This is a transcription of an interview with Lawrence Durrell conducted by Lyn Goldman. The interview took place at Pennsylvania State University in 1986, during On Miracle Ground IV, the conference of the International Lawrence Durrell Society.

Lawrence Durrell's biography and oeuvre form a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. He tried his hand at virtually every genre. Despite its obvious syncretism in form and ideas it is also astonishingly coherent. This is mainly because there is no fundamental difference between fact and fiction, life and reality, and the author and the text in 'Durrell.' His life, his political and travel writings, his poetry, drama and his novels form a textual (or as Durrell would say, 'heraldic') universe. This is specifically thematised in his last writings and especially in The Avignon Quintet. This essay thus follows the author's invitation and treats fiction and biography as part of the same 'textuality.' It critically evaluates the effects of Durrell's engagement with Taoism on life and fiction and develops some similarities and differences between Durrell's 'postcolonial' project and the critiques of Western metaphysics found in Derridean deconstruction and Levinasian ethics. It concludes, however, by arguing, against Durrell, that the kind of encounter between East and West that Durrell tried to perform fails because it does not engage critically with the dynamic of (ethical, cultural, linguistic, etcetera) alterity that necessarily inhabits the structure of such an 'encounter.'

Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria is a maze of shuffling relationships, loyalties, and allegiances where all participants struggle to define themselves through their love and work. Characters' beliefs, personalities, and even identities are constantly refined and reevaluated in the shifting maze of Durrell's city; lovers' motivations are revealed to be calculated, healers serve to inflict pain, and the dead find themselves suddenly vital with the turn of a page. The question, then, is how to search for the meaning of a literary work when the work defines that meaning as relative to the observer. As critical readers, where do we look to discover the truth of Durrell's masterwork when the text itself tells us that truth, in both our creative and romantic lives, is no longer absolute? Where would Durrell have us look to uncover the meaning of his Quartet? This paper argues that the work is a mirror for the reader and the critic, much as the lovers in the Quartet are mirrors for each other, providing meaning only in the reflection.

Durrell often suggested that the Gnostic element in The Alexandria Quartet is very strong, though scholarship has not borne this out. I contend Gnostic elements are embedded in the structure of its narrative pragmatics. True to the esoteric nature of Gnosticism, Durrell chose to lay the traces of a Gnostic reading not so much in the substance (themes, incidents, words), but in the weft so-to-speak of, his text: in the prominent, yet not directly registered, conditions of his complex authorial apparatus.

Previous scholarship on source materials for Lawrence Durrell's Gnostic themes in Monsieur are insufficient in light of his marginalia in Serge Hutin's Les Gnostique and his notebooks for the novel. We contend that archival evidence from the Bibliothèque Lawrence Durrell in Nanterre, France, necessitates a reevaluation of previous work in order to account for the combination of Hutin's approach to Gnosticism and newspaper clippings in the notebook, which recast the nature of the Gnostic suicide cult that provides the impetus for the plot of the novel.