Monsieur (novel)
First UK edition
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| Author | Lawrence Durrell |
|---|---|
| Country | Great Britain |
| Language | English |
| Series | The Avignon Quintet |
| Publisher |
Faber & Faber (UK) Viking (US) |
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Publication date
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1974 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 296 p. (Faber edition) |
| ISBN | (paperback edition) |
| OCLC | 1109339 |
| 823/.9/12 | |
| LC Class | PZ3.D9377 Ml PR6007.U76 |
| Followed by | Livia |
Monsieur, or The Prince of Darkness (1974), is the first volume in Lawrence Durrell's The Avignon Quintet. Published from 1974 to 1985, this sequence of five interrelated novels explore the lives of a group of Europeans prior to, during, and after World War II. Durrell uses many of the experimental techniques of metafiction that he had integrated into his Alexandria Quartet, published 1957 to 1960. He described the later quintet as a quincunx.
Monsieur is based on a metafictional narrative in five major sections, each with a competing narrator. The novel does not resolve which narrative is 'real' and which are 'fiction.' The novel was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1974.
The novel draws extensively on Gnosticism, and this system of belief recurs as a plot element throughout the Quintet. Durrell had an interest in Gnosticism from the early 1940s and had studied Gnostic texts. According to critics James Gifford and Stephen Osadetz, for Monsieur, Durrell drew from Serge Hutin's Les Gnostiques, as he had marked numerous passages in his copy, as well as contemporary newspaper reports he held of a Slovenian suicide cult. (These materials are held at the Bibliotheque Lawrence Durrell, Université Paris X, Nanterre.)
Gifford and Osadetz say that "most critics" suggested that the author had based his discussion on Jacques Lacarrière's The Gnostics. He had known the essayist and critic since 1971, and wrote the "Foreword" to the 1974 English translation of his book. In Monsieur, "Durrell's Gnostics enact their refusal of the cursed world, flawed in every way, through suicide via the active acceptance of death." But Lacarrière had written that "suicide is the absolute antithesis of the Gnostic attitude." The Gnostic suicide plot is an element that Durrell uses in his four late novels of the Avignon Quintet.
Durrell's 1974 novel was published prior to the publication in English of the Nag Hammadi Library, (1978). This was greeted with great interest by the many interested in these unique materials. The annotated edition has translations of an extensive stash of ancient documents from the period of early Christianity when Gnosticism was a powerful movement. The documents were discovered in the 1940s and had been tightly controlled by a group of scholars. The English edition of the Nag Hammadi papers refers to Durrell in its introduction, but largely in relation to his earlier The Alexandria Quartet (1957 to 1960).
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