Review of THE UNICORN

It is hard to avoid our past, fortunately or unfortunately, because the self is made up of its cumulative experiences and memories.  Without our memories of past experiences, we are hardly ourselves at all. That lesson was powerfully driven home to me when my late mother underwent the onset of dementia when she was 81 years of age, my two brothers and I witnessed the gradual wiping clean of her memory and personality over some fifteen years following – a painful and most dispiriting long goodbye indeed, a gradual diminution of self or personality or identity into nothingness.

There are many memories I find hard to dismiss from my mind, especially those associated with growing up poor in an Ireland deeply rooted in the Catholic values of the 1960s.  The Latin Mass had given way to Vatican II’s vernacular liturgy.  I can just about remember the Latin Mass, the priest with his back to the people and prayers and incense rising to the highest heaven and to the City of God on earth: that palpable community of all who believed in and were enlivened by the Divine Presence.  For me, my experience was that God was never far away, always a mighty forbidding presence forever watching out for our slightest misdemeanour, especially any possible sexual peccadilloes.  My childlike view of the Deity was that he was mighty in his majesty but fearsome in his wrath. 

With the absence of media intrusion, our world was then very much one that allowed the imagination to experience the diaphanous nature of reality.  It appeared as if there was an apparent veil dividing the material world from the spiritual one, that with clear spiritual insight, one could penetrate or see through the veil to the truly real world of the spirit.  That is the root meaning in Greek of the word “diaphanous”, to see through or shine through.  There are, of course, several cognate words in theology like “epiphany” and “theophany” where the first of this pair means the revelation of the divine Son of God in the person of the young child Jesus, born to Mary without human intervention, and the second a visible manifestation to humankind of God’s presence, the burning bush being a good example.

In my last post, I reviewed three books on astronomy which fascinated and continue to fascinate me as I attempt to grapple with the vastness of the universe.  I quoted both Pascal and Coleridge in that regard, where the French philosopher admitted his fear before the vast magnitude of space, while awe and wonder were the inspiring motivation of the Romantic poet.  Either way, the starry mystery of infinite spaces overpowers us when we try to grasp its vastness in comparison with our finiteness and minuteness in the scheme of things.  In this post, I wish to review a book written by the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch called The Unicorn.   The following few sentences will explain my rather personal and somewhat long introduction to this novel.  Iris Murdoch was a firm Platonist.  Indeed, all Christians are essentially Platonists in that they believe in the existence of another reality, a spiritual one called Heaven and Platonism, of course, harmonises quite well with that belief.  For Plato, the world of Ideas was more “real” indeed than the apparent material world we live in, a world which is really a mimesis or an imitation.   Plato considered the world itself as an imitation of a higher realm of perfect ideas. Consequently, he saw artistic mimesis as being "twice removed from reality": the art object is an imitation of the physical object, which is itself an imitation of the true, ideal form.  Hence, my introduction.  Deep down, I intuit another order of things; that there is more to the world than meets the eye; that my brain is far too finite and limited to get my mind around what the universe or the world or reality really is.  I am also too much a romantic to believe that this life, as we experience it, is all there is; that this is just as good as it gets.  There is too much mystery, and oftentimes we experience glimpses into another deeper reality, that there is a transcendent realm, that as St Paul puts it in 1 Corinthians 13:12 in the language of the King James Version: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”   

The Unicorn by Iris Murdoch is a gothic novel, and it very much exploits the intuition that there is another reality -- good or evil and Gothic summons the latter to the fore -- to be experienced beneath or behind the exterior physical world.  Hence, my rather long personal introduction above. We are immediately introduced to Marian Taylor on the first page, a young woman who takes a job as a governess at a remote castle, only to discover there are no children. Instead, she finds that she is to become a tutor or companion to the beautiful and enigmatic Lady Hannah, who is the subject of a mysterious, a sort of spiritual confinement orchestrated by her controlling husband and other house members. The story, then, is a psychological thriller that explores themes of obsession, good versus evil, and the nature of freedom and confinement, and given Murdoch’s deep interest in Plato and the French Philosopher Simone Weil, there is some philosophising about the nature of ultimate reality or the nature of the Good.  The book, like all Gothic novels, keeps us reading as we are presented with such a range of mysterious, strange and weird characters.  Many of the characters have exotic and strange names like Effingham and Evercreech, while others have ordinary Irish/English names like Nolan and Talbot.  The very name Gaze Castle, a lonely edifice gazing out over the cliffs and the wild sea on one side and the barren land of the Scarren, a pseudonym for the Burren, on the other side, conjures up a world of mystery.  The verb “gaze” means “to look at steadily, especially in admiration,” but in the Gothic context of the story, it takes on a somewhat sinister undertone.  Furthermore, gazing necessitates paying attention to what’s going on in life or in reality – whatever that may be for the characters, authors or readers. There is also a voyeuristic undertone to gazing as we find that Marian has her own field-glasses and observes Riders, the opposing country house intently, only to find a man “looking straight into her eyes with lifted binoculars trained on Gaze.” (p. 17) Again, it is important to remind ourselves of Murdoch’s background in philosophy and classics, and that “paying attention” was one of the main planks in Simone Weil’s attitude to life, and Weil, as well as Plato, was one of her favourite philosophers.

From the very beginning, we know we are in Gothic territory.  On the first page, we learn that Marian Taylor is very apprehensive, if not downright frightened: “She felt helpless and almost frightened.  She had not expected this appalling landscape.” (p. 7) There is a word in Gaelic, “sceirdiúil”, which sounds scarier than its English equivalent “, bleak,” to describe this sort of landscape.  When I read the first few pages, I assumed it was set in a fictionalised remote British county bordering the sea.  However, John Bailey, Murdoch’s husband, tells us in his memoir Iris that the author conceived the idea for the novel on a visit they made to County Clare in the west of Ireland. While the area is renamed or fictionalised, the two famous landmarks in Clare, the famous Cliffs of Moher and the limestone country of the Burren, form the geographic backdrop for the novel. Picked up at the station by Gerald Scottow, accompanied by a young servant/chauffeur called Jamesie Evercreech, Marian is appalled by the frightening landscape as she nears their destiny, Gaze Castle:

Marian was suddenly overcome by an appalling, crippling panic.  She was very frightened at the idea of arriving. But it was more than that.  She feared the rocks and the cliffs and the grotesque dolmen and the ancient secret things.  Her two companions seemed no longer reassuring but dreadfully alien and even sinister.  She felt for the first time in her life isolated and in danger.  She became in an instant, almost faint with terror.  (p. 15 – 16)  

The landscape is bleak, then, in Gothic terms, like the wild moors in Wuthering Heights by the inimitable Emily Bronte.  At the other side of the bay to Gaze Castle lies a more brightly lit house called Riders, owned and occupied by a philosopher, Max Lejour, who is writing his last book, a magnum opus, on Plato.  One suspects that Riders must have electricity it is so brightly lit.  Light, of course, is highly symbolic of the notion of the Good or Ultimate Truth in the Greek philosopher’s lexicon, a fitting contrast to the darkened and shadowy world of the oil-lamp-lit world of Gaze Castle.

One of my favourite chapters is chapter twelve, where Effingham Cooper pays a visit to his former tutor’s study at Riders, where he is now lodging.   His former University tutor, Max Lejour, has been in residence here for some time at his family’s country home.   At this stage in the novel, we know that Effingham had fallen in love with Hannah Crean-Smith, the mysterious lady shut away, seemingly voluntarily, at Gaze Castle.   He had once had carnal relations with her, and as a result, she has been imprisoned there by her now-absent and deceived husband, Peter Crean-Smith.  There is also some confusion about whether Hannah was somehow responsible for the latter’s falling over the cliff into the sea, from which he has amazingly and mysteriously escaped alive.   Effingham comes to stay at Riders every summer and pays a visit to see his former lover. 

The reader feels that he is witnessing a one-to-one tutorial with an Oxford don here in chapter twelve.  Effingham and Max discuss the sheer mystery, the heart of the novel, of the imprisonment of Hannah at Gaze Castle, whether that is imposed by others or self-imposed.  Perhaps both, indeed.    

Knowing that Effingham was and still is romantically infatuated with the beauty of his former lover, Max cannot resist giving a short lecture on Plato’s notion of beauty: “Plato tells us that of all of the things which belong to the spiritual world, beauty is the one which is most easily seen here below.  We can see wisdom only darkly…. Hannah is beautiful, and her story is, as you say ‘somehow beautiful.’  But of course, unless there are other virtues, other values, such worship can become corrupt.” (p. 97) Plato here gives the lie to the juvenile observation of John Keats’ in his Ode on a Grecian Urn that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all// Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."  All who have lived longer than poor young Keats or who have experienced great evil in their lives realise how wrong his sentiments are:  The Nazis could appreciate great art and great music and great literature, but at the same time do millions of human beings to death.  So, aesthetics or beauty is never a substitute for ethics or truth.

There is also a swipe at what Max and Effingham consider the flaws of Freud’s theory of unconscious motivation.  The atheist Freud would be anathema to any Platonist. Freud saw religion, and Platonism shares a lot with religious intuitions, as a collective neurosis. It was also wish-fulfilment, an illusion stemming from infantile helplessness and the human need for a protective, paternal figure.  Max and Effingham, as indeed Iris, would be more at home in the realm of Platonic Ideas and the world as mimesis than in Freud’s atheistic world of unconscious motivation, illusion and wish fulfilment.  

Effingham feels that the mysterious Hannah had told him that she had, in some way, gone beyond feeling guilt and indeed did not feel any emotions anymore.   Max opines that Hannah Crean-Smith has perhaps become a scapegoat for all who surround her: “She is our image of the significance of suffering.  But we must also see her as real.  And that will make us suffer too.” (p. 98) It is during this tutorial between the donnish Max and the student-like Effingham that the Unicorn is mentioned as a potent symbol of Jesus Christ and his sacrifice, a classical allusion that furnishes Murdoch with the title.

The Oxford don admits that Hannah’s situation has always fascinated him, but in a way that he is also afraid of her, that she might actually disturb his work on Plato. Furthermore, in true Socratic style, he admits his lack of knowledge in judging the mysterious prisoner of Gaze castle: “I don’t know….  She may be just a sort of enchantress, a Circe, a spiritual Penelope keeping her suitors spellbound and enslaved.” (p. 99) This is a strange and weird comparison, as Circe was a goddess who turned Odysseus’s crew into pigs, while Penelope is his loyal wife who waited for twenty years and turned many suitors away from her door.  In this way, Murdoch is upping the mystery for the reader.  Then, Effingham brings up the subject of belief in God and asks Max for his opinion as regards his existence, and Max’s response is worth quoting here in full as it is essentially an account of Murdoch’s Platonic belief.

I don’t know Effingham…. Of course, in the ordinary sense of believing in God, I certainly don’t.  I don’t believe in that old tyrant, that old monster…. I believe in Good.  So do you… Good is the distant source of light; it is the unimaginable object of our desire.  Our fallen nature knows only its name and its perfection.  That is the idea which is vulgarised by existentialists and linguistic philosophers when they make good into a mere matter of personal choice.  It cannot be defined, not because it is a function of our freedom, but because we do not know it. (p. 100)

This is deep but brilliant stuff.  It cuts to the heart of belief or, indeed, to the core of the motivation to believe.  Leaving behind Freud’s idea that all religion partakes of wish-fulfilment, illusion and collective neurosis, Platonists like Murdoch see the spiritual or the religious urge being like a response to the magnetic Good.  The Good is attracting us with a forceful desire.  “The unimaginable object of our desire” is pulling us ever forward towards itself.  St Augustine saw true desire for God as the source of his spirituality. Our desire for God is the only road that leads to Him and to happiness. This in-built desire, this longing for God, is our only road to happiness.  So, the desire for the Good can never be “vulgarised… into a mere matter of personal choice.”  There are also hints of T.S. Eliot in Max’s declaration at the end of this chapter that he had always meant to go on a spiritual pilgrimage: “And here I am at the end – and I haven’t even set out.” (p 100 – 101) The lines from Eliot are somewhat similar: “And the end of all our exploring //Will be to arrive where we started. // And know the place for the first time. (“Little Gidding: Four Quartets”)

There is much more mysterious material to be revealed after the brief philosophical encounter in chapter twelve, as the intrigue continues for another twenty-three chapters.  Readers need not, of course, burden themselves too much with this weighty philosophical background because, like all good literature, this novel can be read on several levels.  If you are interested in Gothic or dark and spooky literature, then it can be read at that level.  There are many dark, mysterious and occult-like twists and turns in the narrative, such as fairy lore like the will-o'-the-wisp or the flame-like phosphorescence caused by gases from decaying plants in marshy areas interpreted by country folk as ghostly lights seen as mischievous spirits leading wanderers astray in the bogs.  There are also deaths, suicides and at least one murder as well as a near-death experience recounted, and all are told in a frighteningly suspenseful way that keeps the reader enthralled with the text.  There are also musings on the meaning of romantic love and of death thrown in for good measure.  Once again, none of these needs to deter a reader more interested in the Gothic scenery and action, as all of the above is written to whet your appetite for mystery and magic, garnished with a little tragedy.  If Gothic literature is your bailiwick, you will delight in reading The Unicorn.