The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch [7]
A further device for obtaining our consent to such a deluded being is what Seymour Chatman calls “interest point of view,” a term for the gradual imbedding in a work of fiction of the vantage established by one character’s desires; we might also call it the libidinal interest. It is not surprising that a work of fiction would cohere around the protagonist’s desires; what is unusual is an author’s exhaustive, deliberate, and artful manipulation of this perspective until we empathically attribute desire and response in cases where the narrative cannot or does not. Murdoch, with her fascination for first-person narrators and for exclusionary characters in other novels—demons of possessiveness like Hilary Burde and Austin Gibson Grey and George McCaffrey who, like Charles Arrowby, are driven by jealousy—takes interest point of view to profound extremes; it is part of her ingeniously thorough placement of the character within both past time and the novel’s lived time. It works like a buried clue. Even when the novelistic actor may not be focused on a moment or even when his consciousness is closed to us (as often occurs here in letters addressed to the protagonist and in passages of reported dialogue), the reader assumes his angle of vision. Invisible to the narrative locally, the interest point of view derives from a work’s overarching perspective as the main character’s history guides us to make associations and to take sides, defending the character’s “interests” while he is away. We understand that Charles relishes the discomfort he causes one of his former troupe’s character actors, the homosexual Gilbert Opian (who is also aging), when he lands on certain ill-chosen words of Opian’s, who is trying to explain the new non-sexual menage he has formed with Lizzie Scherer:
“It’s about Lizzie and me. Please, Charles, take it seriously and don’t look like that or I shall cry! Something has really happened between us, I don’t mean like that sort of thing, but like real love like, God, in this awful world one doesn’t often have such divine luck, sex is the trouble of course, if people could only search for each other as souls—”
“Souls?”
“Like just see people and love them quietly and tenderly and seek for happiness together, well I suppose that’s sex too but it’s sort of cosmic sex and not just to do with organs—”
“Organs?”
“Lizzie and I are really connected, we’re close . . . we’ve stopped wandering, we’ve come home.... Now everything’s different, we’ve talked all our lives over together, we’ve talked it all out, we’ve sort of repossessed the past together and redeemed it—”
“How perfectly loathsome.”
“I mean we did it reverently, especially about you—”
“You discussed me?”
“Yes, how could we not, Charles, you’re not invisible—oh, please don’t be cross, you know how I’ve always felt about you, you know how we both feel about you—”
“You want me to join the family.”
“Exactly!” (p. 90)
Poor Gilbert is so nervous he blunders into a younger generation’s babble-style (all those likes), not to mention his clumsy provisos about sex. Charles’s derision of this honest nonsense is clear, and although we have no proof of his “thought,” pleasure is involved here, too, particularly when Gilbert furnishes the dangerous information that he and Lizzie had talked Charles over between themselves. Charles as the “king of shadows” who has figured so largely even for Gilbert (toward whom he feels precious little) likes nothing better than the chance to display his fury at being discussed. (Charles suffers an aversion—common to manipulators—to the sharing of confidences among the