"Despair, Repentance, and Love": Durrell's Remedial Cycle

Abstract

<p>The Relativity Proposition has displaced the concept ot objective truth in favour of a truth that is relative to the viewer, his time, and his place. Durrell ascribes a significance previously reserved for scientific truth to poetic or psychological truth - a pattern or order perceived in human experience. The pattern Durrell perceives is cyclical, an endless repetition of annihilation, precipitated by the defective human heart, and rebirth. The experience of destruction creates the possibility tor spiritual growth. As an individual becomes aware of his participation in what is in fact a universally experienced cycle, he may apprehend what Durrell calls the heraldic universe, the symbolic representation of archetypal human behaviour. Knowledge of the heraldic universe, the embodiment of human potential, frees the individual from the cycle by releasing him from the confines of his own imagination.</p>