‘The Truth Only Partially Perceived’

Abstract

Through the role of the Alexandria Quartet's writer-narrator, L. G. Darley, Lawrence Durrell interrogates the writing process by dem onstrating the co-existence of multiple interpretations of place and time. Both Durrell and Darley build an evocation of Alexandria and its inhabitants using myriad textual sources, including fictional writer-characters as well as wellknown authors such as E. M. Forster and Cavafy. This article examines the use of this palimpsest as a device through which Darley learns to become a novelist, by reading, rereading, and rewriting his impressions of the city. The multi-vocal nature of the Quartet -in which each of the four books effectively retells the same story -demonstrates not only the inherently intertextual and self-reflexive nature of the novel form, but also the way in which stories take shape. Darley frames and structures the narrative, propelling it forward by demonstrating his evolution as a writer throughout the four books. Durrell illustrates this both structurally and thematically, presenting Darley's growth as a novelist through the layering of different versions of the truth, whilst suggesting that only together do these disparate readings of 'truth' constitute something approaching reality. * * * * *There, lying on the table in the yellow lamplight, lay the great interlinear to Justine -as I had called it. It was crosshatched, crabbed, starred with questions and answers in different-coloured inks, in typescript. It seemed to me then to be somehow symbolic of the very reality we had shared -a palimpsest upon which each of us had left his or her individual traces, layer by layer. 1