1Lawrence Durrell’s late and most experimental poetry collection, The Red Limbo Lingo, sketches out a world where man is trapped by matter from the beginning: “Nine months awash in the blue sac / Of the amnion, once there and back: / Washed ashore in the bulrushes of an ape’s wish” (Durrell 1971, 9). Any reassuring distinction between the human and the non-human world has been wiped out, and the reader’s safe bearings dramatically vanish as neither the human nor the animal world seems to correspond to established categories:
Sumptuous lions
brief toads
telephoning giraffes
apt as various fleshes
recent as horses
lucrative as swans (Durrell 1971, 13)
- 1 “Si vous regardez l’image de près, vous ne voyez que des fruits et légumes ; si vous vous éloignez, (...)
- 2 “La lecture tourne, sans cran d’arrêt […] La métaphore tourne sur elle-même, mais selon un mouvemen (...)
2For a fleeting moment we may wonder what the poem is after, what object it is chasing, and we feel tempted to read behind such disquieting man-animal still lifes Durrell’s criticism of our fixed perception of the world. Jeopardizing watertight boundaries between the human and the animal realms, Durrell’s poem is reminiscent of Arcimboldo’s portraits, where, as Roland Barthes has explained, the painter creates a fantastic effect through the arrangement of prosaic objects whose meaning is altered by the viewer’s standpoint: “at close range you can only see fruits and vegetables; but when you move away you can only see a man’s frightening eye […]: distance and proximity create meaning” (Barthes 132).1 The still life suddenly quickens to life—unless it were life itself that suddenly petrified under our gaze? By inducing movement, the painting undermines our assumptions not only about a necessarily fixed point of view, but also about the stability of our perception and of our reading of supposedly familiar, lifeless, and immobile objects. As in Durrell’s poem, the superimposition of the human and the non-human does not just serve the creation of a fantastic, wonderful sight: it prompts an aesthetic response that evinces what Jane Bennett calls “Thing-Power: the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (Bennett 6). Relying on her reading of Spinoza, Bennett explains how these material bodies “enhance their power in or as a heterogeneous assemblage” (Bennett 22), defining assemblages as “ad hoc grouping of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts. Assemblages are living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within” (Bennett 23). These “heterogeneous assemblages” question our way of being in the world by shattering our expectations and forbidding us to be content with a one-sided, fixed reading, petrified by established distinctions that would lead us to ignore what Barthes calls the “splatterings of meaning” (Barthes 125).2
- 3 The blurring of categories that leads to a subtle interweaving of poetry and prose throughout Durre (...)
3Reproaching his contemporaries with “drowsily cutting along a dotted line” (Durrell 1974, 758), Durrell precisely opens to the reader a fictional world that ushers in the unexpected “thing-power” of the city using its characters “as its flora” (Durrell 1974, 17). Reading backward, from the late collection of poems to the earlier fictional work—namely, The Alexandria Quartet and The Avignon Quintet—the reader realises that what may look experimental in Durrell’s poetry has in fact already been experimented in his prose through the creation of objects (whether spatial, natural or artificial) that assemble into confusing still lifes made vibrant with unexpected possibilities.3 One of the most striking instances is the representation of the city that powerfully exemplifies Bennett’s concept of the “force of things” (Bennett 355). We shall first see how the city is conceived as a living body that takes the shape of an elusive female character, thus blurring frontiers between the inanimate and the animate, the object and the subject. Yet, paradoxical though it may seem, this living body is deeply rooted in the dead effigy of “the conqueror in his coffin” (Durrell 1974, 39): its exploration unveils disturbing still lifes meant to haunt the reader’s mind. Finally, we shall show how their multiple refractions enlighten our reading of both The Alexandria Quartet and Durrell’s final volumes, The Avignon Quintet, inviting us to question our modes of perception.
4The Alexandria Quartet has often been described as a love story relating Darley’s—the main narrator’s—quest for Justine, the epitome of the unreachable, elusive female. And yet, from the very beginning the quest for the woman is expressed as a quest for the city:
I return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we inhabited so briefly together: the city which used us as its flora, precipitated us in conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandria!
Capitally, what is this city of ours? What is resumed in the word Alexandria? (Durrell 1974, 17)
5The text opens on an incantation calling forth this “beloved Alexandria,” both city and woman, both real and imaginary. At every stage of the love affairs or political schemes we are presented with a new face of this “heteroclyte [sic.], devious, polymorph, anfractuous, equivocal, opaque, ambiguous, many-branched, or just plain dotty” (Durrell 1974, 494) city. The tortuous love paths sketched out by the many couples (Darley and Justine, Melissa and Darley, Mountolive and Leila, Darley and Clea, Amaril and Semira, Justine and Nessim) appear as so many facets of the city, a city which Durrell asserts in his preliminary note to Justine is the only “real” character in the book: “The characters in this story, the first of a group, are all inventions together with the personality of the narrator, and bear no resemblance to living persons. Only the city is real.” (Durrell 1974, n.p.)
6But this reality is a fragile one, put into doubt by the narrator himself who, despite his need for a geographic landmark, sees Alexandria as a mirrored dream: “The city, half-imagined (yet wholly real) begins and ends in us, roots lodged in our memory.” (Durrell 1974, 209) Rather than being construed as an invention, or as a conveniently fictionalised locus serving as a backdrop to the characters’ stories, the city is rendered as an unpredictable space endowed with a will and a power of its own that account for the disquieting atmosphere of the novel:
We turn a corner and the world becomes a pattern of arteries, splashed with silver and deckle-edged with shadow. […]
“If you think of yourself as a sleeping city for example ... what? You can sit quiet and hear the processes going on, going about their business; volition, desire, will, cognition, passion, conation. I mean like the million legs of a centipede carrying on with the body powerless to do anything about it. […].” (Durrell 1974, 116)
- 4 “Le lieu d’exercice d’une pensée dans l’espace, qui remet en cause la distinction entre la res cogi (...)
7This surprising description of the city does not just place man as a helpless exile doomed to wander in a place that mirrors his own fragmented self. It also endows the city with human physiological qualities, turning it into a hybrid entity—“a pattern of arteries”—that simultaneously pertains to the realms of light and darkness. And only through the projection of the city onto man can the latter’s ontological essence be explained: the psychological concept of volition referring to a specific act of will is followed by the generic term “will” and taken up in the end under the term “conation,” which is defined by Spinoza as the endeavour of “any object to persist in his being” (Spinoza III, 6, 88). Thus it seems that man’s agency, his power to act upon his surroundings, can only be understood through the close observation of what we have been taught to perceive as neutral matter, the product of man’s thoughts and art. Durrell’s cityscape tallies with Michel Collot’s definition of a “place where thought is experienced in space, calling into question the distinction between the res cogitans and the res extensa” (Collot 2014, 188).4 In other words, the perception of space betrays a sensuous relationship to the outer world which cancels out the Cartesian dichotomy between the subject and its environment, the “res extensa”. Such a reassessment of space is also echoed by the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold who argues that “land is not something you can see […] As the familiar domain of our dwelling, it is with us […] And though living in it, the landscape becomes part of us, just as we are part of it” (Ingold, 190-1). But it seems that Durrell goes further than asserting the fundamental link between man and his surroundings. Referring to Spinoza’s “conatus” that applies to “Each thing [res]” qualified by an “active impulsion,” Durrell suggests, after Spinoza, that, as Jane Bennett explains, “every nonhuman body shares with every human body a conative nature” (Bennett 2). Bennett carries on by quoting Spinoza: “‘Any thing whatsoever, whether it be more or less perfect, will always be able to persist in existing […] so that in this respect all things are equal’” (Bennett 2). Jane Bennett further examines these lines from Spinoza in the light of philosopher Nancy Levene’s analysis: “‘Spinoza continually stresses this continuity between human beings and other things,’ for ‘not only do human beings not form a separate imperium unto themselves; they do not even command the imperium, nature, of which they are part’” (Levene qtd Bennett 2).
8Man’s incapacity to “command” is made even more explicit as the walk through the city comes to an end: the subject, both embodied and described here by Pursewarden, the artist and “city-man,” appears disjointed, torn apart by the different tensions plaguing him, unable to get any control over himself, trapped in his inner labyrinth—
You climb through the physical body, softly parting the muscle-schemes to admit youmuscle striped and unstriped; you examine the coil ignition of the guts in the abdomen, the sweetbreads, the liver choked with refuse like a sink-filter, the bag of urine, the red unbuckled belt of the intestines, the soft horny corridor of the œsophagus. […] A whole city of processes, a factory for the production of excrement, my goodness, a daily sacrifice. (Durrell 1974, 117)
- 5 “il implique une relativisation du sens” (my translation).
9The factory metaphor with its ignition, sink-filter and corridor suggests a city that has come to form a second skin around its characters, reduplicating the fall of the spirit into matter, and imprisoning man in a system that he cannot control and that constantly threatens him with annihilation. The mechanism is always faulty, wavering between blockage and waste and mirrors the shattered inner self of “city-man” (Durrell 1974, 117). The city clearly functions as what Bruno Latour calls an “actant,” “something that acts or to which activity is granted by others. It implies no special motivation of human individual actors, nor of humans in general” (Latour qtd Bennett 8-9). By shifting our attention to what Bennett calls “Thing-Power,” Durrell showcases what usually escapes us and builds a fictional world designed to “enhance receptivity to the impersonal life that surrounds and infuses us [and] generate a more subtle awareness of the complicated web of dissonant connections between bodies” (Bennett 4). Projecting upon the city map a human physicality that displays our hidden bodily functions, Durrell ushers in the “Thing-Power” of the city, defined by Bennett as “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (Bennett 6). This is how Durrell creates “a continuum” (Durrell 1974, 757) that affects matter as well as human and non-human beings within a disquieting, mobile space, a relative space that surreptitiously deflates mimesis. Like Arcimboldo’s still-life portraits, “it implies the relativity of space and meaning,” (Barthes 133)5 and spurs us to cut across geographic and diegetic boundaries to envisage not only The Quartet, but Durrell’s entire œuvre. This space-time continuum, that embeds the reader’s moving eye, is not merely characteristic of a specific narrative construct: it ushers in an energy continuum in which various energy systems are operational at any one time, defining a radically modern conception of the novel where, as Bennett explains in her analysis of Latour, “agency appears […] as a continuum, as a power differentially expressed by all material bodies” (Bennett 355).
10The most strikingly operational energy system in The Quartet is, paradoxically, the dissected heart of the city: torn apart between “its spiritual centre […] the Soma” and “its temporal site the Brokers’ Club” (Durrell 1974, 38-9), the cosmopolitan Alexandria of the war years that the reader thinks he can easily identify turns into a monstrous agent, half-animal, half-vegetal, an incongruous predator that displays the hidden rage of human violence—
Blows and curses and printed everywhere on the red mud walls (like the blows struck by conscience) the imprint of blue hands […] And then add screams in the night behind other shutters in that crooked street: the bey beating his wives because he was impotent. The old herb-woman selling herself every night […] The soft pelm noise of bare black feet passing on the baked mud street, late at night. Our room bulging with darkness and pestilence, and we Europeans in such disharmony with the fearful animal health of the blacks around us. The copulations of boabs shaking the house like a palm-tree. Black tigers with gleaming teeth. And everywhere the veils, the screaming, the mad giggle under the pepper-trees, the insanity and the lepers. […] It is like a death—a death of the self uttered in every repetition of the word Alexandria, Alexandria. (Durrell 1974, 56-7)
11The repeated alliterations in [b], the accumulation of plosives, the asyndetic style, the staccato rhythm of the text summon a city that belies its spatial and temporal boundaries, as if Durrell had created a parallel world to the historical city. Such a prose can scarcely be called descriptive as the object of the description dissolves and gives way to the voice of the “poet of the historic consciousness,” as Darley calls himself, “bound to see landscape as a field dominated by the human wish—tortured into farms and hamlets, ploughed into cities” (Durrell 1974, 95). The city walls and crevices are ripped apart and violence springs from every crack of the dilapidated houses, seeps through shutters and veils, echoing the collapse of civilization within the context of World War II that frames the fiction, as well as the forthcoming defeat of all the European colonial empires. This tottering world is utterly estranged from the civilised dream of “the conqueror in his coffin” (Durrell 1974, 39) and displays the forces of violence that turn the city into a place of destruction. The refined city, now reduced to a ruthless arena of primitive interaction, serves the exposure of a world that has forsaken its humanity through the description of the executed camel that lies at the core of the passage:
A camel has collapsed from exhaustion in the street outside the house. It is too heavy to transport to the slaughter-house, so a couple of men come with axes and cut it up there and then in the open street, alive. They hack through the white flesh—the poor creature looking ever more pained, more aristocratic, more puzzled as its legs are hacked off. Finally there is the head still alive, the eyes open, looking round. Not a scream of protest, not a struggle. The animal submits like a palm-tree. But for days afterwards the mud street is soaked in its blood and our bare feet are printed by the moisture. (Durrell 1974, 56)
12This dying still-life, that catches the readers off their guards and deliberately inflicts upon them a deep sense of guilty unease, cannot merely be read as another image of “heteroclite, devious, polymorph” (Durrell 1974, 494) Alexandria. The camel functions as a metaphor for the entire city: lying there with its bowels stripped open, it acts as one of the many mirrors refracting the characters’ gestures. But, whereas the elegant looking-glasses of the Hotel Cecil refracted Arnauti and Darley contemplating themselves and their own misfortunes, the camel refracts the violence that characters, as well as readers, would rather ignore. It mirrors human beings’ inherent lack of humanity, deliberate insensitivity and blindness, their quintessential wild madness for, as Corine Pelluchon argues:
- 6 “Les violences inouïes infligées de nos jours aux animaux […] sont le reflet de ce que ce système a (...)
The unheard of violence inflicted upon animals these days […] reflects what the system has turned us into […] For animal abuse is symptomatic of most of the misfunctions of our society […] The animal cause is also the cause of humanity for what is at stake in animal abuse is also our relationship to ourselves. […] what we inflict upon other sentient beings, directly or indirectly, harms our psyche. (Pelluchon 15-16)6
13Readers silently witness the maiming and killing of the helpless camel while shuddering from its sight. This unconscious blocking of the feeling of horror is as necessary, if readers are to move on with the story, as it is necessary to block the horror of the daily slaughtering of animals in our essentially carnivorous society if we are also to move on with our lives. Yet, it is not without consequences, at least from the point of view of fiction. Corine Pelluchon shows how those instances of gratuitous violence are “revealing:” they are a “reflection” of the inhumanity that constantly besets our world, and they leave traces that damage our psyche. Just as the characters’ “bare feet are printed by the moisture,” the reader’s memory is permanently marked by the image of the “mud street […] soaked in [the camel’s] blood,” reminding us of all the cities that were founded on blood-stained ground. The still life of the dying camel operates as a window reopening the perspective onto a deeper, all too often disregarded connexion with the ground we come from and will eventually return to:
- 7 “La conscience de la possibilité que la nature, les institutions, les œuvres soient détruites et qu (...)
Being aware that nature, our institutions or works of art may be destroyed and that living beings may disappear plays the same role in our relationship to others and to our shared world, as the humble awareness of my corporeal and finite condition plays in relation to myself. In both cases, the individual becomes aware of the humus, the earth that is the condition of his existence and that of others’ whose frailty he also acknowledges. (Pelluchon 43)7
14This explains why the compressed image of the executed camel is never allowed to vanish: it only recedes to crop up again, haunting our mind’s eye as we are hunting for an escape. It is as if the camel’s “head still alive, the eyes open, looking round” stood as a living reproach to our desire to turn a blind eye upon the scene. Its unnecessary and cruel death stamps the characters’ relationships, projecting upon their awkward attempts to find love the indomitable death drive that lies at the core of man’s finitude.
15Unsurprisingly, Darley, when trying to adopt a distanced, analytical perspective upon his “own feelings and desires” through the scientific study of the love act, is faced with a similar mass of exhausted flesh:
The bed was inhabited by an indistinct mass of flesh […] vaguely stirring like an ant-heap. It took me some moments to define the pale and hairy limbs of an elderly man from those of his partner—the greenish-hued whiteness of convex woman with a boa constrictor’s head. […] They lay there like the victims of some terrible accident, clumsily engaged, as if in some incoherent experimental fashion they were the first partners in the history of the human race […]. I recognized that this had been fixed immutably, for all time—this eternally tragic and ludicrous position of engagement. From this sprang all those aspects of love which the wit of poets and madmen had used to elaborate their philosophy of polite distinctions. From this point, the sick, the insane started growing […]. The rain had stopped and the damp ground exhaled the tormentingly lovely scent of clay, bodies and stale jasmine. (Durrell 1974, 151-2)
16Darley’s purportedly detached examination of love in the prostitute’s booth reveals not only the decomposition of the bodies but, more fundamentally, the decomposition of the “engagement” proper, i.e. of human relationships and, in its wake, the frailty of human intellectual constructs and institutions. Leaving the booth, Darley can no more shed off his vision than the reader could shed off that of the dying camel: the dismantled, inert whiteness of the human body has acquired an eerie kinship with the “white flesh” of the dying camel that paves the way for the perverse twist of the narrative. Indeed, Darley’s feet tread upon symbolic ground here: the earth of clay suggests both Adam’s birth in Genesis and his ultimate return to the earth—the “humus, the earth that is the condition of his existence” (Pelluchon 43). Ironically, the clay that shapes Man also shapes Darley’s memory, unable to forget the scene: he returns to it in Balthazar, the second volume of The Alexandria Quartet, where he recognizes at last the “elderly man”—“Now I wonder if it was Narouz. […] Narouz was drinking Clea thirstily out of this old body hired for pleasure, just as I myself wished only to drink Justine.” (Durrell 1974, 326)
17Narouz, Nessim’s ugly hare-lipped brother, compared to a “heifer” with a “taurine neck” (Durrell 1974, 252), is another love hunter, desperately chasing Clea during the Carnival nights when he roams the city hidden under his dark domino. Finally confessing his love to her and his attempt to kill Justine in Balthazar, he founders, uttering “the noise of a she-camel crying” (Durrell 1974, 373). The rest of the time, he leads the life of a recluse in the family farm in Karm, hunting for bats with his whip, before he ends up hunted to death with “his whip […] coiled round his body” (Durrell 1974, 642) in Mountolive. The conclusion to this third volume dramatizes the still life of the dying hunter, stoically bracing himself to wait for the beloved woman who will not reach him in time:
His musculature contracted in heavy bunches with the effort of waiting; his veins bunched out, polished to ebony with the strain, controlled by his will. He ground his teeth savagely together like a wild boar as he felt himself foundering. […] Then lastly there burst from the hairy throat of the dying man a single tremendous word, the name of Clea, uttered in the cavernous voice of a wounded lion: a voice which combined anger, reproof and an overwhelming sadness in its sudden roar. So nude a word, her name, as simple as ‘God’ or ‘Mother’—yet it sounded as if upon the lips of some dying conqueror, some lost king, conscious of the body and breath dissolving within him. The name Clea sounded through the whole house, drenched by the splendour of his anguish, silencing the little knots of whispering servants and visitors, setting back the ears of the hunting dogs, making them crouch and fawn: ringing in Nessim’s mind with a new and terrifying bitterness too deep for tears. (Durrell 1974, 646)
- 8 “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
18Narouz’s description highlights his eerie resistance to death as his entire body slowly petrifies: the polyptoton “bunches” / “bunched” combines with the dark, impenetrable “ebony” to create an alliteration of plosives. And when death finally approaches, leaving Narouz to experience his fate passively (“he felt himself foundering”), echoing the camel’s submission, the moment of dissolution turns his wounded body into an active agent: the inanimate is suddenly animated by the power of a single word—Clea. The resounding cry that penetrates to the heart of matter carries a mythical undertone: just as the biblical word that ushers in the beginning of the world in St John’s Gospel (1:1),8 Narouz’s ultimate word is the alpha and omega of his world as Clea stands in both for ‘Mother’ and ‘God’. It is a name that reverberates through space and time: the accumulation of expanding participle clauses and present participles in the last sentence leading up to the final coordinated clause summon an entire universe: that of the “house,” a word that subsumes both the place and the household, the animate and the inanimate, the human and the non-human realms. Narouz dying impersonates Alexander the Great, as if to testify to the paradoxical plenitude of death that embraces personal and historical time. It is indeed as if Narouz’s last breath had deprived the living of their breath too, “silencing the […] whispering servants” and denying Nessim his power to weep. Only when Narouz is finally gone can his brother, servants and all mourners release their breath into sobs “passed from lip to lip […] as candles take a light from one another” (Durrell 1974, 647). This paralyzing outburst of death that literally sucks in all sign of surrounding life, as if Narouz were “drinking […] thirstily” (Durrell 1974, 326) not only Clea but his whole world, amounts to an arresting still life. Life at a standstill deploys the unsuspected power of death as the dead man becomes the agent of a new form of awareness: Narouz’s final cry, meant neither to welcome nor to address the absent lover, stands out as a “nude […] word” pointing to the paroxysmal unveiling, the quintessential dispossession that death entails—what Pelluchon calls the “humble awareness of [our] corporeal condition” (Pelluchon 43).
19The painfully throbbing still lifes of The Alexandria Quartet that magnify the infinitesimal moment of passage from life to death trigger a profound uncertainty in the reader: what are we given to see? What is at stake in this in-between event that cannot be read as the mere mimesis of a human anecdote but acquires the depth of a sensible experience as it captures not just the event itself but the singular echoes of a nonfigurative presence? Not unlike Arcimboldo’s still lifes that, as Roland Barthes has explained, are “mobile pictures” (Barthes 133) forcing the reader to move around the canvas, taking a few steps backward and forward, while never taking for granted the image that has just begun to reassemble in his mind, Durrell’s still lifes are endowed with disquieting resonances that never leave the reader at peace. The palpitating dying subjects sketch out a hidden pattern that expands beyond the boundaries of Durrell’s tetralogy and branches out across his entire fiction. We are thus invited to turn simultaneously away from and back to The Quartet when reading The Revolt of Aphrodite or The Avignon Quintet and recognize in the complex variations of the hunted female subject the same leitmotiv that shatters the linearity of the diegesis and invites a paradigmatic reading that highlights the relativity of each fictional space-time.
20For reasons of brevity, we shall focus here only on the return of these still lifes in The Avignon Quintet where female characters are repeatedly pictured as helpless stags chased by their male pursuers. The series of novels opens on the case of Sylvie, locked up in the asylum of Montfavet where the narrator Bruce pays her a visit:
She worked under the great tapestry with its glowing but subdued toneshuntsmen with lofted horns had been running down a female stag. After the rape, leaving the grooms to bring the trophy home, they galloped away into the soft brumous Italian skyline; a network of misty lakes and romantic islets receding into the distance along the diagonal; fathered by Poussin or Claude. The stag lay there, panting and bleeding and in tears. (Durrell 1992, 23)
- 9 “How can Bruce, a so-called doctor, not be aware that he and Piers between them brought about Sylvi (...)
- 10 “il s’agit d’une image duplice […] les objets ne font que changer de place” (my translation).
21The description of the tapestry plays on the polysemy of the “horns” that belong to “the huntsmen” but are also the attribute of the trophy, hinting at the unexpected conflation of prey and hunter and blurring inter-species boundaries. The reference to a “female stag” is equally surprising as the word “deer” would have seemed more appropriate and suggests an unnatural confusion between species and genders. This puzzling description reaches its climax as the hunting scene metamorphoses into a “rape” where the animal stands for Sylvie, hunted and destroyed by her two lovers—her husband Bruce and her brother Piers.9 Indeed, the word “grooms” may be read as referring both to the servants and to the “bridegrooms” while the description of the female stag “in tears” is incomprehensible, since the trophy has already been carried “home,” unless the description referred to Sylvie left on her own in Montfavet after her brother’s suicide and her husband’s departure for Prague. In order to understand the image of the female stag readers are therefore asked to keep changing their viewpoint and to become a mobile viewer who articulates the various semantic layers of the tapestry in words. Durrell, not unlike Arcimboldo, offers us a dying still life that is essentially what Barthes calls “a duplicitous image […] [where] objects keep changing places” (Barthes 131).10
22This still life determines the reader’s active and fluid reconstruction all the more forcefully as it reappears, at the end the penultimate volume, Sebastian, where Constance visits Sylvie and announces the suicide of the psychoanalyst Schwarz:
Her old-fashioned bed with baldaquin was set against a fine old tapestry, subdued but glowinghuntsmen with lofted horns had been running down a female stag. After the rape, leaving the grooms to bring the trophy home, they galloped away into the soft brumous Italian skyline, into a network of misty lakes and romantic islets. In one corner lay the stag, panting and bleeding and in tears like a woman. Sylvie herself was not unlike the animal, but the tears had dried on her lashes and she lay in the heavy damascened bed with eyes fast shut though she was in fact awake. Moreover she knew without opening them who her visitor was. (Durrell 1992, 1164)
- 11 “[…] during her moments of relative sanity Schwarz had discovered that she knew as much psychoanaly (...)
23The tapestry, viewed this time through Constance’s internal focalization, renders the metaphor explicit through the repetition of the verb “lay” that applies both to the animal and to the woman and the contrasted comparison adverbials “not unlike” / “like”. The syntactic symmetry highlights the chiasmatic structure that becomes metonymic of the deadlock trapping both woman and animal, as if caught in a mirror-like deathly embrace: “[…] lay the stag […] like a woman // Sylvie […] not unlike the animal.” The female stag not only functions as the impersonation of Sylvie—whose very name ties her to the wilderness of the forest (‘sylva’ in latin)—but also reverberates the deathly drive at the heart of all human embraces. Her “eyes fast shut,” contrasting with the “eyes open” of the dying camel in The Quartet, enhance the quintessentially human battle against death, the strained struggle of Man challenging fate as embodied by Narouz contracting every muscle, as if butting against unrelenting forces. Therefore, the shift from Bruce’s to Constance’s viewpoint materialises the observer’s physical presence, turning the scene into an obsessional, mesmerizing tapestry that slowly reaches completion as the stag-woman comes to impersonate Man’s relation to death and desire. The tapestry can thus be read as a polysemic scene: it functions both as an allegory for the death drift of sexual desire and as a Freudian screen memory that dematerializes the tapestry and transforms it into an obsessive scene, a composite formation distorted by fantasies and desires, a space of projection and condensation haunting the inner eye, simultaneously veiling and unveiling the subject’s desire for full awareness. It is no wonder then that the end of the passage should focus on Sylvie’s perception: despite her “eyes fast shut” she is gifted with insight, with a prescience that surprises even her psychoanalyst11, and that foreshadows the ultimate reversal through which the hunted woman, initially described as the powerless victim, becomes an actant, an empowered agent forcing us to reconsider the ethical implications of her story.
- 12 See Scène de chasse (Liber Veritatis 37). “Collection en ligne”. Site institutionnel du Musée d’art (...)
- 13 See The Hunt of Meleager. “Museo del Prado”. <accessed May 3rd 2021. <https://www.museodelprado.es/ (...)
24Indeed, not only does the tapestry in Constance trigger the memory of its first description in Monsieur, but it also ushers in a series of memories that take us further away from the object proper, just as Freudian screen memories partly screen the source of trauma. The first description in Monsieur suggests that this is not an original but the reproduction of a work that could have been “fathered by Poussin or Claude” (Durrell 1992, 23). Such a reference triggers multiple memories in the reader’s mind. Thus, we may remember Claude Lorrain’s drawing of a hunting scene published in the Liber Veritatis, the notebook in which Lorrain recorded his paintings from 1635 to his death.12 The etching shows a young lord and his lady accompanied by two servants carrying a gun and spears and indicating to a young lady riding a smaller horse a direction to the right, as if to suggest that the chased animal lies in the distance. Two hounds are held on a leash in the left-hand corner and all heads are stretched to the right, as if the frantic speed of the hunt were momentarily suspended in a paradoxical still-life that freezes the hunters’ impetus and displaces our gaze from the object to the subjects of the hunt. The reference to Poussin suggests an altogether different kind of work as Poussin’s most famous hunting scene is probably that of The Hunt of Meleager portraying a passage from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.13 Following a fruitful harvest, Oenus, king of Calydon, had offered sacrifices to all the divinities, except to Artemis. The latter resented having been forgotten and sent a wild boar that wrecked the land and terrified the population. Meleager, Oenus’s son, gathered famous hunters such as Jason, Peleus, Castor and Pollux to help him hunt down the beast. He also included the beautiful Atlanta, with whom he was to fall in love. Atlanta, who had been exposed to die on the Parthenon by her father who only wanted sons, had been fed by a she-bear, before being adopted by hunters. Like Artemis, she was a virgin and killed the centaurs Rhoecos and Hylaeos who tried to rape her. Poussin, not unlike Lorrain, depicts the beginning of the hunt, before the party enters the thick forest where Atlanta and Meleager, momentarily isolated from the group, ultimately find and kill the boar. Meleager, acknowledging the young lady’s bravery and skill offers her the animal’s head and pelt, a gift that infuriates Meleager’s uncles and prompts a war. In the painting Atlanta is the figure dressed in blue in the right-hand corner while Meleager, dressed in yellow, stands to her left, waiting for his servant to finish his work. A marble statue of Artemis, responsible for the hunt and for the ensuing tragedy, stands in the centre. The horses rearing in mid-air and the hounds looking up expectantly to the riders or leaping forward to the left suggest the tension preceding their impending departure—a tension that is enhanced by the unusual format of the oil on canvas (height: 160 cm; width: 360 cm) whose striking width invites the viewer to stretch his neck in anticipation of the oncoming drama.
25Both pictorial references must naturally be considered within the broader frame of one of Ovid’s most famous metamorphoses: that of Actaeon, guilty of having beholden the naked Artemis and who was changed into a stag by the goddess and pursued and killed by his own hounds. The embedded explicit and implicit visual references appear to distort and expand the tapestry that functions as a projecting screen upon which the reader is invited to catch glimpses of diffracted hunting scenes and to experience, from Monsieur to Constance, the puzzling repetition and condensation of a haunting vision.
26In both paintings the female character holds a central part: Claude places the young lady at the centre of the group of characters; she is obviously the one initiated to the art of hunting and the action seems to depend upon her next move. Poussin stages Atlanta to the right in order to highlight the source of action: dressed in blue silk, with the light falling upon the shimmering creases of her gown, she embodies the driving force of the hunt while the stately pace of her tall white stallion symbolizes her sense of control and power in contrast with the ebullient energy of the men riding close by.
- 14 See Scenes from The Story of Nastagio degli Onesti. “Museo del Prado”. Accessed May 3rd 2021. <http (...)
- 15 “une instrumentalisation morale de cette vision d’horreur” (my translation).
- 16 “un moyen d’intimidation, un renversement médusant de l’amour en chasse mortelle” (my translation).
27These visual echoes initially appear at odds with Sylvie’s tapestry where the woman, standing as the hunted stag, is entirely deprived of power and life. The reader thus feels tempted to reread both descriptions in the light of another famous Renaissance hunting scene that remains unacknowledged by the text, as if the latter were screening off its deeper pictorial echoes. Indeed, the fate of the female stag, and of Sylvie, is reminiscent of the story of Nastagio degli Onesti, told in Boccaccio’s Decameron, and portrayed by Botticelli.14 Staged in four panels, it retraces the story of Nastagio who wanders helplessly in the forest, deeply wounded by his beloved’s cruel heart, and intending to kill himself, until he beholds an uncanny apparition: a howling, naked woman is running to him, trying to escape an enormous hound biting at her and the knight threatening her with his sword. In the second panel, the knight, who appears to be a ghost, tells his story to Nastagio and warns him against his own fate: having committed suicide he is doomed to pursue endlessly the woman he can never reach. The third panel stages what Didi-Humerman calls the “moral instrumentalizing of this horrendous scene” (Didi-Huberman 78)15 where Nastagio organizes a banquet and invites his beloved at the place and time of the apparition: the young lady is terrified by the atrocious hunting scene and agrees to marry Nastagio in the fourth panel. The exposure of tortured flesh is therefore to be read as “a means of intimidation, a mesmerizing reversal of love into a deathly hunt” (Didi-Huberman 89)16: the lover’s desire turns into an aggressive and destructive power contest that keeps haunting him until he becomes the ghost of his former self pursued by his own death wish. Botticelli’s painting, as Didi-Huberman pointedly argues, functions as the
- 17 “[…] l’histoire peinte par Botticelli offre une parfaite réponse structurale au dispositif mythique (...)
[…] perfect structural response to the mechanism of Acteon’s myth: a forest where one gets lost, the apparition of naked flesh, followed by a hunting scene with dogs that will not slaughter the woman, guilty of being naked, but the man, guilty of having enjoyed the sight. (Didi-Huberman 89)17
- 18 “ce rythme fantasmatique […] Cette façon qu’a la vision d’horreur de toujours se répéter, en boucle (...)
28The vision keeps reappearing, echoing Acteon’s myth and echoing itself, as the second panel simultaneously shows the dead and eviscerated woman in the foreground and the chase still going on in the distance. The superimposition of different narrative sequences on the same panel suggests, as Didi-Huberman explains, a “phantasmal rhythm […] [and shows] how the vision of horror keeps repeating itself, ad infinitum” (Didi-Huberman 85).18 The purpose of the repeated descriptions and of the superimposed pictorial refractions in Monsieur and Constance is not only to impress the reader’s eye with a compulsive vision but also to lose him, metaphorically speaking, in the forest of signs. For if Sylvie is considered as the female stag and as the literary echo to Botticelli’s slaughtered lady, she is not simply a woman seen as an animal: she is the animal, the prey chased by man, “the hunted ‘object’” pitted against “the hunting ‘subject’” (Traisnel 8). The initial comparison—“like a woman. Sylvie herself was not unlike the animal” (Durrell 1992, 1164)—turns into a metaphor, or, as Barthes has explained, “the analogy becomes mad, because it is radically exploited, taken as far as destroying itself as an analogy” (Barthes 123). Thus Sylvie the stag serves as a foil against which man defines his own essence, since, as Antoine Traisnel has shown, “the human subject, quite fundamentally, creates itself by extracting itself from the world that it seeks to describe” (Traisnel 13). However, in this particular case no dissociation is possible: the hunted object in the painting and in the novel is a human subject and the story-tellers of the deathly tale—Guido warning Nastagio in Botticelli’s painting and Bruce describing the tapestry in Monsieur—are both the narrators, the actors and the victims of the horrendous chase. Neither of them is capable of “excepting himself from the picture” (Traisnel 13) so that the representation of this “predatory drive […] that rests upon a strict, if ill-defined, demarcation between human and non-human animals” (Traisnel 14) serves in fact the blurring of boundaries and stages the paradoxical exclusion of Man from humanity: the woman turns into a beast while the man becomes a hound and his mastery of nature, just as his mastery of story-telling, is significantly jeopardized. Indeed, both Guido and Bruce are endlessly pursued by the hunting scene, as if the capture of the prey brought no release from the urge to kill and no satisfying sense of potency. It would then seem, as Traisnel pointedly argues, that
[…] the hunt is not so much concerned with catching the prey as with the hunt itself […] ‘I fear that this is the origin of hunting,’ writes Michel Serres. ‘The only things hunted are those that have to be chased away.’ It is revealing that the French word chasser […] expresses the apparent paradox at the heart of a concept that means simultaneously to hunt—that is, to go after, to chase—and to repel—that is, to chase away from oneself […] (Traisnel 17)
29The male narrator’s incapacity to chase, to repel and to control the story is implicitly confirmed in the final volume of The Avignon Quintet, Quinx, where the narrative account of Sylvie’s tapestry is taken up by Sabine, the gypsy, who tells the narrator Sutcliffe the actual story of a gypsy pursued by hounds:
“[…] the horns began their deep braying soon to be matched by the bass baying of the great hounds which were almost as tall as the stags they had been raised to hunt. […]
She ran vaguely in the direction of the river […] and the baying of hounds and the shrill groans of stag-horns thrilled her blood. She felt as if she were already bleeding to death as she ran […] the hounds had seen their quarry and they burst out of the woods and crashed through the thin ice-sheet of the lake in order to drag her down as they did the stags of the region. […] As for the boy, he never forgot, and in every capital to which he was posted he commissioned a local artist to paint him an oil, always choosing this scene for subject. He had a whole collection of them at his home in Vienna—a whole gallery of Gipsy Pursued by Hounds.” (Durrell 1992, 1247-8)
30The reader soon recognizes all the elements that already appeared in the tapestry: the horns, the hounds, the stag are now endowed with a sonorous depth as the text plays on repetition, alliterative patterns and paronomasia (deep braying / bass baying / baying of hounds). Just like the viewer of Botticelli’s painting, we are under the impression that we have entered a timeless place wherefrom there can be no escape, as if the duration of the pursuit were artificially protracted to allow us to consider how deeply the human and the non-human are paradoxically bonded. As Jean-Christophe Bailly has explained:
What is played out, and is played back each time we are granted contact for a certain length of time, is precisely the great fugue, the supreme impetus through which each animal withdraws, fully alive, into a wordless world adjacent to ours and which also, so to speak, yet truthfully, speaks to us. (Bailly 2011, 109)
31In this cruel fugue, beneath the raucous and strident noises of the hunt, the reader recognizes an eerie silence: that of the chased gipsy who is never addressed and never heard and whose speechlessness dramatizes man’s incapacity to relate to his natural surroundings. The gipsy’s speechlessness mirrors that of the camel in Justine as well as Narouz’s incapacity to reach out to Clea at the time of death. The accumulation of pictorial reproductions of the scene only enhances this essential silence: as the boy grows into a man he ends up surrounded by a “scene” that becomes a proper “subject,” an “actant,” as defined by Bennett: a “Thing-Power [endowed with] the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (Bennett 6). Thus, the cosmopolitan diplomat’s world significantly narrows down as Vienna—incidentally Freud’s city—shrinks to the confined space of his art gallery bound to stretch on endlessly, like the ever-narrowing funnel of a telescope. The repetitive structure “whole gallery” / “whole collection” suggests the implicit hole at the heart of his life: the natural world turned into the gipsy’s trap closes in upon him while expanding through the repeated titles of the artworks that testify to his incapacity both to connect with this “wordless world adjacent to ours” and “to repel—[…] to chase away” the hunting/haunting scene. His gaze becomes the very hole, the abyss where the unnatural killing is played back endlessly, a tragic mirror to “the estuary turned carnation-red as the hounds ate their fill” (Durrell 1992, 1248). Yet, unlike the hounds obeying the laws of nature, Von Lupian never has his “fill” and desperately endeavours to obtain fulfilment through a repetition that merely deepens desire ad infinitum.
32The gipsy’s unreal silence can only be broken by another gipsy: Sabine, the gipsy who holds the tale from her own father, Banquo, another diplomat, and finally repeats it to her lover, the narrator Sutcliffe. The avowed purpose of Banquo’s narrative was to dissuade his daughter from following the gipsies by showing her “the relentless persecutions they had had to endure over the centuries” (Durrell 1992, 1245). Yet this tale of horror and fury is also a tale of desire as Von Lupian recalls his uncle’s “sexual orgasm […] after witnessing the hounds at kill” (Durrell 1992, 1248). In the end, it triggers the listener’s desire: “‘You have excited me terribly,’ he said in a whisper, and she replied, ‘Yes I wanted to.’” (Durrell 1992, 1248)
- 19 “[…] étymologiquement analogia veut dire proportion: le sens dépend du niveau auquel vous vous plac (...)
- 20 Let us not forget that the last pages of Quinx, the final volume of The Quintet, lead us to follow (...)
- 21 See Sigmund Freud, Cinq Psychanalyses.
33By reclaiming the tale as its final story-teller Sabine magnificently asserts the male hunter’s trapping: whether we think of Bruce, Von Lupian, Banquo or Sutcliffe, the story of the hunt discloses every male character’s incapacity to possess the female subject. This changed viewpoint ushers in a renewed interpretation: as Barthes reminds us: “[...] etymologically analogia means proportion: meaning depends upon the level where you are standing. […] moving the point of view backward gives birth to a new meaning” (Barthes 132).19 The story that was meant to keep Sabine under her father’s control serves the empowerment of the female figure whose words prove that all the men are failed hunters in both senses of the term, as analysed by Michel Serres: they are simultaneously unable to “chase” and capture their prey, and “to repel” and “chase away” (Serres 77) their traumatic memories. The tale of the impotent hunter told by Sabine not only arouses Sutcliffe’s desire, but also establishes her as the final narrator taking power as the source of the story and of action.20 As a result, Sabine invites the reader to reconsider the hidden motives behind the male narratives: was Banquo intending to protect or to trap his daughter? Did Bruce plan to portray Sylvie’s plight or his own repressed desires? Did Von Lupian mean to raise awareness as to the gipsies’ fate or to arouse his listeners’ erotic fantasies? Ego Von Lupian’s name, strongly evocative of Freud’s Wolfsmann21 also suggests the pack of hounds tearing apart the female stag and the gipsy: not unlike Freud’s patient, he is his own victim and victimizer. This ambivalence is redoubled by the intriguing in-between position of Von Lupian as a young crippled child, sitting on the horse’s saddle, next to his impotent uncle and witnessing “the enormous impression made by [the killing] upon the hunters” (Durrell 1992, 1248). Sabine’s narrative concludes on the dramatic image of the gipsy “holding the child above he head” (Durrell 1992, 1247), in a position that is not entirely unlike that of the little boy “perched upon the high saddle from which he could command an excellent panoramic view” (Durrell 1992, 1247): the final drowning and tearing apart of the gipsy’s child is prophetic of Von Lupian’s metaphorical drowning in the neurotic repetition of the haunting vision. Eventually, the “panoramic vision” will turn into a panoptic view encircling the viewer and blocking out the world: as in Botticelli’s painting, the hunt closes in upon the hunter.
34Rereading Durrell’s fiction through the prism of the dying still lifes scattered in the narrative like so many beacons leads us to reassess the role and function of the inanimate and the non-human realms. Inviting his readers to understand that the lifeless surroundings that seem to fall under man’s dominion must be regarded as acting still lifes Durrell opens up our attention to the non-human, commonly objectified world. The cruel transposition of the woman into the role of the slaughtered prey combined with a medley of possible, yet uncertain, pictorial references, triggers a new awareness: the visual quality of these scenes acts as an incentive to question the visible. If female characters look like camels or stags, and may be treated as the objects of the hunt, they also function as the source of a symbolic and ethical reappraisal that jeopardizes the hegemony of male physical, symbolic and narrative power. The visual strength of superimposed pictorial and textual images paradoxically highlights the de-figuration at stake, the deflation of mimesis. The network of embedded still lifes not only functions as the hidden pattern in the carpet: it prompts us to question our relation to the world through the focus of the weak and vulnerable subject. Eluding men’s grasp, these animalized females inhabit peculiarly throbbing, secret, still lifes, palpitating with the possibilities of a renewed perception. As the acting subjects of these still lifes, permanently on the move and always hiding, caught in the web of their own distant echoes, they share the essential characteristics of animals for whom, as Bailly explains, “living […] means […] going through the visible in hiding,” (Bailly 2013, 26) and whose vanishing imprints invite us to question the visible:
- 22 “Le visible n’est pas une image, ne fonctionne pas comme une image. Il n’est pas ce qui est devant (...)
The visible is not an image; it does not function like an image. It does not stand in front of us, but all around us: it precedes and follows us. […] The visible is the sum of all the recitatives that fashion appearances. These are networks, entanglements, endless hopscotch patterns, powerful echoes and ricochets. […] There is an infinite number of holes, hiding places, dangling threads. Every animal inhabits the network of appearances in his own way, that is to say, he hides in it. Hiding is the golden rule of dwelling in the world where, however, everything finally comes into view. The visible holds in the hidden, they are inseparable, and the latter is the condition of the former. The hidden is, so to speak, the intimacy of the visible, and we may even say that it is its inclination. (Bailly 2013, 25-6)22
35The endangered female animals and characters hiding in the forest of the text disrupt the visibility of pictorial and textual images: their presence shatters the linearity of the surface narrative and builds up a paradigmatic network of echoing structures that prods us to pay attention to all the “holes, hiding places, dangling threads” of the shifting, tangled, and uncertain storylines and paintings. The Alexandria Quartet and The Avignon Quintet thus call for a singular mode of reception whereby reading becomes the ultimate hunt through which, in order to drive out the covert meaning of the text, we explore a transgressive space where we are exposed to our buried fears and fantasies, allow ourselves to be hu/aunted by fiction, and enter a new mode of perception that opens us to “the intimacy of the visible” and teaches us to distrust mimesis. Such may be the meaning of the last, haunting words of The Quintet as the characters enter the booby-trapped cave: “It was at this precise moment that reality prime rushed to the aid of fiction and the totally unpredictable began to take place!” (Durrell 1992, 1367)
Pelluchon, Corine. Éthique de la considération. Paris: Seuil, 2018.