Somehow, now, I have been put in the wrong class--it seems. I want to float; no, this isn't it at all! It's just that everything is already over, and I didn't finish! Wearing thin already, it's positively heinous, as I would say if I were quaint. But it's instead...some deathly thrash band, calling me out to learn some new words before I get back to the thesis. That thesis--is scary at times. I have thrown out everything and am trying to write to Durrell from the realm of...poetry. Simply the aesthetic attitude in creating mode--look, this word seems plain dirty now. The aesthetic. Ambivalence and the like, ambiguity, occupy different spaces...not defensive as yet. Who cares anymore about them? But they are not a scourge on the differentiating mindframe as is aesthetics. So entirely removed that I cannot say where I am when I bring it up: suddenly back in my basement, mixing elements and staring off, writing! This is the space for poetry, even if I would produce only dismal prosaic lines about the same nothing I'm trying to escape. The space...of poetry? The notional space? Can Borges help?
At least allow me to explain that I'm after a process, truly. Something to rely upon. Calling it a battle between criticism and fiction--this has been a very long temporary pursuit, but it's due to my being a student still. This era will end on Friday; and of course I'm stuck wondering what I'm about. The project has to take up its own life, carry me along. I'll comment upon it. Please, allow me repose! Sitting on a divan in a boxcar tossing out quips, the humor of the secretly sick artist, hiding all and everything and thereby not making it up so much as allowing it to pass, borrowing his own dirty laundry.
Durrell and Lowry could be bad influences on me, who have grown up on Joyce, the Beats, Woolf. Only here the pain of existence is more prevalent, it makes each text glow. The others merely sing; they have style with content, with erudition and even spiritualism. In Lowry the problem is as obvious as the genius, in Durrell the intellect is as problematic as love.
Each has a symptom that plagues, the negative that produces the positive. The alcoholism of Lowry is legendary; in his life he posed as various egos, an exaggerating personality to deal with in conversation. Where's the truth--why should it matter, this is the Consul. His drinking as an author is not too close to the surface in the character Geoffrey Firmin; the quality is sincerely fictive, exposing everything that an artist should but still so we do not blame him.
The moral is certainly around here somewhere, but if Darley is struggling to conceptualize Justine, it is because Clea has difficulty painting her without kissing the painted hand and putting down the brush. The next level: Darley's easiest way of knowing the world is through Clea, the artist who came of age but not fruition preoccupied with another, the same Justine who involves Darley in the literary process. She is interested in philosophy like a syphilitic finds aspects to reflect upon her medicine, the places it takes her--love is the vehicle. Balthazar declares "all our women are Justines." And so, her involvement in ideas is telling for the redemption necessary to purge one of her: becoming an artist, or ceasing to try. For at that point she is no longer needed and returns to her husband, whom she never needed at first, whom she warned about the impossibility of her ever loving!
Yes, well, the best way of digging around in Durrell is explaining to yourself the triangulation. It is all slippery, yet centered, and so: we cannot stay for long in this set of texts alone. An entire trinity awaits, with a few onlookers besides. That little stage produces mixed results by default; try now to actually mix the elements and put them with something already mixed. Then mix. Do you see? This sort of reading has to approach poetry, it has no other choice. It is not seeking to establish anything but my own voice with the help of a batch of masters. Forget that they're all male. I write to a female audience, and yet feminism can't get a foothold.
One cannot wonder what that all means without feeling guilty already--now this is the space from which these writers write! Bad conscience, which Nietzsche explained thoroughly according to his dialectics (which took several books to come into a dialectical shape) and Freud then conceptualized with his damn trinity. The origins, the true causes, are fascinating to contemplate, but not a part of this project. I would rather fabricate my own cause for shame, the strongest motivator of these books even if the author feels it not, for it is in the background, the edges of society are ever peeked into--the writer could be mucking it up or anguishing over it, whatever the pleasure is. Perhaps lionizing the whore while condemning the critic: Justine is the concubine of individuality, Darley is the artist too intellectual for Pursewarden to call an artist, because preoccupied with the question of "writing" rather than willing to suffer on account of it. And the most suffering is the greatest art, certainly: this is proved by Pursewarden's letters, which we are not granted permission to see for both its shameful content (incestuous) and its unutterable beauty--too much pressure, one would expect, for the author, too much awe in the narrator leading up to the letters' discovery. Pursewarden's blind sister Liza, raised in mutual isolation, the other partner in the fateful taboo of Durrell's text, the sin raised up to show at what cost true art is settled: and they must be burnt. As a writer contacted by the widowing sister, he makes that decision, and we are spared the scenes perhaps barely alluded to by the artist: Pursewarden takes contrary views deliberately, saying (in my paraphrase), that words being what they are, and people being what they are, we ought to discard of language forever as a tool that can express one's meaning. But he doesn't write in Sade's space.
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