Murdoch’s Leech Gatherer: Interpretation in The Message to the Planet

Abstract

MURDOCH’S LEECH GATHERER: INTERPRETATION IN THE MESSAGE TO THE PLANET JUNE STURROCK S im on F raser U niversity L ike many ofher contemporaries, Iris Murdoch weaves her work into a com­ plex and disparate tissue of parody and allusion; her effects are as dependent on previous art as are those of Woody Allen or Madonna. Jake in Under the Net is a latter-day Aeneas, The Black Prince sometimes looks like a mar­ riage between Lolita and Hamlet, while the Prince of Denmark reappears in Nuns and Soldiers, this time as a pub—the queenly Gertrude contracts an o’er-hasty second marriage with one of its denizens. The Nice and the Good starts offas a spy thriller and ends up as a Midsummer Night’s Dream, while in The Sea, The Sea, the obsessively jealous narrator actually sees a greeneyed monster surfacing off the Yorkshire coast (19). Murdoch plays not only literary games but also games with opera, notably Der Rosenkavalier and The Magic Flute, as well as paintings, especially those of Titian —his Bac­ chus and Ariadne, Perseus and Andromeda, and the Flaying of Marsyas.1 The Message to the Planet may show some signs of fatigue—after all, it was published in 1989, the year she was seventy, and is her twenty-fourth novel—but the spring of allusion is not dried up. Clive Sinclair, review­ ing the novel in the Times Literary Supplement, speaks of references to Leonardo, Wittgenstein, several plays of Shakespeare, and C.S. Lewis (and concludes, rather unkindly, that the novel itself at times reads more like the bland children’s thrillers of Enid Blyton). The parodic element that I wish to pursue, the leech gatherer of my title, is especially interesting partly be­ cause he is multiple. The following discussion involves not only Murdoch’s character but also two Wordsworthian old men—the leech gatherers of the two versions of “Resolution and Independence”—and Lewis Carroll’s “aged, aged man a-sitting on a gate,” himself a parody of the leech gatherer. His multiplicity indicates parody: Murdoch’s parody depends on Carroll’s par­ ody as well as on Wordsworth’s original(s); it implicates writer, critic, and reader—all inevitably interpreters. It involves interpretation not merely be­ cause it is parody but also because the texts themselves, novel and poems, very deliberately concern interpretation, in the specific form of one man ob­ sessively trying to make meaning out ofanother. The Message to the Planet itself is finally concerned with the impossibility of interpretation. English Stu d ies in C a n a d a , 19, 4, December 1993 The eponymous message to the planet is that which Alfred Ludens,2the main centre of consciousness in this novel, expects from Marcus Vallar, who was once a mathematical genius, then, briefly, an interesting painter, and then an isolated and eccentric thinker. Ludens, a historian at the Univer­ sity of London, is devoting his research leave to his obsession with Marcus and his conviction that Marcus will produce a great philosophical work— not just a work of academic philosophy but a thought-transforming, world­ transforming book; his obsession grows despite Marcus’s indifference to any such aspiration. Ludens brings Marcus to London, where Marcus miracu­ lously cures the dying poet, Patrick; follows Marcus into Wiltshire, where Marcus’s daughter, Irina, has placed her father in a mental hospital for the rich; falls in love with Irina, and stays by Marcus when he becomes the ob­ ject of a religious cult and later when he renounces his authority and dies a self-chosen death,3 to be remembered by Ludens as “my dear monster, my friend and my master, my dear dear wounded monster, my poor dead monster” (599). Meanwhile in the subplot, the secondary centre of consciousness, Franca, takes a much-needed holiday from her ménage à trois, visits the Lake Dis­ trict, and sees “the very pond where Wordsworth had met the Leech Gath­ erer” (317); the poet and his subject thus make virtually their only overt appearance in this novel.4 Nevertheless, the crude outline of my argument may be becoming visible by this point—the apparently random allusion to...