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A review by ericjaysonnenscheinwriter2392
Balthazar by Lawrence Durrell
4.0
BALTHAZAR: A BRIDGE TO MANY ISLANDS
In The Alexandria Quartet, "Balthazar" is like "The Two Towers" in "The Lord of the Rings." It is connective, rather than hermetic, a bridge between the other books, and an elaboration and commentary on Justine rather a stand-alone volume. This may explain why it took a long time to complete it. It was interesting and full of Durrell’s luxuriant prose, yet I was able to put it down because it was more like an anthology of anecdotes providing context and ornamentation to the world of Alexandria than a coherent story with narrative momentum leading to a satisfying ending.
Lawrence Durrell's concept of a "word continuum" which applied Einstein's theory of relativity to fiction, permits a non-linear story-telling. There is no one particular arc. Vignettes and plot points can move back and forth because ultimately time is as relative as truth. Ultimately, Durrell's primary objective is not to tell one protagonist's story or the saga of a circle of friends moving through time—although the characters ultimately age, go through vicissitudes and move through time. His main project in this series of novels is to challenge and provide an alternative to our conventional notion of truth—and time—as unitary and absolute. Meanwhile his protagonist turns out to be not a single human character, but the place where human characters love, banter, agonize and intrigue—Alexandria, Egypt.
Durrell was very candid about this proclivity. In his essay "Landscape and Character" (1960) he wrote, "I willingly admit to seeing 'characters' almost as functions of a landscape..." Later he writes, "so...a Spain, an Italy, a Greece...will express itself through a human just as it does through its wild flowers..."
Perhaps the meandering and unstructured presentation of Balthazar is intended to parallel the moral relativism, sophistication, lubriciousness and world weariness of Alexandria, the much conquered, much compromised metropolis at the crossroads of so many civilizations. This book starts as an "interlinear"-a cross-examination and revision of what Darley, the hapless and romantic narrator-agent of Justine believed to be true about the promiscuous and beautiful Justine and their elite circle of friends.
Whereas Justine is Darley's story, told from the partial and unreliable perspective of an impecunious foreigner and outsider, Balthazar is a counter-narrative told by the consummate Alexandrian insider. Balthazar is a well-connected physician and Cabalist who is also the city's medical examiner and privy to all of the city's grisly secrets. His goal is to enlighten Darley by disabusing him of his romantic illusions. In the process, Balthazar evicts Darley from the center of the narrative to the edge of it. Balthazar thus opens the Alexandria Quartet in various directions. It is no longer a "bildungsroman" in which a principal character debouches from a series of tests to a new awareness or life status. It will henceforth be about a universe of characters whose fates somehow mirror or relate to each other, without resolving each other.
Ultimately, all creative writing projects are experiments. Writers seek the optimal way to express themselves. In the process they depend on old conventions or break from them—or devise their own methods piecemeal, ending up with a Rauschenberg-like mélange of diverse techniques and effects, until they convey their vision in their own particular style.
The Alexandria Quartet was a narrative experiment. It was the writer Durrell's attempt to tell the only kind of novel he could write or wished to write—one in which characters are exponents of where they live, its landscape and its cultural features.
However, Durrell’s innovation comes with artistic risk. As exponents of a place, rather than as free agents shaping their own fates with their own decisions and actions, the characters of Balthazar may seem, despite the ornate descriptions, provocative attitudes and fanciful storylines the author bestows on them, to lack the agency and independence to make them real and relatable. While Alexandria emerges as the principal and only fully developed character, the characters that populate it, though colorful, active and full of thoughts and attitudes, become less granular and solid, more mythic and abstract, not performers but performances. Their worldly activities—betrayal, murder, adultery, bribery and deception—seem symbolic and weightless. They are literary effects, rather than figures causing effect.
In the end, even the city of Alexandria, the protagonist of the piece, makes a symbolic impression. It is not revealed as an actual metropolis, an historical palimpsest where civilizations, conquests and events left their residues and where people of all social strata continue to lead lives. It never comes into focus as a place on a map with its own quiddity, but as a metaphorical placeholder for the author’s musings and preoccupations, a hypothetical lost-and-found for his psyche.
Near the end of Balthazar one of the pivotal characters, the literary genius Pursewarden, describes the literary process in this way:
"In my art, through my art, I want really to achieve myself shedding the work, which is of no importance, as a snake sheds its skin. Perhaps that's why writers at heart want to be loved for their work rather than for themselves..." Balthazar stands as part of the creative process by which Durrell achieved himself. Only the reader can judge how well he succeeded at producing a satisfying artistic effect.
In The Alexandria Quartet, "Balthazar" is like "The Two Towers" in "The Lord of the Rings." It is connective, rather than hermetic, a bridge between the other books, and an elaboration and commentary on Justine rather a stand-alone volume. This may explain why it took a long time to complete it. It was interesting and full of Durrell’s luxuriant prose, yet I was able to put it down because it was more like an anthology of anecdotes providing context and ornamentation to the world of Alexandria than a coherent story with narrative momentum leading to a satisfying ending.
Lawrence Durrell's concept of a "word continuum" which applied Einstein's theory of relativity to fiction, permits a non-linear story-telling. There is no one particular arc. Vignettes and plot points can move back and forth because ultimately time is as relative as truth. Ultimately, Durrell's primary objective is not to tell one protagonist's story or the saga of a circle of friends moving through time—although the characters ultimately age, go through vicissitudes and move through time. His main project in this series of novels is to challenge and provide an alternative to our conventional notion of truth—and time—as unitary and absolute. Meanwhile his protagonist turns out to be not a single human character, but the place where human characters love, banter, agonize and intrigue—Alexandria, Egypt.
Durrell was very candid about this proclivity. In his essay "Landscape and Character" (1960) he wrote, "I willingly admit to seeing 'characters' almost as functions of a landscape..." Later he writes, "so...a Spain, an Italy, a Greece...will express itself through a human just as it does through its wild flowers..."
Perhaps the meandering and unstructured presentation of Balthazar is intended to parallel the moral relativism, sophistication, lubriciousness and world weariness of Alexandria, the much conquered, much compromised metropolis at the crossroads of so many civilizations. This book starts as an "interlinear"-a cross-examination and revision of what Darley, the hapless and romantic narrator-agent of Justine believed to be true about the promiscuous and beautiful Justine and their elite circle of friends.
Whereas Justine is Darley's story, told from the partial and unreliable perspective of an impecunious foreigner and outsider, Balthazar is a counter-narrative told by the consummate Alexandrian insider. Balthazar is a well-connected physician and Cabalist who is also the city's medical examiner and privy to all of the city's grisly secrets. His goal is to enlighten Darley by disabusing him of his romantic illusions. In the process, Balthazar evicts Darley from the center of the narrative to the edge of it. Balthazar thus opens the Alexandria Quartet in various directions. It is no longer a "bildungsroman" in which a principal character debouches from a series of tests to a new awareness or life status. It will henceforth be about a universe of characters whose fates somehow mirror or relate to each other, without resolving each other.
Ultimately, all creative writing projects are experiments. Writers seek the optimal way to express themselves. In the process they depend on old conventions or break from them—or devise their own methods piecemeal, ending up with a Rauschenberg-like mélange of diverse techniques and effects, until they convey their vision in their own particular style.
The Alexandria Quartet was a narrative experiment. It was the writer Durrell's attempt to tell the only kind of novel he could write or wished to write—one in which characters are exponents of where they live, its landscape and its cultural features.
However, Durrell’s innovation comes with artistic risk. As exponents of a place, rather than as free agents shaping their own fates with their own decisions and actions, the characters of Balthazar may seem, despite the ornate descriptions, provocative attitudes and fanciful storylines the author bestows on them, to lack the agency and independence to make them real and relatable. While Alexandria emerges as the principal and only fully developed character, the characters that populate it, though colorful, active and full of thoughts and attitudes, become less granular and solid, more mythic and abstract, not performers but performances. Their worldly activities—betrayal, murder, adultery, bribery and deception—seem symbolic and weightless. They are literary effects, rather than figures causing effect.
In the end, even the city of Alexandria, the protagonist of the piece, makes a symbolic impression. It is not revealed as an actual metropolis, an historical palimpsest where civilizations, conquests and events left their residues and where people of all social strata continue to lead lives. It never comes into focus as a place on a map with its own quiddity, but as a metaphorical placeholder for the author’s musings and preoccupations, a hypothetical lost-and-found for his psyche.
Near the end of Balthazar one of the pivotal characters, the literary genius Pursewarden, describes the literary process in this way:
"In my art, through my art, I want really to achieve myself shedding the work, which is of no importance, as a snake sheds its skin. Perhaps that's why writers at heart want to be loved for their work rather than for themselves..." Balthazar stands as part of the creative process by which Durrell achieved himself. Only the reader can judge how well he succeeded at producing a satisfying artistic effect.