Cavafy, Forster, Durrell Bachelor’S Diploma Thesis

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Petr Ondráček Towards an Alexandrian Text: Cavafy, Forster, Durrell Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph.D. 2018 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Acknowledgement I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisor, for his words of encouragement that kept me on track and the kindness he showed me when I found myself in dire straits. I would also like thank my family and friends for their endless patience and support. Lastly, I would like to dedicate this work to J. D., my guide into and out of Alexandria. Table of Contents: Introduction……………………………………………………………………………..1 Prologue: Alexandria, a History………………………………………………………...8 Chapter I: Cavafy’s Alexandria – Queen of the Greek World…………………………12 Chapter II: E. M. Forster – An Eye Adapted to What Is to Be Seen?.………………...36 Chapter III: “Only the City Is Un/Real” – Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet….59 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………..84 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………90 Introduction Few literary representations of Western metropoleis can compete with that of Alexandria, Egypt, with respect to the iconicity and resonance with which the Alexandria-based literati articulated the cultural narrative of their local milieu. Despite the fact that the city could not contend with Paris, London or New York in terms of sheer quantity of literary output, the degree of discursive coherence and density of the literary myth of cosmopolitan Alexandria during the first half of the twentieth century may vie with major capitals of Western imagination, such as the St. Petersburg in the literature of tsarist Russia, Berlin of the Weimar Republic, the enigmatic Prague of Gustav Meyrink and Franz Kafka, or Joycean Dublin. As such, the rich and complex internal structure of Alexandria’s literary discourse, or semiosphere, as produced by and presented in the poetry of Constantine Cavafy (1863-1933), E. M. Forster’s Alexandria: A History and a Guide (1922) and Pharos and Pharillon (1923), and Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet (1957-60) merits a critical appraisal. The process of the city’s resurgence in the nineteenth and twentieth century was a peculiar one: it was only in the mid-1790s that Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign re- enlivened the languishing township, starting its steady growth in size and significance over the subsequent decades. By the turn of the twentieth century a new Alexandria had arisen on the groundwork of the ancient metropolis, re-drawn as a strikingly modern urban centre. The complementary pressure of the colonial powers’ competition for the control over the North African coast, headed by the United Kingdom which turned Egypt into a British protectorate, and the region’s Muslim rulers’ struggle to maintain their power held each other in check, only sporadically escalating into open conflicts, 1 which allowed the city to develop a palpable, if uneasy, sense of autonomy. Its surge in prominence over the nineteenth century was facilitated by the government of Muhammad Ali, who opened Alexandria to waves of migrants from all around the Mediterranean Basin and beyond; it took only about a century for the city’s meagre population, counting several thousand during the Napoleonic times, to reach six-digit numbers. Soon enough the indigenous population was outnumbered by the Maghrebi and Levantine Arabs, Greeks, Jews, Turks, and Armenians who gravitated towards the city alongside the ambitious European colonists, principally the English and Italians, seconded by the French, Germans, and even Americans, striving to raise their stake in the increasingly affluent, strategically noteworthy seaport. The immigrant settlers partitioned the city into quarters that housed inhabitants of shared ethnic heritage, yet these communities were not strictly segregated: Alexandria’s bustling commercial, political, religious and social life derived much of its vitality from the exchange and amalgamation of the tributary national identities of its citizens. Alexandria’s multicultural ferment also spurred intellectual and cultural growth: after an initial lull that accompanied the re-establishment of the city, a lively artistic scene developed in Alexandria towards the close of the nineteenth and over the initial four decades of the twentieth century. Internationally renowned artists put in guest performances there and a noteworthy body of local literary work was produced in Alexandria; among the resident writers the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy, and the British authors E. M. Forster and Lawrence Durrell were of particular note. While each of these possessed a distinct personal style and employed a different literary form, the overt concern with the cultural milieu of the cosmopolitan metropolis represents a common denominator in their literary output. For these artists the city was not merely a 2 neutral backdrop to their literary activity; it informed their writing in a markedly thoroughgoing manner. Among themselves they established an urban literary myth in which echoes of the famed city’s ancient past reverberated through its contemporary manifestation. Despite the obvious effort to bridge the gap caused by the reversals of Alexandria’s historical development, the texts that were concerned with the city did not succumb to the illusion that a new golden age was dawning on Alexandria, the colonial ambitions of the Western sojourners notwithstanding. At best, the period in which Cavafy, Forster and Durrell inhabited the city might be termed its “iron age”; knowing full well that its ancient greatness was unlikely to repeat itself in the precarious present, these authors adopted rearward-looking, melancholic nostalgia with more than a tinge of decadence as a default mood for their works. As the century progressed, it was becoming increasingly evident that the status quo that allowed cosmopolitan Alexandria to flourish on the site of the ancient metropolis was untenable in face of the calamities of the two world wars and the deleterious effect they had on the public life of the Levantine region. The internal conflicts that had been lulled to sleep by the foregoing decades of prosperity resurfaced with a renewed velocity and their peaceable, generally beneficial resolution was unattainable in the atmosphere of polarized radicalism that came to characterize the international politics of the 1930s and 40s, a strain the Levantine multicultural enclave could hardly withstand. The end of World War II redrew the world map and the former colonial empires had to let go of the territories they had formerly possessed; simultaneously, Egyptian authorities seized the opportunity to fully assert their power and show their foreign callers that they had outstayed their welcome. By the time of the 1956 Suez Crisis, cosmopolitan 3 Alexandria’s brief time in the sun was unequivocally over, as the vast majority of non- Egyptians who had not already left were forced to withdraw from the land, ousted by the anti-imperialist policies initiated by the Egyptian president Abdel Gamal Nasser. In 1956 Cavafy had already been long dead, Forster had returned to England, and Durrell was staying in Greece, just about to publish Justine, the first instalment of the “Big City Poem” he had started drafting during his Egyptian sojourn. Despite the fact that the city was forcibly assimilated into the emergent Egyptian Republic, its legacy represents a landmark in literary culture, whose significance warrants critical consideration. The three writers discussed in this text are indeed all distinguished authors both individually (even if Forster’s canonical status is not founded on his Alexandrian texts) and in terms of their Alexandrian affiliation. Cavafy’s, Forster’s, and Durrell’s canonicity means that there is an abundance of academic texts that focus on particular aspects of their writing and also of those that explore their mutual connections stemming from their association with the Egyptian city. The secondary sources featured in this work fall within the former as well as in the latter category. Robert Liddell’s critical biography serves as the main source of information about the life of Constantine Cavafy; two books provide a background for the interpretation of Cavafy’s aesthetic tenets (reconstructed in Gregory Jusdanis’ Poetics of Cavafy: Textuality, Eroticism, History) and of his affinities with late-nineteenth century artistic trends (examined in Peter Jeffreys’ Reframing Decadence: C. P. Cavafy’s Imaginary Portraits), complemented with references to Peter Bien’s Constantine Cavafy and Cavafy’s Alexandria, a pioneering English-language monograph by Cavafy’s translator Edmund Keeley that presents a coherent Alexandria-centric reading of the poet’s canonical writing. Forster’s texts about Alexandria, due to their relative obscurity, have not 4 received a great deal of critical attention on their own; they have nevertheless been examined with respect to their links to those of Cavafy and Durrell, as well as within the context of with the writer’s preceding and subsequent works, in Jane Lagoudis Pinchin’s 1977 study Alexandria Still: Forster, Durrell, and Cavafy. Hala Halim’s Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive is a recent (2013) book-length study that deconstructs the established notion of the cosmopolitan discourse of early twentieth century

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