When Elsewhere is Home: Mapping Literature as Home in Lawrence Durrell’s “Cities, Plains and People”

Abstract

Written in Beirut in 1943, by an Anglo-Irishman man born in India and later posted in Egypt, the poem “Cities, Plains and People” raises the question of Lawrence Durrell’s problematic relationship to the outside world and to his own identity. Elsewhere functions as the point of departure for the poet’s investigation into his past as he tries to recapture the innocence of youth, a time-space which functions as the maieutic space of writing. Leaving behind the imaginary haven of an idealised childhood, he offers the reader an apparently linear and biographical poem whose deeper Odyssean structure forces the reader into the uneasy, off-centre yet rewarding position of the traveller constantly reassessing the old frontiers. We shall show how the syntagmatic outline of the poem’s retrospective is woven into the paradigmatic structure of the memorial, philosophical and aesthetic construct mapping home as a perpetual elsewhere and defining Lawrence Durrell’s personal landscape.

Keywords

• “Cities
• Plains and People”
• Laurence Durrell
• childhood
• elsewhere
• innocence