The Iris Murdoch Book Club: Episode 3
The Unicorn
Prelude / Episode 1 / Episode 2
‘So none of us managed to finish the book, not even the Dame’s number one fangirl?’
‘I’ve been distracted.’
‘You mean dick-stracted?’
‘I kept hearing Pistelli’s voice in my head, dismissing The Black Prince as “an unformed sketch for The Sea, The Sea”, a description even more fitting for a tale set in a remote house along a beautiful but dangerous coastline.’
‘Beware the anxiety of influence…’
A year later, Johann met up with Sita in Barcelona, in the midst of the European leg of the tour for her no-longer-a-surprise bestseller I’m So Horny: The One-Billion-Year History of Sex. The Metropolitan Review hailed her as ‘Amia Srinivasan for people who fuck’. The Republic of Letters called her ‘the independently-minded love child of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Sadie Plant’. The Mars Review of Books praised the work as ‘a worthy tribute to the wisdom of the Divine Mother’. The Free Press proclaimed it ‘more based than the Kama Sutra’, a remark which ignited the fury of a couple of twenty-something Desi writers on Substack, which in turn set off a spat between Hindu and white nationalists on X.com, which led to the immediate doubling of tariffs on all goods imported from Bharat.
Johann had arrived the previous day to spend a night in Casa Grindr: The Immersive Gay Experience: a thousand rooms all filled with guys who are down to fuck, as well as swimming pools, saunas, dance floors and plenty of other cruising areas. He was not in the right head space, haunted by a passage from Oscars Wilde’s De Profundis that he had heard at a performance the night before:
The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flâneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.
His mood further soured during check-in when he witnessed the hotel manager try to explain to an increasingly irate guest why, for community safety reasons, they couldn’t display his I’m gay for Israel sign on the Express Yourself wall, notwithstanding the fact that there were several Queers For Palestine posters on prominent display. The guest eventually left with a full refund to continue the feud online. That night, Johann drank more than usual (he was attempting to have a weed-free weekend), got in some bitter arguments about the need for viewpoint diversity, felt increasingly alienated from the gays around him, drank more, felt worse, and went to bed.
Before meeting Sita for dinner, he spent most of the day on the beach, feeling sorry for himself. When someone lit a joint nearby, his resolve caved and he visited a garishly decorated “weed shop” which turned out to sell only CBD and vibes. Fortunately, Sita had come though with a nice chatty strain of sativa. She was on her second bottle of red. They enabled one another, out of what they would have liked to believe was a form of Platonic love.
‘So how many men have you slept with since you got here?’
‘Could you define your terms please?’
‘Okay, how many penises have you had in your mouth in the last twenty-four hours?’
‘Four. Well, five, technically.’
‘Technically?’
‘I shall not be slut-shamed by someone who has made millions out of culturally appropriating gay male horniness!’
‘You wanted to make a point about Freud earlier…’
‘Nice deflection! I’m beginning to agree with Traylen that Jung is just a degraded, if less perverted, version of Freud.’
‘How important are the pervy bits?’
‘They serve the same purpose as the dungeons and dragons in Jung: a bit of titillation while the bitter medicine is absorbed.’
‘Which is?’
‘You cannot take people at their word, including yourself.’
‘Hence your scepticism of textual analysis.’
‘A lot happens in life which is not written down.’
‘Is that why you haven’t been writing?’
‘What do you think of the little bromanticist movement blossoming on Substack? Gasda, Barkan, Pistelli, Franz, Kumin, Jennings, Smith-Ruiu, et cetera?’
‘I’m all for it’
‘So am I, of course. But I’m doubtful that the average girly, gay or they is going to be persuaded to abandon self-actualisation in favour of loftier Romantic pursuits. Les femmes d’un certain âge, at least the ones writing for magazines and getting book deals, all seem to be divorcing their beta husbands and learning the life-changing magic of getting fucked by a chad…’
‘For someone whose body count is well into triple digits, you sound disturbingly like an incel.’
‘Internet poisoning.’
‘I’ve enjoyed the excerpts from Galluzzo’s essay Love in the Age of the Algorithm.’
‘Not to sound like a Thiel-fellating tech bro, but isn’t the all-purpose scapegoating of the Algorithm giving Girard? Here I was innocently looking up historical facts on YouTube.com and the Algorithm came and radicalised me…’
‘Here I was looking for classic films and the Algorithm got me hooked on sissy hypno...’
‘Here I was looking for love and the Algorithm turned everyone around me into insecure narcissists incapable of forming deep, lasting relationships…’
‘There may be some truth to that last one.’
‘You know, people talk a lot of shit about Grindr and for good reason: it doesn’t exactly lift the spirits to see someone advertise themselves as a “human toilet”. But at least the fantasies there are actionable, unlike the romantic delirium displayed on other dating apps. No wonder there is no cultural appetite for realist fiction: we are inundated in one another’s attempts at hyperstition’
‘It worked for Land, didn’t it?’
‘Furthermore, Grindr has obviated the need for any other form of pornography.’
‘Is that an improvement?’
‘At least I no longer get blurry-eyed from huffing poppers while jerking it to porn supercuts.’
‘If you were straight, you would probably have been an autogynophile by now, you know.’
‘If I were straight, I would have been partner in a VC firm with seven children all named after characters from The Lord of the Rings.’
‘I don’t see the contradiction.’
‘Please allow me my gay victimhood complex — we’ve fought long and hard for it.’
‘Maybe you should, in all honesty, identify as an autoandrophile.’
‘Sita, darling, I can hardly be accused of loving myself.’
‘Did Ted Bundy love his victims? Think about it: when you’re fucking some twink, are you actually fucking that twink or are you fucking an image of yourself fucking that twink?’
‘There is no need to pathologise the fact that everyone now has an American Psycho-style mirror in their bedroom and may indulge in a little narcissism every now and again. As A would say, these are market-created perversions: psychosocial adaptations to conditions of late human capitalism. Maybe I should write a Gurwinder-style article called The Gaymification of Love on how gays have pioneered the art of algorithmic matchmaking. Long before Grindr, there was the hanky code, remember? Red hanky in your right pocket if you want to get fisted, red on the left if you want to fist: it’s a very efficient sorting mechanism. Concentrating one’s desire on a particular act — or better yet, on a particular prop — greatly increases one’s matching potential compared to holding out for true human connection. Maybe the autosexuals are the last of the Romantics: if the Algorithm has made it impossible to love other people, they have found a way to love themselves.’
‘Have you spoken to A?’
‘Not since that night. Apparently he is still involved in that project to resurrect the Queendom of Dahomey.’
‘I hear it’s got tonnes of tech divorcée money behind it.’
‘Well, if anyone can bring good governance to Africa, I’m sure it will be QPOCs!’
‘Afro-scepticism is not a good look on you, Johann. Especially given your… background...’
‘Do I need to spend my life atoning for the sins of my father’s father’s father and those of my mother’s father’s father? My peoples may have brought the world Apartheid and the Holocaust, but they also produced Charlize Theron and Goethe. Does that count for nothing?’
‘What is that I smell?’
‘Don’t… don’t do the perfume bit, please, I beg you!
‘Is that… Ressentiment from the Haus of Nietzsche?’
‘Believe me, Resentful White Man is not the part that I would have chosen to play.’
‘Yet you play it so well! And bitterness is such an attractive quality in an older man…’
‘I’m no longer trying be attractive. I’m trying to become attracted to the Good.’
‘And yet you keep mistaking the decadent for the Good? Do I smell something else?’
‘Verdammt nochmal!’
‘Mauvaise foi, from the Haus of Sartre, I believe?’
‘I have actually been wondering whether my cherished word images from Weil and Murdoch are really just deepities, as Dennett liked to call them: sweet nothings wrapped up in a pretty philosophical package. But then the Daoist in me replies that this should serve as a reminder that we are all sweet nothings, flickering in and out of existence. Heaven and Earth are not kind: The ten thousand things are straw dogs to them.’
‘I thought you were against Western Buddhism?’
‘Buddhism is fine for the jaded upper castes. But it will never satisfy the post-Christian masses raised on hope! Spiritual traditions all teach the importance of acceptance; the question is what is to be accepted. Hope leaves open the possibility of idealism. The Western mind cannot function without ideals.’
‘As opposed to the bovine nature of the Eastern mind, I suppose?’
‘You said it, not me!’
‘You are going to burn in hell, Johann Wagner!’
‘Well done weaponising my childhood trauma! Too bad it can’t change the fact that despite your considerable intellectual and commercial success, you still remain a disappointment to your mother and all your feminist theorising didn’t prevent her from blaming you when your husband left you for a 22-year-old!’
‘I’m not talking about the post-Christian masses, Johann, I’m talking about you. Regression can be a defensible move if it is a case of reculer pour mieux sauter. But I have yet to see you jump, my dear. You insist on having all these experiences to have something to write about and then you never write about them! The problem with shadow work is that it is easy to go around in circles in the dark. Or to become enamoured with your shadow self, who can be a lot more exciting that your regular boring self trying to hold down a job and to be a decent human being.’
‘You’ll be glad to know that I’ve started microdosing self-awareness. It’s been horrifying: trying to view my actions objectively, without filtering it through the usual rationalisations for why I cannot help being a fuck up. I really don’t know if the examined life is worth living. If only my gay fantasies were as lucrative as yours!’
‘That is the crux of the matter, isn’t it? You don’t mind when your beloved Murdoch writes about the gay experience. What irks you is the fact that my fake gay characters have resonated with more real people than anything you have ever written. You are consumed by envy, Johann. And chasing desire can only offer a temporary reprieve.’
‘Oh spare me that Salomé shit! In any case, he has now re-crossed the Rubricon, or swam across the Tiber, or whatever.’
‘Why are you so invested in these characters?’
‘You know how people like to forget that Weil wanted to purge Christianity of its Jewish roots?’
‘Right…’
‘Well those who like to remember that tend to forget that she also wanted to abolish the imperial influence of Rome’
‘Leaving only Athens standing’
‘Memphis, when you get right down to it’
‘If we have reached the Ancient Aliens portion of this evening’s proceedings, then I shall call it a night.’
‘As you wish, darling. You infuriate me deeply and I love you!’
‘Ditto, you dirty old slapper!’
‘Adieu!’
I screamed when I saw this on my home page. Did not disappoint! Thank you for writing and sharing this!