Clea is a novel written by a guy who doesn't seem to believe in novels. It is sort of the opposite of books like Brideshead, A la recherche du temps perdu, and A Dance to the Music of Time. In those books, characters keep trying to live lives that have the unity and purpose of art and keep failing at this. In Clea, and the rest of the Alexandria Quartet, art keeps trying to represent life and it keeps failing.
I suppose this sort of stuff goes back to Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford: think of Conrad's Marlow telling the story of his visit to Africa but stopping again and again to say. "It's hopeless, hopeless".
Lawrence Durrell has used that trick in a way that's really quite audacious. He has a story told by a writer named Darley. You might say that Durrell created a character named Darley and then had Darley write the books for him. The audacious thing is that Darley, unlike Charles Marlow, is not a good story teller; he is a bad writer. He aspires to do fine writing and all four books are full of his efforts that don't really add up to much.
Here is an example. This is from Clea. Notice the clichés and awful metaphors here:
That's not unconsciously bad writing. Durrell has put a lot of effort into making Darley like this. And it's very modern. Compare it with the way Shakespeare has characters say stupid things in beautiful language that only Shakespeare could write. Bottom gets love all wrong when he wakes up from his dream but he gets it wrong in ways that are beautiful and profound. Darley just gets love wrong. He gets it wrong the way a fourth rate writer would if he tried to express something too big, too beautiful and too sacred. Pulling that off credibly is a lot harder than it seems.
That's also brave because, obviously, there is always the possibility that your readers won't get the joke and think that it's just bad writing plain and simple. Alternatively, and this is far more common in my experience, they might miss the thing entirely and think that the "fine writing" Durrell means to mock really is fine writing. That's what I did back in university and I knew a bunch of guys who took Durrell as their Hemingway and got wrapped up in silly romantic fantasies about Alexandria.
This ought to have been harder than it was because no one, not even silly romantic young men, could miss that Durrell was playing with us. But you also can't shake the feeling that he is playing with himself too. He keeps playing game after game after game. But it's never quite like peeling an onion in that you never get to the point where you have nothing.
To keep reading you have to believe that the truth is cleverly hidden around the edges like A Heart of Darkness or The Good Soldier. Or, as he keeps hinting, that Durrell is pointing at some sort of gnosticism where the possession of inside knowledge will give you power. In the first volume when Justine first meets Darley after a lecture he has given on Cavafy, she says, "What did you mean by your remark about the antinomian nature of irony?" That seems like a powerful idea: that irony would free us from moral obligation.
Except that the irony in The Alexandria Quartet is anything but subtle. To recognize it is not to join some small and exclusive club of knowers.
By the time you get to Clea, you're thinking maybe this time he is going to let us get a glimpse of real love; maybe this time he is describing a woman who won't turn into so much vapour at the end. And he seems to do that at first. Except that he starts using the same events to describe his love and she starts to feel like the other women Darley has loved and the awful suspicion that Melissa, Justine and Clea are the same fantasy woman described in different ways starts to bother you.
The party at the end of the universe
Camus, in a metaphor I've borrowed before, compared nihilism to a dead-end alley. When you get to the dead end, you have three choices,
In real life, though, being a martyr for nihilism is a grim and depressing choice so we find ways to make the second choice look morally admirable. You sit in the audience and watch the nihilistic movie and then you go to a party where you and a bunch of your friends collectively pretend to be edgy and transgressive and a whole lot of other words that mean a little less every time you think about them. The nagging doubt that you are just being dilettantes is always there but you are still alive and you can even have quite a bit of fun.
The last choice seems underwhelming.
You may wonder why I invoke Cardinal Newman as it doesn't seem like we need to be told that you can turn around and walk out of a dead-end alley. That's because metaphors have limits. In real life, you never would have headed up the alley in the first place if you had really believed it was a dead end. You may have known in an abstract sense, or adults may have tried to tell you, that this alley went nowhere but you thought maybe it would be different for you.
And when you get to the end of the alleyway, you found that it was crowded with other people just like you and they were having a party and it was a good party at first. And there is no denial quite like collective denial.
You can't just turn around because you have paid a price to get all this way up the alley. You had to defy those adults who told you not to go as well as overcome your own sense of doubt. And then you had to earn your way into that party at the end. The cool kids at the nihilism bash don't let anyone in. You have to learn the talk and the ways to act and dress and, not incidentally, it always costs more money to be a nihilist than it might appear. You might think that you should be able to do anything you want but show up at the nihilist party wearing the wrong clothes and you'll soon know about it.To just dump all that investment on the ground and turn around is to abandon much of what your life has been about.
And so you convince yourself that you can't turn around because logic defies you. "Show me proof that walking out the alley will get me to the truth and then I'll go," you shout, forgetting that the brick wall going the other way definitely won't get you any truth. Although you might argue that oblivion is a kind of truth and try beating your head to a pulp against it.
Of course you are right, and this is comforting, that there is no proof that walking back out again will lead anywhere at all. The choice is not between dilettantish semi-nihilism and a life of meaning and truth. It's a choice between nihilism and a life where you have to keep up the hope and faith that there will be meaning and truth.
I think Durrell never got over that party at the end of nihilism alley. He had to leave at one point because he wasn't cool enough to be allowed to hang around too long. But he kept trying to find a way to recreate it. He recognized it was laughable to he dressed it up in irony in the perennial hope that "being stupid" isn't quite the same as being stupid.
But if Clea is supposed to be real love then how does he make her seem like something other than an arbitrary choice? You can go through life having one monogamous relationship after another wondering what is going to make you stop at this one. You'd like to think there was more to it than the feeling that your sexual capital is drying up and the choices are going to get progressively less appealing and then vanish so you better settle before it's too late.
On the other hand, you want the experience. It would be nice to say you lived in Alexandria just before the war. That you lived in this wonderful polyglot city full of romance and despair and with a history that includes Cavafy, Ptolemy, Anthony and Cleopatra and even the great Alexander himself. A city that now no longer exists and maybe it never existed but the sense of a dead end is what makes it attractive somehow. Who cares you think. Damn the expense, feed that cat another goldfish 'cause here we go.
I suppose this sort of stuff goes back to Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford: think of Conrad's Marlow telling the story of his visit to Africa but stopping again and again to say. "It's hopeless, hopeless".
Lawrence Durrell has used that trick in a way that's really quite audacious. He has a story told by a writer named Darley. You might say that Durrell created a character named Darley and then had Darley write the books for him. The audacious thing is that Darley, unlike Charles Marlow, is not a good story teller; he is a bad writer. He aspires to do fine writing and all four books are full of his efforts that don't really add up to much.
Here is an example. This is from Clea. Notice the clichés and awful metaphors here:
How could I help but think of the past towards which we were returning across the dense thickets of time, across the familiar pathways of the Greek sea? The night slid past me, an unrolling ribbon of darkness. The warm wind sea-wind brushed my cheek—soft as brush of a fox. Between sleep and waking I lay, feeling the tug of memory's heavy plumb-line: tug of the leaf-veined city which my memory people with masks, malign and beautiful at once.Read it quickly—because you are gobbling up the book the way people gobble up the road when they are in a hurry to get somewhere and don't care to notice the country they are driving through—and it might not bother you. But does writing come any more hackneyed than "dense thickets of time", or winds that are "soft as the brush of a fox"? And ask yourself what an unrolling ribbon of darkness is supposed to convey? Or how does a plumb line tug at you? And what does telling us that Alexandria is leaf-veined help us to see? That it has streets that form a regular pattern maybe? Which would make it different from every other city in the known universe how exactly?
That's not unconsciously bad writing. Durrell has put a lot of effort into making Darley like this. And it's very modern. Compare it with the way Shakespeare has characters say stupid things in beautiful language that only Shakespeare could write. Bottom gets love all wrong when he wakes up from his dream but he gets it wrong in ways that are beautiful and profound. Darley just gets love wrong. He gets it wrong the way a fourth rate writer would if he tried to express something too big, too beautiful and too sacred. Pulling that off credibly is a lot harder than it seems.
That's also brave because, obviously, there is always the possibility that your readers won't get the joke and think that it's just bad writing plain and simple. Alternatively, and this is far more common in my experience, they might miss the thing entirely and think that the "fine writing" Durrell means to mock really is fine writing. That's what I did back in university and I knew a bunch of guys who took Durrell as their Hemingway and got wrapped up in silly romantic fantasies about Alexandria.
This ought to have been harder than it was because no one, not even silly romantic young men, could miss that Durrell was playing with us. But you also can't shake the feeling that he is playing with himself too. He keeps playing game after game after game. But it's never quite like peeling an onion in that you never get to the point where you have nothing.
To keep reading you have to believe that the truth is cleverly hidden around the edges like A Heart of Darkness or The Good Soldier. Or, as he keeps hinting, that Durrell is pointing at some sort of gnosticism where the possession of inside knowledge will give you power. In the first volume when Justine first meets Darley after a lecture he has given on Cavafy, she says, "What did you mean by your remark about the antinomian nature of irony?" That seems like a powerful idea: that irony would free us from moral obligation.
Except that the irony in The Alexandria Quartet is anything but subtle. To recognize it is not to join some small and exclusive club of knowers.
By the time you get to Clea, you're thinking maybe this time he is going to let us get a glimpse of real love; maybe this time he is describing a woman who won't turn into so much vapour at the end. And he seems to do that at first. Except that he starts using the same events to describe his love and she starts to feel like the other women Darley has loved and the awful suspicion that Melissa, Justine and Clea are the same fantasy woman described in different ways starts to bother you.
The party at the end of the universe
Camus, in a metaphor I've borrowed before, compared nihilism to a dead-end alley. When you get to the dead end, you have three choices,
- you can beat your skull to a pulp against the brick wall at the end of the alley,
- you can just hang around and think of ways to amuse yourself, or
- you can do what Cardinal Newman advised and turn around and walk out.
In real life, though, being a martyr for nihilism is a grim and depressing choice so we find ways to make the second choice look morally admirable. You sit in the audience and watch the nihilistic movie and then you go to a party where you and a bunch of your friends collectively pretend to be edgy and transgressive and a whole lot of other words that mean a little less every time you think about them. The nagging doubt that you are just being dilettantes is always there but you are still alive and you can even have quite a bit of fun.
The last choice seems underwhelming.
You may wonder why I invoke Cardinal Newman as it doesn't seem like we need to be told that you can turn around and walk out of a dead-end alley. That's because metaphors have limits. In real life, you never would have headed up the alley in the first place if you had really believed it was a dead end. You may have known in an abstract sense, or adults may have tried to tell you, that this alley went nowhere but you thought maybe it would be different for you.
And when you get to the end of the alleyway, you found that it was crowded with other people just like you and they were having a party and it was a good party at first. And there is no denial quite like collective denial.
You can't just turn around because you have paid a price to get all this way up the alley. You had to defy those adults who told you not to go as well as overcome your own sense of doubt. And then you had to earn your way into that party at the end. The cool kids at the nihilism bash don't let anyone in. You have to learn the talk and the ways to act and dress and, not incidentally, it always costs more money to be a nihilist than it might appear. You might think that you should be able to do anything you want but show up at the nihilist party wearing the wrong clothes and you'll soon know about it.To just dump all that investment on the ground and turn around is to abandon much of what your life has been about.
And so you convince yourself that you can't turn around because logic defies you. "Show me proof that walking out the alley will get me to the truth and then I'll go," you shout, forgetting that the brick wall going the other way definitely won't get you any truth. Although you might argue that oblivion is a kind of truth and try beating your head to a pulp against it.
Of course you are right, and this is comforting, that there is no proof that walking back out again will lead anywhere at all. The choice is not between dilettantish semi-nihilism and a life of meaning and truth. It's a choice between nihilism and a life where you have to keep up the hope and faith that there will be meaning and truth.
I think Durrell never got over that party at the end of nihilism alley. He had to leave at one point because he wasn't cool enough to be allowed to hang around too long. But he kept trying to find a way to recreate it. He recognized it was laughable to he dressed it up in irony in the perennial hope that "being stupid" isn't quite the same as being stupid.
But if Clea is supposed to be real love then how does he make her seem like something other than an arbitrary choice? You can go through life having one monogamous relationship after another wondering what is going to make you stop at this one. You'd like to think there was more to it than the feeling that your sexual capital is drying up and the choices are going to get progressively less appealing and then vanish so you better settle before it's too late.
On the other hand, you want the experience. It would be nice to say you lived in Alexandria just before the war. That you lived in this wonderful polyglot city full of romance and despair and with a history that includes Cavafy, Ptolemy, Anthony and Cleopatra and even the great Alexander himself. A city that now no longer exists and maybe it never existed but the sense of a dead end is what makes it attractive somehow. Who cares you think. Damn the expense, feed that cat another goldfish 'cause here we go.
good post.
ReplyDeleteThank you it is very kind of you to say so.
ReplyDelete