Durrell, Lawrence (1912–1990)

Lawrence Durrell was born in Jalandhar, India under British colonial rule. Both his parents were born in India and never saw England before 1923 when they sent him ‘home’ for schooling. This experience shaped his writing career, and themes of expatriation and exile appear in his autobiographical first novel about this period, Pied Piper of Lovers (1935). Durrell was involved in English Surrealism and formed some of his key aesthetic concepts from Henry Miller’s anarchist rebuttal to surrealism’s communism. He left England in 1935 for Greece, and this move and post-surrealist aesthetic is reflected in his first major experimental novel The Black Book (1938). He did not make England his long-term home again, and after 1968 was designated a British non-patrial without the right to enter or settle in Britain without a visa. His writing career included works from 1931 to 1990, bridged late modernist and postmodern writing, and retained a baroque prose style even as realism grew more fashionable after World War II. He is most famous for his four-volume series The Alexandria Quartet (1957–1962).

The flâneuse and the City as uncanny home in Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria quartet

The concept of the home is not something that can be readily associated with Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria quartet. Generally, the word home is defined as a place where one lives, a house or dwelling. The idea of home is associated with the architectural construct of the house, as both a place and a space. With this in mind, I approach the conceptualisation of the house as representative of safety and happy remembrance from a somewhat different premise, exploring Durrell’s representation of Alexandria as an enclosing womb-like home that voraciously consumes her inhabitants. Although Durrell’s Alexandria has been considered by scholars from many angles, I propose my position represents a rather different approach to the manner in which the city has previously been examined. Durrell’s city, as uncanny home, will be shown to create her residents as fragments of her own consciousness, and this is particularly true of the character Justine. The narrator Darley’s memories of Justine moving through the streets of the city evoke her in the guise of a flâneuse and this flânerie, I go on to suggest, establishes a symbiosis between herself and the city, setting up an interplay through which Justine becomes the proxy for the city as unhomely home.