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Lawrence Durrell’s Mediterranean Shores: Tropisms of a Receding Line

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Critically Mediterranean

Part of the book series: Mediterranean Perspectives ((MEPERS))

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Abstract

Durrell’s essays, fiction, poems, and travel books picture the Mediterranean as a disjointed whole whose meaning may not lie so much in the reassembling of the puzzle as in the careful examination of the crisis of representation. Our analysis of Durrell’s landscape writing explores the underlying connections between the various images of the Mediterranean at a time when Durrell was grieving the loss of a geographic, historical, and cultural entity that was then just falling to pieces. Far from being a mere sensual backdrop, Durrell’s Mediterranean anchorage functions as a device—a structure that both implies an organized form and works as an informal matrix out of which an unexpected, shattering light emerges which defies language and opens up an aesthetic and philosophical enquiry.

The title is a homage to Hogarth 2008.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “Moins une mer que des rives.” All unattributed translations are my own.

  2. 2.

    “Cette lente, très lente conquête […] le long apprivoisement.”

  3. 3.

    “Un monde énorme à la mesure des hommes, disloqué, contradictoire […] une masse de connaissances qui défie toute synthèse raisonnable.”

  4. 4.

    For further details, see Theodore Stephanides’s letters to Durrell (2006).

  5. 5.

    “Le pictural déforme le verbal […] l’objet échappe. La matière qu’on cherche à dire, à toucher, se transforme en pure lumière, intangible […] L’éclat de matière est un accident pictural, une crise qui ‘interrompt […] la continuité du système représentatif ’” (Didi-Huberman 1990: 313).

  6. 6.

    “Il semble avoir désigné un tableau ou la partie d’un tableau qui représente une vue étendue d’une contrée quelconque. Le paysage n’est pas le pays, c’est une image du pays.”

  7. 7.

    “Le lieu d’exercice d’une pensée dans l’espace, qui remet en cause la distinction entre la res cogitans et la res extensa.”

  8. 8.

    “Durrell croit à une rencontre entre deux êtres vivants, chacun d’ordre différent, l’homme et le paysage. Il prône un abandon de soi à cet immense corps vivant qui englobe.”

  9. 9.

    “Comme l’héliotrope se tourne vers le soleil, l’image et le texte, par l’effet du tropisme, semblent pouvoir désigner une direction vers laquelle ils sont alors ponctuellement tendus; et la rupture produite est si prégnante qu’elle nous entraîne à son tour dans la perte des repères […] vers des terrains troubles mais fascinants—car, à travers une sorte de surplus d’imaginaire, c’est paradoxalement vers le réel qu’ils nous tournent, nous retournent.”

  10. 10.

    For a detailed analysis of this passage that expatiates on Durrell’s borrowing and reappropriation of the contrapuntal composition that is the basic structure of the fugue, see (Keller-Privat 2002: 295–304).

  11. 11.

    See Durrell’s letter to Henry Miller (1989: 159–160).

  12. 12.

    See Plato, La République, “Livre VII,” 516b–520c and Phèdre 249c–250b.

  13. 13.

    “[…] pathless island waters/Crossing and uncrossing, partnerless/By hills alone […]” (Durrell 1946: 72).

  14. 14.

    “Le vrai lieu […] Un regard, un ébranlement intérieur.”

  15. 15.

    We may quote, for instance, Homer, Diodorus, Thucydides, or William Lithgow’s account of Corfu in 1632, as well as eighteenth-century travelers, not to mention the historical and sociological descriptions of Theodore Stephanides, all of which blend with Durrell’s text as quotation marks slowly disappear (Durrell 1962: 55).

  16. 16.

    See Plato, Ménon, 81a–82a.

  17. 17.

    See the nominalization and personification of the color from “the amazing blue” (l.4) to “the elegiac blue” (l.11), from “Nor ever the less blue” (l.31) to the final line, “And the blue will keep” (l.36).

  18. 18.

    “Chaque ombre contient un message, bien enfermé dans son enveloppe obscure. Les ombres sont pleines de pensées. Mais ce sont des pensées visibles à tous […] Un peu comme un mot, si l’on sait à quelle langue il appartient.”

  19. 19.

    One also recognizes in A Private Country Stephan Syriotis, Father Nicholas, Agamemnon, Virgil, and Seferis.

  20. 20.

    “A elle seule, elle était jadis un univers, une planète.”

  21. 21.

    “La ‘mare nostrum’ de jadis […] est un de ces grands signifiants qui permettent la vraie pensée, celle qui ne renonce pas à se défaire des mythes. La Méditerranée, poésie, est confiée à la poésie. On peut espérer que la poésie la gardera avec elle, en elle, à combattre, à espérer.”

  22. 22.

    “Pays […] d’une conscience qui peut appréhender l’univers […] non dans le heurt déjà des existences finies, mais dans la musique des essences.”

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cultures Anglo-Saxonnes, Toulouse 2 – Jean Jaurès University, Toulouse, France

    Isabelle Keller-Privat

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  1. Isabelle Keller-Privat
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  1. Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA

    yasser elhariry

  2. Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, USA

    Edwige Tamalet Talbayev

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Keller-Privat, I. (2018). Lawrence Durrell’s Mediterranean Shores: Tropisms of a Receding Line. In: elhariry, y., Talbayev, E. (eds) Critically Mediterranean. Mediterranean Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71764-7_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71764-7_3

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