‘We are not one undivided self, ... but many selves — in fact a flux of identities without clear and determined outlines.
The characters of the novel began, like matter when it was broken down,
to radiate not along a series of points but in waves, in wavelets of subjective experience.’
Lawrence Durrell, Key to Modern Poetry (London: Peter Nevill, 1952) 116.

1Lawrence Durrell’s literary and critical writing is tightly linked to his aesthetic and philosophical concern with the emergence of modernism. In his critical essay, Key to Modern Poetry, published in 1952, he delves extensively into the new handling of time, space and identity which writers such as Yeats, Auden, Sitwell, Hopkins and Eliot heralded. And it is through T. S. Eliot’s own words that Durrell attempts to define the modernist approach to the concept of personality:

Writing of poetry in 1917, T. S. Eliot says: ‘What happens is a continual surrender of himself [i.e. the artist] as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.’ It is this self-surrender that gives the final authority, the deathless bloom to good poetry.... (Durrell 1952, 136)

2As Lawrence Durrell takes up and explores Eliot’s quest for ‘a continual extinction of personality,’ he progressively realises that it is not so much the artist’s abnegation as his detachment from his own ego which is at stake: through this self-imposed depersonalisation the artist attempts to divest literature of the old lyrical echoes and to generate a modernist aesthetic emotion, ‘the deathless bloom’ which should cross spatial and temporal boundaries. Thus, Durrell experiments with ‘im/personality’2 through multi-prismatic characters and narrators in the Quartet, presenting his readers with a new facet corresponding each time to a new point of view in time and/or in space. And when the reader discovers the Quintet, a few decades later, his sense of defamiliarisation is heightened by Durrell’s baffling system of characters both alike one another and estranged from their own selves. Eventually, Durrell’s creations all seem to echo Pursewarden’s far-reaching advice to Clea in the Quartet: ‘The real obstacle is oneself. I believe that artists are composed of vanity, indolence and self-regard.... You get a bit scared about the imaginary importance of what you are doing! Mirror-worship!’3

3The author must strive to overcome his own defective ego in order to reach out to the symbolic world of the Heraldic Universe, which stands for the hidden place of genuine aesthetic emotion.

4Therefore, we shall study how Lawrence Durrell plays on splintered narratives and metafictional refractions in order to expose the illusion of identity which the artist must distrust. But the artist’s progress also paves the way for the reader’s necessary education as he is constantly asked to reconsider his own conceptual representations of the narrative voice and of characterisation. As the reader himself starts experimenting with this new type of shattered, diffuse and unreliable fictional world he is left to wonder, after Durrell, ‘what reintegration is possible for the poet in order to recompose the ego, to give it value and shape’ (Durrell 1952, 162). This, as we shall see, is precisely the point where the ‘heraldic aspect of reality’ is revealed to the reader. (Durrell 1974, 759)

1 Deconstructing the illusion of identity: Justine as the embodiment of the literary artefact

5According to Lawrence Durrell’s own definition, human personality is merely a label meant to hide man’s fragmentary perception of the world and of himself:

Human character? A sort of rainbow I should say, which includes the whole range of the spectrum. I imagine that what we call personality may be an illusion, and in thinking of it as a stable thing we are trying to put a lid on a box with no sides. As for the analytical faculty as you call it—wasn’t it given us to help us inch up on the illumination?4

6Indeed, the Quartet, which tells more or less the same story from different angles, presents the reader with iridescent figures changing colour and contour at each new movement of the kaleidoscopic narrative. This technique of scattered reflections is explicitly suggested at the beginning of the novel as the only truthful representation of ‘human character’: ‘Look! five different pictures of the same subject. Now if I wrote I would try for a multi-dimensional effect in character, a sort of prism-sightedness. Why should not people show more than one profile at a time?’ (Durrell 1974, 28)

7Yet, this ‘sort of prism-sightedness’ does not lead to a unified whole. Moreover, Darley, the homodiegetic narrator, who stands as the only reliable anchor amidst all these ‘fearful displacements,’ as Balthazar calls them, distrusts his own reality, based on ‘a memory which catches sight of itself in a mirror.’ (Durrell 1974, 188, 209) And when rereading his own manuscript corrected by Balthazar in the second volume, Darley understands that his own friends have also ceased to exist in order to become mere paper characters, so that, far from counterfeiting successfully the illusion of lively, coherent human beings, he has undermined the whole literary process of identification and real effect: ‘Indeed, I saw my lovers and friends no longer as living people but as coloured transfers of the mind; inhabiting my papers now, no longer the city, like tapestry figures.’ (Durrell 1974, 210)

8These disembodied characters are initially introduced as the very proof of the narrator’s inability to portray the living adequately and seem to confirm the artist’s failure:

In art I had failed (it suddenly occurred to me at this moment) because I did not believe in the discrete human personality. (‘Are people’ writes Pursewarden ‘continuously themselves, or simply over and over again so fast that they give the illusion of continuous features—the temporal flicker of old silent film?’) I lacked belief in the true authenticity of people in order to successfully portray them. (Durrell 1974, 159)

9Thus, Durrell leads his readers to wonder whether the artist’s task is to reverberate the illusion, or rather to expose it. Indeed, Darley’s failure to capture human personality is due to what Durrell himself calls ‘the changing conception of the ego under the influence of Jung, Freud and Groddeck.’ (Durrell 1952, 136) Darley, as the impersonation of the artist, is then ‘faced with a dispersed ego provided by [the] science’ and philosophy of his time. This is why we never meet the same portrait twice: ‘Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed,’ as Pursewarden aptly comments. (Durrell 1974, 210) Therefore, Darley reorients his narrative towards an unexpected quest: how to build up characterisation when one is convinced that ‘as for human characters, whether real or invented, there are no such animals?’ (Durrell 1974, 210)

10In the Quartet, Durrell chooses to answer this question through the play on multiple refractions. Thus, we notice from the beginning that Justine is first introduced ‘sitting before the multiple mirrors at the dressmaker’s’ and that she symbolically meets Arnauti, her first husband, ‘in the long mirror of the Cecil.’ (Durrell 1974, 28, 63) These refractions are carried a step further through the playful handling of names: the ambassador Mountolive, for instance, becomes ‘Montolif” under the influence of Leila’s faked French accent and is later referred to as ‘The Mountain,’ the name code used by Nessim. (Durrell 1974, 409, 597) As for Justine, the name refers both to Melissa’s daughter and to Darley’s lover, who is also Nessim’s wife, his political partner whose name echoes that of Palestine.5 In Arnauti’s popular novel, she becomes Claudia; but Darley can never ascertain whether Claudia is indeed Justine so that she may also be the heroine of a second embedded fictitious narrative.

11As a result, the characters’ names become blurred signifiers and the character as such—traditionally conceived of as ‘a signifying unit’ and as a ‘contextual effect,’6 relying on the reader’s memorisation and active reconstruction—is threatened since he can no longer function as a coherent entity.

12Thus, Durrell’s characters progressively become experimental objects of enquiry. Indeed, Justine should not merely be seen as Darley’s lost lover; she also epitomises the writer’s desperate quest for absolute desire. As such, she does not exist as a psychological identity so much as an aesthetic issue—that of a subject which partakes both of the myth and of the symbol:

Nymph? Goddess? Vampire? Yes, she was all of these and none of them. She was, like every woman, everything that the mind of man (let us define ‘man’ as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself)—that the mind of man wished to imagine. She was there forever, and she had never existed! (Durrell 1974, 695)

13Durrell successfully creates an enmeshed network of passions—Arnauti’s, Darley’s, Nessim’s, Clea’s—all centred around a character who vanishes into thin air as soon as the narrator tries to grasp her true identity. The novel ends on the ghostly revelation of a fictitious construct, of an almost subliminal entity, which functions as the screen upon which all the other characters keep projecting their secret dreams. Thus, Arnauti realises in the end that ‘she was not really a woman but the incarnation of Woman.’ (Durrell 1974, 61) And when the reader tries to identify Justine he is left with the mesmerising metaphor of the empty mask reverberating his own hopeless search:

On the far wall there is an idol the eyes of which are lit from within by electricity, and it is to this graven mentor that Justine acts her private role. Imagine a torch thrust through the throat of a skeleton to light up the vault of the skull from which the eyeless sockets ponder. Shadows thrown on the arch of the cranium flap there in imprisonment.... It is possible, she says, to talk in her sleep and be overheard by the wise and sympathetic mask which has come to represent what she calls her Noble Self.... (Durrell 1974, 113)

14Justine encapsulates this unknown world which lies beyond appearances and which the artist can only hint at. She exists as this empty skull trapping the light and projecting transient images ‘lit from within by electricity,’ which are purely due to an artful trick. Her ‘private role,’ or ‘Noble Self,’ remains hidden. Yet, the secrecy kept by the skull is none but that of its own emptiness, of its metaphysical vacuum. As such, Justine embodies the literary artefact which is disclosed in the Quintet.

2 Breaking up the prism

15In the Quintet, Lawrence Durrell carries out the experiment on the depersonalisation of his characters one step further by introducing all the main characters at the precise point when they have already disappeared. As usual, Durrell investigates identity under the garb of his artist-characters. Thus, Rob Sutcliffe, one of the writer-narrators of the novel, is first introduced post-mortem so that his own story stands out as the last trail preceding his drowning. This narrative choice entails a temporal dissociation through which a character can exist both as a dead body7 and as a living voice brought back to the surface of the narrative. This leads to a series of embedded narratives where Sutcliffe’s narrative is included within Blanford’s, just as Bruce Drexel’s is included in Sutcliffe’s. However, this apparently clear hierarchy is soon disrupted when two narrative sequences overlap. The momentary crisscrossing of what ought to be two disjointed time scales confuses the reader who finds himself faced with a most peculiar embedding through which the paper character, Sutcliffe, asks his creator, Blanford, to think out the details of his past life:

‘... What more would you like to hear from me if I bring you back to life?’
‘... About the lake and about Tu Duc and the Avignon of those early days.
About us, the real ones.’
‘Then let me ask you one question,’ said Blanford sternly. ‘Just how real do you feel to yourself, Robin Sutcliffe?’
‘I have never stopped to think,’ said his only friend after a pause. ‘Have you?’
‘And you want to know about your own youth? Of course I endowed you with mine, for we are about the same age.’
...
‘Tell me the details, it will help me to act.’
‘Very well.’ (Durrell 1992, 324)

16In this surreal narrative situation, the creature asks his creator to bring him back to life, i.e. to bring him back into the story, and to fill in the blanks. In so doing, Blanford gives shape to Sutcliffe’s past, trying to make the character feel more ‘real’ while leaving the reader totally nonplussed. Thus, Durrell manages to explore and pinpoint his character’s artificial pattern, while placing his reader in front of an unanswerable alternative: are we to believe in Sutcliffe’s character because he now has a realistic past or because he questions his own making? Are we to accept creator and creature as equal entities when we know that they belong to distinct narrative logics?

17Later on, Blanford invites Sutcliffe for tea, addressing him as a ‘real’ character in a totally unreal dialogue throughout which the reader feels all the more baffled as the enunciators’ identities are eventually blurred. We are then forced to follow the exchange without knowing for certain who is speaking. As the dialogue unfolds, we realise that we might as well be following Blanford’s inner thoughts as he builds up Sutcliffe’s character while talking to himself:

... Blanford who had been following his thoughts said, ‘Everything you say is true.’
‘I said nothing,’ said Sutcliffe. ‘I merely thought a lot. It’s as if we were versions of one another set upon differing time-tracks....’ (Durrell 1992, 911)

18As Blanford’s and Sutcliffe’s thoughts become less and less distinguishable, the two characters seem to be deprived of their own discrete personalities. But Sutcliffe is not the only one to have ‘no future and no past,’ only ‘contexts’ as ‘fictions’8 have; so does Constance whose love story with Affad is known before it happens.9 Although she belongs to the same reality level as Blanford, she also exists as Blanford’s fictitious creature and consequently appears as a character in Blanford’s novel. Yet, she surprisingly retains part of her autonomy since she can read about her future. Therefore, she is both the fictitious character Blanford can toy with in his narrative and the independent woman he tries to conquer, both actress and reader of her own role: ‘Yesterday she spent the afternoon with me and I started to read her bits of my book; but in the middle dozed off, and I fear without permission she did a brief riffle of the rest, while I slept. I am vexed, she was supposed not to know until he went back to Egypt.’ (Durrell 1992, 912)

19Eventually, the reader finds himself unable to identify the character’s position in this series of enmeshed fictions and ends up experimenting in turn with the limits of this metafictional game. Blanford and Sutcliffe, twin narrative figures acting as the ghostly reflections of the implied author, like other characters, such as Constance and her sister Livia, who also function as dual figures, jeopardize the unity of the whole structure. Characters as incarnated personalities are thus discarded through the successive narrative shifts to the point that they become impalpable entities, disembodied literary functions.

20Consequently, characters are to be conceived as symbols to be decoded: they become metaphors for a cryptic essence, what Blanford calls their ‘water’ or ‘signature.’ (Durrell 1992, 451) They acquire shape and meaning as the afterglow of a disappeared image leaving behind them a signature to be deciphered. Therefore, the progressive depersonalisation of the narrative source and of its agents guides the reader towards the perception of a new aesthetic emotion. By forcing us to give up our classical expectations, Durrell’s novels pave the way for the emergence of a new, modernist vision which transcends the multiple appearances of the ego.

3 The reader’s progress through ‘the totally unpredictable’: the emergence of the Heraldic Universe (Durrell, 1992, 1367)

21Oddly enough, it is precisely when the reader starts feeling at a loss, trying to distinguish the creature from its creator, groping his way through the tangled threads of the narrative, that the pattern appears to make sense. Thus Constance, as a mirror figure to her sister Livia, also ties in the Quintet with the Quartet: ‘Was this true of Constance or of Livia her sister, the writer wondered. The blonde girl and the dark. The girl with the velvet conundrum and the girl with the beak of a swan?’ (Durrell 1992, 303)

22As early as the third sentence the description appears purposefully deceitful, since we can no longer tell the two sisters from each other. However, the careful reader will not fail to notice that the enigmatic twin figures are strangely reminiscent of Justine and Melissa in the Quartet. At the end of the Workpoints in Justine, Darley notes: ‘Conundrum: a peacock’s eye. Kisses so amateurish they resembled an early form of printing.’ (Durrell 1974, 198)

23Whether he is thinking of Justine or Melissa is not known, but the description is made explicit a few pages later in Balthazar: ‘As for the something that remains constant... the shy kiss of Melissa is predictable, for example (amateurish as an early form of printing), or the frowns of Justine....’ (Durrell 1974, 210)

24At this point, we realise that the initial note in Justine was actually meant to entwine the two female figures. Consequently the deliberate blurring of paired identities turns out to be the very clue to Durrell’s system of characterisation. And as we find more and more characters from the Quartet resurfacing in the Quintet, we realise that these ‘are all fragments of one another,’ as Blanford says: ‘After all, why not a book full of spare parts of other books, of characters left over from other lives, all circulating in each other’s bloodstreams —yet all fresh, nothing secondhand, twice chewed, twice breathed.... Be ye members of one another.’ (Durrell 1992, 693)

25Thus Durrell’s world stands out as the vanishing point of broken lines: shattered identities have exploded into splinters of meaning that can only be recaptured by a backward and cross-novel re-reading. Consequently, the reader is not merely dealing with a book, or a novel, but with a whole moving universe made of corresponding symbols. The ultimate result is a fragile, unstable construction, never ‘second-hand, twice chewed, twice breathed’ since it is reborn at each new reading. The characters, once deprived of a realistic entity, emerge then as signifying forms, illustrating Pursewarden’s far-sighted prediction in the Quartet: ‘Art occurs at the point where a form is sincerely honoured by an awakened spirit.’ (Durrell 1974, 751)

26The concept of personality, revisited by Durrell, revolves around this moving ‘form’ which is constantly reshaped by the writer and reader’s living ‘spirit’. Whereas traditional psychology thinks in terms of a unified, coherent picture, Durrell imagines a composite, mobile network. For, according to psychologists, personality is defined as the assemblage of qualities or characteristics which makes a person a distinctive individual. Instead, Durrell suggests a disembodied version, which would no longer be an individual but a collective one: ‘Be ye members of one another, he thought. If each had a part in the play perhaps they could also be the various actors which, in their sum, made up one whole single personality?’ (Durrell 1992, 1177)

27Yet, this ‘whole, single personality’ cannot be made into flesh and bone but only hinted at, and remains to be improvised. Thus, Durrell leaves us with an imaginary ‘edifice [that] would point the finger at the notion of discrete identity as being very much in question.’ (Durrell, 1992, 1181) Eventually, the pervasive play on broken profiles and superimposed refractions, which stand out as so many ‘“spare parts,” pièces détachées’, tends to shatter the traditional space of representation. (Durrell 1992, 1181) As such, it is strongly reminiscent of what the Cubists did, creating a specific ‘spatial concept’ which, as the art critic Rudolph Arnheim explains, implied that ‘there is no other order than the mutual balancing of individual “slants, each pointing its own way”’:

They did not wish to show the unreal creatures in real space. Rather they presented things that were real but decomposed, because their components had to obey the laws of heterogeneous systems of space crossing each other irregularly. This could be shown only by the disintegration of space itself.10

28Similarly, Durrell’s characters are not ‘unreal creatures’ but ‘decomposed’ fragments of reality. Each new narrative point of view alters the perspective and discloses a new, unexpected facet; it is only through the ‘mutual balancing of individual “slants”’ that the characters take shape and meaning as composite wholes pointing to the heterogeneous, fragmentary nature of human perception. This is how the Quintet is able to build up polymorphous characters: ‘a girl somewhat like Pia-Constance-Livia’ or ‘Livia and Constance, the two faces? Transposed heads!’ (Durrell 1992, 305, 313)

29However, although Durrell may resort to the cubist techniques of fragmentation, his aesthetic purpose is a totally different one. Whereas the Cubists sought to free themselves from the illusion in order to reveal the quiddity at the heart of the material world, Durrell denounces the sham representations of a unified coherent whole in order to warn us against the fragility of any form of truth. Durrell re-members the splintered facets of the prism in order to allow the reader to play with a new composition which he knows to be transient and illusory. In so doing, Durrell stresses the self-renewing power of creation, the life-giving force of the ‘act of the imagination’ which brings to birth the poet’s heraldic universe: ‘To see is to imagine!... Brother Ass, the so-called act of living is really an act of the imagination. The world—which we always visualize as “the outside world—yields only to self-exploration!”’ (Durrell 1974, 764, 772)

30This ‘self-exploration’ may lead to drastic discoveries, such as that of the dingy world of child prostitutes Pursewarden encounters when following Justine. Symbolically, Justine discloses for Pursewarden the hidden world of the starved souls of Alexandria’s brothels just as Blanford, at the end of the Quintet, relinquishes his notes to ‘the death-drift of history’:

He had thrown away all his notes for the new book.... It would be like this after the atomic explosion, he was thinking—just clouds of memoranda filling the air—human memoranda. The sum of all their parts whirled in the death-drift of history —motes in a vast sunbeam. (Durrell 1992, 1177- 8)

31It is as if the Quintet echoed the Quartet at this point: just as Justine abandons the world of light and reason for that of dark passion and stunted lives, Blanford gives up all rational preconception and allows his notes to fly away in an imaginary ‘atomic explosion.’ The storytellers, fathoming not the ‘outside’ but the inner world, discover a frightening, deadly reality. Simultaneously, this maddening process of self-destruction appears to contaminate the very nature of the book, which slowly turns into a ‘teratoma,’ ‘literally a bag full of unfinished spare parts—nails and hair and half-grown teeth... part of a twin which at some stage decided to stop growing.’ (Durrell, 1992, 315)

32Eventually, the reader is left with a gallery of shrivelled lives fighting their way through ‘a bag full of unfinished spare parts,’ fully aware that he alone can reconstruct the heraldic universe by relating the symbolic figures and crossing the textual, temporal and spatial divide. Significantly, the illusion of fiction outlives the end of the story, allowing him to hope that he may still dream out some sort of reconstruction, some new way of life-giving. Darley ends the Quartet on the birth of a new fiction—‘I wrote: “Once upon a time...” And I felt as if the whole universe had given me a nudge!’—while Blanford opens up again the dark cave of fiction at the end of the Quintet: ‘It was at this precise moment that reality prime rushed to the aid of fiction and the totally unpredictable began to take place!’

33We started by asking ourselves how the disintegration of the artist’s ego could lead to a renewal of literary emotion. We have seen how the artist’s depersonalisation is staged through a most peculiar, and initially confusing system of characterisation and how the various impersonal practices playing on fragmented identities build up the metafictional game which entices the reader to give meaning and shape to broken and transient forms. It is precisely through this deliberate process of depersonalisation that the characters’ portraits become meaningful: they orient the reader towards a self-exploratory inquiry where he/she comes to grasp the fleeting nature of reality. As shapes and figures overlap and fade out, he/she is drawn into the moving puzzle and starts seeing and imagining for him/ herself. Depersonalisation stands out as the key to Durrell’s deconstructing technique and becomes the necessary condition to the birth of a new aesthetic emotion. Eventually, the Quintet opens up Durrell’s entire literary construction on what Pursewarden calls ‘the poetic jump’. By exploding the stilted boundaries of a dead ego the novel gives birth to a new kind of book which is no longer a self-enclosed system but an organic, self-regenerating whole which triggers the very emotion of life, which exists ‘to be lived out and not thought out!’ (Durrell 1974, 772)