Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince: The Term “Characters” is a Misnomer Whenever They Function Autonomously like Alternate Personalities

Definition of Terms

Both characters and alternate personalities are imaginary: both are products of the mind. But they are very different concepts.

Characters, by definition, are created and manipulated by the novelist. They are, functionally, lifelike puppets. Everything about them, including what they think and say, is put there by the writer. A character cannot know things that the writer does not know, and does not have free will.

Even if you claim that some things about characters come from the writer’s “unconscious,” once anything is conscious to a character, it is conscious to, and controlled by, the writer, because, in this model of the mind, there is only one personality, and, therefore, only one will and consciousness.

A character, per se, cannot do things behind the writer’s back, on its own initiative, or to bolster its own reputation at the expense of the writer’s credibility.

Alternate personalities, in multiple personality, are not created or controlled by the person’s regular self (“host personality”). Alternate personalities may know things that the host does not know — since they have separate, independent consciousnesses — and they may do things of their own free will: they are autonomous.

Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince 

Bradley Pearson, the first-person narrator, is a 58-year-old, divorced, unsuccessful novelist, who falls madly in love with the 20-year-old daughter of his much more successful novelist friend. 

According to Bradley, the successful novelist is eventually killed not by Bradley, but by his own wife; however, Bradley goes to jail for the murder, because the police and jury don’t believe him.

At the end of the novel, there are Four Postscripts by four of the other characters (including the dead novelist’s wife). Three of the four say that Bradley was guilty and deluded in regard to both the love affair and the murder. The fourth postscript, written by the daughter of the murder victim, is not very clear, but tends to support Bradley’s story. There is also an Editor’s Forward and Postscript by a peripheral character named Loxias, who supports Bradley’s story. But this Editor’s credibility is questionable.

One Interviewer: [Given the postscripts] there is no way in the world to know what really did happen. Which is what you were aiming for.

Murdoch: Yes, yes. (1, p. 69)

Another Interviewer: What attitude are we to take to your characters, such as Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince?

Murdoch: …he’s reliable in the most important respects: the author does not intend us to imagine that he murdered his friend. (1, p. 186).

Interviewer: [re the fourth postscript by the murder victim’s daughter, with whom Bradley had claimed true love, but which the other three postscripts had called delusional] …there she was saying it was a true love affair…

Murdoch: Yes, she does say casually, actually it’s all true…yes, all this did happen, you may take what you’ve just been reading about as true… (1, p. 188).

Thus, in one interview, Murdoch says that she added the postscripts to make sure that the reader could not be sure what really happened. However, in another interview, she says that the reader is to know that on the most important issues, Bradley told the truth. But if that was the author’s intent, why add the three postscripts that say he lied about those things?

Judging by these contradictory interviews, Murdoch doesn’t seem to really know what she intended or why those unusual postscripts were added.

Now, I would argue, the reason she doesn’t know is that these are not created characters under her control. On the contrary, they are autonomous, like alternate personalities:

“…when one has got the thing really going, the story invents itself, and the characters invent the story…(1, p 85). “Yes, if you get hold of a good character, he will invent himself…”(1, p. 198). “The second stage [of writing a novel] is that one should sit quietly and let the thing invent itself. One piece of imagination leads to another. You think about a certain situation and then some quite extraordinary aspect of it suddenly appears…Somehow things fly together and generate other things, and characters invent other characters, as if they were doing it themselves…”(1, p. 221).

Evidently, those three postscripts, which told lies about Bradley, were added because those other three so-called characters were not really characters under Murdoch’s control, but were autonomous alternate personalities, who insisted on the postscripts as a platform to defend their own versions of the truth and their own reputations.

This reminds me of a past post in which I quoted Nobel Prize novelist, Toni Morrison. She said that a novelist must control her characters, and that, as a former editor, she could see when a novelist’s characters had run away with the story. But how “characters” could do that, she did not explain.

1. Gillian Dooley (ed). From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch. University of South Carolina Press, 2003.