The Psychological Orientation Towards Growth in Lawrence Durrell's "The Alexandria Quartet" Page: 114
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114
surprise tears upon the cheek of his Chief. He ducked
back tactfully and retreated hastily to his office,
deeply shaken by a sense of diplomatic inappropriateness.
. . . 'A good diplomat should never show feeling,'" the
subordinate thinks to himself (M, p. 186).
In the Quartet England and the English education are
associated with guilt. Pursewarden confides to Mountolive
that he is "always glad to get out of England to countries
where I feel no moral responsibility" (M, p. 64). Pombal,
a French diplomat, complains of the British, who fill
rooms "with their sense of guilt!" (M, p. 159)- Nessim
too is an example of the stifling character of the rigid
English education, for "Oxford . . . had only succeeded
in developing his philosophical bent to the point where
he was incapable of practising the art he most loved,
painting" (J, p. 28). Thus when Nessim attempts to paint,
"self-consciousness like a. poison seemed to eat into the
very paint, making it sluggish and dead. It was hard
even to manipulate the brush with an invisible hand
pulling at one's sleeve the whole time, hindering,
whispering, displacing all freedom and fluidity of
movement" (J, p. 160).
The rigid nature of society is not, however, limited
to England. As the third-person narrator of Mountolive,
Durrell complains of "the feeble dams set up by our
fretful legislation and the typical self-reproaches of
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Fordham, Glenn Wayne, Jr. The Psychological Orientation Towards Growth in Lawrence Durrell's "The Alexandria Quartet", dissertation, May 1981; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc330626/m1/120/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .