A Comedy of Worldly Salvation (original) (raw)
January 12, 1986
A Comedy of Worldly Salvation
By HAROLD BLOOM
THE GOOD APPRENTICE By Iris Murdoch.
t the end of her first book, an enduring study of Jean-Paul Sartre published in 1953, Iris Murdoch prophetically lamented that Sartre's ''inability to write a great novel is a tragic symptom of a situation which afflicts us all.'' Her own inability has extended now through 22 novels, of which the best seem to me ''Bruno's Dream'' (1969), ''The Black Prince'' (1973), ''A Word Child'' (1975) and her latest, ''The Good Apprentice.'' So fecund and exuberant is Miss Murdoch's talent that many more novels may be expected from her. If ''The Good Apprentice'' marks the start of her strongest phase, and it may, then a great novel could yet come, rather surprisingly in the incongruous form of the 19th-century realistic novel. The age of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Pynchon, post-Joycean and post-Faulknerian, is set aside by Miss Murdoch's novelistic procedures, almost as though she thus chose to assert her own direct continuity with the major 19th-century Russian and British masters of fiction.
Miss Murdoch's conventional style and traditional narrative devices are not, in my experience of reading her, the principal flaws in her work. Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, she favors a realism that can be more phantasmagoric than naturalistic, but she tends not to be able to sustain this mixed mode, whereas he can. Consistency of stance is one of Miss Murdoch's problems. She is both fantasist and realist, each on principle, but her abrupt modulations between the two visions sometimes seem less than fully controlled. Her novels rush by us, each a successful entertainment but none perhaps fully distinct from the others in our memories.
Yet her fictions fuse into a social cosmos, one that is reasonably recognizable as contemporary British upper-middle-class. Of all her talents, the gift of plotting is the most formidable, including a near-Shakespearean faculty for intricate double plots. Again, her strength seems sometimes uncontrolled, and even the most respon-sible reader can feel harried and at last indifferent as labyrinthine developments are worked through. Yet that is how Miss Murdoch tends to manifest her considerable exuberance as a writer, rather than in the creation of endless diversity in her characters, which nevertheless (and rather sadly) seems to constitute her largest ambition. She does not excel at fresh invention of personalities. We learn to expect certain basic types to repeat themselves in her novels. Fierce, very young women, compulsive and cunning, violent in their pursuit of much older men, are omnipresent. Their quarry, those older men, are narcissistic charmers but weak, self-indulgent, hesitant skeptics, fearful of reality yet, in defiance of their fears, frequently brash in engaging it. Then there are the power figures whom Miss Murdoch once called ''alien gods.'' These are frequently male Middle European Jewish charismatics, who may perhaps have some allegorical or ironic link to the Nobel laureate novelist and philosopher Elias Canetti, a friend of Miss Murdoch in her youth. Unfulfilled older women abound also; they are marked by resentment, anxieties about identity and a tendency to fall in love drastically, absurdly and abruptly.
Miss Murdoch's particular mastery is in representing the maelstrom of falling in love, which is the characteristic activity of nearly all her men and women, who somehow have time for busy professional careers in London while obsessively suffering convulsive yet enlivening love relationships. Somewhere in one of her early novels, Miss Murdoch cannily observes that falling out of love is one of the great human experiences, a kind of rebirth in which we see the world with freshly awakened eyes. Though an academic philosopher earlier in her career, Miss Murdoch's actual philosophical achievement is located where she clearly wishes it to be: in her novels, which demonstrate her to be a major student of Eros, not of the stature of Freud or Proust but still an original and endlessly provocative theorist of the tragicomedy of sexual love, with its peculiar hell of jealousy and self-hatred. Her nearest American equivalent in this dark area is Saul Bellow, a novelist whom otherwise she does not much resemble.
Indeed, she resembles no other contemporary novelist, in part because she is essentially a religious fabulist, of an original and unorthodox sort, and therefore very unlike Graham Greene or John Updike or Walker Percy or Cynthia Ozick, whose varied religious outlooks are located in more definite spiritual traditions. Miss Murdoch thinks for herself theologically as well as philosophically, and her conceptual originality is difficult for readers to apprehend, particularly when it is veiled by her conventional forms of storytelling and her rather mixed success in the representation of original characters. There is a perpetual incongruity between Miss Murdoch's formulaic procedures and her spiritual insights, an incongruity that continues in ''The Good Apprentice.''
The good apprentice is 20-year-old Edward Baltram, a university student who begins the novel by slyly feeding a drug-laden sandwich to his best friend and fellow student, Mark Wilsden. While Edward goes off to visit a girl in the neighborhood, Mark wakes up and falls or jumps out of the window to his death. Edward's grief and guilt dominate the book, which is his quest for a secular absolution at the hands of his actual father, Jesse Baltram, an insane vitalist and reclusive painter who begat Edward upon one of his models and has not seen him apart from a childhood meeting or two. Miss Murdoch's ironic opening sentence is the novel's spiritual signature: ''I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son.''
In a narrative that chronicles Edward's journey from hell to purgatory, we might expect that he would encounter at least one figure who unequivocally embodies love, wisdom or at least power. But that underestimates Miss Murdoch's authentic spiritual originality, which has now matured to the point that all such figures are negated. Though Edward regards himself as a dead soul, he is nevertheless the book's only legitimate representative of the good, in however apprentice a guise. His elders all fail him and themselves are exposed as souls deader than he is. Jesse Baltram, his mad father, is a magician, but a perpetually dying one until his mysterious death by water. Mother May, Jesse's wife, seems at first as charming and innocent as her daughters, Bettina and Ilona, Edward's half sisters, and the long middle section of the book set at Seegard, Jesse's estate, begins as the most beautiful of all Miss Murdoch's pastoral idylls. But May is revealed to be scheming, resentful and jealous, Bettina scarcely less so, and the ineffable Ilona is transmogrified into a Soho stripper. The book's wisdom figure, Thomas McCasker-ville, Edward's uncle by marriage, is at once a subtle Scottish-Jewish psychoanalyst, uttering a parodistic version of R. D. Laing's madness-as-spiritual-journey ideology, and also a bemused cuckold, preaching about the reality principle of death while understanding very little of life as it touches him most closely.
With her alien gods and charismatics so discredited, Miss Murdoch boldly steps into their place herself, editorializing directly about her characters' psychological and spiritual miseries. Here she analyzes the meditative stance of Stuart, Edward's stepbrother and foil, who also has rejected life in favor of a death that might precede a more abundant life:
''A disinterested observer might have wondered why Stuart so ardently rejected God, since he did not simply sit and meditate, he also knelt down, sometimes even prostrated himself. Once again, Stuart, recognising no problem, instinctively resolved apparent contradictions. Meditation was refuge, quietness, purification, replenishing, return to whiteness. Prayer was struggle, reflection, self-examination, it was more particular, involving concern about other people and naming of names. Harry [ Stuart's father and Edward's stepfather ] had said that Stuart wanted to be like Job, always guilty before God, an exalted form of sadomasochism. Stuart's rejection of God was, in effect, his rejection of that 'old story,' to use Ursula's words, as alien to his being. His mind refused it, spewed it out, not as a dangerous temptation, but as alien tissue. Of course he wanted to be 'good'; and so he wanted to avoid guilt and remorse, but those states did not interest him. Towards his sins and failures he felt cold, no warmth was generated there. . . . He knew there was no supernatural being and did not design to try to attach the concept in any way to his absolutes. If something, 'good' or something, was his 'master,' it was no personal or reciprocal relation. His language was thus indeed odd as when he sometimes said 'forgive me,' or 'help me,' or when he commended others, Edward for instance, to the possibility of being helped. Stuart understood the phrase 'love is only of God'; his love went out into the cosmos as a lonely signal, but also miraculously could return to earth.''
Admirers of Miss Murdoch are fond of defending such authorial interpolations by citing their prevalence in the 19th-century novel. It is certainly true that George Eliot is never more impressive than in such interventions, and Miss Murdoch is recognizably in Eliot's explicitly moral tradition. Unfortunately, what worked sublimely for Eliot cannot work so well for Miss Murdoch, despite her engaging refusal to be self-conscious about her belatedness. As speculation, this passage is impressive, but as fiction it makes us wonder why Miss Murdoch tells us what we expect her to show us. Her gifts for dramatic action are considerable, but her own narrative voice lacks George Eliot's authority, being too qualified and fussy when a rugged simplicity is required. She is no less acute a moral analyst than Eliot, but she does not persuade us that her judgments are a necessary part of the story she has made for us. Y ET I do not wish to slight her conceptual strength as a religious writer, which is her particular excellence, since she has taught herself how subtly story and magic, narrative art and the questing spirit, can fuse in a novel, even if the fusion is incomplete so far in her work. Starting as an existentialist writer in ''Under the Net'' in 1954, she has evolved into that curious oxymoron, a Platonist novelist, perpetually in pursuit of the Good, a quest that she herself parodies in the hilarious and painful couplings of her romantic questers. Her obsessive symbol for this sadomasochistic pattern is the myth of Apollo and Marsyas, which I recall as being exploited in ''The Black Prince'' and several other novels and which is repeated in ''The Good Apprentice.'' Marsyas the flutist, having challenged Apollo to a music contest, loses and suffers the penalty of being flayed alive. Miss Murdoch reads the myth so that the agony of Marsyas is our agony now in seeking to know God in an age when God is dead. So in ''The Good Apprentice'':
''Thomas recalled Edward's weird exalted stare, his uncanny smile. A demon who had nothing to do with the well-being of the ordinary 'real' Edward had for a moment looked out. How ambiguous such conditions were. The entranced face of the tortured Marsyas, as Apollo kneels lovingly to tear his skin off, prefigures the death and resurrection of the soul.''
Our shudder here is not shared by Miss Murdoch, whose version of a post-Christian religion is marked by violence and deathliness. Whatever Socrates meant by saying we should study dying, Miss Murdoch harshly means that death is the truth, since it destroys every image and every story. Her savage Platonism in the novels is consistent with her stance in ''The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists'' (1977): ''Plato feared the consolations of art. He did not offer a consoling theology. His psychological realism depicted God as subjecting mankind to a judgment as relentless as that of the old Zeus, although more just. A finely meshed moral causality determines the fate of the soul. That the movement of the saving of Eros is toward an impersonal pictureless void is one of the paradoxes of a complete religion. To present the idea of God at all, even as myth, is a consolation, since it is impossible to defend this image against the prettifying attentions of art. Art will mediate and adorn, and develop magical structures to conceal the absence of God or his distance. We live now amid the collapse of many such structures, and as religion and metaphysics in the West withdraw from the embraces of art, we are it might seem being forced to become mystics through the lack of any imagery which could satisfy the mind. Sophistry and magic break down at intervals, but they never go away and there is no end to their collusion with art and to the consolations which, perhaps fortunately for the human race, they can provide; and art, like writing and like Eros, goes on existing for better and for worse.'' M ISS MURDOCH exploits magic while endlessly disowning it. ''The Good Apprentice'' seems to me an advance upon all of Miss Murdoch's previous novels, even ''The Black Prince,'' because the ferocious moralist finally has allowed herself a wholly sympathetic protagonist in the self-purging Edward. His progress out of an inner hell has no false consolations or illusory images haunting it. In some sense, Edward's achievement and torment is wholly Freudian in its spirit, resembling as it does the later Freud of ''Beyond the Pleasure Principle'' through ''Civilization and Its Discontents.'' Freud's only spirituality was his worship of reality testing, or the reality principle, which was his way of naming the conditions imposed upon us by mortality. Miss Murdoch's only consistent spirituality is grimly parallel to Freud's, since her novels insist that religious consciousness, in our postreligious era, must begin with the conviction that only death centers life, that death is the only valid representation of a life better than the life-in-death we all suffer daily.
This is the impressive, if rather stark, structure that Miss Murdoch imposes on ''The Good Apprentice,'' where the first section is called ''The Prodigal Son'' and depicts Edward's descent into a private hell and the second, ''Seegard,'' recounts his purgatorial search for his enigmatic magician of a father. The third and last part Miss Murdoch names ''Life After Death,'' implying that the still anguished Edward has begun an ascent into the upper reaches of his personal purgatory.
Like nearly all of her 22 novels, Miss Murdoch's ''Good Apprentice'' has a surface that constitutes a brilliant entertainment, a social comedy of and for the highly literate. Beneath that surface an astringent post-Christian Platonism has evolved into a negative theology that pragmatically offers only the dialectical alternations of either total libertinism or total puritanism in the moral life. The esthetic puzzle is whether the comic story and the spiritual kernel can be held together by Miss Murdoch's archaic stance as an authorial will. And yet no other contemporary British novelist seems to me of her eminence. Her formidable combination of intellectual drive and storytelling exuberance may never fuse into a great novel, but she has earned now the tribute she made to Sartre more than 30 years ago. She too has the style of the age.
Harold Bloom is editing and writing introductions for the more than 400 volumes of the Chelsea House ''Modern Critical Views'' and ''Modern Critical Interpretations'' series.
Jesse in Bed Jesse, sitting up, seemed to be expecting him. He showed no surprise, but nodded his large head several times, opening his very red lips, and gazing at Edward with intent dark rather prominent round eyes. His eyes had a wet jelly-like appearance and seemed to be entirely dark, a reddish brown in colour, with no white area visible. They were gentle eyes rather like a cow's, yet also huge like the eyes of a tree. His nose was strongly aquiline. He had indeed still got his teeth and hair, as Ilona had said; the dark hair, though receding a little at the brow, grew into a copious crest and fell in long locks as far as his shoulders. The hair of his head and beard, which had been trimmed a little, was silky and dead straight. It showed no grey. His hands moved a little upon the sheet as if he were playing the piano, as he contrived, without exactly smiling, to nod his head. The hands were large and long-fingered, white and blue-veined, covered in long dark hairs which grew down as far as the fingernails. One finger wore, embedded in straggly hair, a big golden ring with a red stone. Edward noticed that the whitish-yellow pyjamas were badly frayed at the cuff and showed a long tear in one sleeve. The bed was disordered, the blankets falling off at one side. Edward remembered afterwards that once he was in Jesse's presence the terrible fright which he had felt as he ran through the house left him entirely, and it was as if he knew, or were being told, exactly what to do. He did not speak, but moved forward and began to set the bed to rights, lifting up the blankets and smoothing out the sheet, accidentally touching the straying hands. Then he drew up a chair to the side of the bed and stared at his father, feeling suddenly like a favoured visitor, a necessary acolyte, someone summoned. He studied the big head, so close now, discerning squares and hexagons in the wrinkled skin. . . . Of course his father was not really old. Yet in spite of the dark strong hair, he seemed old. Jesse was now hunching his shoulders and putting his head on one side with an air of whimsical thoughtfulness, almost playfulness. Edward took the near hand, the left hand, the hand with the ring, and, with the same sense of confidence, bent his head and kissed it. He released the hand which returned to its play. He said, ''Father - ''
-- From ''The Good Apprentice.''