Title: Lawrence Durrell's major novels
First published: 1997
Description: This book provides a thematic reading of all of Lawrence Durrell's major novels, while also considering Durrell's incorporation of other art forms - especially painting, architecture, and horticulture - to structure his fiction. Building on insights found in Durrell's travel essays and the psychoanalytic theories of Georg Groddeck, a contemporary of Freud whom Durrell admired and promoted, author Donald P.

Kaczvinsky suggests that the artist-heroes of the major novels will be exposed to a place and a culture that is debilitating, unhealthy, and diseased. The Black Book, Durrell's first major novel, is a "black romance." Lawrence Lucifer is on a quest, whose success depends on his ability to reject the spiritual and material comforts of a medieval English culture and accept the pagan world of Greece.

Of particular importance is an extended consideration, in chapter 3, of Durrell's best-known series, The Alexandria Quartet. Taking their cue from Durrell's "Note" to Balthazar, most critics have considered the four volumes in the context of Einstein's theory of relativity. Kaczvinsky suggests this approach interferes with our appreciation of the Quartet as a unified and complete work.

The reality presented in the Quartet may be quite complex, but it is not "relative." A coda to the chapter offers a critical consideration of Pursewarden's suicide and illustrates how to approach the sometimes contradictory, oftentimes complementary information offered in the four volumes.

Rather than complacently repeating himself after the Quartet, Durrell, in the latter half of his career, questions and explores, in self-conscious, postmodern texts, the assumptions that underlie his earlier fiction. In the companion novels, Tunc and Nunquam, Felix Charlock and Iolanthe represent the human couple in postmodern society. Bound by contractual agreement, they cannot escape the firm.

The only hope for a healthy society is through the total destruction of existing institutions - an apocalyptic ending that is unconvincing on political, cultural, and aesthetic grounds. Clarifying and revising the conclusion of the Revolt, Durrell asserts in The Avignon Quintet, his last series, that World War II was a turning point in history, the key event that ushered in a new, postmodern age.

Through his use of Gnostic beliefs, Durrell destabilizes our notions of the "real" and suggests that the civilization to emerge out of the ruins of a devastated Europe will not be Christian, but Quincunxial. Durrell's aesthetic and thematic concerns establish him as a significant, indeed central, voice in twentieth-century British literature. His career, which spans over five decades, links the British High Modernists with the Postmodernists.
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation, Durrell, lawrence, 1912-1990, English fiction, history and criticism, 20th century
People: Lawrence Durrell
LC classification: PR6007.U76 Z72 1997