Avant-garde Orientalism: Lawrence Durrell, Marguerite Duras

Two minor cuts from the final edition of Avant-garde Orientalism, the first from the section on Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet in the "Egypt and Palestine" chapter; the second from the Duras/Genet section in "The Literary Genealogy of Avant-garde Orientalism" chapter.  #avantgardeorientalism, #lawrencedurrell, #margueriteduras

On Durrell:  'In Balthazar this formula is vividly illustrated in the case of Scobie, a sort of farcical policeman-spy in the novel with many colonial adventures to recount and exotic collectibles to display.  With years of experience to draw on, Scobie has cultivated an indulgent attitude toward his Egyptian charges in a way that echoes some of [Jean] Cocteau’s borrowed sentiments:  “You see the Egyptians are marvelous, old man.  Kindly.  They know me well.  From some points of view, they might look like felons, old man, but felons in a state of grace, that’s what I always say.  They make allowances for each other” (35).  Of course, when Scobie deviates from predictable behaviors to walk Alexandria’s streets wearing a dress and his “Dolly Varden,” he is chased away by the locals with obvious malice, only to be beaten to death later by some French sailors.  In short, the moment any shift from the official pattern is attempted and standard orientalist warnings are ignored, the cultural tolerance that supposedly comes with imperial enforcement is quickly shattered.  The primitive instincts of the native Others erupt in a way that suggests an automatic, perhaps genetic predisposition supposedly missing in the exemplary Westerner, if not in the West’s more marginal cases (i.e., the sailors, workers, derelicts, and others of lower station who don’t matter).  At the same time, Durrell never hints that the local populace might be using their knowledge of Scobie’s proclivities to harass him for actions performed in his official capacity as director of municipal police.  But in a sense, Scobie is no less a defective Westerner than the French sailors who kill him.  They are not the sort of Europeans whose cultural integrity entitles them to rule here [in Egypt].' 

On Duras:  'Finally, in echoing the lepers, the Vice-Consul’s screams outside the French delegation reveal his liminal relation to both communities—communities with an iconic, [...] dominant female at the center, but one who is no less heterogeneous to those communities than the Vice-Consul is. [25]  Whilst serving as allegorical fulcrum between beggar woman and ambassador’s wife, the Vice-Consul represents the gulf of desire and regret between them, from whence to face one or the other shore can lead only to bullets or to screams.  All three, then, negatively frame the void at the center of colonialism.'

25.  Indeed, one reviewer of Duras’s books finds mitigating factors to explain the Vice-Consul’s conduct:  “Pour retrouver l’inspiration du Vice-consul, c’est au scenario de Hiroshima, Mon Amour, qu’il faut retourner. Dans le Vice-consul, l’holocauste atomique est remplacée par la présence obsédante de la faim et de la misère, catastrophe qui, cette fois, s’abat sur tout un continent.  Hiroshima deviant l’Indochine et l’Inde, Calcutta et Lahore où le vice-consul de France tirait sur les mendiant lépreux parce qu’il ne pouvait plus supporter la souffrance du monde; au ‘Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima.  Rien’ correspond ‘On ne peut pas comprendre Lahore de quelque façon qu’on s’y prenne.’” Jean V. Alter’s review of Duras’s Le Vice-consul in The French Review 40.4 (February 1967): 585-587.