Egypt, or the quest for syncretism and spiritual wholeness in Lawrence Durrell's Avignon Quintet

Though Durrell mainly concentrates on the French Midi in his Quintet, he also explores another part of the Mediterranean world: Egypt. Two characters, Bruce and Blanford (Durrell's alter egos), relate their experiences in Egypt: Bruce gives us a detailed account of his strange meeting with a gnostic sect at Macabru and of the Nile journey that followed the gnostic experience, while Blanford recounts his stay with an Egyptian prince (Hassad) and a Nile journey which echoes Bruce's. These views are paralleled and contrasted so as to suggest that there is no objective and fixed reality, for reality depends on the observer's inner eye. As John Unterecker remarks, Durrellian reality is 'nothing more and nothing less than the angle of observation of a distorting observer, truth nothing more and nothing less than the distorting observer's relationship to a distorted thing imperfectly observed'.1 At the same time, through the different approaches and experiences of his characters, Durrell points to the many facets of the rich southern world and to its deeper (spiritual) significance for the characters — and for the author himself, as this essay will try to show.

In the Quintet, Macabru is an oasis situated east of Alexandria. Although the name of the place is invented, it is very similar to the name of a famous troubadour called Marcabru(s),2 whose treatment of 'la fin' amor' (courtly love) was both realistic and esoteric. Several scholars3 also emphasize the influence of

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