The Sea, the Sea

arrested in the aging shell of himself. The place no less than the phrase “Shruff-” (with its etymology of metallic refuse or the kind of scrub wood used for kindling) piling up at an “-End” (where all the ladders start) becomes a speaking emblem of his ragged, foul, and haunted nature. (The dreams he has are part of the haunting.)

A further potent rendering of skewed truth occurs as Charles is gathering his resources (he thinks, to write about Clement); there is another significant page break. (These breaks typically announce a passage of time of fairly short duration-overnight, or at most a few days.) Then he recounts the following half-awake vision about a premonition he ascribes to the wrong “presence”:

Since I started writing this ‘book’ or whatever it is I have felt as if I were walking about in a dark cavern where there are various ‘lights’, made perhaps by shafts or apertures which reach the outside world. (What a gloomy image of my mind, but I do not mean it in a gloomy sense.) There is among those lights one great light towards which I have been half consciously wending my way. It may be a great ‘mouth’ opening to the daylight, or it may be a hole through which fires emerge from the center of the earth. And am I still unsure what it is, and must I now approach in order to find out? This image has come to me so suddenly, I am not sure what to make of it.

When I decided to write about myself of course the question arose: am I then to write about Hartley (p. 75)

One notes the canny device (is the narrative voice of Nicholas Mosley apropos here?) of choosing a strategic point in the utterance for turning a statement of uncertainty into a question: “And am I still unsure what it is, and must I now approach in order to find out?” It is by this device that Charles doubles the suspense of the paragraph, as if to say, I think I am uncertain what it is, but the closer I come to the thought, the more a suspicion with a shape I can identify detaches itself from these shadows. By increasing the suspense, Charles also performs the sleight of hand by which the previous withholding of information seems less culpable. He thinks (wrongly) that he knows what his great topic is.

There has been a subtext to which we were not privy until now-another person beyond Clement Makin whom the narrator believes to have been the “alpha and omega” of his life. This other person has been peripherally present in numerous veiled asides: “someone I had loved and lost”; “I never (except for once, when I was young) considered marriage”; Lizzie was “the only woman (with one exception) who never lied to me”; while cousin James in the war was in India, at Dehra Dun, “I had my own problems, notably first love and its after-effects”; Charles reserves the right to use the phrase “in love” “to describe the one single occasion when I loved a woman absolutely. (Not dear Clement of course.)” Even scattered across seventy pages of text and often occurring when more rambunctious revelations are afoot, these hints reveal the narrator’s reliance upon a still-operative daydream of the past. Gradually Murdoch, through Charles, brings this sweet shadow into the light, where she is given a name: Arrowby’s childhood sweetheart was Mary Hartley Smith, in comparison to whom he writes that “all the rest, even Clement, have been shadows.”

Charles’s decision to think about Hartley, even to place her name on the page, comes about as the subliminal result of his seeing now and then in the village south of him an old woman, who resembles his first love. Exploring the indefinite effect of these “glimpses” leads him to meditate on the imagery of the cave. Hartley is still, for him, a true light-source, whereas his first mistress Clement was only a fire-edged shadow. The terms recall Plato’s in his condemnation of false art (the shadow thrown by the fire of mediocre art), as contrasted with true art (the light of the sun). Murdoch’s long meditation on Plato and on art uses the two terms of this image. However, we would not need the philosophical text to validate the symbolism of Charles Arrowby’s meditation of wandering and discovery in the dark limbo of suspended and omen-filled time he seems to have entered with his removal to the northwest coast of England. He is moving about in his own dark. Then lo! the old woman in the village turns out to be Hartley, and Charles hurls himself into a maelstrom of hilarious conniving to “get her back.” Not once during the two hundred pages of his pursuit and not very edifying capture of Hartley does he reflect on the pertinence of his many earlier cautions about the difficulty of seeing into a family from the outside: “It may be that my uncle and aunt thought that my upbringing was too strict. Outsiders who see rules and not the love that runs through them are often too ready to label other people as ‘prisoners’ ” (pp. 59-60). But Charles reflexively interprets Hartley’s marriage as her prison. Not only this; in stealing her away to Shruff End he literally imprisons her. His defense is that “in the teeth of all the evidence, we belonged to each other.” In the teeth of all the evidence-Charles’s proud banner. As Borges wrote about the great Roman historian, “Tacitus did not perceive the Crucifixion-although his book recorded it.”

To be sure, Charles is a frail vessel, given to fantasy, greed, and unscrupulous manipulation. And while these adjectives suggest a personality that has hardened, we can also see him as unformed, arrested midway. This arresting of development has brought with it all the supersimplified polarities that attend on exaggerated images of ourselves. (There was a “rival” figure, and a “true” mother of more joyous good cheer than his own, a sad, sweet, ineffectual father, and a radiant, innocent sweetheart.) Binding all these extremes together is a series of extreme responses, inextricably woven into each other, envy, shame, and rancor: envy, of his wealthy uncle Abel’s family, including the joyous Aunt Estelle and cousin James; shame at the disloyalty this entailed toward his poor and ordinary parents; and rancor toward the larger world that made his small family seem pinched and sad. His career allowed him to “shout back at the world” because he discovered that theater was essentially “an attack on mankind carried on by magic” (p. 33, my emphasis).

A further device for obtaining our consent to such a deluded being is what Seymour Chatman calls “interest point of view,” a term for the gradual imbedding in a work of fiction of the vantage established by one character’s desires; we might also call it the libidinal interest. It is not surprising that a work of fiction would cohere around the protagonist’s desires; what is unusual is an author’s exhaustive, deliberate, and artful manipulation of this perspective until we empathically attribute desire and response in cases where the narrative cannot or does not. Murdoch, with her fascination for first-person narrators and for exclusionary characters in other novels-demons of possessiveness like Hilary Burde and Austin Gibson Grey and George McCaffrey who, like Charles Arrowby, are driven by jealousy-takes interest point of view to profound extremes; it is part of her ingeniously thorough placement of the character within both past time and the novel’s lived time. It works like a buried clue. Even when the novelistic actor may not be focused on a moment or even when his consciousness is closed to us (as often occurs here in letters addressed to the protagonist and in passages of reported dialogue), the reader assumes his angle of vision. Invisible to the narrative locally, the interest point of view derives from a work’s overarching perspective as the main character’s history guides us to make associations and to take sides, defending the character’s “interests” while he is away. We understand that Charles relishes the discomfort he causes one of his former troupe’s character actors, the homosexual Gilbert Opian (who is also aging), when he lands on certain ill-chosen words of Opian’s, who is trying to explain the new non-sexual menage he has formed with Lizzie Scherer:

“It’s about Lizzie and me. Please, Charles, take it seriously and don’t look like that or I shall cry! Something has really happened between us, I don’t mean like that sort of thing, but like real love like, God, in this awful world one doesn’t often have such divine luck, sex is the trouble of course, if people could only search for each other as souls-”

“Souls?”

“Like just see people and love them quietly and tenderly and seek for happiness together, well I suppose that’s sex too but it’s sort of cosmic sex and not just to do with organs-”

“Organs?”

“Lizzie and I are really connected, we’re close… we’ve stopped wandering, we’ve come home… Now everything’s different, we’ve talked all our lives over together, we’ve talked it all out, we’ve sort of repossessed the past together and redeemed it-”

“How perfectly loathsome.”

“I mean we did it reverently, especially about you-”

“You discussed me?”

“Yes, how could we not, Charles, you’re not invisible-oh, please don’t be cross, you know how I’ve always felt about you, you know how we both feel about you-”

“You want me to join the family.”

“Exactly!” (p. 90)

Poor Gilbert is so nervous he blunders into a younger generation’s babble-style (all those likes), not to mention his clumsy provisos about sex. Charles’s derision of this honest nonsense is clear, and although we have no proof of his “thought,” pleasure is involved here, too, particularly when