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By Root 2164 0

Sea, the Sea? How far can Charles Arrowby, the scot-free predator upon other men’s women, theatrical Tartar and tyrannus tonans , enter into an understanding of the backwardness—the lies—of his own character? On the surface, he admits he has nothing extraordinary to show for his sixty-some-odd years, that he leaves nothing of lasting value behind (no offspring, for example), that he has not been generous or ever, really, courageous—and certainly not “good.” Yet he cannot seem to get up and move elsewhere with this recognition; he remains sanguine about his prospects, sunk in that self while lavish in his criticisms of traits in others that resemble his own bad ones. The hard, the necessary, and the fated truths of existence do not seem to affect or even brush against him—or when they do, they do so in beckonings of apparent reprieve or unanticipated blessing (as in his two visions of the starry night, the second ending with a visit from the selkies).

The first of Murdoch’s ways of telling the truth-of-an-untruth is to perfect and thicken and verify the world in which the play is played. Murdoch (and Arrowby with her) is a genius of texture and description. The world Charles enters—even the sea—is fresh, strange to his touch, on every page of his narrative exactly and eloquently delineated. We believe in this person in large measure because he can see the natural and material world in its intricacy and persistent changing. The “untruth” lies only in its transience as a handhold. Another technique is to present through Charles images of truth, which he misinterprets—or fails to see. (Because this is a first-person novel, it therefore seems as if Charles can notice as a record-keeper what he cannot absorb imaginatively.) A brief instance, already quoted, is his cousin’s comment on how much people lie to themselves, which occurs at a point where, as memoirist, Charles feels especially robust in his truth-telling. His response to James is therefore one of pique. More comically, he misinterprets James’s quotation from “some philosopher”: “ ‘It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of one’s finger’ ” (p. 72). Charles recalls this unidentified mot (it comes from Hume) in light of the reckless mood he shared with one of his mistresses in which “we definitely preferred the former”; the woman even “hurled herself downstairs in a fit of rage.” But in fact, Hume was speaking of desires large or small as logically separate from reason, although he also believed natural benevolence and common sense would militate against preferring the world’s destruction to a minor irritant. (In Charles’s defense, James may well have thrown out the quotation knowing that his cousin would misconstrue.) Psychologically telling too are the occasions when Charles cannot take the point home, making “untrue” the echo in his own repetition of Lizzie’s loving and melancholy admission about herself, “You feel you can compel the beloved, but it’s an illusion,” at which Charles of course does not feel compelled by her or under any obligation to assuage her sorrow. Yet Charles will stormily try to compel his beloved later on. Nor can Charles take the point when he overhears the husband tell the woman he loves, “You’ve made me bad,” when he had already said of her, “she made me faithless.” Any cross-reference within Charles’s text is diminished into a sort of renvoi bandé, blind to its doubleness.

How many patterns flicker over the tale unremarked by Charles—including the rafts of ghosts who press in (characters often mentioned but never met, primarily Clement and Wilfred Dunning); there are even “double” ghosts, unmet characters borrowed from Murdoch’s earlier novels, such as Will and Adelaide Boase from Bruno’s Dream, and from A Severed Head the “character” Honor Klein is mentioned in terms of an established dramatic role someone else does not get to play. There are also offstage figures who travel closer to England and the present, although only Charles’s erstwhile chauffeur Freddie Arkwright ever reaches the scene;