L’isola di Prospero. La Grecia di Lawrence Durrell

The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the image of Greece emerging from Lawrence Durrell’s travel writings. In particular, the analysis will focus on his works dedicated to Corfu. In line with the British literary tradition, Durrell perceived the Mediterranean Sea as an opportunity to escape from the English death that affected his time. Nevertheless, he is not driven by a mere interest in archaeology or history, but he looks for places of an artistic nature where “to put down roots and create” (Landscape and Character, 1960). Durrell was born in India, as a “child of the jungle” (From the Elephant’s Back, 1982), thus his thinking is colored by the fact that he is a colonial. In England, where he moved at the age of twelve to attend established schools, he felt like an outsider. Hence, his journey to Greece, far from being a literary topos, is a sort of voluntary exile, a quest for a lost home. In 1935 Durrell persuaded his family to move to Corfu, safe in the knowledge that he could have regained a contact with nature and developed his literary talent in a place that offers “all the charms of seclusion”. This experience gave birth to the first of his island portraits, Prospero’s Cell (1945), which relates some of the events of those years adopting the fictitious technique of the diary. Actually, it was written in Alexandria, during the Second World War, as we learn from the epilogue. Also his youngest brother, Gerald, wrote an account of that period, from the point of view of the scientist: the novel My Family and Other Animals (1956), conceived as a sort of “natural history”, combines fact and fiction harmoniously, juxtaposing landscape descriptions – especially animals and plants – and lively family life episodes. Lawrence Durrell’s portrait in the novel is close to reality, since his brother depicts him as an intellectual surrounded with books and points out ironically his restlessness, which leads him to move house frequently. Prospero’s Cell has been defined a landscape with characters. Greece is perceived as a mysterious crystal that should be penetrated to ensure self-discovery, as a country with no geographical borders, which becomes the metaphor of a state of mind. As a late Modernist, Durrell expands chronology and describes the landscape using an impressionistic technique: he focuses on colors, on the magic of Greek light, and on sounds and voices that create a hypnotic atmosphere. Corfu acquires a dreamlike dimension that recalls the description of Prospero’s island in The Tempest by William Shakespeare. Greece is rich in literary and mythological echoes that scholars and archaeologists try to recognize, in a vain attempt to trace the ancient sites and figures – take Odysseus for example. It is an unchanging land of “stone fables” (Delphi, 1965), where it is not possible to distinguish between truth and imagination, since legend is an intimate part of daily life, and people and their scenery retain a kind of mythological form. This dichotomy between history and conjecture is at the heart of Prospero’s Cell. Lawrence Durrell will offer a more complete itinerary across the Ionian Sea in The Greek Islands (1978), hoping that a traveler may follow in his footsteps and, under the spell of Kardaki spring, may return to Corfu in the future.