Characterization in Bruno's Dream

        Iris Murdoch has an uncanny ability to inhabit the minds of her starkly different characters, providing them with identity as well as insight. Her seamless transitions from third person omniscience to first person narration allows for the story to continually be driven forward while giving the reader cause to care about these characters’ hapless lives. In particular, I am interested in reviewing the primary characters’ internal dialogue as well as the literary techniques employed by Murdoch to make this display believable and compelling.

        Adelaide de Crecy. Adelaide the maid. Although she is a secondary character in the novel, we are privy to her emotional fits and travails as if she were the titular heroine. She has a one sided involvement in the novel’s main love quadrangle (meaning she is “in love” with a character who loves another, but none of the other major players returns her affections) and could be simply written off as a one dimensional character needed to complete the romantic drama – much like a best friend or comic relief supporting character, there to assist in the pathos of the main character but retaining none for themselves. This is not the case for Adelaide, as Murdoch delves into her romantic foibles with Danby, Will and Nigel with a sympathetic third person narration, “{Danby} turned her into a joke, as he turned almost everything into a joke, and it hurt her” (45) as well as her sentiments of being adrift “if there had been a bus she had by now certainly missed it” (44) As if the sympathetic slant Murdoch lends to Adelaide weren’t enough, Murdoch allows Adelaide to own her words, using phrases like “auntie was gaga” (43) which clearly belong to Adelaide and not the author. Consequently, when Adelaide’s dismal situation comes to a head with the discovery of Danby’s love letter to another, her “rigid and tearless” (166) composition is poignant not simply from an objectively sympathetic standpoint, but because you somehow feel the rejection and loneliness. This, I argue, is only achieved through Murdoch’s ability to inhabit, albeit briefly, the character’s mind through the oscillation of her third and first person narration.

        If there were to be a need for a new title for this novel, I would suggest that “Danby’s Drama” could be a fitting contender, for if there were a “main” character in this ensemble romance, Danby Odell would fit the bill. Bumbling, bombastic, and brash, Danby’s “man of simple tastes” characterization, much like Adelaide, could play off as a one note tune. But here again, Murdoch allows the reader to access Danby on a more fundamental level, not just simply as a man who lives for women and wine, so to speak, but the deeper rationalizations of his actions. Specifically, despite the fact Danby’s major character flaw (if one may call it that) is his primarily hedonistic nature, we recognize that he has the capacity for greater affections, first in his relationship with Bruno, and then again with his overwhelming, consuming love of Lisa. Danby may be initially brushed off as a dullard but there is psychological dynamism at work in the character that we see most vividly in his encounters with Miles, who, although they are the same age, he regards him as “senior” and experiences “that old familiar humiliating sensation mixed of fear and admiration and bitter hurt resentment.” (72) Now one could argue that these words are, in fact, not Danby’s own, that they are simply Murdoch’s omniscient summary of the situation. However, Murdoch employs another technique with Danby especially to persuade the reader that Danby is more than he seems, the medium of correspondence. We discover, via Adelaide’s investigation of his room, a letter written and unsealed to Lisa. At once both self-deprecating and fervent, he states “I know I’m nothing compared with you, but I love you terribly and one is not mistaken about something like this. I have loved like this only once before.” (165) We see that he is able to make differentiations from his feelings for Lisa versus someone like Adelaide who was “sweet, she was there.” (18) or tells Diana “Men aren’t good at romantic friendships. I want you in bed.” (95) Suddenly Danby is rocketed from a character who simply pursues immediate gratification to one who can yearn, can feel, who is ultimately and entirely human.

        Of all the primary characters, Diana is the least accessible. (Perhaps I am personally encumbered by the fact that she exemplifies who I imagine Murdoch to be with the limited information I know about her and her relationship with John Bayley) She first appears in Miles’ recollection, a free spirited failed artist who knows what she wants and goes after it. By the time we are able to reach her on a more intimate level, however, she has changed. She has become a domiciled creature who has lost her sense of identity in the veil of married life and discovers a resurgence of youth in a dalliance with Danby. This seeming contradiction in her character’s introduction is reflected heavily in the amount we see her waffle between being “constantly, consistently, passionately interested” (90) in Miles, telling Danby “no” again and again and yet being discovered by her sister in a compromising position (and to be clear, I am not referring to the foxtrot)

        “The fragile pearly shaft sinks into the table and located where there is a dim red blotch, a shadowed unred red, reflection of a flower. Above yet how above it stretched the surface skin of grainy wood, a rich striped brown. Red reddest of words. Brown luscious caramel word. Yet also loneliest of colours, an exile from the spectrum, word colour, wood colour, colour of the earth, tree, bread, hair.” (153) This singular excerpt we get from Miles’ Notebook of Particulars provides insight into the character who, one would expect, would have the greatest amount of reflection and observation. It seems very fitting that Miles would describe anemones in a way which renders the bigger picture indiscernible. Phrases like “red reddest of words” may sound poetic on paper but fail to give an accurate description of the item before him. This Notebook of Particulars is seemingly representative of Miles’ failure later in the novel to recognize his love for Lisa who has been right before him all along. He is caught up in a metaphysical world of high-minded ideas and, although Nigel is presented as the messianic figure, Miles represents an intellectual spirituality. This is conveyed in the words such as “venerable” and “sacred” (154) given to Miles as he reflects on the catastrophic meeting with his father, the reference of William Blake who, although critical of religious institutions, was haunted by the intellectual nature of spirituality (seen in his works The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Jerusalem The Emanation of the Giant Albion) and finally, the hymn he sings to himself, “Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison, Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Christe eleison, Christe eleison.” (189) Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, repeated thrice, underscoring Miles’ hallowed and solemn nature.

       
       Now for the true titular character. Bruno Greensleave. It is interesting that this character is heralded on the title cover, as well as the opening line, for his prominence is falsely advertised. That is to say, we begin the novel with Bruno awaking, with the immediate vacillations between third person and first person narration, suggesting that this novel will truly be about this man’s “sombre and lively meditation upon death, love and the pursuit of happiness” (cover) and although we receive of taste of his meditations – his remorse his nostalgia his basic human needs, the novel itself has very little to do with this grotesque and self-pitying man. In fact, the only episode in which we have an extended stay in the urgent tunnel of Bruno’s thoughts is the initial chapter. Most likely this is a sage choice, as this tunnel is crowded with dizzying melodies of the past (e.g. “Hold that tiger, hold that tiger” 13) with piles of books on spiders and crumpled copies of the Evening Standard cluttering the corner, a claustrophobic aura of past regrets permeating the room and a metal prison box obstructing the view. This opening sequence allows the reader to safely store Bruno on the second floor and enter the dramatic interactions of the aforementioned characters. So why is he presented as such an important character if his importance is relegated to a pitiable pile of “so many misunderstandings”? (11) I believe that this introduction provides the gravity needed to handle the romantic entanglements which characterize the majority of the novel without coming across as trite or maudlin. Murdoch trusts that this daunting image of awaiting death, of embittered regrets and self-flagellation, will stick with the reader through the more soapy passages. That the impermanence of existence will rest in the back of our minds as we watch the Danby fall for Lisa, who loves Miles, who is married to Diana, etc. And for my experience, it does. I applaud these characters for pursuing happy days, knowing that the lonely nights are waiting patiently on the second floor for their chapter to begin.

Happy Days and Lonely Nights

Review: Bruno's Dream

Bruno’s Dream is a tricky novel to pin down. It seems at once classic and contemporary. Both tragic and comic.  A novel with a lofty vision and a pulpy melodrama. In some ways it was a traditional dramatic work: it exhibited well defined three-act structure with (several) distinct climaxes, as well as very strong unities of place and action. This latter feature gives the story something of a theatre set feeling – the action is effectively limited to a complex web of need between 7 characters, taking place in an obscurely sketched house on the Thames.  Each character’s emptiness (ranging from mild boredom to angst in the face of death) is foregrounded in turn, and, with Bruno’s dream of reuniting with his son, the web begins to spin. As such, and a-traditionally, there is no single protagonist. Moreover, while the purported climax of the book works itself out in almost clichédly symbolic situations – the duel and, all the more, the Deluge – and while these are followed by a stylistic and temporal break that is typically a cue that we are well into the ‘resolution’ or ‘falling action’ of the narrative, there is something altogether irresolved about this supposed denouement. And I think this is because the dual/deluge event is something of a red herring in making sense of the plot. It is hard to see how these events have any bearing on what follows them. Objectively, we can track all our characters: Miles and Diana find a cozy balance, Adelaide runs off with Will, Nigel declares his love for Danby and sets off on his next caper, and Lisa and Danby become involved.  Each character seems to have paired off in a way that makes sense. But are they better for it? Or are the events that transpire just another episode in their lives, still so full of the small love of self-love? And what, after all, about Bruno?

I want to suggest that for the most part, these characters are not dynamic characters – they do not exhibit substantial change as a result of undergoing the conflict. Or perhaps more accurate is to say that they make very small victories. I think what is at stake in Bruno’s dream is none other than what is at stake in Plato’s Symposium – the soul’s progress from “the lesser mysteries of love” to the vision of the true divine Love. And while most of the characters make some bit of progress down this path, I think only two of them, namely, Diana and Bruno, are left with a lasting (and Real) vision of Love. These visions take the form of epiphany; both Diana and Bruno ‘wake up’.

                Diana’s epiphany – her ascending from a less pure to a more pure vision of Love – happens while she is bedside with Bruno in his final days (Ch. 32). Diana’s love never strikes us as a selfish love – especially in contrast to characters like Danby, Adelaide, and Miles. She gets great fulfillment from caring – and yet a closer reading does indicate that she gets (and expects) something in return for her care:

“Making the house had taken years and within it she had occupied years in posing….She had never dreamed of so distinguished a catch. She would have been contented with much less…but could not help contemplate with satisfaction the gap between her mother’s life and her own…She played the passionate exacting mistress…she charmed herself”

Here we can see that Diana’s love serves to enforce her identity, her sense of her-self. It is subtle, like I said, especially in comparison to the other characters, but this passage makes clear that not only does she find playing the role of (or ‘posing’ as) mistress/savior “charming” but that her understanding of Miles “distinguished” status serves to distinguish her – in this case, from her mother. It is also clear that the way Diana differentiates herself, carves out a self-conception, is gives her ‘satisfaction’.

This separate sense of self is – at least according to the metaphysic espoused by the books native shaman, Nigel – precisely the root of the dreaming and delusion – the love that should be emanating forth is turned back into self-love, and is put into the service of love’s opposite – or reinforcing separateness and sense of Self.

It is precisely because Diana is only so subtly using love to define her Self that she is capable of being disabused of her delusions in the end. Compare how deeply lost in petty love Adelaide is, and how here glamorous future will only serve to aggravate this lostness.  And yet common sense tells us that things worked out for Adelaide while Diana perhaps lost the most of any character (even Bruno seems to gain from his death). After all, Diana ends nearly overcome by pain. Still, such pain is a sign of progress, in the same way the Cave Dweller’s initial exposure to the light of day is painful and dazzling. For in these final moments with Bruno, Diana, wonders “Perhaps this great pain was just her profitless love for Bruno” (310), and “Becoming so attached to someone who is dying. Is this not the most pointless of all loves?” (309). What is profit, what is point? They are the goals set by the separated self in light of its perceived needs. Diana has, more than any other character, overcome herself and her ‘natural’ conception of love as serving a need (contrast this with Lisa, who moves backwards, towards a conception of love that serves her, “sanely self interested” love.). We need only consider two things to see this: first, it is rather a shock to find, in the last chapter, that it is Diana who regularly visiting Bruno – the last we really saw was her rushing from the house in disgust (and, significantly, resorting to some harmless flirtation with a strange man). Something in her has loosened up, has opened up, and now here she is loving Bruno – the one holding his hand as he passes and so too confronting Profitless Love in the face of Death. And her resolve in the face of these disconcerting inhuman forces yields its own profitless vision (viz., of Love-as-all) and its own death (viz, of her self): “She tried to think about herself but there seemed to be nothing there…Yet love still existed and it was the only thing that existed” (310).  This, then, is Diana’s epiphany.

                In the final chapter, Bruno makes an identical movement from darkness to light. It is rather simpler and more straightforward. Bruno’s real illness is the mixture of his crippling doubt and his inveterately pessimistic way of filling in the gaps in his knowledge:

“Supposing Janie had wanted to forgive him at the end after all? He would never know. The most precious thing of all was lost to him forever” (40)

This passage - so telling of how a single unresolved emotion can develop into an ever intensifying, crippling obsession – has a dual reading. There is a gap between his “never knowing” and “the most precious thing”: That is, we do not know if “the most precious thing” to Bruno is Janie’s forgiveness, or the knowledge, the closure, of whether she ended forgiving or berating him. For, IF the “most precious thing” is simply that Janie dies forgiving me, he cannot know that this is lost forever. Indeed, he thinks: he would never know if she forgave him. So what Bruno wants (and fears lost) is not that Janie forgave him, but the knowledge that she forgave him –THIS is what, he believes, is lost forever. So here too, on page 40, Bruno is not concerned with how-Janie-felt-when-she-died-as-such, but rather with Janie qua the Other who serves to validate/exonerate his own guilt. Bruno, like Diana, indeed like all the other characters, is too struggling with the “lesser mysteries” of love – or, to use Gibran’s words, Bruno still, right up to his final moments, seeks only love’s peace and love’s pleasures.

                But, like Diana, the Truth has a way of revealing itself rather unannounced. At the end, Bruno comes to see the rather simple fact that “it’s so obvious now that nothing else matters” other than “to be kind and good”. Bruno will never live a good life – he will never be a Good man; he knows rightly that nothing he can do know will change the fact the he loved so little, and loved so poorly. But it is the intense pain or this regret that points towards his failure and at once points to how things Ought to be:  “only in the presence of death… one could see so clearly what love ought to be like”. In the end, nothing matters except love (keeping Plato’s Symposium always in the back of our minds) and it is our own sense of our falling short of love that reveals the Ideal heights of Love, or, to be more explicitly Platonic, the Idea of Love. For him, like Diana, it is the presence of death which effectively puts an end on the sprawling human points and purposes and leaves us only to become receptive to our waywardness and, consequently, the One True Way. And he too (like Diana) out of the great, dismal swamp of his uncertainties, comes to have Absolute Knowledge, namely, “…the knowledge he had now, this absolute nothing-else-matters.”

There is a final consolation for Bruno – it is a sort of implication of his epiphany: for if Love is revealed concurrently with the death of the self, with the loss of all individually distinguishing features, then Bruno can know that his final episode is every one’s final episode – a disintegrating of the self back into the “All is one” (29) – a painful agonizing torturing of the “extended” back into “a single point” - the shedding of the delusion of the self and it’s lesser loves is the certain attainment of the Idea of Love: that this Love is all that there is; and as such, Bruno gets, at last, something like exoneration from Janie – for this absolute certainty is also a “presence” that all will experience as they disappear, and so Janie too would know that there is Love and nothing-else-matters: “Had Janie known this at the end? For the first time Bruno saw it with absolute certainty” This final epiphany at once which means that Janie forgives Bruno and that Bruno becomes certain of this fact, it means that in the end Bruno obtains his most precious thing. But really, what can it matter now, in the Presence of this absolute certainty?

***

Virtue has been compared to a bullseye – there are a million ways of missing it, but only one way of hitting it (if you’ve never thought about it before, now you can understand the cumbersome opening of Anna Karenina – “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”).  So the characters in Bruno’s Dream all fall short of love – which is just to say they are all, in their own way, less than virtuous in how they relate themselves to the world, to other people, and to themselves. And within this concentric, spinning universe, at least two of these characters (through what is more like an act of grace than an outcome of the plot or of personal effort) come to inhabit the sacred and singular center: to the hub of the wheel, which is motionless and empty while the wheel itself spins on; Or: they come to occupy the center of the web; and while they are not really liberated (for in the end there is no ‘they’ from which to be liberated) from here they can see, at last, how everything is connected. 

I liked this book. I found it compelling and intriguing but more importantly thought provoking and emotionally moving enough for me to be okay with the incestuous melodrama that actually made up it's plot. More importantly, the book for me possessed a strong philosophical argument about the Reality of the Good - and how we suffer needlessly when we are cut off from this source of light. Human destiny is a ethical destiny, and this is something that I too often forget, and of which I cannot too often be reminded. 

 

Dharmacakra (Buddhist Wheel) , Sun Temple, Orissa

Amblypygi

Still of Karin From Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly

This could easily be a sprawling post. But since Babbitt is already knocking at the door, I want to err on the side of too sketchy than too convoluted. What I intend to do is talk a bit in depth about the spider/web imagery in the story. I had a bit of an advantage in this respect because I have read Murdoch’s first novel, Under the Net, and recalled the passage in which she gives a ready meaning to this title. It appears in a passage in the book written by one of the characters (yes, imagine, Murdoch writing a writer!), and it goes as follows:

“All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net”

Just from this passage, we can see that the image of a net serves Murdoch as a symbol for that which mediates reality, with ‘mediate’ here taking on the double sense of giving access to reality (ie, ‘the situation’), but not IMMEDIATE reality. Murdoch, the old Platonist, uses nets in much the way Plato (the older Platonist) uses shadows in his allegory of the cave: namely, as that which comes between us and the truth AND which is taken as the truth.

In the above passage, it is “theorizing” that is seen as a net. Of course, any philosopher talking about futility of “theorizing” is actually decrying the impossibility of metaphysics: we make a thrust for reality, but find ourselves struggling (for 2500+ years now!) with a cumbersome and inescapable tangle of vague concepts, hidden contradictions, unquestioned assumptions, and dialectical dead ends. For all our books and sophisticated concepts (wiki the philosophical concept of “gunk”; or “grue”, if you want to see how decadently sophisticated are conceptual apparatus is!), and institutional machines publishing papers left and right, I doubt there has ever been a time that Philosophy has been more suspicious/doubtful/indifferent to ‘accessing the Real’.

Moving on. The net – as meditating the Real – transforms slightly to become a web in Bruno’s Dream; but the upshot is the same: we are caught up in something that immobilizes us while pulling us in contrary directions. This post will be about the human being as immobilized/torn apart by a distortive mediation of reality. There are three important occurrences in which this structure is found: the embodied self as web; the “They” as web; and thought/language/theory as web. In each case, to make this post more manageable, I will for the most part limit myself to citing and unpacking one pertinent passage for each occurrence. I’ll leave it up to you to find the thematic reoccurrences of them on your second, third, and forth reading of this book (you’re on a desert island for chrissakes!).

I. The body as obstructing the Real

The easiest way to see this correlation is by seeing the physical resemblance of Bruno to a fly caught in a web. Indeed, a close reading of the opening of ch. 11 actually follows up the image of Bruno feeling a pain in his chest with the image of a “fly struggling in a spider’s web”. The pain is described thus:

“His heart was missing jumping and missing beats like a runner who runs too fast and constantly stumbles. There was an acute pain in his chest in the region of the heart and a sense of constriction as if a wire which had been passed round his chest were being drawn tighter and tighter”

It is not only the succession of these images (of Bruno’s struggle, or the fly’s) but also the wording, of a wire being drawn tighter. If this isn’t an obvious enough allusion to a spider preparing a fly for consumption (which is non-metaphorically the body’s breakdown preparing Bruno for death), Bruno’s own final vision is of a “large housefly struggling” in the web of a spider which has “reached the fly and cast a thread around it” (302). This imagery, this correlation is repeated whenever we encounter Bruno: his helpless clawing at the ‘counterpane’ is clearly of symbolic significance (as it’s conspicuously frequent usage should cue us to), as is the brute fact that Bruno “won’t be coming downstairs anymore” (5). Bruno’s decaying body means that he is trapped – his feet are caged, his room is a prison. Why is this a mediated reality? Because, I think, of the fact that “At the end there’s nothing left to do. It’s all just thought” (125). If the body is our interface with the world, and if the world is the space for the play of our potentialities, then the only possibility left to a effectively bed bound man are possibilities of thought: “Those million-times-thought thoughts could still blind him, make him gasp with emotion and absorb him into utter oblivion of everything else” (16). Bruno lives in oblivion (forgetting – the literal meaning of ignorance to a Platonist) of everything because he is fixated on unsettled - and unsettling -  possibilities – Is there a god? (No, he thinks) Can newly gained wisdom work backwords? (No, he thinks) Can there be redemption? (No, he thinks) And most significantly, Did Janie die hating or forgiving him? This fixation causes him, among other things, to alienate Miles on his first – and for all he knew potentially last – visit.

Elaborating further the indebtedness to Plato, what we have here is the first cause of delusion in the Allegory of the Cave, namely, the simple fact that the prisoners watch the mere shadows, and cannot ascend to the light of day, because they are physically shackled to make them immobile. What possibility remains to them? To gaze upon and conjecture about mere shadows. So too Bruno is physically bound to his “prison” room, the curtains closed so only veiled light comes in at the edges, conjecturing about foregone possibilities.

II. The “they” as obstructing the Real

I’m not sure how familiar you are with Heidegger’s concept of the “they”. Basically it is who we (everyone of us) are, in our everydayness (ie., tranquilized into forgetting our mortality – not a necessarily a bad state, just a contrast with the limit situation of being (truly) faced with our inevitable End). The they-self is the unowned self. The public self. Another translation is the “One”, where this derives from expressions like “One doesn’t do that”, “One doesn’t wear white after labor day”, “One shouldn’t end a sentence in a preposition”. It stands not only for the self that is unconsciously governed by rules and customs of society – the ‘conformist’ self - but also the self for which off the rack clothing is made, the self that engineers consider when they design doors and chairs, ie., the self that is common to a people – a sort of shortcut of a self that makes society smooth and regular. It is specifiable to any role – the self of a woman, the self of a man, the self of an academic, of a pious churchgoer. These roles we inhabit spare us from deliberating on the innumerable options we are faced with each day, and give us ready-made maps for navigating the social world. Here, in Adelaide’s monologue, we see a thought processed completely bidden to social roles. 

“She wondered if life were like that for other people and thought it could not be so…And there were married people who knewthey would be together forever…And there were people who did important work and had their names printed on official lists. And people with grand families and property. There people belonged to the structure of the world, to which Adelaide did not feel herself in any way attached. She felt like something very small which rattled around somewhere near the bottom and could quite easily fall out of a hole without anybody even noticing. Her greatest certainty was Danby, and what kind of certainty was that? …He had absolute power over her status and her being” 131.

To live inauthentically means to mediate your own self-understanding by the understanding of others. Adelaide-the-maid (equating her to her social role) plainly regards herself through the reflection of society’s mirror. The validity of her own feelings is contingent upon whether “life were like that for other people”. The “structure of the world” is reduced to people secure in their own social roles, exemplified her by marriage, and people whose names appear on official lists, people with material prosperity. Unlike other characters, whose pasts are elaborated in terms of formative experiences and relationships, hers is mostly a list of jobs held. Indeed, “her greatest certaintly” (which to any philosopher since Descartes is the “I”, the self) is external, is Him, is Danby: her man. Moreover, the very next sentence effectively equates her status  with her being.

The consequence of her removal from reality is her crime: while most people are defined by their ethical code (which is tantamount to what kind of behavior they would never commit), it becomes clear that Adelaide’s own ethical code - exhibited by her claim that “…it would be perfectly wicked to steal from an old man” (53) – is just another form of inauthentic, idle talk – for the second that her Man (her status, her being) betrays her, her reaction – stealing the stamp - betrays her own self-ascribed ethical identity and her motive – to take revenge on Danby/to win Will’s favor – points to what matters to her:  not Danby, not refraining from wicked actions, but having a (any) man, which, we can surmise from what has been said earlier, is a way gaining recognition of her role as an appealing woman, of fulfilling her “need of reassurance of being wanted” 20.

The theme is not just that: Adelaide is inauthentic. It is that people’s Real identities, which are, to return to our inspiring quote, “unutterably particular” are mediated by socially generic concepts. Another way to put this, is that the “they” self exhibits the structure of replaceability.  This is a major theme in the book and I can only hint at its importance here: replaceability, qua mediating socially generic concepts, qua unReal. Adelaide’s delusion is exhibited through the interchangeability of men and of Nigel/Will in particular: “She was haunted now by a vision of a slim dark-haired boy about whom she could not decide whether he was Nigel or whether he was Will as he used to be” (46). The same with Miles with respect to Diana/Lisa when they are first introduced: “Which of them was it? The obscurity defeated his eyes as he watched the moving figure in silence” (67) [This proves to be a clever bit of foreshadowing on a second reading.]  Danby too, with Gwen/Lisa, the latter of which he tells, “I have only loved like this once before” (165). This debauched and incestuous interchangeability is I believe consummated when Lisa – hither too our most ethically “pure” character, exhibited in her almost saint-like kindness to a nearly complete (and monstrous looking) stranger – when she realizes, speaking to Danby, “I loved Miles but I could see you too” (296) – a switch that coincides with her self-interested desire to be “a woman”. In Bruno’s Dream, not only does one relate to oneself though a mediating concept – but so too does one mediate the other – not necessarily now by social roles, but by one’s own desires: the love object becomes a blank into which one may project the play of one’s own fantasy which even, in the case of Parvati/Gwen/Lisa, takes the form of phantasm (and this is not limited to romantic love, eg., Bruno’s need for Miles forgiveness). As Nigel says (who is the voice of reason if the story has one) “A human being hardly ever thinks about other people. He contemplates fantasms which resemble them and which he has decked out for his own purposes” (239)

The way that the mediated web of relations of intersubjectivity contribute to our delusion corresponds to the second stage of delusion in Plato’s cave allegory: “And if they [the prisoners] were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?” If our embodied state eventually catches us in a web, so too does our essential being-with-others, and the resultant inauthenticity which leads to self-delusion and a leveling of the particulars that make individuals interchangeable. 

III. Thought as obstructing the Real

So much for not sprawling.  This theme was already hinted upon – Bruno’s thoughts are so many spinning wheels going nowhere. He is lost in a web of possibilities. But it is not just uncertainty that immobilizes us – it is also a lack of resoluteness that pulls thought in all directions. Schopenhauer once observed that from a given concept you could move seamlessly in opposite logical directions and arrive at contraries. Sextus Empiricus remarked how any theoretical claim suspended us in a state of equipollence ie, that it pulled an unbiased thinker equally in either direction. So too the web that logical and verbal possibilities throws over the unbiased thinker (or the faithless thinker for that matter) leaves one rather helpless with respect to the Real. To Bruno:

“Death refutes induction” (8)

To be clear, this means that death makes any series incomplete, and so makes certainty regarding the general law-like or essential behavior of things forever impossible. But this also could mean that death defies induction – that because death is an experience we can only have once, we cannot draw inductive inferences about it. Bruno is, as it were, suspended between this unknowability of death (“What would it be like? Would someone be there?” (17) “Was there any point…in setting up the idea of being good now, of repenting or something?” (10)) and also his own “certainties” about death,  that death is NOT waking up, that life can NOT be redeemed, that at his stage there are no more purposes and indeed, that life is a dream which would “terminate at some moment and be gone, and no one would know what it had really been like” (10). Moreover, what seems to sweep ALL of it away (much in the same way the paradoxes of the liar and of relativity sweep themselves away) is the belief that nothing is real – just insubstantial dream stuff; how can he square this “unbearable lightness” with the his other claim, namely that “I’ve been through this vale of tears and never seen anything real. The reality…But now it’s too late and I don’t even know what it is” (304) That is, does Bruno believe that nothing is real, or that there is something real that he is missed out on? Does death refute induction and so remain a mystery but not necessarily a tragedy, or is it all just pitiful? What I read into it is that Bruno hides behind metaphysical thought; his reality is mediated/falsified by these thoughts because thought to him is a tool to reinforce his own self-pity. He irresolutely flutters from metaphysic to metaphysic, depending on which view will cast the most shadow on his being, and thought as a web of possibilities acts as another medium in which he struggles.

This impaired vision, this web of thought, this obscurity as Bruno stares into the abyss, is the final obstacle before Plato’s cave-dweller sees the sun:

“And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take and take in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?”

For Plato, the near-blind eyes must adjust to the light that reveals the Real, and this process is painful and involves a turning away as well as a reverting to old certainties. But Bruno, one of the many Cave-dweller’s in our story, will, I claim, see the Sun before it is too late. But that I will have to save for my next post.

IV. Conclusion: The Spider

Corresponding to all three of these webs in which our characters struggle – the bodily, the interpersonal, the metaphysical – is Nigel, who, assuming his true role as Spider, gracefully navigates these webs. He flutters and dances about, moving with ease and in unobserved silence. He meddles between all the characters but always with a sort lightness that balances carefully between mischievous and holy. And finally, his ability to use thought as a way of engaging the particular situation – he could be god. Or the false God. Or god could be spiders. It matters little. “Up any religion a man may climb”. Of course, like a Spider. Nigel’s sort of faith-without=certainty is in sharp contrast to Bruno’s certain-faithlessness, the latter of whom cannot “climb up” any religion because the thread that god lowers down to him keeps breaking off in his hand (which, incidentally, is Bruno’s FINAL dream (302)).

But to complicate things (as I am wont to do) I want to close by citing a famous passage from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment that undoubtedly influenced, perhaps even served as inspiration, for the spider theme in Bruno’s Dream. It will serve to remind us that, after all, all this DEUS EX ARANEUS is actually quite a repugnant idea. And raises the question of whether anything redeeming actually takes place in Bruno’s dream [a question which I hope to address in my review]:

“But what do you say to this argument (help me with it): ghosts are as it were shreds and fragments of other worlds, the beginning of them. A man in health has, of course, no reason to see them, because he is above all a man of this earth and is bound for the sake of completeness and order to live only in this life. But as soon as one is ill, as soon as the normal earthly order of the organism is broken, one begins to realise the possibility of another world; and the more seriously ill one is, the closer becomes one’s contact with that other world, so that as soon as the man dies he steps straight into that world. I thought of that long ago. If you believe in a future life, you could believe in that, too.”

  “I don’t believe in a future life,” said Raskolnikov.

  Svidrigaïlov sat lost in thought.

  “And what if there are only spiders there, or something of that sort,” he said suddenly.

  “He is a madman,” thought Raskolnikov.

  “We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that.”

  “Can it be you can imagine nothing juster and more comforting than that?” Raskolnikov cried, with a feeling of anguish.

  “Juster? And how can we tell, perhaps that is just, and do you know it’s what I would certainly have made it,” answered Svidrigaïlov, with a vague smile.

  This horrible answer sent a cold chill through Raskolnikov. Svidrigaïlov raised his head, looked at him, and suddenly began laughing.

Father Son Dynamic

A man on his deathbed reaches out to estranged loved ones for reconciliation. This is not a novel construct in fiction or reality, however, in Bruno’s Dream, Iris Murdoch trudges this familiar road with unique perspective. We encounter Bruno Greensleave in his “little prison box” (38) of a bed which will undoubtedly be his deathbed as we discover the decrepit state of this man “Real death was nothing to do with obelisks and angels. No wonder they all averted their eyes.” (8) This is a man who, although he may not be on death’s door, is certainly camped out on the front lawn. And with such close proximity to the end, he naturally takes inventory of his life which the reader is privy to. An arachnophile by nature and philatelist by nurture, Bruno seems to have missed the bus on his true calling (this phrase is actually used for Adelaide and I suspect it is a recurring theme for multiple characters) and looks back on a life of regret muttering “Poor Bruno, poor Bruno, poor Bruno….” (17) Even in the midst of his bitter nostalgia, he does not take responsibility for his decision to going into his father’s business of the printing press over pursuing his love of zoology (that is his father’s fault, obviously) nor does he own the consequences of his infidelity, allowing his wife’s call to him on her deathbed to go unanswered. But the most interesting relationships Bruno wrangles with, and one which I would like to delve further into, is the one he has with his son Miles as I am interested in Murdoch’s treatment of this father-son deathbed dynamic. The main question I am left to consider after reading the first six chapters is, what is the reason for Bruno’s decision to reach out to Miles? Or as Murdoch states, “Was there any point in trying even now to be reconciled whatever that meant?” (12) Especially when considering Bruno’s toxic relationship with his own father, whom he already blamed for his unfulfilled life and describes as “a source of negative energy, a spring of irritation and resentment, a hole through which things drained away.” (8) Although his father has long since passed away, this relationship is ostensibly set up as a major source of consternation for Bruno and, if his reflections are any indicator, it is very much still present in Bruno’s mind. So perhaps Bruno’s desire to reestablish a connection with his son is a way in which he can rewrite his own paternal relationship issues, simply an illustration of psychological displacement from father to son. I find this to be an unsatisfying answer, though, as the dynamic between Bruno and his father and Bruno and his son are very different. Bruno believed that “only through business, only through money, had he ever really communicated with his father” (8) and pursued a career in his father’s printing business because of this. Miles, on the other hand, did not feel the need to follow his father and grandfather’s legacy and Bruno “had admired his for refusing to go into the works, envied him perhaps.” (11) Not only did Miles clearly diverge from his father in terms of paternal communication/identification, Bruno was aware of this and even coveted Miles for this feat. Therefore it would be dubious to believe that Bruno’s desire is a mere displacement for his unresolved issues with his own father. When one reaches the end of their life, the possibility of infinite nothingness is a terrifying prospect. For this reason, many people turn to their religious/spiritual beliefs, particularly clinging to the notion of an afterlife, to assuage their concern that their last breath really is their last. By accepting the possibility of an afterlife, particularly the Christian notion of Heaven and Hell, one must therefore confront their actions on a moral level. For this reason do we find that people on their deathbed will reach out and make amends to people they perceive to have wronged. In Bruno’s case, he rehashes his unkind treatment to Miles’ soon to be wife, stating that he does not wish to have “coffee colored grandchildren” and also reflects on the fact that his infidelities to his wife may also be the reason that Miles “had forgiven nothing” (12) Moreover, with Bruno’s dismissal of his wife before her death and the subsequent realization that “the most precious thing of all was lost to him forever” (40) perhaps it is on a moral ground that Bruno wishes to reconnect with Miles. He wonders to himself “could Miles forgive him on behalf of the others (*I take this to be referencing his wife and daughter in law) or would it all be coldness and cruelty and an increase of horror?” (13) In his projection of what it would look like to see Miles again, he imagines “{Miles} would bow his head and look upon his father with great gentleness and the room would be filled with an aura of reconciliation and healing” (31) Surely the hope that Bruno has for his son’s forgiveness and the possibility of healing is a testament to a moral basis of Bruno’s motivation? Unfortunately, this explanation also falls short of expectation for “as one grows older, thought Bruno, one becomes less moral, there is less time, one bothers less, one gets careless” (10) In fact, as the novel progresses, it is clear that the offenses which he has committed against his son (to the point of needing reconciliation) do not bother him at all. “It was his accusers and not his crimes which troubled him” (31) So again I posit the question of why? Why is it that Bruno believes “there are things I can only talk to Miles about” (33) when regarding the potential of his “life confession”? The most reasonable answer to be found is actually provided in the text with the caveat that Bruno’s choice is most likely an ill-advised and foolhardy one. Specifically, “it was a mere convention after all that one ought to be on good terms with one’s son or father. Sons and fathers were individuals and should be paid the complement of being treated as such.” (12) Bruno is not reaching out to Miles because he is psychologically tormented by his relationship with his own father (he might be, but that is not the reason for his communication with his son) nor is he looking for forgiveness and reconciliation because he fears eternal damnation and seeks redemption. It is simply because it is what one does at the end of one’s life. The conception that “blood is blood” is sociologically ingrained in our culture and we often follow this convention even when it can suck the life out of us, as it did with Bruno and his father. This also provides a reason for why, even after making his decision and insisting Danby write the letter (not that very day of course) he immediately begins to rethink his decision as “{Miles} could hurt him now terribly…it was better to die in peace.” (37) Clearly, this convention, although ingrained, does not supercede one’s own natural selfish considerations. The caveat that sons and fathers should be paid the complement of being treated as such is also supported historically in literature. In considering celebrated father/son pairs, in the vein of Odysseus and Telemachus or King Henry and Prince Hal, one common theme they share is the vast amount of distance these individuals have between them for the majority of the tales. It is only with this distance that the sons come to respect their fathers and vice versa. It is with knowledge of this that I am concerned about the results of Bruno’s conventional crisis.

Introducing: Bruno, Danby, Nigel

Dali, The Metamorphosis of Narcissus

In this post I want to discuss what I see as a kind of parallel construction in the characterization techniques with which Murdoch introduces three of her principle characters in the first three chapters, viz., Bruno, Danby, Nigel. This parallelism is not simply a reiterated structure, but informs what has gone before - that is, certain figures and tropes take on new definition and significance as the newly introduced characters are foregrounded. 

From the title, to the opening sentence and chapter, we are clearly meant to take Bruno as our 'hero' (but that in what Northrup Frye calls the ironic mode - in which the hero is inferior in power/knowledge to his environment/other characters). It is important to establish right away that the narrative form, though third personal, is located towards the subjective/limited poles of the axes of interiority and knowledge. This 'third person personal' perspective is established immediately by the heavy use of intensional and modal propositions in the opening paragraphs. "The room seemed to be dark"; "Perhaps he had nodded off over his book"; " Danby must not know that Nigel broke the Simla cup. Bruno must remember to say that he broke it himself". The narration is decentered, but still lends voice to the interior happenings of the characters, while also remaining limited by their limited perspectives; in this case, the narrator remains as ignorant of the time of day, or just how he fell asleep, as Bruno.

Curiously, the story begins with the enigmatic statement, Bruno was waking up. The most ready reading of this use of the past progressive verb tense is to indicate that Bruno was in the (open-ended process) of waking up. As opposed to a past perfect action - Bruno woke up - whose logic is sequentiality - A took place. Then B took place. So C took place., etc. "Perfect" - as opposed to progressive - means complete, the literal meaning of perfection. To say that Bruno was waking up therefore implies that Bruno had not (yet) woken up. There is an undeniable reference to the Proustian process of waking up, as we see that the sleeping/waking distinction goes beyond the physiological, discrete states of conscious/unconscious: re-engaging the world, reorienting oneself in it is not a passive and instant occurrence, but an active achievement - to awaken, we are reminded, is a "success" verb, ie.,one can be waking up without succeeding in waking up, while one cannot, eg., be going for a walk and not succeed in going for a walk. 

Significantly, while we begin with an ongoing, contextualizing process (which acts much more like a description of a state of affairs than the description of an action; compare: It was a dark and stormy night); however, we are never explicitly given a cue to suspend this context/action - either that it has been interrupted or accomplished. From the outset, Bruno is located indefinitely in a space between sleeping and waking (as a consequence, we already have a reading of the title from the first sentence, as this describes the dream state). All of these themes are immediately confirmed/repeated by the subsequent statement - "The room seemed to be dark." There is of course immediate tension between the suspended claim to the rooms seeming darkness and the rooms being dark - a room that looks dark just is dark (or: seeming is not a success verb). But once again, the act of light perception is made into a process, one mirroring the process of waking up; light is the ground for seeming - light (broadly, metaphorically) opens up the field of perception (broadly, metaphorically) and in the opening of the light, objects seem this way or that way; but in the transitionary state of waking up, the way the light itself (the ground of seeming itself) may seem this way or that. This inoffensive little phrase denoting an old man's eyes slowly adjusting to his surrounding actually has profound and undeniable (for someone as indebted to Plato as Murdoch) philosophical connotations - the focus of the suspending function of seeming is not a claim about a given experience of the world, but a claim about the conditions of possibility of experience at all. This of course echos and expands all the philosophical/spiritual potency of the notions of waking/sleeping/dreaming hinted at in the first sentence, which claims all three as true, namely, That:  Bruno was asleep, Bruno was awake, Bruno was dreaming.

These grammatical aspects of both sentences also firmly establish us in medias res - "beginnings" are impossible: that we always start in the middle of things, or, more aptly here - as well as hint at large philosophical issues we are sure to encounter - they also initiate a stylistic theme that will act to characterize Bruno's own temperment: that of suspense/suspension. The opening passages of the book are riddled with suspension, incompletion, stopping short: From the indefiniteness of the first two sentences - en train de se reveiller, seeming - we find Bruno holding his breath, and testing/wondering: again, interruptions, suspension of the processes of breathing, knowing respectively. This is followed up by a conditional (which suspends its possible consequents) - whose alternatives are bad and worse - a conjecture about what he was doing when he fell asleep, and then an explicit reference to "that dream": which already echos the title, as well as possesses the demonstrative pronoun "that" which both imputes/suspends the reader's common knowledge of a specific dream; finally, it closes with the enigmatic, vaguely foreboding, and subtly suspenseful reference to the "hatpin" - a object from which all the murkiness of this first passage hangs (sus-pend of course contains the notion of pendere: to hang). 

The suspension started in the opening sentence arguably ends with the opening of the next paragraph: "It was not night, thank God. The cowering mind and body fidgeted, discovering themselves in time." Allegedly, Bruno's 'waking' involves, for reasons we will discuss soon, orienting himself in time (ie, afternoon, night). But this sentence too contains noteworthy suspensions: first, is the use of the definite pronoun "the" rather than the personal pronoun "his" to modify mind and body. This suggests a residue of alienation that has not been overcome in fully "waking up". Indeed, the mind/body have discovered "themselves" and this initiates a theme that will be prevalent for Bruno's condition: that both the mind and the body do not belong to him, but in dying have taken on a monstrous life of their own.  But even more remarkable is the playful/profound ambiguity of the prepositional phrase, "in time". This reads two ways, and I would claim that neither reading predominates: discovering themselves in time means they discover themselves after all, or at last, or eventually. This responds directly to the indefiniteness of the waking process, signifying its completion. As in statements like, She'll come around, in time,  Time here takes on the significance of a distance that the natural processes of resolution must traverse. But the other reading is that waking means: mind and body find themselves within time, that is, not of being in a particular here/now, but being subject to the conditions of hereness and nowness (note the deeper meaning of the "reflexive" form of this verb, as well as its resonance with the german befindlichkeit, an existential term that Murdoch no doubt was well familiar). Here time is metaphysical: the form of consciousness (Kant) or the horizon for any understanding of being (Heidegger). Time is commonly understood in this way as container - it is the empty space within which all things (mind and object) commune; as such it is no-thing. Here waking up is finding oneself thrown into the world, suspended in the nothing (to use some language that is not entirely my own).

It is here that we are introduced to the existential themes that will predominate Bruno's situation. Bruno tests the light because he anxiously anticipates the time of day (or night) and he anticipates these because they in turn signify whether he will have a playmate (Danby or Nigel) or whether he will be left alone to sleeplessly "gasp with emotion" from his "million-times-thought-thoughts" (11), which consist mainly of regret over his life lived, and uncertainty whether there is any time/point in trying to redeem things now. There is also reason to see Bruno as caught up in an inauthentic, or unowned, existence: from the very Sartrean claim that he existed for himself mediated by the opinions of others, glimpsing "himself only in the averted eyes of Danby and Adelaide…” (6), to his worrying more about the practical affairs of his death - his "death duties" - rather than confronting his imminent  death itself (6), to his claim that he would rather suffer for eternity in purgatory because this would contain a godlike judgment on his life, which, again a la Sartre, would absolve him of his own responsibility to create his own values (11). Indeed, Bruno's transformation into a monster means: he is alienated from his mind, from his body, and his guilt has become "a monstrous unwilled part of himself" (11). 

This transformation into a object (a 'being-in-itself', not a free 'being-for-itself') is elaborated with Bruno's identification with his red bath robe - the pathos-laden last garment he will wear, and which will outlive him. This contains some very famous Platonic symbolism - it recalls the argument, given by Cebes in the Phaedo, which moves from the sophistic argument for the immortality of the soul: after a man dies, upon seeing the coat he was accustomed to wearing, one might argue that the man must still live, since a man lasts longer than a coat. This is of course rejected, since a man outwears many coats in a lifetime, and yet there can/will be one which outlives him. But this leads to the line of reasoning that the soul is like the man, and it wears many coats - or bodies. But from this possibility of reincarnation, it is concluded, nothing can be said about immortality, because, like the last coat a man wears, any body may be the last one the soul wears, and so any impending death could be final, even given that the coat analogy holds. It is of course too early to read too much into this allusion, but it obviously resonates with Bruno's preoccupation with his impending death and his inability to resolutely grasp his own mortality. [The Phaedo has further important correspondences: one argument for immortality consists of equating life/death with waking/sleeping and showing how the one comes out of the other.]

The next chapter/character is Danby. In a large way, he is defined by contrast with our encounter with Bruno. Danby is introduced as "in bed with Adelaide the maid service" and this at once contrasts Danby's beddedness with Bruno's bedboundness - the bed as both "love nest" and prison - both communal and solitary - and it also sets up a characterization style for Danby - Danby exists in and through his relations to women. Indeed his relationships with Linda, Adelaide and Gwen are all treated before anything is positively said of him - and when it finally is, it is "Danby was attractive to women".  And while both Bruno and Danby are defined to some degree by their multiple relationships with women, Danby is seen as a good deal more adept at this, by virtue of the simple fact that he arranges them diachronically, rather than synchronically (ie., Maureen/Janie fiasco). 

If the narrative style that came to condition Bruno-foregrounded scenes was characterized with suspense, by contrast, Danby is often narrated with short, sometimes tersely factual sentences, which are permitted to change rather abruptly, with a sort of light hearted indifference: RE the transition from Linda to Adelaide: "Then one day she went back to Australia. THey exchanged three letters. Six months later Danby had taken up with Adelaide. She was sweet, she was there" (18). Then it jumps to Gwen. All this serves to show Danby's ability to cope with change and loss, and this of course contrasts strongly with Bruno's own stuckness and regret. Indeed, Murdoch boldly drops the word "stuff" twice while introducing Danby, which is clearly meant to indicate not a puerile vocabulary of the author, but the simplicity of the subject, of Danby - who's life energy was "cheerful stuff", and the 'basic stuuf of the trade' as what he loves about his job. 

And though the simplicity of Danby's character may border on stupidity or vacuity, it is clear that he is coping with the contingencies of his life in his own way. His consolation for the rather senseless death of his wife is telling: “It was just the sort of lunatic thing she would do. It was typical. Comic, really” (26). Here is Danby's thought process: he goes from tragic fact, to personal trait, a word: comic. Generalized, Shrugged at, laughed at. Terser, simpler. Comic relief. 

This ability to cope with change insouciantly is elaborated in the very first words from Danby's mouth and the opening lines of the chapter, offset almost like a dedication or epigram: "O Adelaide, sweet adelaide, The years may come, the years may go..." This is it seems an Irish folk song sung for the departed - it goes on, "But the loving thoughts of her who's gone, forever will remain". What's telling here is that while he inserts Adelaide's name in the tune, it is surely his late wife that the ode is meant - it is thoughts of her that remain with him. After all, as it goes on in all it's easy transistioning abruptness, as Adelaide is chattering sweet nothings, we find suddently that "Danby was asleep. Dreaming of Gwen" (26). Again, we see the ease with which Danby can fall asleep, in contrast to Bruno's "drama of waking and sleeping", as a sort of easiness with life, an innocence and freedom from guilt and care. But there is more than just a dying old man filled with regret and a easy going young(er) man in a woman's company. For there are many hints that Danby's own cheer is to some degree deluded. The easy transition from woman to woman, his insertion of Adelaide into his wifes ode, his departing Adelaide in his bed for Gwen in his dreams - all this might have consequences that Danby is too dense to be aware of. Danby's own self-understanding is as harmless "comic relief". His naively simplistic ethical slogan is put forward immediately: “He thought that one should do what one wanted on the whole as long as one did not make people unhappy” (21). This might be called the leanest possible ethical theory. But it goes on: "...and he saw no reason why he should make Adelaide unhappy." (20). Not only is this terribly, unromantically unambitious, it also immediately causes the reader to suspect that he does not make Adelaide all that happy, at least in certain respects. She "suits" him. He "supports" her. What could be simpler?

But Danby too is lying in bed in the dark, and though his vestments are not a red robe, but a living breathing woman "glued to his side", he too sits in the half dark, half light - he lies comfortably, looking at "his knees outlined against the thin curtains which glowed faintly with the light of the street lamp..."(21). And though perhaps he is not as veiled as Bruno, who sees only faintly the light that shines through the edges of his red curtains, the image is still one of artifical light coming through a veil (remember we're dealing with a Platonistic author here!). But still, while Bruno's gaze at the curtain or veil is one of angst, Danby's is one of 'relaxation' - a simple man, happy to lie on his back just like that. Subtly enough, this image of a man in good health with his knees up refer us back to the miserable state of Bruno's own lower extremities - him struggling to lift his own feet, “scrabbling inside the metal cage which lifted the weight of the blankets off them” (3) while Danby has pulled up his feet, by lifting his knees, quite naturally. 

This theme of legs becomes unpacked further with the introduction of Nigel in Chapter 3. Nigel proves to be the most nimble: his is introduced not lying, as the other characters, but sitting "cross-legged" and as he moves to standing, it is pointed out that his legs remains crossed thoughout the motion. He "glides" to his room - where he turns and turns, or - let's just come right out with it - spins and spins: Nigel the spider. From the gracefully articulated legs, to the spinning and the black clothing , to his sitting, listening, unobserved, in a dark corner, solitary. Even his "concentric universe" is the image of a spider's web - and his furniture is too like a spiders web: "against the wall...sleek and flat" (27) This all serves to contrasts with Bruno's useless limbs and his feet that are crushed by his blankets and which are curling up, rounded, distorted, much like a spider pretending to be dead. [We will later find that Nigel was a dancer.] 

And if Danby's room has thin curtains, and Bruno's thick ones that let light in at the edges, Nigel's are light proof, "thick as fur". As the chapter unfolds, we find, through pronouncements of varying sensicality, of varying degrees of cliche, that Nigel is some sort of mystic - "All is one" - and probably a nihilistic one at that, which is evinced not only by the presence of the word, Annihilation, but also by his hearing without responding to Bruno's cries (importantly, Bruno's name is not mentioned - he is only an 'old man', which serves to show Nigel's devotional detachment and abstraction). Nigel's curtain's are as thick as fur - he has shut out the outside sources of light (and locked the door behind him) in order to cultivate the inner light - which is here symbolized with the candle. Indeed we seem to observe him in something of a mystical communion: "The presence is agony, punishment, stripes, the extended being tortured into a single point."(29). This Presence is presumably the unnamable All = One. And notably, the sentence itself is in the present tense. Moreover, the whole chapter takes place in the present tense. The effect of this choice is not only to cleverly refer to the 'eternal now' that the mystic seeks, but also to add an timelessness to Nigel's - to the mystics - ritual: it is happening even now, as you read. Of course, the most cogent reading is that Nigel himself is rooted solidly in the present. For the last paragraph begins, "Later...", and so we are forced to attempt to locate these strange, present tense passages within the temporal structure of the narrative. 

Furthermore, it is with Nigel that the sentences begin to become fragmented: the entire passage beginning "Concentric universe" is sentence fragments. Even as the metahphysics is one of unity and clarity, the sentences fragment and their content becomes more opaque. Nigel however is no Siddhartha; Bruno's apprehensiveness that Danby doesn't like Nigel (which is not yet confirmed by Danby) and Adelaide's uneasiness with him become our own. Even the word oft used to describe how good NIgel is with Bruno has an equally double reading: it is "uncanny" which again might just serve to intensify  his skill, or it may take on its reading as the infamous translation of Heidegger's unheimlichkeit - being-not-at-home - a reference that Murdoch could not have been unaware of. To be not at home is to be a foreigner - to be seen as a stranger or an outsider. This sentiment is often cited as the one that gives rise to spiritual journeys that culminate in epiphany. However it also refers to the fact that Nigel's motives - even his facility with Bruno, what they do, what they talk about - are completely veiled to us. And his being something of a spider incarnate is relevant too: because insects are disgusting, even frightening to people, even if they are harmless miniscule little beings. They make us uneasy on a level we can't quite explain.  And while the others lie in beds, Nigel is prostrate on the floor; and this too should resonate with both valences: the ground as the the foundation, the ground as what is lowest. Nigel, we might say, is something of a wild card so far and the range of his potential is the greatest. 

I think beyond the observations I've put forward above, we can make some generalizations about Murdoch's characterization style that we can anticipate will carry throughout. We have already seem how the narrative voice takes on the aspect of the character which it is foregrounding. This fact alone raises questions about relativity. Prevalent themes are of  light/darkness, sleeping/waking, and again and time - as extension and "extensionless point". There is also something of a Spinozistic mind/body identification: so far, we see the not only the character's bodies, but their entire physical situatedness (their clothing, their relations or lack of relations to others, their physical locations) as mirrors or expressions of their mental situatedness. 

Our characters, different but somehow actualized possiblities that lie on the same axes, all live under one roof, and yet in three chapters we are in three different worlds: Bruno in his prison - whose only option of communication is crying out loudly, with no guarantee of reply; Danby well rooted in his half underground extension - his "semi-basement annex" and Nigel in his upstairs (attic??) cloister. Prison, annex, cloister - where is the house? It is unfolded from within as an ununified location which is held together by cries, whispers (sssh!), and spies.  From without we know of its general shabbiness, and also that “The chimneys of Lots Road power station towered above, suitable extensions of that murky infertile earth” (21) - the chimneys standing for the menacing external powers that dominates this household, and the infertile earth indicating that our cast is childless, and perhaps all older than 40. 

Each chapter brings up the notion of dreaming.  This seems the least insidious for Danby, who states in his offhand way, "We all live in a private dream world most of the time. Sex is largely in the mind" (24). Danby's dream is perhaps that his behavior is harmless and without consequent. He is insensitive to the Otherness of his women - they are, as the image suggests, like Eve from his rib - is his delusion, which may be broadened as we see his complicity/interference with helping Bruno reunite with Miles over the issue of who gets the "stuff". Nigel's dream is the old mystics - that difference is a dream -  dualisms (love and death) are dissolved and all is one. Bruno's dream, so far anyway, is that everything is dream - like Nigel, except there is no Oneness that remains after awaking. "This dream stuff...would terminate at some moment and be gone, and no one would ever know what it had really been like" (10). That everything will be as though it never was is Bruno's dream, and as we find him, this is his only consolation for the burden of his life, which is, at this stage, nearly tantamount to the burden of his past; if he cannot forget then maybe, then certainly, the cosmos itself must forget everything. 

De Chirico, The Anguish of Departure

Review

I have no idea what to expect. That was the prevailing sentiment I had prior to picking up Midnight’s Children and, surprisingly, it lasted up until the very last page. I chose to read this novel because it was unlike the standard tomes staring back at me from my bookshelf. I was ready for a new perspective and the subject matter, India’s independence, was unfamiliar territory. I hoped to catch a glimpse of a culture that has always seemed glaringly foreign to my scope of experience. Even the title, Midnight’s Children, had a romantic allure that seemed full of poetical promise of a new generation, meditative musings, possibly a twilight sequence. This is going to be great, I told myself, I have no idea what to expect.

            The opening sequence with Aadem Sinai in the Kashmir Valley and the introduction of the perforated sheet was sublime. It was undoubtedly the highlight of the novel for me. Kashmir felt like such a mythical, almost holy, place and the characters I encountered, Aadem, Tai, Ghani and his daughter, were fascinating individuals brimming with back-stories and future journeys that I was bracing myself to read. Unfortunately, this was the back-story and I, as the reader, would not stay in Kashmir for long. But because of the beauty and tranquility of that initial sequence, I maintained hope that the characters would at some point return to that serene valley. In the meantime, however, I was entreated to a narrative that became increasingly haphazard as the novel went on.

            The concept of the novel, we’re reading a story about a man writing a story and therefore we are reading that story as well, has the potential to provide an interesting perspective in comparison to your standard, run of the mill, omniscient narrator novels or even the first person, stream of consciousness narration. Yet in the case of Saleem Sinai, this mode is downright frustrating. If there were a competition in beating around the bush, Saleem would have the competition beat (please forgive the pun) The way in which he insists on the importance of an event over and over (e.g. the incident in the washing chest, Shiva, the Widow, etc) and still fails to describe the event had me ready to hurl his story across the room or, taking a queue from Padma, just walk away. Why didn’t I? Well for a large portion of the novel there was a promise of “magical realism” lingering in the back of my mind, more specifically, I was hoping that the grandeur of the titular children, the MCC, would come to a head and dazzle me the way I wanted to be, and after reading chapter upon chapter of Saleem’s rants, deserved to be dazzled. Here again, I had no idea that this promise would remain unfulfilled and that the MCC would “end before it even began” as one member prophesized.

            Perhaps Saleem’s rants would not have seemed so arduous had it not been for the bevy of characters presented who were so thoroughly cloying and so far from redeemable that I cared very little for their fates. That is not to say that I didn’t give them a chance – I wanted to believe that Amina would remain faithful, or that Ahmed would sober up and finally rewrite the Quaran, or even that Saleem would grow up and maturely utilize the gift he had been given (in this case, I was telling myself that the ramblings of his narration were simply brought on by the spectre of death looming) Nevertheless these characters seemed to shirk every possible chance they had to redeem themselves to the point where, when the house caved in or when they were about to fall into six million pieces, I simply shrugged and said “good riddance”. (the one exception here would be Aadem’s revelation that he had “found God” and subsequent flight into certain death –I was not ready to let him go and his seeming descent into madness was hard to read)

            One appreciable fact of the novel for me was the correlation of Indian history with the fictitious lives of the characters. I learned about a fair number of historical events which occurred in India in the 20^th century thanks to either their description in the novel or their reference to which I went and read with interest. Although it helps that I knew next to nothing about this time period and someone who isn’t a complete neophyte to this period would probably be familiar with these facts, I was happy to learn about them in this context.

            So, is this a “good” book? I am told that it is but you’d be hard pressed to find me in that chorus. I do not have a taste for magical realism (or postcolonial literature), even when used in such a disappointingly clever way. And although I am still intrigued by the faraway enchantment of Indian culture I think I’ll leave my pickled chutney in the cabinet for the winter because although I have no idea what to expect, at this point, I just do not care.

Literally

Bisson Freres, The Portal of Saint Ursinus at Bourges, rue du Vieux Poirer, 1854

From: Literary Theory, An Introduction, by Terry Eagleton

"In the early 1920s it was desperately unclear why English was worth studying at all; by the early 1930s it had become a question of why it was worth wasting your time studying anything else. English was not only a subject worth studying, but the supremely civilizing pursuit, the spiritual essence of the social formation. Far from constituting some amateur or impressionistic enterprise, English was an arena in which the most fundamental questions of human existence - what it meant to be a person, to engage in significant relationships with others, to live from the vital centre of the most essentials values -- were thrown into vivid relief and made the object of the most intense scrutiny" (27)

"Society is in crisis [I.A.] Richards argues, because historical change, and scientific discovery in particular, has outstripped and devalued the traditional mythologies by which men and women have lived. The delicate equipoise of the human psyche has therefore been dangerously disturbed; and since religion will no longer serve to retrim it, poetry must do the job instead" (39).

"The process of reading, for reception theory, is always a dynamic one, a complex movement and unfolding through time. The literary work itself exists merely as...a set of 'schemata' or general directions, which the reader must actualize. To do this, the reader will bring to the work certain 'pre-understandings', a dim context of beliefs and expectations within which the work's various features will be assessed. As the reading process proceeds, however, these expectations will themselves be modified by what we learn, and the hermeneutical circle - moving from part to whole and back to part - will begin to revolve. Striving to construct a coherent sense from the text, the reader will select and organize its elements into consistent wholes, excluding some and foregrounding others, 'concretizing' certain items in certain ways; he or she will try to hold different perspectives within the work together, or shift from perspective to perspective in order to build up an integrated 'illusion'. WHat we have learnt on page one will fade and become 'foreshortened' in memory, perhaps to be radically qualified by what we learn later. Reading is not a straightforward linear movement, a merely cumulative affair: our initial speculations generate a frame of reference within which to interpret what comes next, but what comes next may retrospectively transform our original understanding, highlighting some features and backgrounding others. As we read we shed assumptions, revise beliefs, make more and more complex inferences and anticipations; each sentence opens a horizon which is confirmed, challenged or undermined by the next. We read backwards and forwards simultaneously, predicting and recollecting, perhaps aware of other possible realizations of the text which our reading has negated. Moreover, all of this complicated activity is carried out on many levels at once, for the text has 'backgrounds' and 'foregrounds', different narrative viewpoints, alternative layers of meaning between which we are constantly shifting" (67).

"What [Jakobson] contributed in particular to poetics...was the idea that the 'poetic' consisted above all in language's being placed in a certain kind of self-conscious relationship to itself. The poetic functioning of language 'promotes the palpability of signs', draws attention to their material qualities rather than simply using them as counters in communication. In the 'poetic', the sign is dislocated from its object: the usual relation between sign and referent is disturbed, which allows the sign a certain independence as an object of value itself. All communication for Jakobson involves six elements: an addresser, an addressee, a message passed between them, a shared code which makes the message intelligible, a 'contact' or physical medium of communication, and a 'context' to which the message refers. Any one of these elements may dominate in a particular communicative act: language seen from the addresser's viewpoint is 'emotive' or expressive of a state of mind; from the addressee's standpoint, it is 'conative', or trying for an effect; if communication concerns the context it is 'referential', if it is oriented to the code itself it is 'metalinguistic' (as when two individuals discuss whether they are understanding each other), and communication angled towards the contact itself is 'phatic' (e.g., "Well, here we are chatting away at last"). The 'poetic' function is dominant when the communication focuses on the message itself -- when the words themselves, rather than is said by whom for what purpose in what situation, are 'foregrounded' in our attention" (86).

"Genette discerns five central categories of narrative analysis. "Order" refers to the time order of the narrative, how it may operate by prolepsis (anticipation), analepsis (flashback) or anachrony, which refers to discordances between 'story' and 'plot'. "Duration" signifies how the narrative may elide episodes, expand them, summarize, pause a little, and so on, "Frequency" involves questions of whether an event happened once in the 'story' and is narrated once, happened once but is narrated several times, happened several times, happened several times and is narrated several times, or happened several times and is narrated only once. The category of 'mood' can be subdivided into 'distance' and 'perspective'. Distance concerns the relation of the narration to its own materials: is it a matter of recounting the story ('diagesis') or representing it ('mimesis'), is the narrative told in direct of indirect or 'free indirect' speech? 'Perspective' is what might be traditionally be called 'point of view', and can also be variously subdivided: the narrator may know more than the characters, less than them, or more on the same level; the narrative may be 'non-focalized', delivered by an omnisicent narrator outside the action, or 'internally focalized', recounted by one character from a fixed position, from variable positions, of from several character-view-points. A form of 'external focalization' is possible, in which the narrator knows less than the characters do. Finally there is the category of 'voice', which concerns the act of narrating itself , what kind of narrator and narratee are implied. Various combinations are possible between the 'time of the narrative' and the 'narrated time', between the action of recounting the story and the events which you recount: you may tell of the events before, after, or (as in an epistolary novel) while they happen. A narrator may be 'heterodiegetic' (i.e. absent from his own narrative), 'homodiegetic' (inside his narrative as in first-person stories), or 'autodiagetic' (where he is not only insdie the narrative but figures as its principle character)...one important aspect of discourse to which [these distinctions] alert us us the difference between narration - the act and process of telling a story - and narrative - what it is you actually recount. When I tell a story about myself, as in autobiography, the 'I' who does the telling seems in one sense identical with the 'I' whom I describe, and in another sense different from it...." (92).

"The 'healthy' sign, for Barthes, is one which draws attention to its own arbitrariness - which does not try to palm itself off as 'natural' but which, in the very moment of conveying a meaning, communicates something of its own relative, artificial status as well. The impulse behind this belief...is a political one: signs which pass themselves off as natural, which offer themselves as the only conceivable way of viewing the world, are by that token authoritarian and ideological. It is one of the functions of ideology to 'naturalize' social reality, to make is seem as innocent and unchanging as Nature itself. Ideology seeks to convert culture into nature, and the 'natural' sign is one of its weapons" (116).

"The most intriguing texts from criticism are not those which can be read, but those which are 'writable' - texts which encourage the critic to carve them up, transpose them into different discourses, produce his or her semi-arbitrary play of meaning athwart the work itself. The reader or critic shifts from the role of consumer to that of producer...literature is now less an object to which criticism must conform than a free space in which it can sport...A specific piece of writing thus has no clearly defined boundaries: it spills over constantly into the works clustered around it, generating a hundred different perspectives which dwindle to a vanishing point. The work cannot be sprung shut, rendered determinate, by an appeal to the author...the biography of the author is, after all, merely another text, which need not be ascribed any special privilege...It is language which speaks in literature, in all its swarming, 'polysemic' plurality, not the author himself. If there is any place where this seething multiplicty of the text is momentarily focused, it is not the author but the reader" (120).