The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [1]
In Titian’s painting, the satyr Marsyas is hung upside down, his goatish legs lashed to a tree’s branches as if in a long, tense stride. Bound at the wrists, his arms rest bent on the ground, framing his head. Near this suffering, shadowy head (the eyes open and luminous, but the mouth rucked down to the chin, as in the mask of tragedy), an ugly lapdog is licking up blood fallen from the long torso. The god Apollo, whom we also see, down to the left, in Phillips’s painting, is wielding the knife that has just begun to flay the skin from the living Marsyas’s body. Titian’s radiant blond Apollo is kneeling and intent—Robert Hughes calls him “prim,” but perhaps it is more accurate to say that Apollo is completely absorbed, for it is his task to extract the true soul, however painfully, out of the husk of even a very beautiful body. As he does so (in fact), he must aim to make the materially beautiful seem like a husk. Rather than being primarily an allegory of the mortal artist punished for hubris by a divine one (Marsyas was tricked into admitting he believed his reed flute might rival Apollo’s lyre), Marsyas represents for Murdoch, as he clearly did for Titian, the pain of yearning endured and terror faced in the ordeal of creation. The artist is being remade with a new kind of beauty as we watch the painting, and a new definition of heroism is born out of this unbearable unselving.
Murdoch’s Bradley Pearson, the narrator and protagonist of The Black Prince (1973), explains how this unselving works in the artwork he is most drawn by:
Hamlet is words, and so is Hamlet.... He is the tormented empty sinful consciousness of man seared by the bright light of art, the god’s flayed victim dancing the dance of creation.
The late Elizabeth Dipple, a Renaissance scholar attracted to Murdoch because of the novelist’s Shakespearean variety and seriousness, has properly identified the source of the dance: “That Shakespeare is Marsyas,” writes Dipple, “flayed, suffering, defeated, dead to the self (drawn out of himself as his skin flaps to the wind) is Murdoch’s image of the genuine artist.” The identification between Marsyas and the artist is made in Tom Phillips’s painting by the placement of Murdoch’s face over the suffering satyr’s. But what are we to make of the preternaturally gentle expression on Murdoch’s face? Surely this is not the artist as masochist? “Is Shakespeare a masochist? Of course,” Bradley Pearson insists.
He is the king of masochists, his writing thrills with that secret. But because his god is a real god and not an eidolon of private fantasy, and because love has here invented language as if for the first time, he can change pain into pure poetry.... He enacts the purification of speech, and yet this is also something comic.... Shakespeare cries out in agony, he writhes, he dances, he laughs, he shrieks, and he makes us laugh and shriek ourselves out of hell.... What redeems us is that speech is ultimately divine.
Shakespeare endures the tortures of imperfection yet renders them in intelligent plots, careful placement of character, and sublime and various language. He is both the delver into the coils of self and the perspective taken by art above self. (To be Apollo is beyond even the great artist’s ability; his is an unearthly music.) All one can do is hope to endure the pain that comes with creation. Furthermore, Marsyas as the type of the artist is being both defeated and redeemed. His rescue