The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
How many patterns flicker over the tale unremarked by Charles—including the rafts of ghosts who press in (characters often mentioned but never met, primarily Clement and Wilfred Dunning); there are even “double” ghosts, unmet characters borrowed from Murdoch’s earlier novels, such as Will and Adelaide Boase from Bruno’s Dream, and from A Severed Head the “character” Honor Klein is mentioned in terms of an established dramatic role someone else does not get to play. There are also offstage figures who travel closer to England and the present, although only Charles’s erstwhile chauffeur Freddie Arkwright ever reaches the scene; the producer Fritzie Eitel (his name means “idle”) merely takes encroaching steps toward the principal players, like Gradus the assassin in Pale Fire, but never arrives before us. (Real memoir does not open in this way to the incomplete present.) In all I count twenty-two absent presences who, even if still alive, add to the ghostliness of the novel’s human complement. I know of no other novel that, while operating in the present, summons forth so many nonextant characters.
A more extended example of Charles writing past himself or speaking more than he knows covers longer segments of the book—as in the unfolding of the first seventy pages and their settings. Charles somewhat restively goes through what has become the daily routine of swimming in the dangerous sea, buying groceries in the village, stopping at the Black Lion pub for unsatisfactory gossip with the mocking locals, making his obsessively detailed meals (garnished with fanatical views of right and wrong cookery: “Dried apricots eaten with cake should be soaked and simmered first, eaten with cheese they should be aboriginally dry”), reading the letters he is beginning to receive in retirement, and, sometimes steered by these, putting together rambling oddments of the journal-memoir we are reading. It is a limbo period, ominous, expectant. There are loose ends, half-done projects, things that break, things that are simply let lie when they fall, like the table that tumbled into the crevasse when Charles tried to haul it out across the rocks to his martello tower. He thinks he might restore the tower, provide it with a winding stair and a high workroom (like Yeats’s at Thoor Ballylee?)—but he never does. This time has also been a stage of “portents” during which a large, ugly vase and the silvery oval mirror are smashed, and he has seen a luminous orb, like a face, high in the window of an inner room of Shruff End, the unspeakably sinister house he has rashly purchased to retire to. One of its more creepy furnishings is the sticky, yellow-and-black wooden bead curtain on an upper landing that ominously clicks in undetectable drafts. All these tell even the casual reader something the speaker may not yet realize about himself—that he cannot settle in. Arrowby is restless, half-finished, a sojourner arrested in the aging shell of himself. The place no less than the phrase “Shruff—” (with its etymology of metallic refuse or the kind of scrub wood used for kindling) piling up at an “—End” (where all the ladders start) becomes a speaking emblem of his ragged, foul, and haunted nature. (The dreams he has are part of the haunting.)
A further potent rendering of skewed truth occurs as Charles is gathering his resources (he thinks, to write about Clement); there is another significant page break. (These breaks typically announce a passage of time of fairly short duration—overnight, or at most a few days.) Then he recounts the following half-awake vision about a premonition he ascribes to the wrong “presence”:
Since I started writing this ‘book’ or whatever it is I have felt as if I were walking about in a dark cavern where there are various ‘lights’, made perhaps by shafts or apertures which reach the outside world. (What a gloomy image of my mind, but I do not mean it in a gloomy sense.) There is among those lights one great light towards which I have been half consciously wending my way. It may be a great ‘mouth’ opening to the daylight, or it may be a hole through which fires emerge from the center of the earth. And am I still unsure what it is, and must I now approach in order to find out? This image has come to me so suddenly, I am not sure what to make of it.
When I decided to write about myself of course the question arose: am I then to write about Hartley (p. 75)
One notes the canny device (is the narrative voice of Nicholas Mosley apropos here?) of choosing a strategic point in the utterance for turning a statement of uncertainty into a question: “And am I still unsure what it is, and must I now approach in order to find out?” It is by this device that Charles doubles the suspense of the paragraph, as if to say, I think I am uncertain what it is, but the closer I come to the thought, the more a suspicion with a shape I can identify detaches itself from these shadows. By increasing the suspense, Charles also performs the sleight of hand by which the previous withholding of information seems less culpable. He thinks (wrongly) that he knows what his great topic is.
There has been a subtext to which we were not privy until now—another person beyond Clement Makin whom the narrator believes to have been the “alpha and omega” of his life. This other person has been peripherally present in numerous veiled asides: “someone I had loved and lost”; “I never (except for once, when I was young) considered marriage”; Lizzie was “the only woman (with one exception) who never lied to me”; while cousin James in the war was in India, at Dehra Dun, “I had my own problems, notably first love and its after-effects”; Charles reserves the right to use the phrase “in love” “to describe the one single occasion when I loved a woman absolutely. (Not dear Clement of course.)” Even scattered across seventy pages of text and often occurring when more rambunctious revelations are afoot, these hints reveal the narrator’s reliance upon a still-operative daydream of the past. Gradually Murdoch, through Charles, brings this sweet shadow into the light, where she is given a name: Arrowby’s childhood sweetheart was Mary Hartley Smith, in comparison to whom he writes that “all the rest, even Clement, have been shadows.”
Charles’s decision to think about Hartley, even to place her name on the page, comes about as the subliminal result of his seeing now and then in the village south of him an old woman, who resembles his first love. Exploring the indefinite effect of these “glimpses” leads him to meditate on the imagery of the cave. Hartley is still, for him, a true light-source, whereas his first mistress Clement was only a fire-edged shadow. The terms recall Plato’s in his condemnation of false art (the shadow thrown by the fire of mediocre art), as contrasted with true art (the light of the sun). Murdoch’s long meditation on Plato and on art uses the two terms of this image. However, we would not need the philosophical text to validate the symbolism of Charles Arrowby’s meditation of wandering and discovery in the dark limbo of suspended and omen-filled time he seems to have entered with his removal to the northwest coast of England. He is moving about in his own dark. Then lo! the old woman in the village turns out to be Hartley, and Charles hurls himself into a maelstrom of hilarious conniving to “get her back.” Not once during the two hundred pages of his pursuit and not very edifying capture of Hartley does he reflect on the pertinence of his many earlier cautions about the difficulty of seeing into a family from the outside: “It may be that my uncle and aunt thought that my upbringing was too strict. Outsiders who see rules and not the love that runs through them are often too ready to label other people as ‘prisoners’ ” (pp. 59-60). But Charles reflexively interprets Hartley’s marriage as her prison. Not only this; in stealing her away to Shruff End he literally imprisons her. His defense is that “in the teeth of all the evidence, we belonged to each other.” In the teeth of all the evidence—Charles’s proud banner. As Borges wrote about the great Roman historian, “Tacitus did not perceive the Crucifixion—although his book recorded it.”
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
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.
Even to enact the role of Perseus, hero and dragon-slayer, entails a connection to a flaw. In the myths, Perseus is the vanquisher of the Gorgon, but the act of killing feeds a continuing destruction of life—as is true of most violent acts. He is a model (of sorts) for the reckless and delusional Charles in the sense that he meets challenges such as the treachery of Andromeda’s parents and their court by pulling from the enchanted wallet the head of Medusa and turning whole palaces into wastes of petrified folk. This is one symbolic origin for the quantities of misshapen yellow boulders that ring the uncanny north-coastal home Arrowby has chosen for his retirement. The boulders suggest a display of something formerly animate, again like the mythic land of the Hyperboreans in which Perseus finds the Gorgons asleep (as Robert Graves has put it) “among rain-worn shapes of men and wild beasts.”