Only the City Is Real: Lawrence Durrell's Journey to Alexandria (Critical Essay‪)‬

In both his travel books and his novels, Lawrence Durrell examines the nature of reality, not least in Prospero's Cell-about Corfu but written in Alexandria during the Second World War. Already in 1938, as his notebooks show, Durrell believed that culturally, intellectually, and spiritually we live as though within a womb, comfortable in out assumptions and mistaking our experience for reality. But the womb becomes a tomb for those who do not escape. In The Alexandria Quartet, embarked upon after he completed Prospero's Cell, it is only by escaping from the falseness of the so-called real, from the false city inhabited by false selves, that one can move towards the ultimate reality and, therefore, to the truth. **********