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• Durrell Re-read: Crossing the Liminal in Lawrence Durrell's Major Novels by James M. Clawson
• Anthony Hirst (bio)

James M. Clawson invites us to see Lawrence Durrell's twelve major novels as a unity, an oeuvre—or opus, as he prefers to call it—but also as a process, a development. The twelve novels are The Black Book (1938), The Alexandria Quartet (1956–1960), the novel pair Tunc and Nunquam (1968 and 1970, known collectively as The Revolt of Aphrodite) and The Avignon Quintet (1974–1985). [End Page 576] Clawson starts from Durrell's own plan of the opus, announced in 1945 in a letter to T. S. Eliot and based on modern critics' debatable view of the structure of Greek tragedy: agon, pathos, anagnorisis. At the time, only The Black Book (the agon) had been published; later the Quartet was identified as the pathos and the Quintet as the anagnorisis. To account for the Revolt, Richard Pine later proposed—and Durrell concurred in this—the missing fourth term sparagmos (Pine 2005, 53). The scheme, however, is not a reliable basis for understanding the opus, since, as Clawson does not quite acknowledge in his endnotes (18nn6–8), Durrell misunderstood the meaning of two of the terms (Chamberlin 2019, 70n4); but then Clawson makes little further use of the scheme.

We should not ignore the Greek context of much of Durrell's writing. Leaving aside his semi-fictional accounts of periods of residence in Corfu, Rhodes, and Cyprus, and restricting ourselves to the opus, we can note that, although he is writing mainly of an earlier part of his life in London, the primary narrator of The Black Book is writing on a remote Greek headland in the Ionian Sea (and the narrator's and/or author's timeline on the last page refers to Koloura in Corfu); in the Quartet, again, the primary narrator, Darley, trying to recreate on paper his past life in Alexandria, is doing so on an unnamed Greek island in the Aegean, which he leaves in Clea (the fourth volume, 1960) to return to Alexandria, though the novel (and the Quartet) concludes with him back on the island, for few weeks only, contemplating an uncertain future; much of Tunc is set in Athens and other parts of mainland Greece, though the focus is shifting towards Istanbul (the principal location of the companion novel Nunquam)—a rather Greek Istanbul regularly referred to as "Polis." Only in The Avignon Quintet is Greece left behind, as the title suggests; but by then Durrell himself had long been settled in France, though he still hankered from time to time to return to Greece, where he had spent six formative years (1935–1941) that were followed by two years on Rhodes, not then a part of Greece (1945–1947), and three years in Cyprus (1953–1956).

I read Clawson's book with an almost uninterrupted sense of intellectual unease. But, to be fair to Clawson, it was the same unease that I always experience in reading eight of the twelve novels involved—that is, all but the four novels of The Alexandria Quartet, where my unease is only occasional. Most of Durrell's major characters, and especially his narrators think too much, and tell us too much about what they think; and most of them think in the same way, obsessed with the relation of "reality" to fiction and with the nature of being an "artist." Much of their thinking could be described by the derogatory term opinionated. Darley, the narrator of three of the four novels of the Quartet, is not exempt from this, but his agonizing and posturing are tempered by the focus [End Page 577] on his own fallibility and the presence of a supposedly superior intellectual and artist in the novelist and diplomat Pursewarden, the principal thinker—and least convincing character—in the Quartet, which is (except for the third-person omniscient narration of the third volume, Mountolive) essentially a Bildungsroman or, to use the more precise...

审核人：

• 杜雷尔重读：在劳伦斯·杜雷尔的主要小说中穿越禁区詹姆斯·克劳森（James M. Clawson）
• 安东尼·赫斯特（生物）

詹姆斯·克劳森（James M. Clawson）邀请我们将劳伦斯·杜勒尔（Lawrence Durrell）的十二本主要小说视为一个整体，一件作品（或他喜欢称呼的作品），也视为一个过程，一个发展。十二小说黑书（1938），亚历山大四方（1956年至1960年），该新颖对Tunc和Nunquam（1968和1970，统称为忒的反抗）和所述阿维尼翁重奏（1974-1985）。[完第576页]克劳森从杜尔雷尔（Durrell）自己的作品计划开始，该计划于1945年在给TS艾略特（TS Eliot）的一封信中宣布，并基于现代批评家对希腊悲剧结构的有争议的观点：痛苦，悲痛，不确定性。当时，只有黑皮书（在雅安）已经出版; 后来四方被确定为悲怆和五重奏作为anagnorisis。为了解释这次起义，理查德·派恩（Richard Pine）后来提出并得到了杜雷尔（Durrell）的同意-缺少了第四期Sparagmos（Pine 2005，53）。然而，该计划并不是理解作品的可靠依据，因为正如克劳森在其尾注（18nn6-8）中不太清楚地承认的那样，杜勒尔（Durrell）误解了两个术语的含义（Chamberlin 2019，70n4）; 但是克劳森再也没有对该计划做更多的利用了。

我们不应该忽视杜勒尔著作中希腊语的大部分。撇开他对科孚岛，罗得岛和塞浦路斯的居住时期的半小说性描述，并限制自己进入剧情，我们可以注意到，尽管他主要是在伦敦生活的较早时期写作，但他的主要叙述者是《黑皮书》是在爱奥尼亚海中一个偏远的希腊岬角上写的（最后一页的叙述者和/或作者的时间表是指科孚岛的科洛拉）；在四重奏中，主要叙述者达利（Darley）试图在纸上重现他过去在亚历山大的生活，他在爱琴海的一个未命名的希腊小岛上这样做，他留在克雷（Clea）（第四册，1960年）以返回亚历山大，虽然是小说（和四重奏））和他一起回到岛上结束了，只有几个星期，他在考虑一个不确定的未来；Tunc的大部分地区都定在雅典和希腊大陆的其他地区，尽管重点转移到了伊斯坦布尔（同伴小说Nunquam的主要所在地）上，伊斯坦布尔是一个颇为希腊语的伊斯坦布尔，通常被称为“波利斯”。顾名思义，只有在《阿维尼翁五重奏》中希腊才被抛在后面。但那时杜勒尔本人早已在法国定居，尽管他仍然时不时渴望返回希腊，在那里他度过了六个成年（1935年至1941年），随后在罗得岛度过了两年，然后不再是一部分希腊（1945-1947），和塞浦路斯（1953-1956）三年。

我读克劳森的书时几乎没有间断的思想上的不安感。但是，公平地讲，对克劳森来说，这是我一直在阅读所涉及的十二本小说中的八本相同的不安感，即亚历山大四重奏的四本小说以外的所有小说，而我的不安只是偶尔的。达勒尔的大多数主要人物，尤其是他的叙述者，都考虑得太多，而对他们的想法却告诉我们太多。他们中的大多数人都以同样的方式思考，痴迷于“现实”与小说之间的关系以及对“艺术家”的天性。他们的很多思想可以由贬义词描述自以为是。达利（Darley），《四重奏》四部小说中的三本并非无法免于此，但他的痛苦和姿态受到[End Page 577]的关注，因为他专注于自己的谬误，以及小说家，主要思想家和外交家Pursewarden中一个据称是高级知识分子和艺术家的存在，并且至少令人信服角色-在“四重奏”中，（除了第三卷的第三人称全知叙事，Mountolive以外）本质上是Bildungsroman，或者，使用更精确的...