Abstract: This interdisciplinary essay studies Lawrence Durrell's (1912-1990) classic The Alexandria Quartet (1958-1960), specifically demonstrating the ways in which Durrell was inspired by Freudian notions of the dream and dream-work, and used these ideas, as he understood them, in this literary work and others. Lawrence Durrell was an avid reader of Freud and his fictional work is virtually saturated with explicit and implicit references to Freudian ideas. In this tetralogy, Durrell used the concept of the dream as a topographical construct to demonstrate his claim that the human psyche is governed by transcendental forces. Durrell uses various narrative techniques to echo his claim of the multilayered voice of the author-protagonist, thus introducing and reverberating some rather complex notions regarding the cohesiveness of the human self and its questionable authority.The Alexandria Quartet was Durrell's claim to fame. When published in the early 1960s, it brought him worldwide critical and financial acclaim, including a nomination for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The success of the tetralogy soon required translations into numerous languages (sadly, only the first two volumes have been translated to Hebrew thus far). Despite its declining popularity, The Alexandria Quartet is still a shining example of the way Freudian thought informed and inspired creative writing during mid-20th century, above and beyond the work's more general commitment to the earlier traditions, and more general psychological perspectives, of the Bildungsroman.The inception of The Alexandria Quartet was more than “just" an act of sitting down to tell a complex, multi-layered story. Having suffered traumatic separation from his own family and homeland at the age of 12 years-old, Durrell establishes the field of writing as the place where he can find, create, and recreate a sense of belonging absent from his personal life. In this sense, The Quartet is Durrell's attempt to reestablish himself as an autonomous and discreet subject, while at the same time trying to acknowledge that being a subject implies the process of being related to, and even controlled by, forces beyond his conscious grasp. Thus, dreams and dream-work seemed to be the perfect media for the author to try and exercise his attempt to come to terms with a sense of existential bewilderment and estrangement that had been a driving force in his life. Through the act of writing, Durrell, and perhaps the literary artist in general, attempts to transform his personal injury into art.I try to depict how Durrell uses different readings of the same textual circumstances in order to show that the notion of Truth is deeply reliant upon the perspective from which it is viewed and told. The structure of the novel is based upon the idea—indeed, it textually-graphically presents the idea—that Truth is a construct based upon unconscious notions. In addition to demonstrating the way concepts of dream and dream-work construct the novel, this study also shows how Durrell uses particular dreams to bring forth the prominent themes of the novel. In the analysis of two major dreams, I am able to show the way in which certain ideas about sexuality play a major role in the formation of the novel. But Durrell is not content to adopt the Freudian notion of the centrality of sexuality in explaining human motivation. Based upon his own experience as an employee of the British Foreign Office during the Forties and Fifties, Durrell constructs a narrative that uses historical (‘real') political events in Egypt and Palestine during that period, in order to portray the individual as a pawn in a game whose rules seem to be arbitrary.The interpretation of the two dreams illustrates the intricate relation between the form and the content of the dreams, but also addresses the issue of the ‘true' or deepest level of authorship of the work. Both dreams serve to communicate to the reader a complex set of motivational forces that the ‘author figure' is himself supposedly unaware of. Thus, through the dreams in The Quartet, Durrell offers an important response to the question “Who is the author of a text?" Which of the many author-figures appearing in the work is truly “responsible" for the text and its veracity? Can anyone make such a claim? Durrell states his position quite subtly. Due to his own ambivalence towards Freud, which in turn can be interpreted as ambivalence towards his own father, Durrell veers away from simplistic and reductive conclusions. In the end, the question of the authorship, as well as the question of the status or identity of Truth, remain unresolved on purpose. It is up to the reader to make up his or her own mind as to what might have been the “real" story underlying the labyrinthine plots and sub-plots that Durrell describes in his beautiful if biased view of pre-World War II Alexandria.Beyond the question of Truth, The Alexandria Quartet, through the abundance of references to the workings of the unconscious—be it through actual dreams or through rich, dream-like metaphoric prose—deals with the protagonist's quest for meaning in a world which seems to be traumatized both by political upheavals as well as individual human suffering. The dream-work that is offered through the tetralogy repeatedly points towards a remedy—words, language, writing. Language wields the power to injure but also to heal. The function of writing, Durrell claims, is to transform personal pain into art. The particular pain that Durrell sought to relieve through the transformative force of sublimitive writing can be described as relating to his severed sense of belonging. Owing to not being a citizen of any particular nation, as was the case for Durrell himself, his protagonist-hero finds that he must become a citizen of his own consciousness. Through his existential efforts to make sense of himself, and his world, he is an example of modern man. No longer able to put his trust in the Old World security, shattered by two World Wars, he turns inwards, seeking to define himself through the new concepts that Freudian thought had provided. Psychoanalysis would seem to have helped Durrell in his courageous and painful attempt to chart these new fields in the hope of locating potential new terrain or geography wherein one might dwell, with ambivalence and doubt, recognition and estrangement, marking every step, balancing the sense of real and dream until some medium, temporary or longer-term, can be achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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