Really great stuff, I love the structural sandwich of sober (but also dryly funny, "vegan Palestinian Makloubeh") narrative between episodes of high badinage!
If you don't mind a belated contribution to the last meeting of this club: I did finish The Black Prince but am not sure enough what to make of it to write a review, thought it was perhaps too under the influence of Nabokov or other postmodernists, an unformed sketch for The Sea, the Sea. I did like aspects of it, especially Arnold of all people as Murdoch's self-insert character re: the kinds of books he writes and his literary fluency and his aesthetic debate with the more modernist B.P., and Rachel and Julian as consistently and maddeningly unpredictable characters, and the overripe descriptions of a London summer and middle-aged midcentury eroticism (all those sweat-damp stockings)...but I thought the tricksy ending slightly ruined it in a way reminiscent of Counterlife-era Roth.
I remember reading somewhere (and being convinced) that The Black Prince turns the “tricksy postmodern ending” trope on its head. The various new voices might claim to challenge the main narrative, in a postmodern subversive gesture, but in a subversive gesture of Murdoch’s own, these challenges only confirm the main narrative’s fundamental truth. The challenges are too typical of the characters who make them, and all of them vindicate their speaker at the direct expense of our antihero (who, whatever his sins, never spares himself). Thus the desire to relativize truth, to present it as radically undecidable, reveals itself as in fact consonant with stable truth—and the selfish desire to avoid that truth through dishonesty, whether personal, intellectual, or artistic.
Ah, thank you, that makes a lot of sense. I'd grasped the unreliability of the closing narratives, and the way it punctured what were even then operative identity politics—i.e., Bradley's female "victims" and the gay Jewish psychiatrist are revealed to be ludicrously selfish and self-serving in their own testimony—but I hadn't realized it was meant to confirm Bradley's narrative. It's as if Nabokov ended Pale Fire by revealing Shade to have been a scholar of Zembla all along. I was probably over-reading Murdoch's criticism and authorial persona into the book, since she's not at all a B.P.-like writer.
The characterisation of The Black Prince as an intermediate step towards The Sea, The Sea is fair. But I think this may be exactly why it is beloved by Murdoch devotees: she is showing her work in attempting to be more than just an entertaining writer and wrestling with the sometimes contradictory demands of art and ethics.
And I’ll grant that perhaps she was trying a bit too hard to be clever at the end!
Also, being stuck in the self-centred mind of a frustrated writer for 400+ pages can be trying, so I found the polyvocal structure of A Fairly Honourable Defeat a relief!
Like Arnold said: “Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.”
Yes, it's true that when we become a devotee of a writer, we enjoy or have a fondness for even relative "failures" as necessary parts of the process of the oeuvre. (Talk about trying English novels about frustrated artists, I think of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled in this connection.) Maybe Defeat will be my next!
Really great stuff, I love the structural sandwich of sober (but also dryly funny, "vegan Palestinian Makloubeh") narrative between episodes of high badinage!
If you don't mind a belated contribution to the last meeting of this club: I did finish The Black Prince but am not sure enough what to make of it to write a review, thought it was perhaps too under the influence of Nabokov or other postmodernists, an unformed sketch for The Sea, the Sea. I did like aspects of it, especially Arnold of all people as Murdoch's self-insert character re: the kinds of books he writes and his literary fluency and his aesthetic debate with the more modernist B.P., and Rachel and Julian as consistently and maddeningly unpredictable characters, and the overripe descriptions of a London summer and middle-aged midcentury eroticism (all those sweat-damp stockings)...but I thought the tricksy ending slightly ruined it in a way reminiscent of Counterlife-era Roth.
I remember reading somewhere (and being convinced) that The Black Prince turns the “tricksy postmodern ending” trope on its head. The various new voices might claim to challenge the main narrative, in a postmodern subversive gesture, but in a subversive gesture of Murdoch’s own, these challenges only confirm the main narrative’s fundamental truth. The challenges are too typical of the characters who make them, and all of them vindicate their speaker at the direct expense of our antihero (who, whatever his sins, never spares himself). Thus the desire to relativize truth, to present it as radically undecidable, reveals itself as in fact consonant with stable truth—and the selfish desire to avoid that truth through dishonesty, whether personal, intellectual, or artistic.
Ah, thank you, that makes a lot of sense. I'd grasped the unreliability of the closing narratives, and the way it punctured what were even then operative identity politics—i.e., Bradley's female "victims" and the gay Jewish psychiatrist are revealed to be ludicrously selfish and self-serving in their own testimony—but I hadn't realized it was meant to confirm Bradley's narrative. It's as if Nabokov ended Pale Fire by revealing Shade to have been a scholar of Zembla all along. I was probably over-reading Murdoch's criticism and authorial persona into the book, since she's not at all a B.P.-like writer.
Thank you!
The characterisation of The Black Prince as an intermediate step towards The Sea, The Sea is fair. But I think this may be exactly why it is beloved by Murdoch devotees: she is showing her work in attempting to be more than just an entertaining writer and wrestling with the sometimes contradictory demands of art and ethics.
And I’ll grant that perhaps she was trying a bit too hard to be clever at the end!
Also, being stuck in the self-centred mind of a frustrated writer for 400+ pages can be trying, so I found the polyvocal structure of A Fairly Honourable Defeat a relief!
Like Arnold said: “Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.”
Yes, it's true that when we become a devotee of a writer, we enjoy or have a fondness for even relative "failures" as necessary parts of the process of the oeuvre. (Talk about trying English novels about frustrated artists, I think of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled in this connection.) Maybe Defeat will be my next!