Stefan Herbrechter.  Lawrence Durrell, Postmodernism and the Ethics of Alterity.  Amsterdam/Atlanta:  Editions Rodopi, 1999.  334 pages.  $61.11
 
 


Charles L. Sligh


Somewhere near the start of The Avignon Quintet, Sylvie breaks the silence of a wet and wintry Provençal afternoon, reading extempore to her friends from one of Rob Sutcliffe's notebooks.  "Identity is the frail suggestion of coherence with which we have clad ourselves," Slyvie intones.  "It is both illusory and quite real, and most necessary for happiness, if indeed happiness is necessary" (Monsieur 84-85).  The reception history of Durrell's writing suggests that literary identities are likewise the product of such necessary--if arbitrarily conceived--impositions.  Too often these frail suggestions of coherence have been unhappily put forth by critics eager to pigeonhole (or to dismiss) Durrell.  Relatively few scholars have heeded John Maynard's admonition that the shifting landscape of Durrell's art requires his critics to re-evaluate their "charts and cartographic typologies" (72).  Instead, like mad cartographers in a Borgesian ficcione, these myopic surveyors have been too quick to cover the brilliant idiosyncrasies and the frustrating inconsistencies of Durrell's variegated terrain beneath their ready-made maps, obscuring his works within a dense labyrinth made up of modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and other theoretical preconceptions.
    Such cautionary parables have everything to do with Stefan Herbrechter's new study, Lawrence Durrell, Postmodernism and the Ethics of Alterity, a work whose ambitious range and serious flaws merit consideration by all scholars of Durrell's art.  Caveat lector.  Although the title of this book appears to promise a study of Lawrence Durrell, granting that author's name top billing, Herbrechter's main intent is really something altogether different.  Readers may take up Lawrence Durrell, Postmodernism and the Ethics of Alterity expecting an elaboration of certain active principles at work within Durrell's writing.  Instead, they will quickly discover that Herbrechter proposes to use Durrell's work as the means, rather than the ends, of his study:

    [Lawrence Durrell, Postmodernism and the Ethics of Alterity] attempts neither an application of postmodernist theory to the work of
    Lawrence Durrell, nor does it take Durrell's writings as a reflection of or on postmodernist theory.  Both, Durrell and postmodernist theory,
    are here set side by side, allowing differences and similarities to emerge with regard to a particular 'theme', namely:  alterity. (1)

Issues of "alterity"--postmodern, postcolonial, or otherwise--are the truest concerns of this survey.  And postmodern theory, with its deep commitment to championing this alterity, easily displaces Lawrence Durrell as the favorite hero within Herbrechter's narrative.  Indeed, Herbrechter makes his preference quite clear:  "This study uses Durrell's writings as a springboard into the pool of contemporary notions of alterity, in order to arrive at a different, and hopefully a more rigorous and 'radical', conception of postmodernism" (3).  No doubt the choice to plunge headlong into the theoretical depths of Herbrechter's book will be decided by the reader's ability to appreciate this prioritization of insights into postmodern theory over insights into Durrell's writings.
    "Postmodernism," Herbrechter incessantly reminds his readers, "is obsessed with otherness" (3)--it recognizes an "incommensurable alterity" (137), an "Other" which forever eludes the seeker.  What we have been calling the "modern," by contrast, is characterized by a desire to break with existing orders and by its "voracity and its drive to appropriate or colonise the other" (167).  So far, so good.  T.S. Eliot would probably reject the comparison, but we can see how, once Herbrechter's story of the modern is stripped of the clichéd terminology of ideological criticism, the two critics' modernist programs might look somewhat similar.  After all, Eliot's prescription for "amalgamating" the fragmented and "disparate" modern experience by means of a "more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect" art (64, 65) could conceivably be misread as a "voracious" attempt to "colonize" the postwar waste land.  (See, for example, Said's artful account of modernism's rise alongside imperialism's decline, in Culture and Imperialism [1993].)  After the modern, according to Herbrechter's theoretical narrative, there follows something called "postmodernity," which is less clearly explained and quite a bit more elusive.  An intermediate stage between the modern and postmodernism--it is "an age considering itself to be 'beyond' modernism" (4)--postmodernity reflects "the perceived social change" (1) resulting from modernism and involves, like Gnosticism, a nostalgic longing for "spiritual revival" (114).  Finally, Herbrechter heralds the arrival of postmodernism, a mode of critique which is purged of postmodernity's nostalgic longings and opposes the modernist "violence and universalism" (3).  In the place of an Eliotic shoring up of fragments, postmodernism insists on an "ethics of alterity" (5), which requires that all those fallen ruins--Athenian, Alexandrian, or otherwise--be left to themselves.  Postmodernism, as a result of this new ethics, ends up sounding a lot like a manifesto for political correctness, vigilantly on its guard against "the reduction of the Other into the Same or its appropriation within categories of sameness or difference" (5).
    Having first established a critical emphasis on an ethics of alterity, Herbrechter then moves on to consider the treatment of the Other in Durrell's work.  More often than not Durrell is convicted of doing violence against alterity:

    Postmodern theory rejects the nostalgic longing for unity and welcomes radical plurality as a challenge, an opening towards the future, not
    as a loss but as a gain in perspective.... It is this plural notion of alterity and difference which Durrell's writings and their gnostic world view
    ultimately foreclose.  In Durrell, the freedom 'promised' within the process of pluralisation is always taken back.  Instead it invokes a notion
    of the entirely Other as the mystical 'One' which negates the difference. (164;  emphasis added)

Poor Durrell never quite makes the jump across to Herbrechter's much-idealized vale of postmodernism.  It seems that the writer always falls just short of the mark, foundering upon his nostalgic longing for gnosis, forever mired somewhere in the midst of a nascent postmodernity.
    And this criticism cuts to the core of the matter.  Herbrechter's study aspires to stay true to the "notion" of postmodern theory and to promote a radical alterity.  Thus there is a profound irony when the possibility of achieving a fresh vantage onto an "other Durrell" or "Durrells" is consistently denied.  In fact, despite posmodernism's frequently avowed disdain for the "violence of universalism" and totalizing metanarratives, Lawrence Durrell, Postmodernism and the Ethics of Alterity puts forward a reading of Durrell that can only be termed a totalization.  As Herbrechter considers Durrell's treatment of the Other in relation to various issues, he insists repeatedly that Durrell "always" promises and then revokes alterity:  "The gnostic ideal of alterity in Durrell's writing and the ethical imperative of alterity in postmodernist theory are therefore infinitely separated in their attitude towards plurality" (119).  This verdict is chilling in its finality.
    As these examples make clear, the characteristic plotline of Herbrechter's book has all the dynamics and suspense of a boxing match that has been fixed.  For seven grueling rounds--Herbrechter's seven chapters address, among other topics, Gnosticism, Time, the Artist, and Postcolonialism--Durrell is set up in the ring, pushed to the ropes by the heavily favored postmodernism, and knocked out cold on the mat.  One ends up admiring such a beleaguered opponent for coming back at all, chapter after chapter.
    That said, it should be emphasized that Lawrence Durrell, Postmodernism and the Ethics of Alterity does offer several memorable moments of insight into Durrell's writings.  Herbrechter has spent time exploring the (now relocated) archive at the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Lawrence Durrell, and he has a knack for offering up primary texts previously neglected by Durrell scholars.  Furthermore, Herbrechter's analysis of "The Artist as Autist" within Durrell's fiction should be of interest to all readers, especially those concerned with the themes of mental illness and trauma that run through The Avignon Quintet.  Herbrechter discerns that "autism is...used as a general ontological condition for humanity" (198) in the Quintet:  "the central paradox for the Durrellian artist figures is:  how can the autist become an artist, and vice-versa?  Why is the autist privileged in his disabused way of seeing and how can artists (re-)enter this autistic state of 'perfect' impersonality?" (197).  There is also some provocative analysis of Durrell's progression from the "islomania" (259-60) of his early works to the "dromomania" evidenced by the "highly mobile and polyglot" characters of the Quintet (280-81).  It is therefore recommended that those readers seeking out new views onto Durrell's art within Lawrence Durrell, Postmodernism and the Ethics of Alterity exercise a highly selected dipping:  the parts satisfy much more than the whole.
    "I'm terribly suspect," Lawrence Durrell confessed in a 1968 New York Times interview.  "You see, I've done these things that read a bit like detective stories.  But of course they're more than that, because I've built a whole system of question marks into them.  This is what bothers the critics with their passion for categorizing.  They don't know what to call the books" (Lawrence Durrell: Conversations 91).  It seems that those question marks still elude us.

Deus Loci 7 (1999-2000):  184-88.

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