The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) (3 page)

Here Murdoch grants that erotic love has a potential for violence and extreme selfishness; but she insists that it is also the greatest source many people can ever have of an experience of being forced out of their own ego, by the sheer blazing power of another person, toward the vision of something true outside the self. Nor is this an isolated passage. In another novel of the same period,
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
, a similar reflection occurs, not in the thought of any particular character, but, so to speak, in the author’s own voice. These passages suggest that we ought to see Bradley Pearson as a more complex figure than the pathetic self-deluded character depicted by the four postscripts.

And indeed, to the reader of the entire novel, it is really the four postscript writers, rather than Bradley, who emerge as deluded egoists. Thoroughly obsessed with the self, they each misrepresent the world in quite comical ways. (When we say “misrepresent,” we are, of course, trusting Bradley, but then he gives us so much more, in terms of human vision and insight, than the flat worlds of the postscripts. These narratives are so thin, so transparently self-serving, that they just
cannot
be true: they wear their egoism on their face.) Christian, while in some ways generous and full of an admirable energy, is vain and mercenary, totally lacking in any sense of the spiritual side of life. Her incomprehension about the value of art betrays her; and her comic conviction that Bradley is in love with her betrays her further. Francis is moving in his affection for his old friend, but he sees the world through the lens of a simplifying universal theory, always a Murdochian vice; for this reason he cannot really comprehend the complex reality of an individual person. Rachel has staked her whole life on a series of lies about Bradley and herself. The closest we get to thoroughgoing evil in this novel is in characters like Rachel, so profoundly deceptive and self-deceptive that the reality of other people simply ceases to exist for them. As Bradley observes, evil is rarely the result of a “conscious leering evil intent.” Much more often it is “the product of a semi-deliberate inattention, a sort of swooming relationship to time” (181).

Of the four narrators, Julian is the saddest, so shell-shocked by the events involving her mother, father, and lover that she has retreated from people into a kind of austere antierotic art that cannot, we feel (and Loxias confirms), be very much good as art. So, rather than undercutting Bradley, the poverty of the four Postscripts actually illuminates, by contrast, all that is rich, generous, and true in the vision of the world from which most of the novel is narrated.

When we return to Bradley with this contrast in mind, we discover that much of his story enacts, in fact, the story of the lovers in Plato’s
Phaedrus
. For years, the center of Bradley’s world has been himself: his sterility as an artist, his envious friendship with Arnold Baffin, the successful popular writer. His passion for Julian opens his eyes and allows his art, ultimately, to see truth—as the mysterious editor of his manuscript remarks, vindicating Bradley against the older Julian’s denunciation of the erotic element in art. “Of course it [sc. art] is to do with truth,” Loxias writes, “it makes truth. But to that anything can open its eyes. Erotic love can” (406). Anxiety and envy have closed Bradley in, but passion opens his eyes, permitting him to see the other characters in the variegated and richly human way in which they appear before us.

In fact, as he looks back on his love, Bradley persuasively articulates a very Platonic and also a very Murdochian theory of vice and illumination that seems a pretty good explanation of what happens to him. In general, he argues, we do not see others truly. Our anxious personal emotions “cloud the view, and so far from isolating the particular, draw generality and even theory in their train” (73). Egoistic anxiety is the root of all the vices (175). Because of anxiety, Bradley suggests, we cannot see other particular people too precisely; their sharp particularity would be too threatening, would give us too much pain. We therefore “defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing” (74). This crude vision of people and things is an essential prelude to evil: “When we do ill we anaesthetize our imagination. Doubtless this is, for most people, a prerequisite of doing ill, and indeed a part of it” (162). In general, the mind of an everyday human being is like one of the souls in Plato’s cave, nourished by comforting shadows (184, 200, 277). (We are clearly to connect this insight with the comic description of the novels of Arnold Baffin, crude melanges of philosophical theory and exotic generality.)

Love, Bradley now argues, is for most people the only force powerful enough to break the grip of the anxious ego. The lover is “dazzled by emergence from the cave” (200). In the blinding joy of the vision of beauty, the lover attains a wonderful loss of self, and something like the regrowing of the wings that Plato’s
Phaedrus
describes. Erotic love gives Bradley wings of joy, a sense of the blotting out of self, a turning away from customary fears. The contemplation of the beloved is an end in itself (236).

Now of course anxiety may, and does, arise in the context of love. The self more or less inevitably returns, revives (201, 236). In fact, “The presence of the loved one is perhaps always accompanied by anxiety” (230). But, continues Bradley, “this one grain of darkness cannot be accounted a blemish. It graces the present moment with a kind of violence which makes an ecstasy of time” (230). Anxiety and love are antagonists, not accomplices, and love is the only force powerful enough to prevail against the anxious ego. Because we are imperfect, the triumph of love, and its vision, are also imperfect. Bradley’s love is, in this way, marred by jealousy, by sexual anxiety, and by a failure to imagine Julian’s distress at Priscilla’s death.

Nonetheless, it is evident that Bradley is freed from egoistic self-preoccupation, to the extent to which he is, thanks only to the intensity of his desire, not in spite of it. His experience of love does include the virtuous actions Murdoch names—letting the beloved go with good grace, knowing when to give up, behaving well when one wishes to behave otherwise. In fact, although he does not praise himself, we understand well that love has brought him to a virtuous action extreme in its consequences—for it is clearly for Julian’s sake that he conceals the true facts concerning her mother’s murder of her father, and takes the conviction and sentence with staggering courage. It is also thanks to love that he becomes a real artist: for we are to think that the manuscript we read is his first humanly rich and truly perceptive work of art. It is subtitled “A Celebration of Love,” and its editor, P. A. Loxias, is a proxy for the god Apollo himself. (Loxias is one of Apollo’s common epithets.)

There are certainly doubts about the vision inherent in Bradley’s love. We wonder, for example, how truly he sees Julian, when he sees her as a “divine form straying among mortals.” The fact is that she is a confused adolescent girl, in some respects very ordinary. So, is he seeing her, or is he seeing
through
her to something general that she merely instantiates? These are worries about Plato and Murdoch’s Platonism, however, not doubts about the extent to which
The Black Prince
is, indeed, Platonic. And surely, Bradley would reply, to see the divinity in Julian is a truer sort of vision than the cramped mean-spirited vision of Rachel and Arnold Baffin, who treat her dismissively as an ordinary not very interesting girl. Love sees truly, in part, because it
does
see divinity rather than the muddled everyday.

Surely, then, despite all the imperfections of Bradley’s love for Julian, the Platonism of Murdoch’s “Celebration” of the erotic has the last word. In her postscript, Julian, grown older but hardly wiser, expresses an anti-Platonic view: true vision is “very very cold.” “Erotic love never inspires art. Or only bad art.” “Love is concerned with possession and vindication of self. Art with neither. To mix up art with Eros, however black, is the most subtle and corrupting mistake an artist can commit” (402). Love, she argues, is inherently narcissistic, antithetical therefore to the outward-reaching, truth-directed vision of good art (403). This view of the world and of Bradley Pearson is, however, repudiated—first of all, internally, since the self-conscious arty prose of Julian Belling rings false, gives us the sense of a stunted personality and imagination. More important, it is repudiated by Loxias himself, who makes fun of her “very
literary
piece,” and asserts that erotic love
can
open the lover’s eyes to the truth.

 

But now we arrive at a deep problem: that of the relationship of erotic love to the erotic work of art. For this is a love story, to be sure. But it is also, very self-consciously, an art story, whose culmination is not the love itself, but the turning of love into art. And although there may be Platonism and Platonic vision in the love story, it is Bradley the artist who very artfully constructs his story as a Platonic story. The theme of art’s relationship to life is signaled to us again and again—by casting Bradley as a blocked and unsuccessful writer for whom Eros opens the door to erotic expression, by the constant self-conscious allusions to the process of narrating his life story, by his Foreword, with its literary self-consciousness about style and form, and, above all, by the Editor’s Foreword and Postscript, which are given authority by the name of the mysterious editor. One of the worries we have about Bradley’s love is a worry about the literary artfulness with which it is narrated: can anything this carefully constructed actually contain a loving vision of a particular beloved?

We must ask two closely related questions, then, about art and life in this book. First, if there is a true and generous vision of Julian Baffin in this book, whose vision is it? That of Bradley the lover, or that of Bradley the recollecting artist? Would a true vision of an individual be possible to someone who is a lover without being, later, an artist of his love? Second, if the vision that animates the text and that is given Apollo’s authority belongs to the artist, not the lover, or to the lover only insofar as he retains, in his solitary life of art, traces of his former loves, what does this say about the role of Julian, the real woman in the work before us? Is there, after all, anything like a true vision of a particular woman here, or is the particular awkward reality simply source material for the creation of a work that goes beyond her? (Both of these questions are central for Proust as well.)

To the first question, we must reply that the vision that is validated in the work is the vision of Bradley the recollecting artist. The proof of the truth of his vision is in the story he tells, so rich and variegated and deep, by contrast to the crudeness of the four Postscripts. And repeatedly he draws attention to moments of illusion, anxiety, and error in Bradley the man, in such a way that we do not ever have stable confidence in the vision of the man as he goes through his bewildering adventures. We do acknowledge that eros has opened his eyes. But the fruit of that initial experience, the fruit that is really valuable, is the work of art before us, and the vision that it contains. As he says in his own Postscript, “The book had to come into being because of Julian, and because of the book Julian had to be.... This is her deification and incidentally her immortality. It is my gift to her and my final possession of her” (381). Only in the work of art has Bradley finally shaken off fog and anxiety.

What this means, too, is that it is the artwork, or the artist as creator of the artwork, who possesses moral virtue and the capacity to see another truly, which is the essence of Murdochian virtue. The man never gets this far—until he is separated from all human society by imprisonment, left in solitude to write his own love story. Thus the Murdoch of the novel seems to agree with Proust’s narrator, who holds that our loves must be studied by reflection in a condition of detachment from love, before the literary work of art that recaptures them can ever come into being. The vision of love itself is inherently unstable and inconstant. Only through the life of art do we ever succeed in possessing all that we have loved, in the sense that only then does our mind embrace the past experience with unerring specificity and sureness.

This being the case, we must now ask our second Proustian question: where in the erotic work of art is the real-life loved one? For Proust, “infidelity toward the individual” is a prerequisite of the appropriate creative posture. The artist is delighted not by this or that particular love, but by a general form of love and desire that emerges from all the concrete experiences. Reaching back to a particular love in memory, the artist will now view the beloved as a model who has “quite simply been posing for the artist at the very moment when, much against his will, they made him suffer most.”

Now, Murdoch is in many respects less austere than Proust, as is the novel she has written. She does not suggest, that is, that the artist must abstain from dwelling on the particular loved one in order to search for general forms, and she represents Bradley as obsessed with the memory of just one beloved, Julian, rather than as engaged in a search for essences through the recovery of several previous loves. Julian, in consequence, appears in the text with a clarity and specificity that is always denied Proust’s Albertine, whose individuating traits fluctuate inconstantly through the novel. Loxias’s account of art, moreover, seems more inclusive and generous than that of Proust, more open to the idea that art can contain the messiness of a real particular. In
Metaphysics
, similarly, Murdoch stresses that art (unlike moral theory, she says) can tell the truth about “the whole entity,” the human being, with all the idiosyncrasy and contingency that characterize a real life. It does so in large part by being funny, since the funny is “a great redeeming place of ordinary frailty.”

So the case is not simple. And yet, I believe that there is reason to see in
The Black Prince
the Proustian view that the main point of the particular loved one is to be served up in the work of art. Given that the work, and not ordinary life, contains the vision of truth, what else could Bradley say? Julian, as he well says, had to be in order for the novel to be, and it is in the novel that she most is. Even though it is also true that the novel is inspired by her and could not be without her (something that may not be true for Albertine), nonetheless, her real being is ultimately of interest primarily insofar as it does contribute to the vision of the work.