Iris Murdoch: The Sea, the Sea

[T]he light seemed a little hazy and chunky and sort of granulated and brownish… The gallery was empty…

I began to walk down the long room and as I did so the hammering of the workmen down below seemed to be becoming more rhythmic, clearer, faster, more insistent, like the sound of those wooden clappers, which the Japanese call hyoshigi , and which are used to create suspense or announce doom in the Japanese theatre, and which I often used to use myself in my own plays. I began to walk away down the gallery and as I went my hangover seemed to be turning into a sort of fainting fit. When I reached the door at the end I stopped and turned round. A man had come into the room by the other door at the far end and was standing looking at me through the curiously brownish murky air. I reached out and put one hand on the wall. Of course I recognized him at once. He was my cousin James. (pp. 167-68)

This description, covering three pages altogether, is gripping, intensely detailed, and credibly real. Yet there is also something portentous and deliberate about it (including as it does a subtle echo of the peasant working with metal in Anna Karenina’s nightmare), and the effect on Charles is as if the molecules of his immediate sensory world were being… rearranged. This suspicion allows us to interpret the second occurrence of the main symptoms. Before the appearance of the Fitches’ adoptive son Titus, Charles experiences a similar cluster of symptoms as he looks through the binoculars at the sea, awaiting what he is convinced will be the reemergence of his sea monster. The disturbances of sound and visual distortion experienced by Charles are plausibly in the world and not inside him. The hyoshigi sound returns. Then he sees through his glass the foot of the young man who has been brought to the sea by James and who is to play such a sad role in the climax of the book. Again, a third time, the accelerating thumping of the hyoshigi precedes a phenomenon we can link to James, his reappearance at Shruff End toward the very end of the book to check up on and say farewell to the cousin it is clear he loves. Since Charles is so fond of noise (“Noise has always been my friend,” he brags when he confronts le mari Ben on the natural stone bridge over Minn’s cauldron, p. 286), it may be that James chose this avenue of preparation for the three experiences of fear and premonition. What is clear is that James is somehow behind as well as mingling in these conjurings of presence.

Of the many other respects in which James and Charles echo one another, the jumble of their living arrangements is not the least important. (The clicking bead curtain from Shruff End is echoed by the tinkling chimes in James’s place.) James, too, seems to have had trouble settling in. His flat, kept preternaturally dark, is filled with a forbidding and apparently nonsensical mix of fetishes and treasures. Charles says he finds this mess of feathers and sticks “childish” (another example of his failure to gauge the spiritual depth of his cousin). The apartment is quite dusty, perhaps unused, as if it were a place James has been trying to leave or has seldom lived in. The aura of departure surrounds him. Charles calls it a “dumping ground.”

There are also a number of very exquisite have-worthy jade animals which I used to feel tempted to pocket, and plates and bowls of that heavenly Chinese grey sea-green colour wherein, beneath the deep glaze, when you have mopped the dust off with your handkerchief, you can descry lurking lotuses and chrysanthemums. (p. 170)

Things of beauty are being sifted over with the inattentions of time as James has moved deeper into white magic, which he admits is also demonic: “White magic is black magic.” Because he summons Titus to the sea, Titus drowns. On the other hand, because James has magical skill, he might have saved Titus had he been able to “hold on.” But here the demons of Charles’s rotten past crowd in and darken the results of James’s well-meaning magic. As the causality of his sins dawns on him, Charles has to take responsibility for Titus’s death, too: Because he stole Rosina from Peregrine and because Peregrine pushed Charles into Minn’s cauldron and James could not resist expending superhuman effort to rescue him, then had to rest for days, he was unable to prevent Titus from drowning or to summon the strength to administer the kiss of life at the right moment when Titus is found. This failure is so bitter that James almost disappears from under Charles’s gaze; he paces about near the tower among the rocks as if measuring something out. This is part of James’s agon, to suffer to the dregs the resemblance between the loss of Titus and the loss of his Sherpa during a Himalayan blizzard. The ego of the adept also leads to sin.

There is a teaching in Buddhism that suggests a more than personal goal for the Bodhisattva, or Buddha-in-training. It is that by delaying his departure from life he may acquire merit and transfer it to another otherwise less worthy person. (The Teshoo Lama does this for Kim at the end of the Kipling novel.) James has unnaturally protracted his own limbo period out of love for Charles, who interprets James’s beliefs somewhat too narrowly but with chastened rue as his cousin’s desire to tidy up an attachment that would hamper him. Partial like so many of Charles’s insights, it nevertheless recognizes in a scrambled way that he figured largely in James’s life and that James was a profoundly troubled as well as gifted soul. Dr. Tsang, who informs Charles of James’s death, is also from Dehra Dun, in the foothills of the Himalayan range separating northern India from Tibet, presumably also a Buddhist, and someone who recognizes in the willed manner of James’s peaceful death the act of an “enlightened one” who died “achieving all.” Undeniably part of Charles’s change is that he knows how much he has lost. With hindsight, we can see that the “one great light” toward whom Charles has been wending in the dark cavern has been his cousin. “I remembered that James was dead. Who is one’s first love? Who indeed.”

During the last third of the novel both James and Charles Arrowby enter the realm of their separate ordeals. We see James’s indirectly because Charles cannot see directly into it at the time. Illusions are methodically, if violently, stripped away. Each goes beyond himself. Each abjures magic, which Murdoch defines in her work on Plato as “the fantastic doctoring of the real for consumption by the private ego” (this could almost be a definition of novel-writing). Magic, ego, illusion -all of these terms, like the dust that falls on their possessions, come to rest with a difference on James, a more advanced being, than on Charles. But the torment of facing all the loss, for the one who remains, is no less Marsyas-like for that. And if Murdoch’s fictional sophist were to cry, “That’s poetic, just a metaphor!” perhaps her Socrates could again be summoned to remind the reader that “There are deep metaphors, perhaps there are bottomless metaphors.”

– Mary Kinzie

Tom Phillips’s painting is in the National Portrait Gallery, London-easier to get to than Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas , which is in a former archepiscopal palace in Kromeriz, Czechoslovakia. (However, the Titian can now be accessed on the Web at artchive.com, and the Phillips portrait appears as a stamp-sized icon on the back of many of the Penguin paper editions of Murdoch’s novels.) For help in thinking about the Titian painting I am indebted to Renaissance art historian Laura Giles of the Art Institute of Chicago, who provided me with the essential essay on this work by Sydney J. Freedberg from FMR, vol. 4 (1984). Robert Hughes’s quip appears in his essay “The Legacy of La Serenissima ” on the Royal Academy of Arts, London, show “The Genius of Venice 1500-1600” ( Time , 6 February 1984); this show brought to London The Flaying of Marsyas , although Murdoch had earlier written of the painting in both The Black Prince (1973) and A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970). Robert Graves’s two-volume work on Greek myths (Penguin, 1955) provided material about both Marsyas and Perseus when it did not appear in Ovid and Dante. Linguist Seymour Chatman’s suggestion about an “interest point of view” appears in his chapter on non-narrated stories in his Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Cornell University Press, 1978), reprinted in Essentials of the Theory of Fiction , ed. Hoffman and Murphy (Duke University Press, 1990). Quotations from Murdoch’s philosophical and critical prose and her Platonic dialogues are taken from the invaluable indexed compendium edited by Peter Conradi, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature , by Iris Murdoch (Penguin, 1998). Professor of philosophy Julius Sensat provided the source for the quotation from David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature , Book II (Of the passions), Part iii (Of the will and direct passions), Section 3 (Of the influencing motives of the will), and helpfully explained its context. Jorge Luis Borges’s remark about Tacitus appears in his essay “The Modesty of History,” Other Inquisitions 1937-1952 .