The novel as a grand theater of ideas and passions

At least during its very long first part, The Black Prince, ofIris Murdoch (Dublin, 1919-Oxford, 1999), suggests a reversal of the premise of Waiting for Godot of Samuel BeckettJust as Vladimir and Estrago spend the entire play without moving from where they are because they wait in vain for someone who never arrives, Bradley Pearson, the protagonist of Murdoch's novel, a retired tax inspector, an ambitious writer but full of quirks, complexes, and frustrations, spends more than three hundred pages wanting to escape—a teacher who has wanted to write for years, but can't leave because a chain of incidents involving friends and family prevents her. Godot No one ever arrives; here, on the other hand, everyone arrives. All of this gives the novel the feel and rhythm of a frenetic tragicomic vaudeville or a sophisticated farce, with constant comings and goings, dramatic situations handled with both seriousness and humor (domestic violence, adultery, suicide attempts or announcements, drunken binges). Murdoch is a virtuoso of profound and transcendent philosophical reflection as well as of comical and absurdist sensationalism, and she is even more virtuosic at combining them. She couldn't be more British.

Although it is obviously a novel, with its plot and subplots, with a narrator protagonist and with the whole galaxy of secondary characters who annoy him, interact with him, argue with him and accompany him, The Black Prince —published in English in 1973— has a core theatrical component, as if for Murdoch each situation were a scene performed on a stage, from which the characters emerge or into which they enter, and while they are there they exchange opinions, moods, feelings, invectives, declarations of love and friendship, or fears. Thus, the novel unfolds as a powerful and rich avalanche of loquacity and fluency—the translation of Jaume C. Pons Alorda It allows us to appreciate it—which in no way intends to explain or demonstrate anything specific, but simply to reproduce the workings and express the inner workings of what we have come to call the human condition, with all its complexities and nuances, deficiencies and abundance, needs and hopes, changes in behavior and contradictions. I would say that Murdoch conceives of the novel as a grand theater of ideas and passions. It is not surprising, therefore, that the novel's referent—explicit and extensively discussed—is the Hamlet by Shakespeare.

Dramatically and narratively, the entire novel revolves around the competitive relationship, fraught with mistrust and envy, between the narrator-protagonist, Bradley Pearson, who struggles with writing and possesses a sublime conception of art, and his literary rival, Arnold Bafflin, younger, more commercially minded, and with a banally commercial approach. The gallery of secondary characters that complements them is fascinating—Bafflin's wife and daughter, Pearson's depressed sister, the idiotic and parasitic ex-brother-in-law—and through these secondary characters, Murdoch conveys a perceptive and intense perspective on romantic desire, loyalty, and longing. However, it is in the relationship between Pearson and Bafflin that the author displays the most brilliant examples of her talent. Perhaps Iris Murdoch's literary secret is precisely that she knew how to combine the best virtues of her two characters, and that is why she created a literature dense with ideas and full of vivid emotions, and managed to be an extraordinarily prolific, successful and respected writer.