[ilds] Tunc 1.1

[Bruce Redwine]

James, okay.  I’m using the 1968 Dutton edition.  When quoting text, I’ll cite to those pages, but I’ll also include a reference to sections and subsections.

I assume we’re going to bounce around in the text and not stick to the usual fixed sequence, from beginning to end.

Re front matter, on 4/16/16, Peter Baldwin has already pointed out the symbol above Claude-Marie Vincendon’s name in the dedication.  I’ll refer to it as a lunette with a dot.  I think it’s Durrell’s symbol for Claude.  I also think it’s obscene, so use your imagination.  Durrell was fond on doodling in his books; he was also fond of obscene jokes.  Of course, I could be wrong.

Re the epigraph, I don’t know what the French translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground actually states, but I believe Durrell has truncated FD’s prose to suit his purposes (he also alters Wordsworth’s letter in the epigraph to Quinx).  In the English translation of Notes, it’s clear that the “the wall” refers to the logic of mathematics as being irrefutable (so a character argues).  In Durrell, the meaning is ambiguous, i.e., it either refers to logical irrefutability or it refers to a barrier to be transcended.  If the latter, then we follow up with all those many references in text to multiple interpretations of an event (e.g., “There seem to be a hundred reasons to account for every act” [p. 264; 5.3]).  Which is another variation on Durrell’s obsessive, “Truth is what most contradicts itself in time” (Balthazar).

“Charlock” = Sherlock Holmes (p. 13; 1.1).  There are many similarities between the two, re habits and disposition.  Kaczvinsky agrees in his note on The Dark Labyrinth.  There’s even a reference to “Charlock Holmes” (p. 240; 5.1).  I take the equation seriously and not as Durrell’s sense of playful misdirection, that is, creating an “unreliable narrator.”  So, Charlock functions as a narrator/detective trying to figure out a puzzle; the plot is a mystery.  You and others might find this too simplistic.  Maybe.

Bruce




> On May 13, 2016, at 11:54 AM, James Gifford <james.d.gifford at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> And perhaps for clarity, I'll propose that since people will have different editions, as we did with the Quartet, we enumerate.
> 
> /Tunc/ is in 7 sections (books?) with internal divisions into unnumbered chapters, within which we also have sectional divisions marked
> 
> * * * * *
> 
> We could use a book.chapter.unit system to keep it all clear in the various editions (US, UK, etc.).  We'd have 1.1.1 opening "Of the three men..." and 1.1.2 "I was brought up..."
> 
> So say we all?
> 
> -JDG

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