The Saint and Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch. Peter Conradi J.

the reader feels he has made a small move in the direction of perceiving the real. Before, she had belonged to that series of ‘Giulias and Gemmas and Vittorias and Carlottas [which] moved and merged dream-like in my mind’ (18). Now she has begun to be an individual and mysterious in her own right. Yet Edmund’s lazy conflation of Italian girls which preceded this separation was affected by his sense of absolute domination by his recently dead mother Lydia. The Oedipus conflict is a subject of this as of so many other novels. Edmund has the odd sense that he has throughout his childhood had ‘as it were, two mothers, my mother, and the Italian girl’ (18). He conflates in his mind not merely the family servants but all those women who act as mothersurrogates to him, a point underlined by the heading to Chapter 13: ‘Edmund runs to Mother’. His mother is dead. It is from the Italian girl he seeks maternal comfort. And when at the end he seeks, possibly with a Platonic ring once more, to ‘live in the sun, to live in the open’ (171), it is with this vector, as it were, of his profound Oedipal guilt that he is to attempt belatedly to grow up. His growth, in other words, is not some impossible ‘liberation’ into the real, but a matter of his increasing his chances of learning to perceive and love ‘original men’ in exactly that area of his mind where the project is most vexed. It is an ambiguous ending and a morally realistic one.

      The point is made with a beautiful clarity by Bradley in The Black Prince when explicating Hamlet to Julian: ‘The unconscious delights in identifying people with each other. It has only a few characters to play with’ (95). Bradley’s remark is double-edged, referring to The Black Prince as well as to the Ernest Jones reading of Hamlet. Both are ‘family romances’. The unenlightened psyche, or unenlightened level within the psyche, coerces others because it sees them playing roles within an Oedipal romance whose terms were laid down in childhood. The effort to perceive others accurately depends on ‘seeing’ them aright where it is impossible to separate out the literal and metaphorical constituents of the word ‘sight’. All Murdoch’s narrators suffer into a state which may conceivably augur slightly better for their chances of deepening their sense of the otherness and separateness of other people.

      This makes for a different use of myth from that of the great Moderns. In a sense it is opposed. Modernism, being marked by hostility and disdain for ordinary consciousness and for history, conceives the artist as an aristocrat doomed to exile. It ‘refuses to conceive of perfection in human terms’ (sbr) and uses myth and symbol to redeem the horrors of contingency. Eliot’s work, for example, is marked by hatred of the present; Joyce in Ulysses presents his Homeric correspondences as a comically mock-epic, mockheroic means of exalting and demeaning his characters simultaneously. Woolf holds out a promise that the flux can be redeemed through symbol, art and love. Murdoch is closer to Woolf than to Eliot, but argues for, and in the later work enacts, a greater patience with the flux in which we are to be immersed. The myth for her is Freudian, and the flux is there to contest it and help emancipate us from its power. (Of course symbols such as the bell and unicorn are the writer’s as much as her characters’; in the next chapter I shall suggest how in being half-achieved they become the property of the characters too.)

      Myth belongs to the characters, and this can be shown in the repeating plots of The Sea, The Sea and A Word Child. Both concern pasts which Gothically repeat themselves, to which the main characters are mechanically enslaved, and deserve to be seen, like all Murdoch’s plots, not simply as cases of Freudian repetition-compulsion, but as studies in Buddhist karma – called by James in The Sea, The Sea ‘spiritual causality’ – and the doctrine that we pay for all we do, say and think, but not necessarily at once. We pay later, and even if we have already decided to ‘reform’. Hilary Burde in A Word Child tries to redeem that moment twenty years before when his adultery with his friend Gunnar’s wife Anne led to her death. This attempted redemption results in his falling in love with Gunnar’s lovely, very silly second wife Kitty, and in her inadvertent death too. One paradox the book shows us is that Hilary’s crime in the interim was not that he exonerated himself but rather that he puritanically made himself, like Lucifer, totally responsible. In claiming Anne’s death so wholly for himself he dramatised his predicament, lost his self-respect, and refused change – refused any healing surrender to history.