[The above video is mostly a
reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure
as they strike me as relevant. I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in
this video.]
The abridged version of events will be difficult to understand without a summary knowledge of what happened in “Justine,” so please read my review of that novel, the “sibling companion” of “Balthazar,” for a fuller appreciation of both. This review also gives away plot spoilers for both.
“Balthazar” continues the narrative started in the first volume of the Alexandria Quartet, “Justine.” This time, we read of many of the events recounted in “Justine” from another perspective, that of the psychiatrist Balthazar, who unceremoniously disrupts and complicates our understanding of the events in “Justine.” A few years after the events, the narrator, whose name we finally learn is Darley, has moved to an island with the child that Melissa has had with Nessim. Here, Balthazar drops off what he refers to as his “interlinear,” (a literary recounting of previous events from his point of view) that Darley spends much of the novel reading and meditating upon. His account completely undermines Darley’s understanding, telling him that Justine was really in love with the novelist Pursewarden, and just used him as a decoy to cheat on her husband. And we read about Scobie, a mutual friend of almost everyone in the book, including Clea, Justine, Melissa, and Darley, who is killed while in drag, possibly trying to pick up sailor for a trick.
In “Balthazar,” Durrell draws the reader to the meta-fictional aspects of the story in at least two ways. His account completely reconfigures Darley’s understanding of events in the previous volume, telling him that Justine was really in love with the novelist Pursewarden, and just used him as a decoy to cheat on her husband. In this sense, Balthazar’s “interlinear” almost serves to turn the entire narrative into a series of suspect, but all equally likely, Rashomon-like perspectival takes, without any single one being allowed to be account for the entire truth. Durrell also uses Pursewarden as a kind of a novelist-cipher to shed light on the plight of the novelist – or, more broadly, the artist’s – task. This ambiguity, which can at times seem heavy-handed, seems to mirror much of what Durrell is really saying about love, and especially erotic relationships in general: that they are a series of shadows, lies, deceptions, and figments of our own fragile imaginations. As with the first volume, the language is stunning, so just as in the first review, I’d like to end with a bit of what I’m talking about – those wonderful ambiguities and mysteries which so wholly constitute Alexandria and its residents for Durrell:
“I feel I want to sound a note of … affirmation – though not in the specific terms of a philosophy or religion. It should have the curvature of an embrace, the wordlessness of a lover’s code. It should convey some feeling that the world we live in is founded in something too simple to be over-described as cosmic law – but as easy to grasp as, say, an act of tenderness, simple tenderness in the primal relation between animal and plant, rain and soil, seed and trees, man and God. A relationship so delicate that it is all too easily broken by the inquiring mind and conscience in the French sense which of course has its own rights and its own field of deployment. I’d like to think of my work simply as a cradle in which philosophy could rock itself to sleep, thumb in mouth. What do you say to this? After all, this is not simply what we most need in the world, but really what describes the state of pure process in it. Keep silent awhile you feel a comprehension of this act of tenderness – not power or glory: and certainly not Mercy, that vulgarity of the Jewish mind which can only imagine man as crouching under the whip. No, for the sort of tenderness I mean is utterly merciless!” (p. 238).
“Balthazar” continues the narrative started in the first volume of the Alexandria Quartet, “Justine.” This time, we read of many of the events recounted in “Justine” from another perspective, that of the psychiatrist Balthazar, who unceremoniously disrupts and complicates our understanding of the events in “Justine.” A few years after the events, the narrator, whose name we finally learn is Darley, has moved to an island with the child that Melissa has had with Nessim. Here, Balthazar drops off what he refers to as his “interlinear,” (a literary recounting of previous events from his point of view) that Darley spends much of the novel reading and meditating upon. His account completely undermines Darley’s understanding, telling him that Justine was really in love with the novelist Pursewarden, and just used him as a decoy to cheat on her husband. And we read about Scobie, a mutual friend of almost everyone in the book, including Clea, Justine, Melissa, and Darley, who is killed while in drag, possibly trying to pick up sailor for a trick.
In “Balthazar,” Durrell draws the reader to the meta-fictional aspects of the story in at least two ways. His account completely reconfigures Darley’s understanding of events in the previous volume, telling him that Justine was really in love with the novelist Pursewarden, and just used him as a decoy to cheat on her husband. In this sense, Balthazar’s “interlinear” almost serves to turn the entire narrative into a series of suspect, but all equally likely, Rashomon-like perspectival takes, without any single one being allowed to be account for the entire truth. Durrell also uses Pursewarden as a kind of a novelist-cipher to shed light on the plight of the novelist – or, more broadly, the artist’s – task. This ambiguity, which can at times seem heavy-handed, seems to mirror much of what Durrell is really saying about love, and especially erotic relationships in general: that they are a series of shadows, lies, deceptions, and figments of our own fragile imaginations. As with the first volume, the language is stunning, so just as in the first review, I’d like to end with a bit of what I’m talking about – those wonderful ambiguities and mysteries which so wholly constitute Alexandria and its residents for Durrell:
“I feel I want to sound a note of … affirmation – though not in the specific terms of a philosophy or religion. It should have the curvature of an embrace, the wordlessness of a lover’s code. It should convey some feeling that the world we live in is founded in something too simple to be over-described as cosmic law – but as easy to grasp as, say, an act of tenderness, simple tenderness in the primal relation between animal and plant, rain and soil, seed and trees, man and God. A relationship so delicate that it is all too easily broken by the inquiring mind and conscience in the French sense which of course has its own rights and its own field of deployment. I’d like to think of my work simply as a cradle in which philosophy could rock itself to sleep, thumb in mouth. What do you say to this? After all, this is not simply what we most need in the world, but really what describes the state of pure process in it. Keep silent awhile you feel a comprehension of this act of tenderness – not power or glory: and certainly not Mercy, that vulgarity of the Jewish mind which can only imagine man as crouching under the whip. No, for the sort of tenderness I mean is utterly merciless!” (p. 238).
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