Objects in Space and Time: Metonymy in Durrell's Island Books - Critical Essay

Style, Spring, 2000 by Jack Stewart

Roman Jakobson links "selection and substitution" with the metaphoric pole of language, "combination and contexture" with the metonymic (90). "In manipulating these two kinds of connection (similarity and contiguity)," he writes, "an individual exhibits his personal style, his verbal predilections and preferences" (91). With a slight adjustment to put the travel writer in place of the realist, Jakobson's terminology can be applied to Durrell's island writing: "Following the path of contiguous relationships, the realist author [or travel writer] metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in space and time." To provide a sense of unity, however, the travel writer--like the realist--is "fond of synecdochic details" (Jakobson 92). In his island books, Pro spero 's Cell, Reflections on a Marine Venus, and Bitter Lemons, Durrell uses metonymy and synecdoche to highlight objects in space and time. According to Alan Friedman, "the motivating impetus, what is at the heart of all Durrellian imagery and design, is a passion for place that [...] attaches itself protean-fashion to numerous different objects" (59). Durrell expresses this passion for place and objects in metonymy, the trope of assimilation and classification. Exemplified in the disjunctive form of Prospero's Cell, an early diary entry there makes clear the mode of metonymic perception. A series of things proliferates around a nuclear consciousness. The list starts with a synecdochic image of a single figure--"I am aware of the brown arms and throat in the candlelight and the brown toes in the sandals"--and passes on to plurality: "I am aware of a hundred images at once and a hundred ways of dealing with them" (Prospero's Cell [PChereafter] 16-17). Ten examples follow in verbless sentence-fragments that identify seemingly neutral phenomena of the place and moment ("wild roses," "knives and forks," "Greek cigarettes," "notebook," "rope and oar"). But these objects do not remain separate or idle: they cohere and take on significance within a human context: "All these take shape and substance round this little yellow cone of flame in which N. is cutting the cheese and washing the grapes" (PC 17). Objects in space are illuminated by the candle-flame, much as memory illuminates a moment of experience that may signify a much wider range, by conjuring up an environment. The circle of light illuminates a domestic action and an act of looking that mutely and metonymically stand for the lovers' relationship.

Durrell's metonymic descriptions of place, marked by absence of verbs, by infinitive moods, and by semi-colons, simply juxtapose objects, landscape features, or actions within a single frame, and leave the reader to gather an overall impression. At the procession of St. Spiridion [1] (patron saint of Corfu), for instance, Durrell lists sixteen items for sale in the streets, ranging from "toothpicks" to "ikons." This list is followed by five parallel units of a taxonomic sentence describing participants and emphasizing the act of seeing [2] (grammatically elided in the central unit), as if people and objects were being pointed out by a guide. The syntagmatic structure, moving from phrase to phrase like a camera panning over a crowd, picks out figures in colorful costumes and presents a vivid cross-section of island cultural life. In Prospero's Cell, Durrell offers other examples of the metonymic method: "The sun shines brightly and the air sparkles with the Albanian snow-caps opposite; wild duck curve and scatte r outside the gulf, and sails [...] are all trimmed in the direction of the old fort" (31). In another instance, a cameo of swimming at night found in Reflections on a Marine Venus [RMV hereafter], Durrell expresses sensations metonymically, using participles with noun phrases and eliminating verbs:

Smell of bitter creeper and claying jasmine. The dark water warm and salty from a day of south wind. Occasional draughts of cool air and colder currents curling in snake-like from the rock-entrances of the harbour. Hanging there in the sea as if in a web [...] to look back and upwards through wet eyelashes at the star-flowered sky. (150)

The viewpoint of this prose-poem is immersed in water, like the swimmer's body: disjunct syntax and parallel structures suspend closure and convey a sensory complex of drifting, smelling, tasting, touching, looking. As Tuan says, "Deep engagement in almost any kind of mental or physical activity can produce [...] the 'flow' experience" (37). In verbless fragments and wavelike alliterative imagery, Durrell thus expresses the effortless sensation of floating in space and time.

Metonymic inventories discard verbs and accumulate substantives. Relating objects by spatial contiguity, one such catalogue in Prospero's Cell contains eleven disjunct units marked off by colons:

The sea's curious workmanship: bottle-green glass sucked smooth and porous by the waves: vitreous shells: wood stripped and cleaned, and bark swollen with salt: a bead: sea-charcoal, brittle and sticky: fronds of bladder-wart with their greasy marine skin and reptilian feel: rocks, gnawed and rubbed: sponges, heavy with tears: amber: bone: the sea. (34)