Representation of Egypt and Egyptian Culture in Lawrence Durrell's "The Alexandria Quartet"

• Main Authors: Jasmine Lin, 林宛瑄
• Other Authors: Yiu-nam Leung
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 1999
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/30086216476647410449

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 外國語文學系 === 87 === Abstract Modern scholarship on Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet (consisting of Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea) has been focused on the investigation of the universal phenomena of the quest, love, art, and modern consciousness. However, it is seldom mentioned that Durrell's discussion of these topics in the Quartet cannot be universal because his projection of Egypt and the Egyptians in this novel is distorted by his Western imagination. This thesis examines how Egypt and the Egyptians are represented in the Quartet in order to reveal Durrell's inevitable Western predisposition toward the Egyptian culture. The first chapter is a succinct survey of the scholarship on the Quartet and an analysis of the strengths and limitations of each methodology and approach. The theoretical framework elaborated in Chapter Two is mainly of the post-colonial model. The collective European phenomenon of displacing the real East with the image of "the mysterious Orient" results from the exercise of colonial ideology and manifests the power relations between the Western colonizers and the Oriental colonized. In the process of displacement, certain rhetoric modes and narrative structures are used to produce and reinforce Western discourse on the Orient. This attitude of representation (including textual representation, cultural representation, psychological representation, etc.) has governed the European encounter with the East. Durrell's Quartet is part of the Western colonial career of producing certain representation of the Orient. Chapter Three aims to analyze how Durrell designs Egypt as an exotic but shabby stage which the European imagination of the Orient can be embodied. In so doing, Egypt is represented, on the one hand, as an erotic playground promising free sex and on the other hand, as a colonized space characteristic of misery and brutality. Chapter Four explores how the Europeans in the Quartet dissipate their anxiety about the decay of the colonial order in twentieth-century Egypt by debasing the Egyptians more completely in their writing. This attitude of representation initiated in high colonial period persists even in the post-imperial era. Slight adjustment of narrative strategies is made to preserve the higher position for the colonizers. In the fifth chapter, I argue that the European writers in the Quartet are revered as the ultimate colonizers. These writers are given the privilege to put Egypt and the Egyptians into discourse while the Egyptians are denied the right to speak/write for themselves. By writing, the Europeans gain power over the colonized by inscribing Egypt and the Egyptians in a coherent representation. The declining colonial order in empirical reality is finally revitalized in their writing. Chapter Six summarizes my discussion of the Quartet as an example of Orientalist discourse.