Islomania and Lawrence Durrell's "idea" of the Mediterranean landscape

Résumé En

In Caesar’s Vast Ghost, Lawrence Durrell’s collection of essays published in 1990, Provence is said to be “more an idea than a place” (31-32), which echoes what he wrote about Patmos in Reflections on a Marine Venus: “[it] was more an idea than a place, more a symbol than an island” (66). This paper intends to analyse the representation of the Mediterranean as a pre-conceived, mental construct, the space-time of history and myth, and the locus of memory and imagination, which precedes and underlays the representation of the real Mediterranean world. The cultural construct also is the vision of a poet, arising from a dream, or as he says about Provence, a “poetic figment” (CVG 15). The Mediterranean is both a mythopoietic land and sea, associated with the myths it has given birth to, and the author’s own creation, a re-presentation of place, i.e. a lost world made present and reconfigured. To penetrate into the Mediterranean hinterland, which is the writer’s inner land, the reader must be initiated into its mysteries.