[ilds] Selected Fictions

[Ilyas]

Bruce, a number of thoughts occur to me on the back of your comments below.

Durrell had many selfs ­ even outside his writing. He was, initially, a
poet. His early work, including the precocious ballade of slow decay written
I think in the early 1930¹s, is a fine example of some signs of that
³negative capability². But durrell was a good poet who showed promise,
rather than a great poet. Who now remembers his poetry as being the equal or
even similar to Eliot, auden and spender ? And then he was a painter, in
fact I possess a couple of his works. An interesting painter, but hardly
notable, and one who would not be collected (however lethargically) were it
not for his writing. And then he was a journalist, and a civil servant, and
a lover. Even a magazine editor. He was all these things, and these
personalities litter his later writings.

I don¹t mean, here, to suggest that he was good at many things, but
brilliant or exceptional at none (since I consider him a hugely under-rated
writer, and AQ as a truly great work), and therefore somehow an apologist,
through his fictive creations, for his failings. But I do know that Oxbridge
would have been the norm for LD and many of his friends and colleagues, and
I feel that he carried the burden of failure more than he rejoiced at the
freedom thus gained by not spending time amongst those glittering spires.


On 03/10/2009 20:44, "Bruce Redwine" <bredwine1968 at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Marc,
> 
> Dunno what's an "Enneargram."  But I see your main point about roles and the
> way we play them.  What you say is undoubtedly true.  We all have various
> social roles:  in my case, son, husband, father, friend, former soldier,
> perennial student, etc.  That's a little like Justine in the dressmaker's shop
> admiring herself in different mirrors and seeing different views of the same
> person.  However, when Durrell starts talking about the self and its "many
> negatives" or when Pursewarden makes pronouncements about lives and "selected
> fictions," then I think they're referring to something far more basic.
> Durrell is talking about one's core identity, the "old stable ego," what you
> call the "true self" -- all that having no real or true identity.  Hence, the
> stress on "fiction."  Being a father or a husband is no fiction, those are
> social facts, but calling the "I" or the "self" a fiction is something else
> again, something radically different.  All this is not new, but a restatement
> or development of ideas central to Buddhism or touched upon by some of the
> English Romantics.  Keats begins to explore this idea when he talks about the
> "camelion poet" and "negative capability," i.e., great artists being able to
> assume other identities because they live in some state of suspended identity.
> All admittedly not very clear, but that's part of the appeal of the notion.
> So, when someone says his core self doesn't exist or is just multiple
> fictions, if he says that and truly believes and demonstrates it, then I think
> that he's either a Zen Buddhist who's reached some level of enlightenment or
> that he's showing early signs of schizophrenia.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Bruce
> 

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