The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [10]
Charles may fancy himself as Prospero now aiming to turn (theatrical) magic back into spirit, but he has been the recipient rather than the generator of a deeper current of magic, which, intersecting with his own fate, goes haywire in the plot. The authentic Prospero figure, surprisingly, is cousin James. It is he who inserts himself into the unfolding of time and who takes charge of it. Standing as a fictive type midway between the occluded consciousness of fascinating mage-figures in other novels (John Robert Rozanov and David Crimond, for example, whose thoughts are yet more hidden than his) and the good characters at the apparent periphery of the main action in Henry and Cato and A Fairly Honourable Defeat (Brendan Craddock and Tallis Browne), James Arrowby both works inscrutably at a distance and attempts to help his cousin Charles in real and immediate ways to cope and also to improve. Like Tallis Browne, James is able to see each person as a reality; like Craddock, he has had a classical education and can reason brilliantly. James arrives with several others at thundery, oppressive Whitsun, when the Hartley episode is at an extreme impasse and the company begin to sing in many tongues. He obtains the approval of the others who are there to persuade Charles to “return” Hartley. He arranges the mission, deflects the animosity of the husband, and seeks to instruct Charles in the chimerical quality of his “love” for this dowdy lower-middle-class woman. (She is nothing but a “phantom Helen” invented by Charles’s needs.) Thus far, his rational, insightful, soldierly self, more a liberating Perseus than a devious Prospero. But there are arrangements of James’s that we do not see—although we see their effects: He finds people. (This explains the otherwise unaccountable appearance of the lost son Titus.) Before this, he also “locates” Charles in the Wallace Collection in London (where Charles has been looking at Perseus and Andromeda ) and comes to him there. James seems to materialize out of the profound auditory, visual, and kinesthetic premonitions not entirely owing to Charles’s hangover:
I still had a headache. A sort of brown fuzz and some very volatile darting black spots intermittently marred my field of vision. I felt unsteady and somewhat oddly related to the ground, as if I had suddenly become extremely tall.
Then it began to seem that so many of my women were there . . . [painted by various masters, but] Hartley . . . was not there. And then the clocks all began to strike four.
Some workmen were doing something or other downstairs, hammering a lot, flashing lights swarmed and receded . . .
[T]he light seemed a little hazy and chunky and sort of granulated and brownish.... The gallery was empty....
I began to walk down the long room and as I did so the hammering of the workmen down below seemed to be becoming more rhythmic, clearer, faster, more insistent, like the sound of those wooden clappers, which the Japanese call hyoshigi, and which are used to create suspense or announce doom in the Japanese theatre, and which I often used to use myself in my own plays. I began to walk away down the gallery and as I went my hangover seemed to be turning into a sort of fainting fit. When I reached the door at the end I stopped and turned round. A man had come into the room by the other door at the far end and was standing looking at me through the curiously brownish murky air. I reached out and put one hand on the wall. Of course I recognized him at once. He was my cousin James. (pp. 167-68)
This description, covering three pages altogether, is gripping, intensely detailed, and credibly real. Yet there is also something portentous and deliberate about it (including as it does a subtle echo of the peasant working with metal in Anna Karenina’s nightmare), and the effect on Charles is as