Iris Murdoch - The Sea, the Sea

To be sure, Charles is a frail vessel, given to fantasy, greed, and unscrupulous manipulation. And while these adjectives suggest a personality that has hardened , we can also see him as unformed, arrested midway. This arresting of development has brought with it all the supersimplified polarities that attend on exaggerated images of ourselves. (There was a “rival” figure, and a “true” mother of more joyous good cheer than his own, a sad, sweet, ineffectual father, and a radiant, innocent sweetheart.) Binding all these extremes together is a series of extreme responses, inextricably woven into each other, envy, shame, and rancor: envy, of his wealthy uncle Abel’s family, including the joyous Aunt Estelle and cousin James; shame at the disloyalty this entailed toward his poor and ordinary parents; and rancor toward the larger world that made his small family seem pinched and sad. His career allowed him to “shout back at the world” because he discovered that theater was essentially “an attack on mankind carried on by magic” (p. 33, my emphasis).

A further device for obtaining our consent to such a deluded being is what Seymour Chatman calls “interest point of view,” a term for the gradual imbedding in a work of fiction of the vantage established by one character’s desires; we might also call it the libidinal interest. It is not surprising that a work of fiction would cohere around the protagonist’s desires; what is unusual is an author’s exhaustive, deliberate, and artful manipulation of this perspective until we empathically attribute desire and response in cases where the narrative cannot or does not. Murdoch, with her fascination for first-person narrators and for exclusionary characters in other novels-demons of possessiveness like Hilary Burde and Austin Gibson Grey and George McCaffrey who, like Charles Arrowby, are driven by jealousy-takes interest point of view to profound extremes; it is part of her ingeniously thorough placement of the character within both past time and the novel’s lived time. It works like a buried clue. Even when the novelistic actor may not be focused on a moment or even when his consciousness is closed to us (as often occurs here in letters addressed to the protagonist and in passages of reported dialogue), the reader assumes his angle of vision. Invisible to the narrative locally, the interest point of view derives from a work’s overarching perspective as the main character’s history guides us to make associations and to take sides, defending the character’s “interests” while he is away. We understand that Charles relishes the discomfort he causes one of his former troupe’s character actors, the homosexual Gilbert Opian (who is also aging), when he lands on certain ill-chosen words of Opian’s, who is trying to explain the new non-sexual menage he has formed with Lizzie Scherer:

“It’s about Lizzie and me. Please, Charles, take it seriously and don’t look like that or I shall cry! Something has really happened between us, I don’t mean like that sort of thing, but like real love like, God, in this awful world one doesn’t often have such divine luck, sex is the trouble of course, if people could only search for each other as souls-”

“Souls?”

“Like just see people and love them quietly and tenderly and seek for happiness together, well I suppose that’s sex too but it’s sort of cosmic sex and not just to do with organs-”

“Organs?”

“Lizzie and I are really connected, we’re close… we’ve stopped wandering, we’ve come home… Now everything’s different, we’ve talked all our lives over together, we’ve talked it all out, we’ve sort of repossessed the past together and redeemed it-”

“How perfectly loathsome.”

“I mean we did it reverently, especially about you-”

“You discussed me ?”

“Yes, how could we not, Charles, you’re not invisible-oh, please don’t be cross, you know how I’ve always felt about you, you know how we both feel about you-”

“You want me to join the family.”

“Exactly!” (p. 90)

Poor Gilbert is so nervous he blunders into a younger generation’s babble-style (all those likes ), not to mention his clumsy provisos about sex. Charles’s derision of this honest nonsense is clear, and although we have no proof of his “thought,” pleasure is involved here, too, particularly when Gilbert furnishes the dangerous information that he and Lizzie had talked Charles over between themselves. Charles as the “king of shadows” who has figured so largely even for Gilbert (toward whom he feels precious little) likes nothing better than the chance to display his fury at being discussed. (Charles suffers an aversion-common to manipulators-to the sharing of confidences among the conquered ones. In a curious way, it’s as if he were jealous of the isolation he expects they will continue in.) He shows the most unsavory side of his jealousy by threatening poor Gilbert with the loss of Lizzie: “I’m beginning to feel it may even be my duty to bust up your rotten arrangement.” For a considerable time in the novel, Gilbert and Lizzie are then separated from each other, each attached miserably to Charles.

In novels of well-managed interest point of view such as this one, the protagonist’s patterns of desire, once established, remain in operation, like demonic presences. Like demons also, the memories and past actions of the middling individual proliferate with time. The technique thus mirrors on the stylistic level what burgeons uncontrollably in the realm Murdoch is most preoccupied with as thinker and artist, the moral realm. Like the magical pot of gruel overflowing in the fairy tale, automatic impulses, unmonitored by the soul, continue to fill up the world; one cannot eat them, but they choke one nevertheless. Not only that; Charles creates demons for others. (One person says Arrowby has been a “devil” in her mind for years; elsewhere, suspicions about Charles have been “like demons” poisoning a marriage.) The longer one lives, the clearer the path of causality streaming from one’s limitations and unchecked impulses as they run over, unleashing mischief. They generate form upon form-indeed, these acts and desires are all cold forms, all posturing grotesques that in time crowd the world with dragons the protagonist must continue to slay.

This is one meaning of the other Titian painting relevant to The Sea, the Sea , the eerie portrayal of Perseus about to rescue Andromeda from the water beast. When he can bring himself to, Charles Arrowby describes his terrible apparition rising up out of the sea, closely resembling the sea monster in the Titian painting, coiling itself high, opening wide its wet pink maw. It presents itself in profound detail-for example, Charles can see daylight at intervals under the arched body. Arrowby understands later on that the monster is a deep, unconscious projection of his voracious jealousy. At first, however, he worries that it is an aftereffect of the LSD he took in the 1960s. (Another sense in which demons proliferate in age is that the body may not recover from the habits of the past.) But of course, once he has his sights set on his suddenly appeared childhood sweetheart Mary Hartley Smith (now Mrs. Ben Fitch), Charles connects the sea monster he thinks he saw from the rocks near Shruff End to the one in Titian’s painting menacing Andromeda. It must have been a premonition of Hartley’s husband, Ben Fitch, from whom he must rescue her. (In his preoccupied state, Charles supposes the future must have cast this shadow.) Charles thinks of Perseus in the sky about to descend on the sea worm as himself , about to destroy the unworthy husband of the woman he loves, whose naked body (the largest thing in the painting) gleams white as it almost floats against the variegated rocks, taking up the entire left half of the painting. The truth is that he is both Perseus and the dragon that embodies his demon of jealousy.