[ilds] the quartet & US politics

[gkoger at mindspring.com]

Above all else this is a reminder of the great debt we owe Richard for his work on Durrell!  Grove


-----Original Message-----
>From: Richard Pine <rpinecorfu at yahoo.com>
>Sent: Feb 26, 2010 6:19 AM
>To: Charles-Sligh at utc.edu, ilds at lists.uvic.ca
>Subject: Re: [ilds] the quartet & US politics
>
>Am snowed under with work. All I can do is to reproduce the relevant short section from Lawrence Durrell: the Mindscape (2nd edn, pp. 373-4). Hope this helps.
>"The train which, like the Ship of Fools, bears its passengers towards the labyrinth (DL 13), reiterates the quest: we are told at the opening of Monsieur that ‘the southbound train from Paris was the one we had always taken from time immemorial’ (Quintet 5); at the inconclusive conclusion to the fourth volume, Sebastian, nearly twelve hundred pages later ‘the train flew on’, bearing them ‘onwards and downwards’ (Quintet 1177); the events of Quinx have yet to unfold. Therefore, to what end? 
>It will have become clear to the reader that ‘what happens’ in the work of Lawrence Durrell is as much a matter for the reader as for the author. Approaching his novels chronologically, one will have noted the growing severity of Durrell’s struggle with faith – faith in the artist’s powers of production, in the nature of society, and even in relation to the question of existence. It may not seem so strange, therefore, to suggest that, in a further five-volume excursion into the same mystical territory, there was little more for Durrell to tell us about human nature or its manifestations. He was nevertheless able to present a new and deeper understanding of the debate on modern aesthetics, on the role of both writer and reader. In The Avignon Quintet there is a return to the situation outlined in Part 2: as with The Black Book, storyline is surrendered to the exploration of a state of ideas; atmosphere predominates over occasion. If we consider,
> for example, the very small nucleus of archetypal symbols from which all our myths derive, and the power which they nevertheless continue to exercise on our behaviour, we can readily appreciate that Durrell’s work, with its strong affinities to the mystical and quest literature of both east and west, can be expressed in a few simple but fundamental phrases, just as the elements in the Grail legends lend themselves so much more extensively to analysis than to exegesis. 
>In this chapter I shall suggest that in the ambition to achieve a ‘vantage point’ from which to realise the ‘new Age’, Durrell ran the risk of making The Avignon Quintet an ‘unreadable book’; it is not that the dream of a ‘Tibetan novel’ was inherently unappealing to a western audience, but that its stasis and circularity oblige the reader to concentrate not on any sequence or series of events but on the idea of thought itself. The Avignon Ouintet becomes unreadable in the sense that a symphony by Brahms becomes ‘unbearable’ or even ‘unplayable’, because, by placing too great a burden on the nature of a language which we have been taught to take for granted, it abandons us without signposts while we are still expecting to be conducted from start to finish by sequential narrative. In the following chapter, I shall take this argument a further step by asking what so troubled Durrell in addressing the question ‘Why?’,
> particularly in relation to his by now highly developed views on otherness. 
>Despite the many flamboyant and vivid scenes – the deaths of Sam, Livia, Ludo and Nancy Quiminal, the blinding of General von Esslin, the epiphany of Hitler and his quest for the Holy Grail, the sexual frolics and Prince Hassad’s ‘spree’ at the Pont du Gard – there is little impetus. ‘Onwards and downwards’, but ‘never landfall’. The book is cerebration, not celebration, a train of thought rather than of action. The Prince’s Petronian fête at which ‘no phantasy had been spared’, with ‘elderly rats in strange paper hats, waving their cigars at the universe’ (Quintet 556-7) – as fitting a way as any of celebrating the apocalypse of culture – cannot replicate the real banquet, the diner à deux (ironically, its title borrowed from Petronius himself)[1]at which Blanford converses with the absent (because deceased) Constance. And the only ‘real’ train is the model railway which so excites Imhof and Lord Galen in the garden
> of the asylum at Montfavet: ‘a couple of absorbed children, a perfectly mated couple’ (Quintet 536). 
>The train is not so much speeding to a destination – towards the imprévisible – as shunted onto a line where its passengers are set, as in the ‘dark labyrinth’, to examine their preoccupations, ‘the great empty gap’, by ‘re-living and re-digesting experience’ (DL 80-1) and awaiting this still undefined sense of the merveilleux: Constance and Sebastian by taking stock of the sexual and psychic perfection of their love-making; Drexel[2]reflecting on the nature of Livia/Sylvie’s madness; Blanford and Sutcliffe[3]on the inevitability of sexual deviance; Piers de Nogaret on the nature of betrayal; Quatrefages[4]on its place in history; Mnemidis on that of inherent evil; Sebastian on the faith that surpasses the love of woman (how ‘to interrogate death itself’ - Quintet 1051); and Sebastian’s autistic child - on what? - how to interrogate life, perhaps? Once more, the prevailing author (and we should no longer readily assume that
> Durrell is the author in the conventional sense) has thrown down a specific ‘gravitational field’ around us, and has returned us to the ‘capital of memory’. 
>There was in Durrell a child whose constant need for the wondrous, for the satisfaction of the bedtime story to set against the unknown qualities of the night, was never assuaged. Equally, Durrell knew that it could never be. The ‘treasure’, for those who represent the forces of capitalism and world mastery (Lords Galen and Banquo, General von Esslin) is indeed a hidden store of riches: for them the search, or game, aided by charts and folklore, is a real and thrilling pleasure. For those who adhere with Durrell to the refusal of such a world, the treasure is merely a state of mind. Maps there may still be: the snake-shaped death-chart of Piers de Nogaret is an echo of previous attempts (in Durrell’s books and in his own life)[5]to obtain a fix on some elusive state, whether or not we regard it as ‘reality’ – it is the child’s method of ‘making sense’, of exploring the interior, even if the only clues are those of fear and warning.
> Durrell the poet naturally sought the still point at the centre of all the flux caused by warfare and greed (after all, usury is merely another form of warfare). In this poetic sense he did believe that the quincunx, the epicentre, was a quint-essential place where antinomies might be resolved: not, as he emphasised in describing the ‘Heraldic Universe’, a state of mind, but none the less a place he would know when, like Eliot’s searcher, he arrived there ‘for the first time’.[6]
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>[1]‘Quartile’, ‘Priestess of Priapus’, is a character in Petronius’ Satyricon; other points on which Durrell may have consciously or subconsciously echoed Petronius include the atmosphere of the banquet chez Trimalchio which emerges both in the decadence of the Regina Hotel in The Black Book and the brothel scenes in Tunc (‘the ‘Nube’) and the Quintet.
>[2]‘Drexel’, like ‘Darley’, is suggestive of an anagrammatic or onomatopoeic corruption of ‘Durrell/Dixie’.
>[3]While Durrell intended a deliberate reference to a French ‘Ripper’ in the translation of Quinx as Quinte: ou version Lande it is merely serendipitous that the protagonist, Sutcliffe, carries the same surname as the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, a serial killer in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. Durrell had also employed the surname in a film treatment of his story ‘The Will-Power Man’.
>[4]‘Quatrefages’ as a surname was, Durrell maintained, a commonplace: ‘you find it almost everywhere – a street name – it’s like Jones really’, but also, and much more significantly, agreed that it means ‘crossroads’ (R. Green, ‘Lawrence Durrell’, Aegean Review). The point should be made that Durrell seldom employed more than rudimentary originality when giving names to characters: ‘Toby’ might have been borrowed from either Tristram Shandy or Point Counter Point; ‘Vasec’ (in The Black Book) from Tarr, ‘Cade’ from Tristram Shandy, ‘Nessim’ from Gerard de Nerval; while his stock of classical and biblical names (Livia, Joshua, Sam) indicates his reluctance to go far afield for new names for old characters who in themselves would not necessarily add to the received characterisation of fact or fiction: ‘I have never been interested in human beings as realities but as metaphors or ideograms – their poetic quiddity so
> to speak. They are like the obscenely funny notions which might pass through the mind of an idle god lying sunbathing’ (SIUC 42/19/8).   
>[5]CERLD inv. 1349 (notebook) contains a list originally dated ‘Feb 68’ with later additions, headed: ‘Dead/Within the space of a few years’ which includes the names of many friends, among them ‘Claude, Bernard Spencer, Roy Campbell… Richard Aldington… Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin [these were two of the later additions]… Seferis, Auden… My mother, John Gawsworth’ and subscribed: ‘for the Avignon book! Nogaret’s death map – “all this winter I have lived with suicide – Terrified” (diary of Piers)’.
>[6]Cf. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’ V: ‘The end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time’; Complete Poems and Plays p. 197.