Anna Lillios
Into the Labyrinth is one of four collections of essays
on Durrell published from 1987 to 1990.The others are Critical Essays on
Lawrence Durrell edited by Alan Warren Friedman, the two volumes of Twentieth
Century Literature edited by Ian MacNiven and Carol Peirce, and On Miracle
Ground edited by Michael Begnal.
Into the Labyrinth began as “a small gathering of
essays” that Frank Kernowski wanted to present to Durrell on the occasion
of his seventy-fifth birthday.After reading these essays, written by people
whose “lives had been affected by Durrell and his writings,” Kernowski
expanded the collection to include critical essays covering almost all
of the genres in which Durrell worked but not all the major titles. There
are excellent essays on Pope Joan (Gordon Thomas’s “Joan and Juan: Christ
and Eros”), the Antrobus series (Kernowski’s “Durrell’s Diplomats: Inertia
Where Is Thy Sting?”), and The Dark Labyrinth (Gregory Dickson’s “The Narrator
in The Dark Labyrinth”)—all given scant attention bythe
critics; but no essay deals exclusively with The Avignon Quintet, a work
begging for lucid explication. Lee Lemon in “Durrell’s Major Works:Classic
Forms for Our Time” points out that a “sizeable community of critics and
lay readers” needs to be prepared for novels like the Quintet which
explore the uncharted territory of the “uncentered ego.”
In his article Lemon raises another significant issue
in Durrell scholarship:“Where the
devil do we put Lawrence Durrell’s major novels? Modernist? Postmodernist?
Experimental? Metafictional?” It is the same problem that John A. Weigel
addressed in Lawrence Durrell twenty-four years earlier:“If one could only
place Durrell, one could deal with him.Durrell as a novelist is easily
misplaced.” Durrell’s position in the ever-shifting canon is also at issue
today. A few decades ago he did not fit in because he was not considered
British enough;as C. P. Snow said, “We don’t think of him as quite British.”
Nowadays, the fact that he was a white British male is to his disadvantage.Durrell’s
importance, therefore, must be established on grounds other than nationality
and gender. His international outlook and playful experimentation with
the form of the novel and metaphysical ideas make him very much in vogue
today—if only academicians would look at him in these terms. More articles,
such as Lemon’s presentation at the Fifth International Lawrence Durrell
Conference, “The World According to Durrell and Derrida: A Study in Deconstruction,”
would start the process of relocation and evaluating Durrell’s work for
the 1990s by placing it in the context of recent critical theories.
In the essay written for Into the Labyrinth, Lemon
continues his efforts at defining Durrell’s work.Referring to Durrell’s
desire “to discover a morphological form one might call ‘classical’ for
our time,” Lemon explains what “classical” might mean to a late-twentieth
century reader. According to Lemon, a classical novel for our time would
not be a Bildungsroman, because it would not deal with the development
of the ego, which we perceive as unstable.As a result, “There will, concomitantly,
be a search for some means of attaining coherence without the presence
of a protagonist with a welll-defined set of traits.”Such a novel would
end without closure, as indeed is the case with The Avignon Quintet.
Another area of Durrell scholarship that is ripe for new criticism concerns his relationship to other writers and the question of influence. At the Sixth International Durrell Conference, Durrell’s name was linked to such disparate authors as Hemingway, Strindberg, Graves, and Eco. Carol Peirce’s article, “’One other guady night’: Lawrence Durrell’s Elizabethan Quartet,” compares Durrell to a classic author of another era—Shakespeare.Though in the Kneller Tape interview Durrell admits to “having Elizabethanized,” no one before Peirce had explored this area of influence. By concentrating on the Quartet’s many allusions to Antony and Cleopatra, she shows how Durrell’s conception of a multi-layered world corresponds to the
…from 1960 on, neither writer was to say much in literary admonition to the other….More likely, there were affectionate Gallic shrugs in Provence—“Ah, that Henry!What can one do?”—and bemused head waggings along the California coast as each author received a work from his friend in the style or genre he disliked. (20)
He was exalted and exultant.And how he could talk!In that beautiful English accent which I only much later came to appreciate.He was scintillating all the time;there was a punch to every sentence he uttered.Nothing could abate his exuberance and enthusiasm.We had always been gay and exuberant;it seemed impossible our gaiety could reach a higher point. And yet, Larry, with his inexhaustible reserve of joie de vivre, pushed our gaiety to a new height. (7-8)
Into the Labyrinth definitely makes a contribution to Durrell scholarship.It and the other recently published collections of essays all bear witness to Durrell’s accomplishment and to the variety of critical scholarship it has evoked.Durrell’s description of Henry Miller—that he was “born many”—applies to himself as well.
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