Characters and Characterization
in
Iris Murdochıs The Good Apprentice
In 1987 Harold Bloom, the doyen of American literary criticism, delivered the following pronouncement on Iris Murdochıs new novel: If The Good Apprentice marks the start of her strongest phase, and it may, then a great novel could yet come, rather surprisingly in the...form of the 19th-century realistic novelı (1). A novelist whom Bloom considers to have achieved that greatness is George Eliot, and in his book The Western Canon, Bloom enlightens us as to the nature of her achievement. He praises Eliot as a writer who, like other the geniusesı Bloom identifies, such as Emily Dickinson, Blake and Shakespeare, rethought everything through for herself,ı going on to identify Murdoch as a modern writer who is Eliotıs descendantı in possessing an unallied directness as a moralist that frees her from any excessive self-consciousness that would inhibit her willingness to judge her own characters, implicitly and explicitlyı (2). While Bloom observes that, as a twentieth-century writer, Murdoch cannot hope to attain Eliotıs nineteenth-century possession of moral certainty,ı he describes her elsewhere as the most traditional of modern novelists for people, for story, for metaphysical and erotic revelations, and for an ironic social wisdomı (3).
In this paper I will analyze one point of dissimilarity between the two novelists, and that is in their notion of characterization. In all of George Eliotıs works and, perhaps especially in her most satisfying work, Middlemarch, there is a tragic inevitability about each characterıs fate. Ironically, this sense of inevitability co-exists with a persuasion of each characterıs possessing free will. Even despite Eliotıs predilection for assuming the role of omniscient narrator, a nineteenth-century novelistıs habit which Murdoch successfully avoids, as we read Eliotıs novels, there is a level at which her characters curiously seem to exist as individuals freed from authorial restraint. It is as though they can exist independently of their creator. It is undoubtedly a measure of Eliotıs skill and assurance as an author that many of her creations appear fully-rounded people whose lives are dictated by their own personalities rather than by any kind of authorial determinism. It is their own natures which will direct the course of their lives, in the sense that Thomas Hardy once pronounced that character is destinyı.
Is this true of Murdochıs characters? It may be as well here to contemplate what we mean by the term characterı. In the Bloomsbury Good Word Guide characterı is described in these terms: The word character can be used of the distinguishing qualities that make up individual people or things, of people with unusual traits, of people portrayed in works of fiction, and of moral firmness and integrityı (4).
The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms amplifies and
refines this simple definition. It quotes E.M. Forsterıs distinction between flatı and roundı characters, with the former defined by a single idea or characteristic and the latter exhibiting the three-dimensional complexity of real peopleı. The Glossary also distinguishes between staticı and dynamicı characters, with the former remaining unchanged throughout the course of a story and the latter changing, (whether for better or for worse) in response to circumstance and experienceı (5).
How important is characterization in a realisticı novel? The Variety of Fiction accords it the highest importance, quoting Arnold Bennettıs observation that the foundation of good fiction is character-creating and nothing else....Style counts; plot counts; originality of outlook counts. But none of these counts anything like so much as the convincingness of the characters. If the characters are real the novel will have a chance; if they are not, oblivion will be its portionı (6).
Middlemarch is filled with charactersı recognizably different from each other, whose dissimilarities are not superficial but extend to a fundamental level, to their acts, thoughts, and the very voices in which they speak. We can open the book at random, peruse a conversation, and immediately know who is talking to whom, and why their views on any given subject either agreeı or disagreeı. We are convinced of their reality in the sense that Bloom describes in his book How to Read and Why: Characters in great novels are not marks upon the page, but are post-Shakespearean portraits of the reality of men and women: actual, probable, and possible onesı (7). Eliot populates her novel not only with people who are three-dimensionalı in the sense described above, but who are dynamic,ı with the proviso that it is only characters who are sufficiently intelligent and self-aware who will be able to benefit from experience: the sensitive intellectual Dorothea Brookes learns bitter lessons about herself and others after the deluded exercise of her marriage to Casaubon although her shallow and self-complacent sister Cecilia will not and indeed cannot change her views on life in any meaningful way in the course of the novel.
Again, is this true of Murdochıs characters? In this paper, we are focusing on The Good Apprentice, the novel which had inspired Bloom to hope that Murdoch finally would achieve a greatı novel. Although Bloom readily acceded Murdochıs genius, at the same time he conceded that a writer can be a geniusı and yet fail to produce a great novelı (8). Whether or not Murdoch achieved her great novelı in her subsequent book, The Book and the Brotherhood, is an issue which needs to be addressed separately.
The Good Apprentice is a novel about manıs struggle to be good. Its protagonist, Edward Baltram, is consumed by guilt. He has inadvertently caused the death of his best friend, Mark Wilsden, by feeding him a sandwich which he secretly had laced with a hallucinogenic drug. In Edwardıs brief absence, Mark has fallen to his death from a window. Edwardıs agony is compounded by the accusing letters he receives from Markıs mother, who knows that Edward has lied to the police to conceal his own culpability. Yet Edwardıs grief and guilt need no prompting; they are already boundless and threaten to destroy him. To the consternation of his friends and family, Edwardıs misery threatens, if not to drive him to suicide, at least to precipitate a nervous breakdown.
who has renounced sex and a promising academic career to live like a monk, helping others; Edwardıs father, Jesse Baltram, a famous artist who has become a virtual recluse, living in an isolated spot of England with his second wife and two daughters; and Harry Cuno, who, in Jesseıs absence, has acted throughout Edwardıs life as his real father.
This being an Iris Murdoch novel, Edwardıs immediate family is sustained and enlivened by an extendedı one - comprised of a complicated web of relationships of people related by blood and by propinquity or circumstance. There is the vivacious and attractive Midge McCaskerville, the younger sister of Edwardıs mother, who died in his youth; her husband Thomas, an elderly psychiatrist; and their son Meredith - a precocious, solemn thirteen-year old. Completing the supporting cast are Willy Brightwalton, his wife Ursula, and their son Giles.
Midge is the vibrant heart of this body of friends and relatives and helps to link them - and the plot of Murdochıs tale. Edward fondly recalls kissing her in his adolescence; Willy is her professed cavalier and admirer; she is actually having a secret affair with Harry Cuno; she longs to meet Jesse Baltram again, whom she met in her youth, when he was her elder sisterıs lover; when she briefly meets Jesse, they immediately fall into a passionate embrace, precipitating the end of her relationship with Harry and the beginning of Midgeıs being hopelessly infatuated with Stuart.
Does Iris Murdoch convincingly draw the people which inhabit the world of The Good Apprentice? If we are judging it by Harold Bloomıs criterion of its constituting an advance on a realisticı novel and one approaching greatness,ı the answer must be a decided no. For all the talk that goes on in this, as in any Murdoch novel, the conversations which preoccupy so large a part of the book are curiously counter-productive. They seem designed rather to deflect than to promote true communication. They are often conducted rather as diatribes or as self-absorbed monologues rather than as dialogues which might genuinely assist the characters to understand each other. There is scarcely a pretence of the courtesy of one characterıs actually being willing to listen – carefully and non-judgmentally - to another.
It seems naturally to follow that misunderstandings between the characters abound. No-one, for example, understands the depth and intensity of Thomasıs love for his pretty young wife. This ignorance may be understandable on the part of some characters in the story, but it seems less than plausible in those who should know Thomas well. Perhaps it is selfishness that prompts Harry Cunoıs anxiety to promote the idea in his mistress that her husbandıs affection for her is superficial, hoping to inspire Midge to leave Thomas and to live with him, but it is less believable that Midge herself has no idea of the important role she occupies in Thomasıs life.
The characters in The Good Apprentice are flatı in the sense offered by the Bedford Glossary. They seem to be distinguishable from each other only in their each possessing one or two defining characteristics or responses towards life. Edward is guilty and feels anxious; Stuart is earnest and longs for goodness; Harry is sensual and relaxed; Midge is attractive and vivacious; Thomas is gloomy and thoughtful. Their voicesı are only distinguishable from each otherıs by virtue of the clues offered by context in any given conversation. A few characters in Murdochıs novel are dynamicı being apparently capable of being changed by their experiences. Edward Baltram, for example, finally is able to transcend his guilty misery sufficiently to contemplate continuing his existence and even to draw hope from life, but his character before this transformation has not been sufficiently delineated for this change to have great force or persuasiveness.
But Edward Baltram is the most fully roundedı character in The Good Apprentice. He is surrounded by mainly flatı and staticı characters. There are also the inevitable mysterious individuals who tend to appear in any Murdoch novel, who seem to possess unusual powers, to whose thoughts we are not privy, who remain enigmas. In The Good Apprentice these include Jesse Baltram, his wife and two daughters, all possessed of amazing talents and capabilities and who exert undue influence on all the other characters in the story.
To return to George Eliot, her characters are not only believable but they also inhabit a recognizable universe. Just as in Jane Austenıs classic Emma, in which the town of Highbury plays a role as important as any of the novelıs characters, so it is no accident that Eliot entitled what Bloom identifies as her masterwork,ı Middlemarch, after the village which forms its setting (9). We are introduced to its farmers and businessmen, to its publicans and citizens. There are the rich and the poor, the idle and the ambitious. Just, too, as Austen insists on the necessity of fastidious dissection of the financial situation of her characters, so Eliotıs are preoccupied by work and its rewards, by money or by the lack of it. Again, these novels depict what any of us might think of as the recognizably realı world.
As Bloom points out, the world created by Murdoch is rather different than the one which most of us might consider reality,ı observing that he thinks of Murdoch as a writer of romancesı and fantasiesı rather than of conventional novels (10). In The Good Apprentice, as in many of Murdochıs novels, the characters live with no visible means of support. They are wealthy and leisured individuals divorced from any social context apart from the family and friends they are able to meet at will. Although they are identified by Murdoch as practicing professions, with Thomas McCaskerville, again, conveniently, a psychiatrist, to whom Stuart and Edward can confess their problems, they are able to live luxurious lives and to devote remarkably little time to their jobs. The setting of the story is presumably London, apart from those sections devoted to description of Jesse Baltramıs secluded home on the Norfolk coast. That home, called Seegard,ı is a place of magic, fantasy and mystery where the normal rules of existence do not apply.
Murdoch not only depicts an unbelievable universe populated by unbelievable characters, but she also encourages her readers to find her setting and characters extraordinary. Our attention is drawn repeatedly to the other-worldliness of Seegard, to the astonishing life of artistic creativity and self-sufficiency led there by Jesse Baltram, his wife and two daughters, and to its improbable remoteness to the outside ordinaryı world. Its design obeys none of the conventional architectural principles. It arises from the flat marshes like a mirage, like a dream. Although Murdoch makes a token bow to the commonplace in observing that Mother Mayı must make an occasional trip to the shops, and she describes Bettina as gifted in mechanical repair, the huge mansion the Baltrams inhabit seems to require few of the goods and services required by more ordinary dwellings: the assistance of plumbers or electricians, for example.
Murdochıs characters are also described as beings above and beyond the usual and the mundane. In our brief introduction to Mark Wilsden before his sudden death, he is described, in his drug-entranced state, as resembling an Egyptian king, a god, a divine being, ;a sleeping knight, and the dead Christ (11). Murdochıs other characters share a heightened appreciation of each othersı potentialities. Sarah Plowmain, who lured Edward Baltram from Markıs side and into her bed and thus served as the inadvertent case of his friendıs death, longs to meet Edwardıs stepfather, enthusing that she envisages him as a real adventurer, like an explorer...like a pirate, a buccaneer, fearfully talented, a hero of our timeı (12). It is as though, in the world stripped of God and religion which Murdoch depicts, she is determined that we find the god-like and the religiously significant in her characters and her setting. It is an ambition seemingly shared by such of her creations as Stuart Cuno, who is often accused by his friends and family of wishing to assume an importance not his due, of wishing to be God, while Thomas McCaskerville, in laments their inhabiting a world divested of priests and veneration of the holy, argues that it is the duty of modern man to re-invent the sacred (13).
Sometimes Murdoch seems to rely, as Dickens had done, on devising names for characters which might assist in conferring upon them a particular identify or significance or uniqueness. Murdoch wants us to find Harry Cunoıs parents, for example, as unusual individuals, bestowing on them the names of Casimir and Romula . Similarly, any child saddled with the appellation Meredith McCaskerville obviously must live up his name. No pedestrian, unruly, untidy child he; predictably, Thomasıs and Ursulaıs boy is preternaturally intelligent and solemn, and it is impossible to distinguish his thoughts and words from those of the clever adults by whom he is surrounded. The Biblical echoes are impossible to ignore in The Good Apprentice which includes a doubting Thomas, Jesse - a modern-day Jesus on whose chimneypiece at Seegard are incised the words I am here. Do not forget meı, and Mother May, likened to Mother Mary in her strength and her self-less love for others (14).
In a sense, the names Murdoch gives to her characters and her habit of providing the startling denouements which characterize much of her work can be seen as tricks or as unearnedı ploys or as manipulative strategies. They are gratuitous, the whimsical indulgences of an omnipotent narrator who has allowed her characters little in the way of meaningful autonomy in the unfolding of their (her) stories. While the unexpected plot twists, revelations, and surprise endings add much to the sparkle and excitement of Murdochıs writings and to our pleasure in reading them, they are ultimately just that - unexpected - and, consequently, lacking in the gravitası they would possess if encountered in such a novel as Eliotıs Middlemarch.
Murdoch also relies heavily on coincidence, a novelistıs strategy she shares with such authors as Thomas Hardy, but in The Good Apprentice we can see how this technique is carried far beyond the convenient, the plausible, or even the possible. When Stuart Cuno visits the dead Mark Wilsdenıs mother, for example, to beg her to stop sending the accusatory letters which are proving so detrimental to his stepbrotherıs mental well-being, he encounters in her home not only Sarah Plowmain, whose phone call to Edward had tempted him to leave his friend temporarily and thus resulted in the tragedy, but her mother, who happens not only to live near the Baltramsı isolated home Seegard but also to be one of Mrs. Wildsenıs oldest, best friends. Naturally, none of the characters seem struck by the extreme improbabilities inherent in this situation, nor does Sarah ever exhibit sufficient self-awareness to lament her own unwitting role in having, with Edward, unwittingly facilitated the accident which led to Markıs death.
Conversely, in Eliotıs Middlemarch we encounter situations which seem to arise naturally from possible circumstances. When Rosamondıs brother falls critically ill, it is foreseeable that she must, of necessity, frequently meet and talk to the family doctor. We readers then can witness the developing courtship between Lydgate and Rosamond with the same fascinated horror with which we might observe a spider trapping a fly in its web. Just as it is intrinsically programmed in a spiderıs nature that it will construct sticky networks to entrap insects, so we have witnessed in Rosamundıs nature, in her every thought and act, a self-absorbed coldness, a frivolous triviality of character, which will preclude her understanding that, in pursuing Lydgate, she will be destroying his future happiness - and, ironically - her own. She can show no mercy because she feels none. She can act no differently because she is who she is.
There is no comparable situation or character presented in The Good Apprentice nor, indeed, in the bulk of Murdochıs twenty-six novels, leading one to the conclusion that this is a novelist who possesses little real interest in drawing realistic people or events in her work.
Then what is her main preoccupation as a writer? Baroness Warnock, a friend of Murdochıs, offered a plausible explanation in an interview given in July 2003, in which she confided that she was not an admirer of Murdochıs novels because, in her view, its characters represented nothing more than animated argumentsı. Warnock observes that None is a person one could conceivably imagine meeting, loving, hating, or having conversations with.ı Warnock compares Murdoch in this respect unfavorably to such writers as Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope, noting that there is nothing abstractı in Austen and whereas Trollope tells one occasionally some general truths, theyıre not philosophical truthsı but represent generalisations about real peopleı (15). Similarly, the head of the English Faculty at Oxford University, Helen Gardner, once opined that Murdochıs grasp of reality is not her strong pointı (16).
The question must be reiterated: what are Murdochıs strong points, and what is she trying to accomplish in her novels? Fellow writer A.N. Wilson, a long-standing friend, initially appointed by Murdoch and her husband to write her official biography, an offer later withdrawn by the couple, believes that in her early novels Murdoch was primarily concerned with defining and demonstrating existentialism in her novels. Wilson argues that Murdoch then rejected existentialism and, rather than promoting it, her aim in her works became to attack that philosophic system (17).
The Bedford Glossary of Literary Terms describes existentialism as the struggle of individuals to define themselves through responsible individual action and social engagement in spite (or perhaps because) of their isolation and alienationı (18). This is an apt description of the texture of The Good Apprentice, whose characters are strangers not only to each other but to themselves. Misunderstandings and misapprehensions abound. These people inhabit a solipsistic universe in which even their nearest and dearest are not privy to their thoughts and desires. Yet beneath this surface of secrets, lies and subterfuges lies a world guided by an inscrutable wisdom manifesting in incredible coincidences and wondrous magic, a world which one is tempted to identify as allied to Murdochıs own religious and philosophic beliefs.
Wilson describes Murdoch as a Platonistı concerned with the nature of the Goodı. According to Raymond Carr, Murdoch, having lost all faith in the personal God of orthodox Christianity,ı found herself inventing, instead, yet another surrogate religion,ı demonstrated in her novels by its proliferation of individuals in search of God or religion or of the Goodı (18). The Good Apprentice seems to bear our some of Wilsonıs and Carrıs conclusions about Murdoch. Its characters are preoccupied by notions of good and evil. Many have abandoned the preoccupations of ordinaryı life in a search for religion or for redemption or simply to achieve some kind of personal peace or emotional serenity. There are heavy Biblical overtones. Edwardıs role in Markıs death, for example, is likened to Cainıs slaying of Abel, and Edward subsequently inhabits a purgatorial state before achieving a salvation of sorts.
Perhaps Murdochıs aim in her novels is to impart a kind of optimism in her readers similar to that urged by Brownie, Mark Wilsdenıs sister, in a letter she sends Edward at the end of the story, in which she informs him that she is to move to America with her mother to marry Giles Brightwalton: I hope that you too, dear Edward, will be at peace, feeling no guilt or self-destructive distress about the past. No one was to blame. Life is full of terrible things and one must look into the future and think about what happiness one can create for oneself and others. There is so much good that we can all do, and we must have the energy to do itı (19).
Brownie seems to be counseling the dispensation of the Bibleıs New Testament, in which Jesusıs death effects mankindıs reconciliation with God, supplanting the vengeful, judgmental deity of the first section of the Bible with the merciful being of the second.
It has often been observed that the novel form has flourished for the past two hundred years and continues to promise to flourish for the foreseeable future because of its amazing flexibility as a literary genre, accommodating, for example, experiments in social realism, fantasy, and science fiction with equal ease. Although Murdochıs characters might fail to satisfy oneıs expectations as believable individuals,ı certainly all her novels are thought provoking and original. As Bloom observes, what one might identify as Murdochıs failuresı as a novelist are more interesting than most other novelistsı victoriesı (20).
Notes
1. Harold Bloom, The New York Times Book Review, quoted in the preface of The Book and the Brotherhood ( New York, Viking Press, 1987).
2. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 322.
3. Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), p. 143.
4. Bloomsbury Good Word Guide, edited by Martin H. Manser (London: Bloomsbury, 1990, 2nd ed.), p. 49.
5. Ross Martin and Supryia M. Ray, The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms (New York, Bedford/St. Martinıs Press, p. 53.
6. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, The Variety of Fiction (New York: the Odyssey Press), p. 8.
7. How to Read and Why, p. 144.
8. Harold Bloom, Genius (London: Fourth Estate, 2002), p. 647.
9. Ibid., p. 622.
10, Ibid., p. 646.
11. Iris Murdoch, The Good Apprentice (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), pp. 1-3.
12. Ibid, p. 5.
13. Ibid., pp. 69-70.
14. Ibid., p. 111.
15. Andrew Brown, ³Profile of Mary Warnock: The Practical Philosopher,² The Guardian newspaper, 19 July 2003, p. 18.
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16. Quoted in Raymond Carrıs review of Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her by A.N. Wilson, The Spectator, 20 September 2003, p. 46.
17. Ibid, pp. 46-7.
18. Ibid, p. 47.
19. The Good Apprentice, p. 506.
20. Harold Bloom, Introduction, Iris Murdoch: Modern Critical Views, 1986, p. 7.