The story is set in the Egyptian city of Alexandria just before World War II, a crossroads of the ancient and the new, simultaneously primitive and cosmopolitan. The main characters include the Irish teacher and writer Darley, who narrates the first two and the last volumes of the quartet in the first person; the two women with whom he has sexually obsessive love affairs, Justine, an Egyptian Jew, and Melissa, a dancer suffering from tuberculosis; Justine’s husband, Nessim, a wealthy Coptic Christian and a friend of Darley’s who fathers a child by Melissa; Pursewarden, a British diplomat and writer who also has an affair with Justine; Balthazar, the Alexandrian psychiatrist whom Darley consults; David Mountolive, a British diplomat and the lover of Nessim’s mother, Leila, and later of Pursewarden’s sister Liza, whose child is the fruit of her incestuous relationship with her brother; and the artist Clea, who also has affairs with Justine and Darley.

Their stories—all concerned with modern love—unfold in a prose narrative that is highly poetic, evocative of the exotic setting in the city of Alexandria, erotically charged, and distinctly subjective. Overall, the series is noted for its innovations in narrative form. Durrell uses several extra-narrative elements to help him achieve his goal of breaking the traditional linear structure of the novel as an art form. For example, he prefaces each volume of the series with a note to the reader and with epigraphs from the Marquis de Sade’s infamous novel Justine. His notes vary, from the plain statement in the first book that the characters are all imaginary, to longer explanations of his plan in composing the series. He takes pains to point out that the series is not and could never become a “roman-fleuve.” Here, Durrell seems to be distancing his work from the multivolume fictions by writers such as John Galsworthy, Anthony Powell, C. P. Snow, and the French novelist Marcel Proust.

The reader is gently instructed to perceive his series as a work inspired by Einstein’s theory of relativity: The first three volumes present different aspects of events occurring in a particular space, viewing those events both subjectively and objectively, but not standing in relation to each other as sequels, while the fourth adds the dimension of time to the story and settles the events of the previous volumes into their proper sequence. In the prefatory note to Clea, Durrell uses the term word continuum to describe his series of novels.

In addition to opening remarks, Durrell also adds an unusual element to the end of all the novels in the series except Mountolive—the story as told from an “objective” stance. These passages are called “Consequential Data,” “Workpoints,” or simply “Notes.” They resemble the rough sketches of a writer’s brainstorming session, or they add specific information that the reader might not be able to infer from the text, such as the identification of “the old man” mentioned in the early pages of Justine as the Greek poet Cavafy. Like the footnotes to T. S. Eliot’s poem The Wasteland, these additional materials augment the text and modify both the content and the form that the text takes as a work of art.

The “Workpoints” in particular undermine the sense of an ending by opening up new possibilities for the characters. The story is not just what is written—it is also everything else that might occur in the imaginary lives of these people but that didn’t happen to be recorded in the volumes in hand. The structure of each volume and of the series as a whole moves from the formality and the historical certainty of epigraphs, quoted from real writers who lived and wrote and died, to the informality of sketchy ideas for plot twists that have not yet happened to imaginary people. In form, the series moves from the actual real past to the possible imagined future, although it does not follow a linear path in getting there.

In his characters as well as his plot, Durrell strives to break with the norms of traditional realism in fictional representations of life. In telling the events of the story from different points of view, he attempts what Justine calls, in the volume named for her, “prism-sightedness.” Like a cubist portrait that shows the front and the side view of a face simultaneously, or like the stop-motion effect of Marcel Duchamp’s famous painting Nude Descending a Staircase, the characters in The Alexandria Quartet are layered with ambiguity and potentiality. Readers must actively participate in constructing the characters, the events of their lives, and the motivations for their actions from the array of conflicting evidence Durrell assembles.

Bibliography
Begnal, Michael H., ed. On Miracle Ground: Essays on the Fiction of Lawrence Durrell. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1990.
Friedman, Alan Warren. Lawrence Durrell and The Alexandria Quartet: Art for Love’s Sake. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970.
Raper, Julius Rowan, Melody L. Enscore, and Paige Matthey Bynum. Lawrence Durrell: Comprehending the Whole. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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