Clea (novel)

Clea

First UK edition
Author	Lawrence Durrell
Language	English
Series	The Alexandria Quartet
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Faber
Publication date	1960
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print (Paperback and Hardback)
ISBN	NA
Preceded by	Mountolive

Clea, published in 1960, is the fourth volume in the The Alexandria Quartet series by British author Lawrence Durrell. Set in Alexandria, Egypt around WWII, the first three volumes tell the same story from different points of view, and Clea relates subsequent events.

Epigraphs and Citations

The Marquis de Sade and Freud again helm the epigraphs - including a nostalgic preface in which Durrell, reluctantly and defiantly, claims the story is now "complete" - failing to convince either himself, or the Reader. The story will haunt the Author in the Quincunx format of The Avignon Novels - and the discerning and perceptive reader. One never views 20th Century Literature the same way again after reading The Alexandria Quartet and has to make seismic shifts of perception and appreciation to accommodate this essential book from the mid-point of the Century.

Plot & Characterization

The book begins with the Narrator living on a remote Greek island with his illegitimate daughter from Melissa( now six years old - marking the time that has elapsed since the events of Justine ); however the tone is very dark & opposed to the light & airy reminescence of Prospero's Cell - Durrell's travelogue-memoir of his life on Corfu. The prolonged nature-peices, which are a highlight of Durrell's prose, still intervene between straight linear narrative - but are uniformly of askesis & alone-ness.

Balthazar arrives on a passing steam-boat with the loose-leafed Inter-Linear - as the narrative is now styled by the Narrator of Justine.A few secrets are revealed ( please read the book for these ). They proceed to Alexandria, where Darley continues to reminesce lamentingly, & seeks and sometimes finds, the characters of the earlier books.

He runs into Clea in the street - & they effortlessly pick up an affaire de couer - this time un-encumbered by the interfering physical presences of Justine & Melissa - though there is a lot of pillow-talk about the two women in a self-absorbed manner by Darley. The sex scenes actually read more real than those in the preceding books, where the fervent desperation of "bodies straining against each other while the souls watch the proceedings from some corner of the ceiling" is finally replaced by an apparently real sexual relationship between two mature adults, rather than the teeming adolescent angst of infatuation ( Justine ) & nurturance ( Melissa ) that precedes this Golden Mean of Coupling. However, this romance is tepid compared to the white-hot intensity of Justine.

The other, & perhaps more enduring, deliciousness of the Text is extended meditations on Art, Composition, Form & Intent - with Darley's Inter-Linear, Pursewarden's Novels & Clea's paintings serving as the imaginary scaffold on which Durrell builds his elegant Ivory Tower theoretical stance.

Post-Colonial Criticism

Although the narrator Darley starts off as a bohemian British expatriate, it is interesting to note that he finds romantic fulfillment neither with the "adulterous jewess" Justine nor with the good-as-gold street-walker Melissa, who unfortunately is also a Greek brunette, with a "feral bush" - who conveniently delivers a baby-girl & dies in a poignant sanatorium scene a la Doeisteveski, which Balthazar describes to the Narrator Darley. Post-Colonial criticism wonders whether this is because Clea is the White, Blonde-haired, Blue-eyed pubescent dream -girl of the Narrator - & that eventually for all "Mad Dogs & Englishmen" the only equitable partner is another White Woman.