Tag: Iris Murdoch

Passion’s slave: #ReadingTheTheatre

On By CalmgroveIn literary fiction23 Comments
Melancolia
‘Melencolia I’ by Albrecht Dürer (1514).

The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch.
Penguin Books, 1975 (1973).

… blest are those
Whose blood and judgement are so well comeddled,
That they are not a pipe for fortune’s finger
To sound what stop she please. Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
In my heart’s core.
— ‘Hamlet’ Act 3 Scene 2, 72-78).

When you’re faced with a narrative nested within forewords and postscripts from multiple authors you may start wondering who best to believe, or whether they’re all unreliable; but when the editor and then the memoirist batter you from the start with their verbosity you may then question whether you’ll have the stamina to stay the course.

But then you will remember that this is Iris Murdoch, who knows exactly what she’s doing, and that it takes great skill and discipline to write consistently dubious prose while keeping a tight rein on characterisation, pace and mood.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if, as a classicist and philosopher, she didn’t bring her disciplines to bear on A Black Prince: with its overt citations of and covert allusions to Hamlet I’m expecting an underlay of the four medieval ‘humours’ that categorised human personalities: blood, phlegm, choler or yellow bile, and so-called black bile, the source of the Prince of Denmark’s melancholia.

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Enmeshmemt: #1961Club

On By CalmgroveIn literary fiction20 Comments
Etruscan sculpture from Pyrgi, ca 350 BC, Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, Rome.

A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch.
Penguin, 1963 (1961).

‘I am a severed head such as primitive tribes and old alchemists used to use, anointing it with oil and putting a morsel of gold upon its tongue to make it utter prophecies.

And who knows but that long acquaintance with a severed head might not lead to strange knowledge.’

In this winter’s tale an economist, sculptor, psychoanalyst, anthropologist and others are discovered all enmeshed in a social network centred on a wine merchant, one who sees himself as a kind of Hephæstus, the cuckold god who ensnared his wife Aphrodite and her lover Ares in a net.

As the various individuals stumble around in a fog of intrigue, one paralleled by a twilight London smog and the perpetual fug of cigarette smoke – this is the early sixties after all – they unwittingly fit into mythic templates, acting out a tragicomedy that would grace an operatic stage.

The mini-epic is narrated by befuddled wine merchant Martin Lynch-Gibbon as he attempts to make sense of situations while suffering from drunken stupors and self-pity, seasoned by a good dose of hypocrisy. Pitiless philosopher that she is, Murdoch skewers every wriggling specimen for us to view under her microscope, getting us to wonder how each will fit into her taxonomy.

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