[ilds] the quartet & US politics

[Ilyas]

James

One small point - you mention Avignon Q being "bleaker". Like many people on
this thread I have read and re-read both AQ's a few times (I betray my age
here), and I have tended to find myself less negatively affected through
Avignon than you suggest. Its certainly a harder read, and the narrative
creates more work on the part of the reader, but I don't think its "bleak".

Someone once described the end of the Alex Q as being written for a movie,
and perhaps that remains longer in reader's minds eye long after the book
itself has gone back to its place on a dusty shelf.

Take care grading papers,
Ilyas


On 24/02/2010 20:40, "James Clawson" <clawson at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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)
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