“In Praise of Iris Murdoch” by Susan Scarf Merrell in today’s New York Times: Prompts five past posts on Murdoch’s identity and characters

Susan Scarf Merrell, a novelist and professor of creative writing, writes “The Enthusiast” literary essay about Iris Murdoch in today’s New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/03/books/in-praise-of-iris-murdoch.html

I discussed the Booker Prize-winning novelist and philosopher—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iris_Murdoch—in five past posts:

November 3, 2014

Iris Murdoch’s first-person narrators were all male, because those novels were written by a male-identified, male-chauvinist, alternate personality.

In 1976, an interviewer asked Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) why all her novels that were written in the first person had a male narrator/hero. She answered:

Murdoch: I identify with men more than women, I think. I don’t think it’s a great leap; there’s not much of a difference, really. One’s just a human being. I think I’m more interested in men than women. I’m not interested in women’s problems as such, though I’m a great supporter of women’s liberation—particularly education for women—but in aid of getting women to join the human race, not in aid of making any kind of feminine contribution to the world. I think there’s a kind of human contribution, but I don’t think there’s a feminine contribution (1, p. 48).

Consulting two biographies, I see that Murdoch was an extraordinarily variable person. She had affairs with men and women; she was alternately and simultaneously heterosexual and lesbian. She was reported to have “fantasied in her inner life that she was a male homosexual” (2, p. 164), but she also had a lesbian relationship for many years. In general, “she had a striking ability to be different with different friends” (3, p. 538).

So it appears that her novels that had male first-person narrators were written by the male-identified, male-chauvinist personality, who answered the interviewer’s question. But her history of having dramatically and distinctly different senses of identity and relationships indicates that this male narrator was not her only personality.

It is common for people with multiple personality to have an opposite-sex personality, as was dramatized in Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden (see past post).

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

2. A. N. Wilson. Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her. London, Hutchinson, 2003.

3. Peter J. Conradi. Iris Murdoch: A Life. New York, W.W. Norton, 2001.

November 8, 2014

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.

January 23, 2016

“The Philosopher’s Pupil” (post 1) by Iris Murdoch (post 3): Protagonist is called “justified sinner,” title of James Hogg’s novel of murder by alternate personality.

At the beginning of Iris Murdoch’s novel, the protagonist, George, who already has a reputation for violent episodes, now tries to kill his wife by pushing her car over a cliff:

“How could I have done that, he thought, looking down. As on similar occasions in the past, he felt a cleavage between himself and the George who did things…” (1, p. 14).

The narrator says, “I confess that I cannot offer any illuminating explanation [of George]…We are in fact more randomly made…than art or vulgar psycho-analysis leads us to imagine…George McCaffrey was deeply affected by his teacher [of philosophy, Rozanov]…how absolutely this man had taken possession of his soul…Why was [Rozanov] coming back to [town]? Was it for him, the lost sheep, the one just man, the justified sinner?" (1, pp. 76-79).

James Hogg’s “Justified Sinner”

“The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a novel by the Scottish author James Hogg, published anonymously in 1824…

“The confession traces Robert's gradual decline into despair and madness, as his doubts about the righteousness of his cause are counteracted by Gil-Martin’s increasing domination over his life. Finally, Robert loses control over his own identity and even loses track of time. During these lost weeks and months, it is suggested that Gil-Martin assumes Robert’s appearance in order to commit further crimes. However, there are also suggestions in the text, that 'Gil-Martin' is a figment of Robert's imagination, and is simply an aspect of his own personality: as, for example when 'the sinner' writes, 'I feel as if I were the same person' (as Gil-Martin)…

“The novel has been cited as an inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde…” (2).

1. Iris Murdoch. The Philosopher’s Pupil. New York, Viking, 1983.

2. Wikipedia.

January 24, 2016

The Philosopher’s Pupil (post 2) by Iris Murdoch (post 4): Both Kirkus Reviews and NY Times quoted “justified sinner” passage, but missed multiple personality.

Times: “But the narrator warns us early that people ‘are in fact more randomly made, more full of rough contingent rubble, than art or vulgar psychoanalysis leads us to imagine’ “ (1).

Kirkus: “George, Rozanov’s former irritating pupil, hounds Olympus for salvation as a ‘justified sinner’ " (2)

Both reviews quoted from the same passage that I did in yesterday’s post, so the passage was, evidently, noticed and memorable. But neither review understood the reference to James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and multiple personality.

1. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Books of the Times, The Philosopher’s Pupil, June 29, 1983: http://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/29/books/books-of-the-times-books-of-the-times.html

2. Kirkus Reviews The Philosopher’s Pupil 1983: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/iris-murdoch-2/the-philosophers-pupil/

January 31, 2016

The Philosopher’s Pupil (post 3) by Iris Murdoch (post 5): Protagonist’s puzzling behavior and memory gap are clues he has multiple personality.

The novel begins with George’s attempt to kill his wife. Throughout the novel, he is erratic. Near the end, he murders his former philosophy professor. And finally, inexplicably, he settles down.

In short, this novel is the story of George’s puzzling behavior, which neither the narrator nor George’s family nor anyone else can explain.

For most of the novel, the reader is led to believe that sometime in the past George had probably killed his young son. But, eventually, a discussion between George and his wife, Stella, reveals that their son had probably died due to an accident or negligence involving Stella, not George; that, in fact, George has always protected Stella’s reputation by letting everyone jump to the conclusion that George had been to blame.

For most of the novel, the philosopher is depicted as a Great Man, while George’s hate for him looks entirely crazy and paranoid. But George is not prosecuted for drowning the philosopher in his sleep, because the philosopher has left a suicide note, and had taken an overdose, over his sexual obsession with his seventeen-year-old granddaughter.

Nevertheless, whatever the failings of his wife and the philosopher, George’s behavior has been puzzling. And at the end of the novel, George’s puzzling behavior remains unexplained. But there are clues throughout the novel that George’s puzzling behavior is due to multiple personality.

Clues

“How could I have done that [attempted to kill his wife], he thought, looking down. As on similar occasions in the past, he felt a cleavage between himself and the George who did things” (1, p. 14).

“George was…an expert and dedicated liver of the double life…” (1, p. 73).

“He had seen his own double in the Botanic Gardens…Twice now he had seen this double, capable of anything, walking about and at large” (1, p. 137).

“Sometime I feel like I lose the present moment…my sense of my individuality goes, I can’t feel my present being” (1, p. 144).

“There was in George something that was not himself…” (1, p. 180).

“…there was another man…George realised with a coldness which made him almost faint that this other man was himself…” (1, p. 219).

“George…saw himself in…the mirror. He thought, that’s the man I was following” (1, p. 221).

“George was wearing a black mackintosh, like his alter ego” (1, p. 225).

“George had taken off his black mackintosh…Alex [his mother] thought, he’s different, he’s the same yet different” (1, p. 243).

“Once I saw Uncle George being in two places at the same time” (1, p. 293).

“You can’t explain George by the old theories. You might just as well say he’s possessed by a devil” (1, p. 370).

“That awful giddiness was coming upon him, that physically-announced loss of identity, a most intense sense of his body, of its bulky heavy solidity and of his various views of it, combined with the absolute disappearance of its inhabitant” (1, p. 398).

“ ‘George, let me ask you…whether you did or did not try to kill Stella that night…’ He [George] said, ‘I’m not sure, I can’t remember’ " (1, p. 498).

“I saw my double carrying a hammer. How can another person steal one’s consciousness, how is it possible?” (1, p. 511).

[In spite of everything that has happened in this novel] “…half the women in this town are in love with George” (1, pp. 530-31) [which is not the attitude you would expect toward a man who was truly psychotic].

“George’s hysterical blindness [a dissociative symptom: multiple personality is classified as one of the dissociative disorders] left him after about a fortnight” (1, p. 559).

“Stella…remains puzzled about her husband” (1, p. 563).

Comment

As previously discussed in this blog, the two cardinal clues to the possibility that a person has multiple personality are memory gaps (like George’s inability to recall whether he had actually tried to kill Stella) and a puzzling inconsistency (due to the comings and goings, incognito, of the person’s alternate personalities). Another clue to multiple personality is seemingly psychotic symptoms in a person whose overall behavior and functioning suggest that he is not really psychotic (multiple personality is not categorized as a psychosis and is unrelated to schizophrenia).

George is not the only character in this novel who has multiple personality symptoms such as those quoted above, but his symptoms are more noticeable and more extensively described. As another character says, “George is like everyone else, only in his case it shows” (1, p. 40).

This novel’s view of people—in effect, that most people have multiple personality, but it usually does not show—is an overgeneralization that is probably based on the author’s experience of her own psychology and the psychology of various people she has known.

1. Iris Murdoch. The Philosopher’s Pupil. New York, The Viking Press, 1983.