[ilds] Tunc 1.1

[James Gifford]

Hi Bruce,

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

I think we can read any way we like...  There wasn't an instruction 
manual with my copy, so with Bill Godshalk very much in my mind, I 
intend to treat the book as passive and the reader as active.

> 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.

I could be wrong too, but I've always read it as a fermata (the musical 
notation to sustain or hold), which seems entirely appropriate over 
Claude's name.  In effect, this book is for her and also as a way of 
holding onto or sustaining her.

> I believe
> Durrell has truncated FD’s prose to suit his
> purposes (he also alters Wordsworth’s letter in
> the epigraph to /Quinx/).

I think the Wordsworth was a genuine mistake -- he misquotes the same 
letter elsewhere, as do literally hundreds of other people, perhaps 
because it sounds better than the original...

> 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).

I think of Orwell's freedom to believe 2 + 2 = 4, or in other words, the 
freedom to be rational.  In this, we're stuck for freedom and 
intentionality with the Enlightenment subject (insofar as I am rational 
and have the capacity through reason to make self-determining choices, I 
can be free -- when I'm irrational or, perhaps like the drunken Charlock 
unable to exercise reason, I can't be said to make free choices).  This 
is, of course, very different from the subject described by Freud, 
riddled with irrationality or unconscious motivations.

Rather than transcending the wall as a way of breaking with determinism, 
there's also the fear that such a transcendence would be a way for 
external powers to rewrite reality.  Dostoevsky looks to freedom, but 
it's qualified and hesitant as well.

> 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]).

I'd go a long way with that.

> “Charlock” = Sherlock Holmes (p. 13; 1.1) ...
> 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.

I don't think that's simplistic at all, although I don't know if having 
a mystery leads us to a solution, which might be where Durrell parts 
ways with Doyle.  He writes about Doyle in his essay on Eliot, noting 
that they'd both read him closely and keenly.  Charlock is certainly 
expressing the turn to rationalism, but like the "flora" of the 
characters in the Quartet (the opening of /Justine/ casts them as flora 
rather than fauna and as lived *by* the city rather than controlling 
their own lives and decisions themselves), Charlock is the "thinking 
weed."  I'd take this as suggesting his rationalism is suspect, just as 
we know our first person narrator is unreliable when he lies to his 
colleagues in the opening of the book while drunk (if we weren't already 
suspicious based on Dostoevsky's deeply unreliable narrator in /Notes/).

But should we emphasize "Charlock" over "Felix"?  He is, of course, 
anything but...

All best,
James