I'm heading into another weekend of following the Bears' joyless playoff run. On Sunday the entire country will be chanting "Geaux Saints!" leaving us lonely, gloomy souls in Ursine Nation rooting apprehensively for our charmless and underachieving team. Even if the Bears win, they will have ruined the NFL's feel good story of the year: the Saints in their mud-colored uniforms carrying all the hopes of post-Katrina New Orleans. Plus, if the Bears make the Super Bowl we'll have to endure still more fevered examination of everything Rex Grossman does, including, it seems, his bowel movements. All I have to say about that matter is this: this is his first full year as an NFL starter behind an offensive line built for run blocking, and the last thing a quarterback learns is how to focus on pass routes while a 300-pound, steroid-crazed maniac with a criminal record charges in from the blind side. We should be looking for disaster in other elements of the Bears' attack, for there are plenty of faults with this team.
Which brings me to Iris Murdoch. I'm reminded of her because there's something ursine about her prose style and I just completed A Severed Head
The novel is set in a wintertime London of pestilential fog and cozy drawing rooms. Our hero, Martin Lynch-Gibbon, experiences exactly 21 and a quarter pages of pleasure, all at the beginning of the novel. Then his wife comes home to announce she's leaving him for her American therapist. Every emotion is stated precisely and completely in a refreshingly direct yet didactic way. Murdoch cuts through psychological realism's vacillations and discontinuities, which is a nice change of pace from a lot of twentieth-century fiction. Her main character can have two or three emotions at once, and each is complete, with its own internal logic. The minor characters, however, can only possess one emotion at a time, and invariably it's the wrong one. The huge discrepancy between what her minor characters claim they're feeling and our judgments about those feelings is the core of Murdoch's didacticism.
The plot grinds on like a car tire over broken glass as the shards of Martin's ruined life get ground into dust. The turning point of the novel--that point Kenneth Burke claims is present in all novels, after which everything changes for the better or worse--is a shock that leaves one with a hollow feeling, but it's also the point at which the first rustling of incredulity sets in as Murdoch proceeds to stage some of the most far-fetched liaisons dangereuses I've read in a long time. Martin ends up with a woman who possesses a fascist wardrobe and a large and very sharp samurai sword, which she knows how to use. We're supposed to believe his love for her is genuine, but one tends to doubt the depths and plausibility of a love born of the very depths of whiskey-soaked misery. (And my, how her characters drink!)
Murdoch wanted us to live moral lives, and she considered fiction to be the primary tool for a moral education. The lesson she teaches about self-deception and the suffering necessary to live truly is certainly driven home by this haunting novel. But the choices she offers her characters are so narrow and the rewards for achieving self knowledge so paltry and oddly self-abnegating that we long to retreat to the more generous and forgiving universe of John Updike, another mid-century moralist. Still, there's no doubt that in A Severed Head an admirable and formidable moral intelligence is at work, and this 1961 novel fits perfectly into our fretful and demoralized times.
I just wish I hadn't read the novel during the Bears' playoff run. Now isn't the best time to be reminded of the suffering we must endure for our passions.
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