Eye trouble: Lawrence Durrell's Prospero's Cell and the problem of sight

In Prospero's Cell (1945), an account of his stay on the Greek island of Corfu, the British writer Lawrence Durrell presents a heavily fragmented way of seeing the island environment. His descriptions of place are characterised by visual images that are fractured or reflected, as well as scenes of darkness in which the non-visual senses take precedence. By closely analysing representations of both sight and sightlessness in the text, this article reveals how Durrell's first travel book problematises vision as a secure way of perceiving and knowing the foreign. Prospero's Cell provides valuable insights into how the role of vision was reconfigured in twentieth-century travel writing, a genre often claimed to especially privilege the eyes. This reconfiguration is linked to Durrell's practice of sea bathing and caving in Corfu, as well as to historical critiques of touristic sightseeing and modernist investigations of the limits of embodied perception.