One of the most complexly philosophical of the many novels by this author, The Black Prince is narrated in the first person by Bradley Pearson, a writer who produces a manuscript entitled The Black Prince: A Celebration of Love before he dies in prison for a crime he did not commit. Although Bradley’s initials point to the title of his manuscript, Murdoch complicates this simple correlation through numerous references to Apollo, to Eros, and to the force of evil in the world.
Readers should familiarize themselves with the myth of Apollo and Marsyas in particular: according to the legend, Marsyas boasts of his musical ability and accepts a challenge against Apollo, the god of music (and of poetry, reason, medicine, and other arts), but inevitably loses the contest to face a horrible punishment. Marsyas is thus a figure of hubris, or overweening pride that offends even the gods, and of blasphemy in comparing his talent to that of Apollo, and of divine retribution in the flaying Apollo decrees as punishment. Like Marsyas, Bradley Pearson foolishly believes in his own power to transcend the limitations of human abilities; Bradley’s act of hubris is to believe that he can produce literary art that limns truth, rather than merely reflecting the appearances of the highly imperfect material world.
The novel opens with layers of artifice: a fictional editor, “P. A. Loxias” (Loxias was an epithet sometimes used of Apollo), introduces the “autobiographical” manuscript of Bradley Pearson and vaguely relates a few details of their association. Then Bradley Pearson addresses the reader in his own introduction, in which he proclaims his devotion to art and to truth and excuses the scanty productivity of his literary life on the grounds that he was unwilling to settle for anything less than the truth.
After this prologue, Pearson’s narrative proper begins, but the reader who skips straight to Bradley’s story will miss the opening strategy of Murdoch’s framing of her fiction within two further layers of fiction. Similarly, after Pearson’s manuscript ends, Murdoch adds fictional postscripts by various characters introduced in Bradley’s story and then gives P. A. Loxias the last word. These framing devices create the appearance of truthfulness and amplify the realism of Bradley’s autobiography: ironically, Murdoch uses fiction to make an embedded fiction appear factual.
Bradley’s story recounts his decline and fall. After a failed marriage and a career as a tax inspector, he retires to a solitary life in order to bring forth his literary masterpiece, the novel that he believes he harbors within himself. His interpersonal skills are limited, and he thinks that his retirement will free him from the pesky distractions of the world and the flesh. Solitude, however, proves to be elusive.
His ex-wife, Christian, returns from America as a widow and suggests that they remarry; Christian’s brother, Francis Marloe, a doctor who has lost his license through shady prescription practices, distances himself from his own homoerotic feelings by projecting them onto his ex–brother-in-law; Bradley’s friend and rival, the enormously popular novelist Arnold Baffin, continually draws Bradley into the stormy domestic life of the Baffin household; Mrs. Rachel Baffin uses Bradley as a diversion, even attempting to seduce him (and denying it later); his emotionally fragile sister, Priscilla Saxe, casts herself on his mercy when her husband abandons her; and, when he least expects it, Bradley falls madly and deliriously in love with Julian Baffin, the 20-year-old daughter of Arnold and Rachel Baffin, sexually alluring but intellectually shallow.
Nothing in his life has prepared him to handle the emotional roller coaster he is soon riding, and he is an easy target for the schemes of others. When Arnold Baffin winds up dead from a blow to the head, Bradley is easily made to seem responsible by the conniving of the actual guilty party.
In prison for a crime he did not commit, Bradley meets P. A. Loxias and finds the solitude he had craved. In retrospect, he has the wisdom that he lacked while the events of his pre-prison life unfolded, and this wisdom of hindsight enables him to pour forth the long-awaited story, which turns out to be the story of his life illuminated by belated understanding.
But Murdoch further complicates this picture of artistic fulfillment with the postscripts that P. A. Loxias collects from Christian, Francis, Rachel, and Julian. Speaking in their own voices, these characters undermine the truth of Bradley’s story, casting aspersions on his telling of the tale and making him seem to be an unreliable narrator rather than an acolyte of truth.
Whatever literary art may be, it is not disengaged from the world of readers nor from the interpretations that each reader will bring to any particular work. Even if artists serve truth, who can guarantee that their readers will do the same, rather than serving their own agendas?
Readers of Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince will need a broad acquaintance with the works of Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, with the literary and philosophical classics of antiquity, and with the conventions of realism and postmodernism in order to appreciate the full range of this complex and demanding novel. It is replete with allusions and parallels to other works; however, Bradley’s story is also a well-constructed psychological thriller and a quirky romance. Murdoch demonstrates her virtuoso command of character and plot in the inner story and augments that achievement through her supple control of voice in the ancillary framework in which Bradley’s story is embedded.
Readers will need a similar level of sophistication in order to decode fully the ironies of the text and to appreciate Murdoch’s literary mastery in this novel.
Bibliography
Antonacchio, Maria. Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Dipple, Elizabeth. Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Todd, Richard. Iris Murdoch: The Shakespearian Interest. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis, Philosophy
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