Not sure what led me to looking up ‘Iris Murdoch’ on Libby. It might have been The Mindfield podcast or In Our Time. Whatever the seed, it was an enjoyable experience to listen to Richard E. Grant’s reading of The Sea, The Sea.
The novel revolves around retired theatre director, Charles Arrowby, who has moved to Shruff End, a small coastal town, to escape London. He is in search of space and distance to write his memoir. However, things unravel, as his past keeps on popping up again and again, both mentally and physically. In particular, he discovers that by chance a love interest from his youth, Hartley, lives in the same town. His life unravels from there.
The Sea, The Sea is a strange book. On one level, it seems somewhat straightforward, a fictitious memoir. Whether it be reflections on a young romance, seeing a dragon or dreaming a death, I found it one of those books where I always felt real, where I knew what was happening or could confidently imagine the world portrayed. However, I often wondered afterwards if it was all true or if there was in fact so much more going on. Even the very nature of the narrative, where characters seem to come on and off the stage like it were a play with a script, or how Arrowby’s memory distorts time, I was left thinking of the world ignored or overlooked. This is something Arrowby touches on himself in the text:
Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. In the middle they are acted. This is why all the world is a stage, and why the theatre is always popular and indeed why it exists: why it is like life, and it is like life even though it is also the most vulgar and outrageously factitious of all the arts. Even a middling novelist can tell quite a lot of truth. His humble medium is on the side of truth. Whereas the theatre, even at its most ‘realistic’, is connected with the level at which, and the methods by which, we tell our everyday lies.
Source: The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
All in all, there is always something seemingly unreliable in Arrowby decisions and reflections that always seems to leave things one step away from disaster. However, as John Pistelli suggests, the constant throughout is the sea.
Through it all, the sea sounds and resounds as a reminder of the transience, violence, and grandeur that is our native element.
Source: Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea by John Pistelli
As a reader, it sometimes felt like we are placed on the stage, asked our thoughts and judgments on Arrowby’s various acts, especially when he locks Hartley up for her own good. We are left to ponder at which point he over-steps or was deluding himself. It is easy to judge him for this, but in judging it feels like we are somehow being judged in return. Asked how we might act? As Murdoch suggested elsewhere:
Good art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recognize, the minute and absolute random detail of the world, and reveals it together with a sense of unity and form
Source: On the Way to the Fen, Ethical and Aesthetic Quandaries Arise by Iris Murdoch, qtd. in Genese Grill
Or as Sarah Churchwell concludes in her review of the novel, all we can do is try.
All of her novels explore the contest between love and art as conduits to truth, and the ways in which contingency contends against form. Does art redeem? Does love? Or do we keep confusing our misunderstandings with metaphysics? Contingency is frightening, as all Murdoch’s characters know, capricious, unpredictable; but it is in the hazards of the fortuitous that life reveals itself. Love is also contingent, unpredictable, hazardous. Good art, Murdoch also said, is “the highest wisest voice of morality, it’s something spiritual – without good art a society dies. It’s like religion really – it’s our best speech and our best understanding – it’s a proof of the greatness and goodness which is in us.” Although Murdoch parses the grammar and traces the limits of love, she never stops believing in its moral force, or the spiritual potential of art. Art is impossible, so is love. And the only possible moral choice is to continue trying to achieve both, knowing that they are impossible.
Source: The Sea, the Sea – Sarah Churchwell on the making of a monster by Sarah Churchwell
The Sea, The Sea was a hard book to move on from. I actually felt that I could not start another book straight away, I wanted it to wash over me a little longer. Cheryl Bove argues that it stresses the necessity for acting with humility.
This novel stresses the interconnectedness of all things, the consequences of actions, and the necessity for acting with humility.
Source: Understanding Iris Murdoch by Cheryl Bove
I wonder if this is what left me thinking and reflecting?
Alternatively, it had me wondering more about Murdoch’s philosophical ideas, such as “unselfing” and “the fat, relentless ego”, and how these may relate to the book.
Iris Murdoch, for instance, once described looking out her window “in an anxious and resentful state of mind … brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige”. When suddenly, she observes a kestrel hovering on the currents of the air. “In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel.” Without going anywhere, contemplating the figure of the kestrel permits Murdoch to move from resentful isolation to contemplation — thereby enacting what she calls a process of “unselfing”, a certain diminishment of “the fat, relentless ego” in the face of a moral reality outside of ourselves.
Source: Ramadan — the discipline of solitude – ABC listen by Scott Stephens
All in all, it is one of those novels that I feel will stay with me for a while.
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REVIEW: The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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