Durrell and Djebar: (De)constructing the Self
By Dr. Linda S. Rashidi, Mansfield University of Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
Seemingly separated by nearly every parameter imaginable—sex, generation, nationality, colonial status, educational background— Lawrence Durrell and Assia Djebar occupy a common space of the mind and employ common fictional techniques that reflect their sense of self as ungrounded. Both lived/live and wrote/write as exiles, children whose very being was constructed by the colonial experience, though from opposing perspectives: Djebar as a native Algerian daughter given a French education, and Durrell as a child of the British Raj educated essentially and casually in the native tradition. In a society where girls traditionally occupied only private spaces, were educated, if at all, in Arabic, and whose whole lives were carried out in the disenfranchised milieu of Berber language and culture, Djebar was given a Western education even though this at first entailed sitting silently in the back of her father’s all-boy classroom. Later sent to a French boarding school, the young Djebar was further isolated from her Berber heritage. Durrell, in a sense, made his way through childhood, had his psyche formed, by the reverse path: the first son of a British colonial engineer, he was born in India, raised by native ayahs, learned to speak various Indian languages, and was immersed in the local culture, but had little formal education. As a result, neither Djebar nor Durrell ever felt ‘at home’—anywhere.
Their lives and their writing were essentially exercises in finding their identities and their own sense of place, in constructing a self for which they had no models. Exiled from their own worlds, both existed in a state of anomie, disconnected from their natural environment but never able to completely enter the world of the ‘other,’ a world thrust upon them. Their writing reflects—not just through its content but also through its structure—this struggle to define a reality that they can inhabit.
In this paper, I explore six large literary devices that serve both authors in their attempt to (de)construct the self: 1) four linked novels as palimpsest; 2) the past to construct the present; 3) wandering; 4) narrative unanchored in time and space; 5) shifts in voice (both subject and object overlapping and indistinguishable); and 6) narrator as shadow self through naming/unnaming.
Keywords: Durrell, Djebar, Linda Rashidi
Seemingly separated by nearly every parameter imaginable—sex, generation, nationality, colonial status, educational background— Lawrence Durrell and Assia Djebar occupy a common space of the mind and employ common fictional techniques that reflect their sense of self as ungrounded. Both lived/live and wrote/write as exiles, children whose very being was constructed by the colonial experience, though from opposing perspectives: Djebar as a native Algerian daughter given a French education, and Durrell as a child of the British Raj educated essentially and casually in the
native tradition.
Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell, 1962
In a society where girls traditionally occupied only private spaces, were educated, if at all, in Arabic, and whose whole lives were carried out in the disenfranchised milieu of Berber language and culture, Djebar was given a Western education even though this at first entailed sitting silently in the back of her father’s all-boy classroom. Later sent to a French boarding school, the young Djebar was further isolated from her Berber heritage. Durrell, in a sense, made his way through childhood, had his psyche formed, by the reverse path: the first son of a British colonial engineer, he was born in India, raised by native ayahs, learned to speak various Indian languages, and was immersed in the local culture, but had little formal education. As a result, neither Djebar nor Durrell ever felt ‘at home’—anywhere.
Their lives and their writing were essentially exercises in finding their identities and their own sense of place, in constructing a self for which they had no models. Exiled from their own worlds, both existed in a state of anomie, disconnected from their natural environment but never able to completely enter the world of the ‘other,’ a world thrust upon them. Their writing reflects—not just through its content but also through its structure—this struggle to define a reality that they can inhabit.
In this paper, I explore six large literary devices that serve both authors in their attempt to (de)construct the self: 1) four linked novels as palimpsest; 2) the past to construct the present; 3) wandering; 4) narrative unanchored in time and space; 5) shifts in voice (both subject and object overlapping and indistinguishable); and 6) narrator as shadow self through naming/unnaming.
1. Quartet as palimpsest
It is perhaps coincidence, but nonetheless interesting, that both authors have chosen to explore the construction of self through the use of the quartet, four linked novels that basically grapple with the same material but from different perspectives. For Durrell this was his famous Alexandria Quartet; Djebar has yet to complete her quartet of books, the first three being Fantasia, Ombre Sultane (Sister to Scheherazade), and So Vast the Prison.
Critics of Durrell and Djebar use the art metaphor: palimpsest. And, indeed, both authors create meaning by layering material, each layer giving depth and complexity to the characters and the events. Durrell’s work is more strictly fiction than is Djebar’s; we need to tease out and interpret the autobiographical bits and pieces. Certainly Darley, the protagonist and first person narrator of Justine, Balthazar, and Clea, is patterned after the young Durrell in his essential circumstances: he works in the British Information Office in Alexandria at the start of World War II and is writing his magnum opus. Here Darley, as did Durrell, uses the city to try to make sense of his own personal life, to sort out who he is, including what it means to be British. Through the four books of the Quartet, Durrell examines not only “modern love,” as he professes in the introduction to Balthazar, but also the very nature of the self, of truth, and of our perceptions versus reality. Darley gets turned through Einstein’s three dimensions of space and one dimension of time in an attempt to create a complex, layered view of the world and of himself.
Djebar’s work is barely, if at all, fiction—at least the bits and pieces. As we read the three completed works in her quartet, we are acutely aware that she is recycling major episodes from her own life and examining them within different contexts and from different points of view. In particular, Djebar tells and retells certain key incidents from her childhood: going to school with her father, the school teacher; her mother’s struggle to speak French and fit in with her French neighbors; her maternal grandmother’s Berber history. Couched in the guise of fiction, these reminiscences become increasingly intertwined with each other and with pieces of historical knowledge. We can almost feel Djebar digging down into her (and her country’s) past, layer by layer by layer, to come to a sense of her Berber heritage.
2. Past as key to understanding Present
Both authors organize, on both a macro and micro level, their works around recollection, reconstruction, and research of past events in order to construct present reality. For Durrell, the whole essential premise of Justine, Balthazar, and Clea is Darley’s sifting through his past to come to ‘the truth,’ to understand “what happened.” This ‘what’ is not just the love affair that lingers on the surface of the AQ; it involves a deep examination of the self and the nature of the self. In Mountolive, Durrell shifts perspective to third person and Darley becomes object. Here ‘the self’ is examined from the point of view of the other. 
Both Justine and Balthazar begin with Darley on his idyllic island trying to reconstruct his time in Alexandria and come to some sense of who he is. He imagines and reimagines the people, the events, the city. At the beginning of Justine, Darley’s attempt to reconstruct the past is almost agonizing:
At night when the wind roars and the child sleeps quietly in its wooden cot by the echoing chimney-piece I light lamp and walk about, thinking of my friends—of Justine and Nessim, of Melissa and Balthazar. I return link by link along the iron chains of memory to the city which we inhabited so briefly together: the city which used us as its flora—precipitated in us conflicts which were hers and which we mistook for our own: beloved Alexandria! I have had to come so far away from it in order to understand it all!
In Part I of Djebar’s So Vast the Prison, the narrator makes a similar Darley-like attempt at reconstructing. To this Djebar adds an historical context in a straightforward way that Durrell does not, by abandoning, in Part II, the first person narrator device and just launching into a ‘herstory’ of Algerian Berber history. We, the readers, take this historical reconstruction for fact, and thus when Djebar returns to first person narration in Part III, we have a feminine history to underpin the narrator’s literal searching for clues to her past, and therefore, her identity.
Assia Djebar, 2005
It is important to note that Djebar is a woman with a country, and as such part of her search for self is her attempt to reconstruct Algerian and Berber heritage, to reclaim both for herself. Durrell, a man without a country, never does this directly, perhaps never can. The 1996 On Miracle Ground Conference of the International Lawrence Durrell Society in Alexandria, Egypt, was an exercise of the controversy that can arise when fiction writers construct history. As can be seen from the papers included in the published proceedings (Ekhtiar 2006), a fiction writer’s depiction of a real place carries an emotional impact for readers, opening up debate over the ‘real’ nature of a place within its historical context. Who gets to tell the story? Durrell’s British view of Alexandria and Alexandrians is British, but with a twist, as a reluctant British civil servant. That he can mock the ‘natives’ of the city with sometimes-cruel humor raises the question: did Durrell see in himself the images he creates of the people of Alexandria?
3. WanderingDurrell and Djebar use aimless wandering both as an escape and a search. The respective cities of the narrators/characters (Alexandria and Algiers) become anonymous locations for pondering and soul-searching.
In Part I of Djebar’s So Vast the Prison, the narrator wanders the city, not so much thinking as just walking, escaping. She needs the anonymous, yet familiar streets to mull over her obsession with her lover, in this case an affair of the mind. In Ombre Sultane, Hajila escapes the prison of her apartment, and the prison of her veil, by venturing out and exploring the new, i.e. Western, city, at once exhilarated by this new self she is daring to create and terrified at being ‘caught’, being recognized in Western guise. The metaphorical significance of this for Djebar is clear: she is that Westernized woman but one whose Berber self lies just under the surface.
Durrell uses wandering in a more masculine, Western way. In all three first-person narrated novels of the Quartet, Darley wanders the old city, deep in thought, where he attempts to reconstruct events and, by doing so, deconstruct himself. In Mountolive, the main protagonist Mountolive escapes the confines of the British residence where he resides as Ambassador by disguising himself in a native fez and wandering the medina. There amid the sensual cacophony of Alexandria’s crowded and lively native quarter, Mountolive, like Hajila, is at once caught up in its otherness but always on the edge of self betrayal.
For both authors the old city/new city divide is both metaphorically and quite literally the colonizer/native divide. Thus, Hajila enters the new city, i.e. becomes French, while Mountolive enters the old city, i.e. becomes Arab. As such, Durrell wanders back to the native environs of his youth, while Djebar’s construction of self involves moving her fictional self from Berber-ness (nativeness) to the anonymity of moderness (Westerness).
4. Unanchored in time and space
Both authors set their novels in locales that, even when named, are mere images, alien places. While characters may have a center in an identifiable locale, these real life places aren’t home for the characters. They feel like aliens in a world where they should/are expected to be natives and feel comfortable.
Mountolive, as Durrell’s alter ego, thinks he is coming home to Alexandria—only to find otherwise. Leila, Mountolive’s Alexandrian mistress of his youth, is perhaps metaphor for the city itself, no longer the young enchanting beauty of his memory, but a pitifully scarred old woman. Coming face to face with her, Mountolive is shocked and appalled. Darley forever remains alien in Alexandria. He is only truly centered in his unspecified and romanticized Greek (fantasy) island. Durrell has Darley comment that “only the city is real,” but one wonders how real Alexandria is for Durrell.
Djebar only vaguely specifies cities. Their various historical (Berber, Roman, Arabic) names become interchangeable. In So Vast the Prison, the narrator yearns for a home, her Cherchell village, that has never been and can never be hers. Yet her own home where she lives her married life is an unbearable prison where she feels uncomfortable and is eventually attacked and nearly blinded by the man, though her husband, who has become a person unrecognizable to her. In Ombre Sultane, Djebar carries this even further. Hajila’s home contains children (and a husband) who belong to someone else. Like a transient, she sleeps on a makeshift pallet on the floor. A recurring line for Djebar is: “Later in another city, in a new country.”
5. Shifts in voice, at once subject/object
The books of the Alexandria Quartet and the events in them are turned through both subjective and the objective modes. As a whole, Mountolive represents the objective relating of facts through the use of the omniscient narrator; the other three books are subjective in the sense that they represent the view of the first person narrator. In actuality the situation is more complex. The reader is constantly being presented with various sides of events and characters. Even Darley himself ( the ‘I’ of Justine, Balthazar, and Clea) becomes object in Mountolive. Durrell states in his “Note” that prefaces Balthazar: “The subject-object relation is so important to relativity that I have tried to turn the novel through both subjective and objective modes. The third part, Mountolive, is a straight naturalistic novel in which the narrator of Justine and Balthazar becomes object, i.e. a character” (np).
In fact, nearly every major (and some minor, if such a distinction can be made) character, while usually object, becomes subject at one time or another by the use of long monologues, diaries, letters, poetry, and even parts of novels. The ultimate example of this is the character Pursewarden who hardly exists as a ‘living’ person. Yet it is through him as observer that Durrell espouses much of his reality philosophy. All four books contain huge chunks of Pursewarden’s writing; the very middle of Clea, for example, is a thirty-page section from Pursewarden’s Notebook that presents Darley as Pursewarden saw him. This creates a disconcerting sense of identity confusion.
Djebar uses an even more direct technique to convey this dual sense of self in Ombre Sultane. Here Hajila and Isma (the narrator) become alter egos. Isma narrates Hajila’s story, tells her story for her, even inhabiting her thoughts. ‘You’ becomes ‘I’ becomes ‘you’ in a blur of identity, until we have the feeling of not two characters but one. One might argue that this is Djebar as her Westernized self imagining a more native, Berber self. What would it be like to be a traditional Berber woman pretending to be a Western woman? Thus Djebar presents us with a Western woman fantasizing about being a Berber woman pretending to be a Western woman.
6. Narrator as shadow self: naming/unnaming
Both Durrell and Djebar employ the technique of unnamed narrators. What is more fundamental to our identities than our names? And yet, or because of this, both authors create narrators without names. In Justine, we never hear Darley’s name, a fact that often goes unnoticed until we launch into Balthazar. Much has been made of the names of the various characters in the AQ, most of whom possess bits and pieces of Durrell himself. This shifting of identities denies the Western notion of a stable self, much in line with deeper Durrell philosophical concepts.
Likewise, the narrator of Part I of So Vast the Prison remains unnamed until the end of the novel--when she is named “Isma”, which is, literally, in Arabic, “my name.” Thus the narrator becomes everywoman, or perhaps every Arab woman, Djebar reclaiming her Arab self. The narrator of Ombre Sultane is also Isma, the phantom self, while the native substitute mother and wife has a real name, Hajila.
A final word about Djebar’s name. In her essay “The Improper Name”, Alison Rice tells the buried story of name and self, an apocryphal story whereby Fatima Zohra becomes Assia Djebar: on a taxi ride in Paris on her way to her publisher, the young author and her husband make a hasty choice of name, misspelling (mistransliterating), and in doing so the author becomes Djebar, “messenger” in Arabic. This nom de plume has become her identity, and, in a sense, “Assia Djebar” becomes the collective identifier of Berber women, her nameless fellow Algerian women. This taking of, and becoming, a pseudonym is an act of fundamental subversiveness, claiming ownership of her own identity, breaking with the paternal censorship that surrounds her on both a private and public level. Rice says, “She conceives (of) her very existence and then assumes it.”
Thus we see two authors separated by time, space, sex, and language using their fiction to grapple with their own sense of identity. Both have, through circumstances beyond their control, had forced upon them identities that they can neither fully assume nor even remotely shake off. This sense of self as ungrounded is reflected in the common devices that permeate their writing.
Editorial
1
ISSUE #5 (2008-08-11)