The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [2]
When we ask why Murdoch so identified herself with this painting as to return to it in her work and to elect it as the background for her portrait, we might conjecture that Marsyas represents the major artistic paradox of the physical being on the threshold of a spiritual change. The figure of Marsyas is blazing with life, although clearly linked to a satyr’s lower, animal nature. (He is a flawed entity, not entirely human as yet.) Moreover, he is suffering, for this is also part of the artist’s task. He is submitting in terror, yet without struggle, to having the real rind of his symbolically flawed nature sliced away. The process is only just beginning in the painting—it will take a long time before he dies to the flesh. The self released from this body is implicitly linked to the beauty of the kneeling Apollo and to the youth Olympus in the background, a former follower of Marsyas who now plays the viola da braccio, Titian’s version of Apollo’s lyre. To these figures Marsyas is linked by contrast (his pan pipes hang from the branch by his hoof), but also by the promise that in his change, through unspeakable striving, he might aspire to mingle with mind, spirit, and wordless nonnarrative formal perfection.
Murdoch believed that the threefold task of the novelist was to see ourselves not as romantically separate beings but in the context of the world about us (“Civilization is terrible,” one character writes to the protagonist in The Sea, the Sea, “but don’t imagine that you can ever escape it”), then to witness ourselves through the ordeal of an introspection that must be painful to our human natures, bent as we are on self-satisfaction, and finally to intuit patterns emerging from random necessity, chaos, confusion, rubble—the “wandering causes” with which the demiurge must work in making the world. Murdoch extends the idea of external chaos to the internal realm: To be an artist means working against—as well as working with—the miserable nonsense that fate and accident make of our lives, no less than the nonsense our own foreshortened insight makes of the patterns in which we are embroiled. “To see misery and evil justly,” Murdoch writes in The Fire and the Sun (1976), “is one of the heights of aesthetic endeavor”:
How this becomes beautiful is a mystery.... Shakespeare makes not only splendour but beauty out of the malevolence of Iago and the intolerable death of Cordelia, as Homer does out of the miseries of a pointless war and the stylish ruthlessness of Achilles.
But the typical Murdoch protagonist—male, middle-aged or older, with some artistic inclinations and a long history of skewed self-regard—seldom begins with such high aesthetic capacities, and certainly never sets out to follow Marsyas into torment. On the contrary, her men of middling sensibilities are originally on the wrong path entirely. Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince does not realize the connection to Marsyas until he has already begun to be drawn out of his old self. He is a limited being, selfish, fastidious, opinionated (Murdoch links him to Humbert Humbert), also desperate for change, eager to retire from the civil service to the seaside so that at last he can add to his thin trickle of artificial poetry. The protagonist-narrator of The Sea, the Sea (1978), Charles Arrowby, is on a path yet more false, since he assumes he can now rest from having been a great theatrical artist and interpreter of Shakespeare. But despite these limitations, he backs into the making of real art, presenting us at last, as the earlier hero had done, with the book we read.
In an important sense Charles Arrowby’s is the story of someone