Shakespeare and Buddhism in Bruno’s Dream

- Dr. Wendy Jones Nakanishi (Faculty of Letters, Shikoku Gakuin University) for The Iris Murdoch Society of Japan

“We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.” (The Tempest, Act V)

The idea that the human consciousness of the experience of life constitutes a kind of dream is a conceit which features largely in Shakespeare - professedly one of Iris Murdoch’s favorite writers - and also in Buddhist teaching. Although the novelist’s Murdoch forebears were Protestant Scots-Irish, with Plymouth Brethren connections, in his Elegy for Iris, John Bayley describes his deceased wife as having been raised in a ‘happily godless’ household, with neither of her parents showing any interest in religion or forming affiliations with any church (1). Bayley asserts that Murdoch’s interest in the ‘spiritual’ developed in her days as a student at Oxford University, nourished by her studies of philosophy and particularly of Plato (2). Peter Conradi, Murdoch’s biographer and close personal friend, characterizes the writer as possessing a personality open to all ideas, with an her unfailing interest in anything and everything, in anyone and in everyone. Her insatiable curiosity naturally extended to the great minds whose ideas have shaped the world. Murdoch read philosophy at Oxford and was awarded a tutorship there in that subject in 1948. According to Conradi, Murdoch had been studying Buddhism since the 1940s, when she embarked on an unrealized project of publishing a work on the Dalai Lama (3).

Chronology supports a connection between Bruno’s Dream and Shakespeare. Bruno’s Dream was published in 1969. Conradi’s biography of Murdoch observes that, on the publication of The Red and the Green in 1965, feeling dispirited and lacking in direction, Murdoch had decided to re-read the whole of Shakespeare’s works, studying the plays over the following four years (4). It is scarcely surprising, then, that in Bruno’s Dream we find echoes of such plays as The Tempest and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As we shall see, we can also find in this novel allusions to Buddhist notions of the significance - or lack of it - inherent in life and death.

Bruno’s Dream centers upon the decaying, decrepit figure of Bruno Greensleave - bed-bound, riddled by guilt, tormented by doubts and fears and lusts - as he struggles to come to terms with the fact of his impending death. The novel’s opening sentence describes Bruno wakening from a troubled dream; its closing sentence relates the fact of his death. It is probable that Murdoch deliberately fashioned the novel’s format as an echo of the famous lines from The Tempest quoted above - Bruno’s life is a ‘dream’ rounded by a ‘sleep’. Murdoch also consciously alludes to Hamlet, in which Shakespeare describes our fear of death as possibly arising from our terror that it might represent a troubled sleep from which there is no awakening. As an old man in failing health, Bruno, accordingly, dreads the night because of the nightmares it will bring.

In old age, Bruno finds that his physical body and his social circle both have suffered drastic diminution. A thwarted zoologist, Bruno derives a curious ironic amusement from the fact that he has come to resemble the spiders who have formed the subject of a lifelong passionate study. His head has become grotesquely large and wrinkled, while his trunk and legs are shriveled and wasted. Scarcely able to move from his bed, he is reduced to a smelly, ugly, and inert mass of flesh. Bruno thinks of his body as a ‘tomb, a grotesque tomb without beauty’ (p. 7).

Bruno is not only ill and in pain most of the time and immobile, but he is also generally alone - mentally and physically. He thinks incessantly of his beloved mother, of Janie, the wife with whom he quarreled and who cursed him on her deathbed for his infidelity, of Maureen, the mistress he loved with a sexual intensity and a happiness he never found with the woman he had married, and of Gwen, the daughter who died in her youth, trying to save a child she thought was drowning. Bruno has long been estranged from his only surviving child, Miles; they had argued on Miles’s decision to marry a woman from India, Parvati, who had died shortly after their marriage, in a plane crash. These individuals who once peopled Bruno’s life have all gone - dead themselves or simply absent - and they now only visit him in his dreams and memories.

Bruno’s world has dwindled to the compass of a small, dirty and smelly bedroom in an old house in south London. He is very old, but he has become like a baby again, completely dependent on the ministrations of the fellow inhabitants of his household. These include Danby, Bruno’s son-in-law, a hedonistic, happy-go-lucky soul, his secret lover Adelaide, the slatternly housekeeper, and Nigel, Adelaide’s cousin, who acts as Bruno’s nurse and spiritual guide.

But the dead and the absent figure much more largely in Bruno’s life than do the present and the living. He constantly replays images from his past in his mind, scenes inspiring remorse, regret, fear and longing. He desperately wants to make sense of his life before death eliminates the possibility of any further conjecture. In old age, Bruno sees his past as if enveloped in a vague cloud of meaninglessness. Thrown entirely upon his own resources, with only his thoughts, and the occasional visit from Danby, the daily care offered by Nigel, the idle observation of a few spiders who have woven webs near his bed, to occupy the endless hours, Bruno passes the time remaining to him in tortuous attempts at analyzing the absent loved ones who once had filled and fulfilled his life. Bruno is consumed with self-pity as he endlessly reviews what he characterizes as these ‘rat-runs’ of his memories (p. 17). But the greatest riddle life has posed for Bruno is that of himself. As death approaches, Bruno increasingly realizes that he understands himself as little as he has comprehended anyone else.

The opening chapter of the novel includes Bruno’s lengthy soliloquy on life’s fundamental incomprehensibility:

What had happened to him and what was it all about and did it matter now

that it was practically all over, he wondered. It’s all a dream, he thought, one

goes through life in a dream, it’s all too hard. Death refutes induction.

There is no “it” for it to be all about. There is just the dream, its texture, its

essence, and in our last things we subsist only in the dream of another, a

shade within a shade, fading, fading, fading (pp. 9-10).

The action informing the plot of Bruno’s Dream is furnished by and follows from Bruno’s desire to be reconciled with Miles before his death, before the fact of his own transient existence dwindles to the dream Miles will have of his father. Bruno is acutely aware that unless he can beg his son’s forgiveness and achieve his love and understanding, the ‘dream’ Miles will possess of his father will resemble a nightmare dominated by Bruno’s having callously remarked, many years before, on hearing of Miles’s engagement to Parvati, that he did not care to have “coffee-coloured grandchildren” (p. 12).

Bruno’s wish to be reunited with his son sets off an unforeseen - and unforeseeable - chain of events. Bruno’s sudden, unexpected request surprises and dismays Danby, who finds his easygoing, undemanding existence of enjoyable work coupled with a casual affair with Adelaide almost immediately unsettled by the prospect. Danby rationalizes his opposition by conjecturing that such a meeting would doubtless upset his father-in-law and perhaps even precipitate his death. But the effect of Bruno’s desire to see Miles resembles that of a rock thrown into a stagnant pool: the initial splash is succeeded by ever-widening ripples. After his first shock at hearing Bruno’s request, Danby finds that assumptions held unconsciously suddenly rise to the surface. Danby realizes that he also dreads the prospect of meeting his brother-in-law again. He recognizes afresh his feeling that he is inferior to Miles. Bruno’s words re-open an ancient wound: Danby begins to think of his dead wife, mulling over their brief life together. Danby is aware that Miles had opposed his marriage with Gwen and for a reason which Danby himself could not refute - that Gwen had been too good for him. The ultimate effect of Bruno’s request on Danby is to make him uncomfortably aware that he has settled for mediocrity in life.

Bruno’s request proves equally upsetting for Miles, and for surprisingly similar reasons. Just as Danby feels he has acquiesced to a second-rate existence following Gwen’s death, so his brother-in-law, equally, knows he has sunk into a kind of torpor, a half-life, after Parvati’s fatal airplane crash. Both Danby and Miles feel that Gwen and Parvati were superior to them and that, in response to the challenge represented by their wonderful wives’ love, they once had lived more deeply and fully and consciously - on a higher plane, as it were. Although Miles has remarried, he is no longer able to write the poetry which flowed freely from him during his time with Parvati. His new wife, Diana, is no muse, but, rather, a comfort, an undemanding companion who allows Miles to lead a simple humdrum life, cocooned from pain and challenge.

Subsequent events are to reveal to Miles and Danby the impossibility of their knowing themselves, let alone understanding the people about them, as well as reinforcing the impossibility of their predicting let alone controlling the effects of their actions or diverting the stream of life from whatever relentless course it chooses to pursue. Danby and Diana embark on a brief flirtation which results in Danby’s improbably falling in love with Diana’s sister, Lisa. In loving Lisa, Danby feels he has re-entered the more significant or meaningful existence he once had enjoyed with Gwen, and he casually dismisses Adelaide as his lover, who is awakened, in turn, to a realization of her love for Nigel’s brother, Will. The surprising and unpleasant recognition of Danby’s infatuation with his sister-in-law causes Miles also to fall in love with Lisa. Although Lisa has lived with Miles and Diana for some four years, Miles had always accepted his wife’s valuation of her sister as a ‘wounded bird,’ a being more deserving of compassion than anything else. Divested of this formerly unquestioned assumption at a stroke by the shock of seeing Danby obviously enamoured of Lisa, Miles suddenly feels he can see Lisa clearly, and his unchallenged beliefs about her fall away as though they never had existed. But Lisa eventually chooses Danby as her lover, a painful event which causes Miles to refigure the erstwhile pathetic figure of his sister-in-law into a tragic muse who inspires him to begin writing poetry again.

The improbable pairings and mismatches and misunderstandings and ultimate reconciliations are, again, reminiscent of such Shakespearean plays as A Midsummer Night’s Eve, The Tempest, and As You Like It. It is as though the characters in Bruno’s Dream, like the individuals who inhabit Shakespeare’s comedies, exist in a magical universe in which the laws of probability and rationality are suspended. Within the framework of the play or the novel, the characters embark on an elaborate dance whose pattern is indecipherable to its participants but who find that some instinctive knowledge enables them to perform the required steps, as they couple and part, and then meet again, seeing each other afresh, with changed vision.

In his book lamenting the relatively recent phenomenon of the demise of the ‘western canon,’ literary critic Harold Bloom identifies Shakespeare as the greatest author to have emerged from that tradition and pinpoints, as Shakespeare’s greatest achievement in his writing, a process Bloom describes as ‘overhearing’ (5). Bloom believes that Shakespeare first glimpsed the dramatic possibilities of ‘overhearing’ in Chaucer, but that Shakespeare’s mastery of the technique eclipsed that of his predecessor.

While Bloom is unwilling to go so far as to assert that the study of literature can make men either ‘better’ or ‘worse,’ he argues that such writers as Shakespeare perform an invaluable service in teaching us:

how to overhear ourselves when we talk to ourselves. Subsequently,

(Shakespeare) may teach us how to accept change, in ourselves as in

others, and perhaps even the final form of change. Hamlet is death’s

ambassador to us, perhaps one of the few ambassadors ever sent out

by death who does not lie to us about our inevitable relationship with

that undiscovered country (6).

A character’s ability to ‘overhear’ his own thoughts allows him to disentangle himself from their self-obsessed nature and, consequently, to realize that other people inhabit their own reality and exist apart from his ideas about them. It also permits him to recognize that his own perspective on life or experience of living is not objective in any sense. As Hamlet remarks, ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so’ or, as paraphrased by R.H. Blyth in Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, ‘nothing clashes or agrees with us, but thinking makes it so’ (7). But few individuals are capable of such a feat. In ‘ordinary life,’ both Murdoch and Shakespeare seem to argue, it is as though the actors performing in a play forget their ‘true’ identities in their absorption with the parts they have been allotted to play. Or, as Jaques observes in As You Like It:

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts (Act II, Scene vii, 139-142)

Imagery of sleep and of dreams, both good and bad, are recurrent in the novel, as are references to ‘webs’ - whether ones woven by the spiders who are Bruno’s abiding passion, or ones constructed unwittingly by Bruno and his family and friends, in the sense of these patterns of imagining in which the characters entangle themselves. In All’s Well That Ends Well Shakespeare talks of ‘The web of our life...a mingled yarn, good and ill together’. In Buddhism, as well, the essential interrelatedness of physical and psychic elements of the world is seen as a ‘spider’s web; touch one part and the whole quivers’ (8).

On his deathbed Bruno envisages himself as a spider caught in a web:

I am at the centre of the great orb of my life, thought Bruno, until

some blind hand snaps the thread. I have lived for nearly ninety years

and know nothing....The spider spins his web, it can no other. I

spin out my consciousness, this compulsive chatterer, this idle

rambling voice that will so soon be mute. But it’s all a dream.

Reality is too hard. I have lived my life in a dream and now it is too

late to wake up (pp. 303-304.)

Several characters in Bruno’s Dream seem to reflect Murdoch’s interest in Buddhism. These include Nigel, who figures as one of the mystical individuals common in her work who are distinctly ‘different’ from anyone else and, indeed, who seem scarcely human at all. Like Murdoch’s other ‘enlightened beings,’ Nigel possesses wonderful powers, his personality is inscrutable, his motives unknowable, and his primary role seems to be to act as a deus ex machina prompting the denouement of the plot or spurring the other characters to greater self awareness. Nigel miraculously appears in moments of crisis in the novel, preventing the people from hurting themselves or each other or offering solace and wisdom to the story’s wounded souls.

The process of ‘overhearing’ which can result in a person’s recognizing and accepting change in himself and others can be likened to the Buddhist notion of the enlightened individual’s ‘awakening’ from the dream of self-obsessed thoughts. The main requirement of Buddhism is ‘wakefulness’ in the sense of an immediate, continuous, clear awareness of one’s body and mind, unclouded by emotions, beliefs, or self-centered thinking, accompanied by a recognition that the world is ‘bathed in love’ (9).

Peter Conradi argues in his autobiographical memoir, Going Buddhist, dominated by recollection of his life-altering friendship with Iris Murdoch, that “her fiction abounded in characters glimpsing...possible future states of being” (10). In one passage he remarks on witnessing Murdoch ‘overhearing’ herself, and feeling taken aback by her own words:

Sometimes she surprised herself, as when hearing herself tell me in

1985, “Everything I have written is concerned in some sense with

holiness” (11).

Many of the characters inhabiting Bruno’s Dream are engaged in a spiritual quest. Some persevere or even seem to succeed while others choose easier alternatives. Lisa and Nigel, for example, are the two individuals in the novel most remarkable for their possession of special spiritual gifts and both resolve to do charitable work in India. Nigel actually carries through this plan while Lisa abandons that path to give herself up to a hedonistic love affair with Danby. In one of the book’s many deliberate ironies, it is Diana, Lisa’s sister, at the novel’s beginning, a self-satisfied and shallow woman, who finds, through personal pain, through self-sacrifice, through her vigilance at Bruno’s death bed, a kind of enlightenment, and the novel closes with her reflections as she holds the dying Bruno’s hand:

She tried to think about herself but there seemed to be nothing there.

Things can’t matter very much, she thought, because one isn’t anything.

Yet one loves people, this matters. ...The helplessness of human stuff

in the grip of death was something which Diana now felt in her own body.

She lived the reality of death and felt herself made nothing by it and

denuded of desire. Yet love still existed and it was the only thing that

existed (pp. 310-311) (12)

Notes

1. John Bayley, Elegy for Iris (New York: Picador, 1999), p. 87,

2. Ibid.

3. Peter J. Conradi, “Talking to Iris,” Urthona: Buddhism and the Arts, Winter 2003, p. 26.

4. Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life (London: Harper Collins), pp. 467-8.

5. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 20-31.

6. Ibid., p. 31

7. R. H. Blyth, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics (Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press), p. 96.

8. Ibid., p. 279.

9. Ibid.

10. Peter J. Conradi, Going Buddhist London: Short Books, 2004), p. 33.

11. Ibid., p. 135.

12. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the annual Iris Murdoch Society of Japan conference held in Okayama, November 2005.