Odd Jobs (81 page)

The Apocrypha
seems to me not only an extension of Pinget’s world but a consummation of it, his best (if comparative terms can be applied within a created microcosm so consistently indeterminate) novel since his best-known and most popular work,
The Inquisitory
(1962; Grove Press, 1967). The Apocrypha (a plural term whose root sense of “hidden” was applied by the Church to non-canonical works, which in time became magical in the popular imagination) are being composed by the Master—tortuously annotated and revised notebooks that he is keeping, and that his heirs are trying to edit. “Unravel the intricacies of these chronicles which delight in getting in a tangle, there’s a secret plan somewhere there.… Upsurges of fervor which soon flag and leave him prostrate in his chair, his manuscript scattered all over the room, monologuing on the theme of the book to be written, of the adventure of art, and of the chaos in his mind.” The Apocrypha are, among other things, the pages we hold in our hands. Pinget’s recurrent method becomes a metaphor for its subject here: “The essential often seems to be brushed aside in favor of the adventitious as if some occult tyrant has adjured the scriptor only to approach the truth at a tangent.” The Master’s notes to himself become Pinget’s self-admonitions: “Beware literary tone”; “Clarify terms.” The elusiveness of the endlessly complicated text serves as a metaphor, too, for decay—the Master’s decaying mind, the erosions of anamnesis, the loss of circumstance within memory. His notebooks, often called “gramarye”—an archaic word associated not only with grammar but with necromancy—are, then, “secret wellsprings of this fight against nothingness.” And, as the book moves
toward its climax, its texture merges with the revisions of the annual natural cycle, the variations from year to year: “The work would take shape according to the rhythm of the year, a forgotten arcanum.” The years are almost interchangeable: “Leafing through the book he finds that the words he’d underlined aren’t on the same pages, they’ve been displaced from where they were the previous year.… Convinced that in the country things barely change from one year to the next, the first memorialist out of either laziness or lassitude might have confined himself to copying some of the passages dealing with the June of the previous year.”

The temporal structure of
The Apocrypha
is clear enough: the year, marked by its seasonal weather and flowers and holy days, goes by twice, revolving about the figure of a shepherd most vividly seen in December. Stephen Bann, in a critical article of thirteen pages appended to this novel of not quite one hundred thirty, explicates the pattern and also establishes clear textual links between
The Apocrypha
and Virgil’s
Eclogues
and the Psaltery. The figure of the Good Shepherd, of course, is where paganism and Christianity overlap; early statues of Christ show a beardless youth with a lamb on his shoulders, and lines from the Fourth Eclogue were interpreted throughout the Middle Ages as Virgil’s magic prophecy of Christ’s birth, out of a virgin, in the reign of Augustus. The prettified shepherds of classic eclogues, the Good Shepherd, and the shepherds who came to the Nativity in Luke’s Gospel all blend into one another while the
image
of a shepherd, in the Master’s roving purview, migrates from a shattered cup to a zodiac-rimmed picture printed in an ancient book, “an old book he found at a junk dealer’s, a modern mind would be ill at ease with it the subject matter is so jumbled up, commentaries on this or that work of Virgil.” Mr. Bann, with his sometimes bristling critical vocabulary (“plunged in his pettifogging apocalypse … is a vivid example of this reiterated catachresis”), pounces on Pinget’s increasing use of Christian symbolism and sees the author as “anticipating the concerns of an important direction of French thought and criticism” and helping to establish “a claim for the seriousness of theological tradition in a post-psychoanalytic culture.” This comes too close to making of Pinget a kind of latter-day Bernanos. Pinget’s fiction has always been haunted and obsessed with the past, and Christianity is Europe’s crumbling past: “the whole shebang of the centuries which now they’re old project a terrifying shadow into their enfeebled hearts in what they’re looking for something that ought to be the soul, which was
it exactly, a precious gift now confused with the fear of death.” On the other hand, the image of the shepherd does appear, in the course of
The Apocrypha
’s double annual round, to become whole. The imperfections repeatedly noted in both its ceramic and printed forms (“a tiny shard wrongly glued,” “a bit of mould obliterates the original contour of the face and hands, just look how clumsily this ink line has been drawn to try to restore it”) have by the last paragraph been, as if miraculously, absorbed into the perfection of an icon simultaneously Christian and humanist:

Iris Murdoch, too, toys with a classical model in her new book.
Acastos
binds together two Platonic dialogues, one of which has actually been produced in London as a short play. Miss Murdoch has taught philosophy at Oxford and published a book,
The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists;
her own Platonism informs the intellectual and erotic seethe of her tireless novels, whose characters reside half in a solidly realized England and half in a translucent realm of immaterial passions and ideas. “Yes,” she and her favorite characters seem to keep saying, “the Good and the True and the Beautiful
do
exist, compellingly, bafflingly, absolutely.” Plato himself, as a somewhat minor character in these two dialogues, asserts, “People know that good is real and absolute, not optional and relative, all their life proves it,” and, when challenged by Alcibiades, gets quite sputtery about it: “Good must be pure and separate and—absolute—and—only what’s completely good can—save us—”

Alcibiades scoffs, “But your perfectly pure good thing does not exist, that’s the trouble, dear, all the world proves
that!
” And Plato cries, “It
does
, it
must
—it’s
more real
—I can’t explain—” Plato, here a callow youth of only twenty, has already developed a lot of bullying mental maneuvers. God, too,
must
exist: “Religion isn’t a feeling, it isn’t just a hypothesis, it’s not like something we happen not to know, a God who might perhaps be there isn’t a God, it’s got to be necessary, it’s got to be certain, it’s got to be proved by the whole of life, it’s got to be the magnetic centre of everything—” Miss Murdoch is the philosopher, and knows better than I how true to Plato’s mature thought is this rather Kantian or
Kierkegaardian sense of God’s stern obligation to exist. Socrates gently says, “Then your ‘ground of things’, your ‘it must be so’, is really ‘I want it to be so’, it’s a cry of fear?” Plato begs off, and even Socrates seems to concede more than a strictly materialistic and relativist standpoint would warrant: “The most important thing in life is virtue, and virtue isn’t a mystery, it’s truthfulness and justice and kindness and courage, things we understand. Anybody can
try
to be good, it’s not obscure!”

Yet of course goodness
is
obscure, to an age that has heard it said that the state is organized violence, that humility and submission help perpetuate the powerful in their crimes, that altruism is a kind of neuroticism, that a repressed “drive” (Freud) becomes self-destructive, and that “slave morality” (Nietzsche) should be despised and supplanted. Miss Murdoch has the aesthetic problem, in contriving these new Platonic dialogues, of how many of modern thought’s dark chaotic voices to admit to the forum: to stay entirely within the intellectual frame of Periclean Athens would be a pointless tour de force, and yet her exercises would be hopelessly campy did they feel any more up-to-date than they do. “Public morality … 
is
breaking down” no doubt expresses a timeless complaint, but “love is energy” seems more a contemporary formulation, put into Plato’s mouth: “You see, love is energy. The soul is a huge vast place, and lots of it is dark, and it’s full of energy and power, and this can be bad, but it
can
be good, and that’s the work, to change bad energy into good.… All right, it’s sex, or sex is it—it’s the whole drive of our being and that includes sex.” A distinctly modern view of the evangelized lower classes as well as a West Indian accent creep into a servant’s refreshing testimony on these great matters: “Like little fish in sea am I in God’s love! All I eat, sleep, work, do, inside his love.… I am not good man, I have many sin, many fault, many, many. I need my God. I am all bad, he is all good. I have bad thoughts—”

But religion and its conundrums are enduring enough to straddle epochs, and the dialogue on religion is much the livelier one. The dialogue on art, which was the one to enjoy performance (in the National Theatre, in 1980), seems relatively insipid, in part because its argumentation is confined to examples of art no later than the fifth century
B.C
. Even as a provisional definition, Miss Murdoch’s Callistos could never, had he seen a single Rauschenberg construct or Pollock painting (or read a Pinget novel), have described art as “copying into a world where everything looks different and clearer, and there’s no muddle and no horrid accidental things like in life.” After Céline and Kafka, can we still, as Socrates
urges, “thank the gods for great artists who draw away the veil of anxiety and selfishness”? Plato is made to say, “Art softens the demand of the gods. It puts an attractive veil over that
final
awful demand, that final transformation into goodness, the almost impossible
last step
which is what human life is really all about.” This is thrillingly put, and in tune with the relevant chapters of
The Republic
—but is, say, a fur-lined teacup or a latrine displayed on a museum wall such an attractive veil? The phrase hardly seems true even of
Oedipus Rex
, or of the satyrical activities painted onto Greek vases.

When we turn to
The Republic
or to any of the authentic Platonic dialogues, we realize how much a novelist and sentimental
Neo
platonist Miss Murdoch is in her adroit and charming imitations. The original atmosphere was much more Spartan: in
The Republic
, Socrates proposed to ban poets because human emotion, which poetry indulges, is “irrational, useless, and cowardly.” Poetry “feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up; she lets them rule, although they ought to be controlled, if mankind are ever to increase in happiness and virtue.” Dry reason and manly endurance should rule “the sympathetic element.” Callistos’s babbling suggestion that art is “exciting and sexy” would have fallen on stony ground in the fifth century. The element of homoerotic byplay
^§
pervades Miss Murdoch’s dialogues and verges on making them farcical playlets. As if in one of her irrepressible novels, each character strains to rattle off in his own direction; Socrates is a kindly presiding tutor but a shadow of the remorseless logical engine who bulldozes his way through Plato’s dialogues, reducing all others to yes-men. Plato wrote in a time when truth was thought to be attainable, when permanent conclusions could be achieved and built upon; this live possibility, so near the beginnings of reasoned thought, throws a white light upon the stylized figures of his debates. Miss Murdoch writes in a time of multiplying shadows, of built-in indeterminacy and ambiguity, when Eros is the only apprehensible god. Her animated but highly inconclusive dialogue on art ends with Socrates claiming, “In truly loving each other we learn more perhaps than in all our other study.” The excitable young Plato tells his teacher, “I’m so happy. I don’t know why. I love you so much,” and, runs the stage direction, “
Socrates puts his arm round him
and leads him off
.” This note of affectionate fellowship among high-minded men and boys also ended Miss Murdoch’s last novel,
The Good Apprentice
, and seems strangely satisfying to her. She and Pinget are almost exactly the same age, and in their different ways show a high tolerance for ambiguity. Models of creative integrity in a slack age, they sing perversely rapturous hymns to muddle.