[ilds] the quartet & US politics

[James Clawson]

I'm loving this discussion about politics and the Quartet! And I love
that a politician would use the Quartet in attempt to sound well read
(in the face of legions of Durrellists wondering at the finer points
of his remarks).

I think I'm with Grove: I've always read the endings as, in the end,
optimistic. Especially seeing them all together like this.  But I'd
like also to add The Black Book, which (unlike the others) isn't past
tense, and speaks of The Now.  Nunquam, too, uses the future tense
near the end (though obviously not right at the end) when one of the
characters speculates to Charlock that either everything will change
or nothing will.  Though it ends in past tense, it's that speculative
future into which Charlock and Benedicta dance.

As for optimism, I see even the Quartet as optimistic, though for
reasons counter to the way Leach uses it.  Darley searches throughout
the Quartet to find the batter vantage point, the better way to
understand everything, and it's this struggle which converts him --
from Justine, through Balthazar, and past Mountolive -- into the
artist we see in Clea: taller-standing and not needing eye glasses.
It's the struggle of looking for The Right Perspective that leads him
to realize there is none... which in turn helps him to become an
artist and finally to move beyond Alexandria.

The Avignon Quintet is bleaker, though it doesn't seem to recognize
its own bleakness in the ending.  If (in one way) reading the books
literally, Blanford is at the catacombs only through an act of
imagination, then that last gambit of Reality Prime (recognized,
again, in the conditional and speculative voice of someone who
*thinks* about how he would write it all down in a novel) is a final
and unproductive caveat to the imaginative realm.  (Our imaginations,
in which we are corporeally whole individuals, and in which fantastic
things happen, can be interrupted by Reality Prime when we don't
maintain control; then what good is imagination? Aren't its
limitations only made more pronounced?)

Hmm, I think I've lost my train.  Something about writing about
thinking about thinking about writing will do that to you.  And I have
essays to grade anyway, so I'll leave it for now.  Let's keep this up!
-James (the nominally non-pneumonial)