Clea: Part Four

It is hard for me to come up with a four volume focus for Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. If pressed, I would say he's struggling with how to define oneself against one's friends and lovers. Although Durrell attests that all his female characters are facets of Egypt, they all die off (except Justine and Clea) and all the men end up only marginally affected by them. Especially Darley, the narrator, who goes through Melissa, Justine and Clea and still seems unfulfilled, not sexually, but from lack of a strong ego. Id be damned.

Durrell's male characters, as I mentioned in previous reviews, seem to follow a pattern: the more physically or morally flawed, they more they are extolled. Coming off as the sainted hero is cross dresser, murdered Scobie. One has to wonder how real he was or how much of Durrell's alter ego. Nessim seems resurrected after the death of his mother, but to what end as he appears still impoverished and politically irrelevant.

I laid awake at night trying to figure out how to diagram the love affairs across all the characters. Soon, that seemed pointless, as the ur-message seemed to be that like in Museum of Innocence, proximity is the main aphrodiasic and time alone causes serialization of relationships. Unfortunately, given a male author, all females fade, die or turn into shrews.

In a long diversion towards the middle of the book, Pursewarden reappears posthumously to lecture Darley as Brother Ass and to expand upon the structure of the Quartet: " ... you might try a four-card trick in the form of a novel; passing a common axis through the stories, say and dedicating each to one of the four winds of heaven. A continuum, forsooth, embodying not a temps retrouve but a temps delivre. The curvature of space itself would give you a stereoscopic narrative, while human personality seen across continuum would perhaps become prismatic? Who can say? I throw this idea out. I can imagine a form which, if satisfied, might raise in human terms the problems of causality or indeterminacy ..."

So I must eventually assess the Quartet in terms of the lust list. It lacks.