  Those of us too poor to keep 
her on our own will happily play voyeur.

Charles