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’s desire to tidy up an attachment that would hamper him. Partial like so many of Charles’s insights, it nevertheless recognizes in a scrambled way that he figured largely in James’s life and that James was a profoundly troubled as well as gifted soul. Dr. Tsang, who informs Charles of James’s death, is also from Dehra Dun, in the foothills of the Himalayan range separating northern India from Tibet, presumably also a Buddhist, and someone who recognizes in the willed manner of James’s peaceful death the act of an “enlightened one” who died “achieving all.” Undeniably part of Charles’s change is that he knows how much he has lost. With hindsight, we can see that the “one great light” toward whom Charles has been wending in the dark cavern has been his cousin. “I remembered that James was dead. Who is one’s first love? Who indeed.”

During the last third of the novel both James and Charles Arrowby enter the realm of their separate ordeals. We see James’s indirectly because Charles cannot see directly into it at the time. Illusions are methodically, if violently, stripped away. Each goes beyond himself. Each abjures magic, which Murdoch defines in her work on Plato as “the fantastic doctoring of the real for consumption by the private ego” (this could almost be a definition of novel-writing). Magic, ego, illusion—all of these terms, like the dust that falls on their possessions, come to rest with a difference on James, a more advanced being, than on Charles. But the torment of facing all the loss, for the one who remains, is no less Marsyas-like for that. And if Murdoch’s fictional sophist were to cry, “That’s poetic, just a metaphor!” perhaps her Socrates could again be summoned to remind the reader that “There are deep metaphors, perhaps there are bottomless metaphors.”

—Mary Kinzie

NOTES

Tom Phillips’s painting is in the National Portrait Gallery, London—easier to get to than Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas, which is in a former archepiscopal palace in Kromeriz, Czechoslovakia. (However, the Titian can now be accessed on the Web at artchive.com, and the Phillips portrait appears as a stamp-sized icon on the back of many of the Penguin paper editions of Murdoch’s novels.) For help in thinking about the Titian painting I am indebted to Renaissance art historian Laura Giles of the Art Institute of Chicago, who provided me with the essential essay on this work by Sydney J. Freedberg from FMR, vol. 4 (1984). Robert Hughes’s quip appears in his essay “The Legacy of La Serenissima” on the Royal Academy of Arts, London, show “The Genius of Venice 1500-1600” (Time, 6 February 1984); this show brought to London The Flaying of Marsyas, although Murdoch had earlier written of the painting in both The Black Prince (1973) and A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970). Robert Graves’s two-volume work on Greek myths (Penguin, 1955) provided material about both Marsyas and Perseus when it did not appear in Ovid and Dante. Linguist Seymour Chatman’s suggestion about an “interest point of view” appears in his chapter on non-narrated stories in his Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Cornell University Press, 1978), reprinted in Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, ed. Hoffman and Murphy (Duke University Press, 1990). Quotations from Murdoch’s philosophical and critical prose and her Platonic dialogues are taken from the invaluable indexed compendium edited by Peter Conradi, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, by Iris Murdoch (Penguin, 1998). Professor of philosophy Julius Sensat provided the source for the quotation from David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, Book II (Of the passions), Part iii (Of the will and direct passions), Section 3 (Of the influencing motives of the will), and helpfully explained its context. Jorge Luis Borges’s remark about Tacitus appears in his essay “The Modesty of History,” Other Inquisitions 1937-1952.

I was guided throughout by Elizabeth Dipple’s Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit (University of Chicago Press, 1982), a study of all of Murdoch’s novels