The Sea, the Sea

NOTES

Tom Phillips’s painting is in the National Portrait Gallery, London-easier to get to than Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas, which is in a former archepiscopal palace in Kromeriz, Czechoslovakia. (However, the Titian can now be accessed on the Web at artchive.com, and the Phillips portrait appears as a stamp-sized icon on the back of many of the Penguin paper editions of Murdoch’s novels.) For help in thinking about the Titian painting I am indebted to Renaissance art historian Laura Giles of the Art Institute of Chicago, who provided me with the essential essay on this work by Sydney J. Freedberg from FMR, vol. 4 (1984). Robert Hughes’s quip appears in his essay “The Legacy of La Serenissima” on the Royal Academy of Arts, London, show “The Genius of Venice 1500-1600” (Time, 6 February 1984); this show brought to London The Flaying of Marsyas, although Murdoch had earlier written of the painting in both The Black Prince (1973) and A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970). Robert Graves’s two-volume work on Greek myths (Penguin, 1955) provided material about both Marsyas and Perseus when it did not appear in Ovid and Dante. Linguist Seymour Chatman’s suggestion about an “interest point of view” appears in his chapter on non-narrated stories in his Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Cornell University Press, 1978), reprinted in Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, ed. Hoffman and Murphy (Duke University Press, 1990). Quotations from Murdoch’s philosophical and critical prose and her Platonic dialogues are taken from the invaluable indexed compendium edited by Peter Conradi, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, by Iris Murdoch (Penguin, 1998). Professor of philosophy Julius Sensat provided the source for the quotation from David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, Book II (Of the passions), Part iii (Of the will and direct passions), Section 3 (Of the influencing motives of the will), and helpfully explained its context. Jorge Luis Borges’s remark about Tacitus appears in his essay “The Modesty of History,” Other Inquisitions 1937-1952.

I was guided throughout by Elizabeth Dipple’s Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit (University of Chicago Press, 1982), a study of all of Murdoch’s novels through Nuns and Soldiers (1980), the novel that followed The Sea, the Sea (1978). These twenty novels would be followed by five more enormous books, The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), the underappreciated The Good Apprentice (1985), The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), The Message to the Planet (1989), and The Green Knight (1993), and then the mysterious and brief postscript to her novel-writing career, Jackson’s Dilemma (1995). Only in The Book and the Brotherhood would Murdoch create additional central characters as resistant to self-scrutiny yet as blindly self-regarding and as sunken into the bog of late middle age as Charles Arrowby, but unlike them, Arrowby, for all his grievous faults, suggests the possibility of insight and the sheer human energy for change.