Justine (Durrell novel)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- for the novel by Marquis de Sade see The Misfortunes of Virtue
Justine, published in 1957, is the first volume in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. Taken together, the four novels of the quartet tell a complex story of passion and deception in the Alexandria of the 1930s and 1940s. Justine serves to introduce the tale and provide some perspectives (red herrings, in many cases) on what might be happening.
One of the epigraphs is from the Marquis de Sade's book of the same name, also known as The Misfortunes of Virtue or Justine ou Les Malheurs de la vertu.
There are two positions available to us--either crime which renders us happy, or the noose, which prevents us from being unhappy. I ask whether there can be any hesitation, lovely Thérèse, and where will your little mind find an argument able to combat that one?
Another epigraph is from Sigmund Freud, in which he states that every sexual act involves four people.
Plot summary
"What I most need to do is to record experiences, not in the order in which they took place -- for that is history -- but in the order in which they first became significant for me."
The Scene
The nominal setting of the novel is an isolated Greek island in the late 1930s. The narrator, a youngish writer whose name and nationality we do not know, lives there in rural seclusion. His only companion is the two-year-old daughter of his dead mistress; he is not her father. As a self-described "poet of the historic consciousness", the narrator feels compelled to think back on his recent life in Alexandria and the cryptic events in which he played a part. His thoughts come to us in random glimpses of people he knew, and of incidents he experienced.
Cavafy
Many references are made within the story to the Alexandrian poet Constantin Cavafy, and this book was responsible for introducing Cavafy to a wide new audience in the English-speaking world. Two Cavafy poems, "The City" and "The God Abandons Antony", are included in the appendix; the implication is that they have something to say about the narrator and his plight.
