ABSTRACT
This essay on Lawrence Durrell’s last fiction is a crossing of boundaries between the different levels of narrative. The fiction deploys many writing devices used to break the implicit reading code, which separates the fictive world from History and facts in the fiction from historical events. The intimate stories of the characters – apprehended through different kinds of narrative techniques (characterization, dramatization, descriptions, interior monologues, authorial comments and so on) – the bits and pieces of official History (carefully chosen, omitted or transformed) intermingled with imaginary scenes weave a complex textual fabric in which WWII is much more than a historical setting or backdrop. This essay is a textual analysis to explore and analyse the devices in the global discourse on culture which, mixing fact and fiction, construct some kind of pervading historical representation of the period while simultaneously the space where enunciation is formed becomes blurred. The essay interrogates the intrusion of real historical documents into the text of fiction and makes a few remarks on characterization and onomastics. It argues that a series of textual fragments from different narrators belonging to different narrative levels paves the way to an agonistic artistic position, which confirms Adorno’s statement that ‘The author’s motivations have nothing to do with the writer’s work, the literary product’.
