Want to have a good chuckle? First, have a serious, soulful time reading or re-reading Lawrence Durrell’s 1957 novel Justine (not to mention the next three volumes of The Alexandria Quartet, Balthazar, Mountolive, and finally Clea, published 50 years ago, in 1960). Then imagine the original manuscript of Justine, with the famous “Lawrence Durrell” replaced by an unknown name, landing on the desk of the average literary agent in the U.K. or the U.S. today. Shock! Revulsion! Not only is it apparently plotless, but it’s also author-centered, seeming to revolve around a moody and maudlin inner world the average reader can’t even begin to form a connection with, and stylistically pretentious to boot.
Perhaps it’s way too easy to blame the general dearth of artistic integrity and aesthetic excitement in today’s literary world on literary agents often catering to the average reader, under the shadow of the budget-conscious publishers through which they make their living. It must be a tough, and sometimes frustrating job. Still, it’s worth celebrating (or soberly celebrating) the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Alexandria Quartet by extolling the “hidden” virtues of Justine, and attempting to make the case that it’s the kind of novel fiction lovers these days are deprived of, and hungry for.
Patience Rewarded
Plotless? Hardly. It’s, in fact, a soap opera (an intellectual soap opera, but a soap opera nonetheless), with more sexual and psychological and cultural intrigue than the average potboiler or thriller. But all this just doesn’t hit the reader in the face in the opening pages. It unravels, or more like uncoils, slowly, as the narrator, piece by seemingly shapeless piece, recalls his life in the Egyptian city of Alexandria in the years between the world wars with his companion Melissa, and the emotionally exotic and complex Justine and her husband Nessim. The novel trusts the reader to follow it, and absolutely rewards that effort.
Author-centered it is, surely. It has the feel of a private memoir, each sentence as if trying to impress upon a mass reading public how crucial one individual life can be, no matter who that individual is, or what that individual has been fated to experience or endure. And that’s what makes the novel beautiful: “author-centered” represents the highest degree of “human-centered.”
Purposeful Style
Finally, often the main reason novels last is because they’re brilliantly written. Because Durrell was also an accomplished poet (though there are many examples of novelists who don’t write poetry who write so-called “poetically”), it’s easy to misrepresent his ornate style. In Justine, and in his other fiction, Durrell’s style is never flowery for the sake of being flowery. Rather, Durrell was out to convince his readers that being ornate is only way to root out and explain or present the depth of human feeling and thinking.
Many times throughout Justine, the narrator attempts to delineate the myriad threads of the relationship between human consciousness and the physical world, such as this passage from roughly the middle of the novel:
“As a poet of the historic consciousness I suppose I am bound to see landscape as a field dominated by the human wish—tortured into farms and hamlets, ploughed into cities. A landscape scribbled with the signatures of men and epochs. Now, however, I am beginning to believe that the wish is inherited from the site; that man depends for the furniture of the will upon its location in place, tenant of fruitful acres or a perverted wood. Is it not the impact of freewill upon nature which I see (as I thought) but the irresistible growth, through him, of nature’s own blind unspecified doctrines of variation and torment.”
Here it’s fascinating how it seems that Durrell’s ornate style is the only way to truly express the narrator’s idea that human beings must learn to relinquish their hope of consciously controlling the world. Irony of this depth is exactly what great novels float upon.
And literary agents and publishers need to trust, to a much greater degree than they do now, that any kind of depth is what readers will embrace, just as Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, as difficult as it is to quantify and reign in, captured the imaginations of many readers 50 years ago.
Douglas Nordfors - Douglas Nordfors grew up in Seattle and graduated from Columbia University (BA) and The University of Virginia (MFA). Before going on to ...
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