Traumatic Repetition and Writing as Awakening in Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince

Abstract

“The Black Prince,” Peter Conradi remarks, “concerns the jealous, implicitly murderous hostility that underlies the friendship between a facile artist-protege and his serious-minded discoverer-patron. Both parties, Arnold Baffin and Bradley Pearson, are aspects of Iris herself” (519). Such a view which regards the novel as a manifestation of the author’s autobiographical aspects forms the critical mainstream of The Black Prince. Indeed, many critics have seen Bradley Pearson the protagonist of the novel as a mouthpiece for Murdoch herself; and examining how Murdoch’s moral philosophy is embodied in Bradley’s writing, critics have concentrated their critical efforts on bridging the gap between Murdoch’s and Bradley’s ideas. For example, Dipple who interprets “the unflayed . . . BP[Bradley Pearson] as the primary narrating voice and the flayed BP . . . as the secondary voice” (138) connects Bradley’s metamorphosis with that of “the prisoners in the cave”; Nussbaum also approaches Bradley’s view of love in terms of “a source of insight and a source of egoistic fog and delusion” (691), taking the cue from Murdoch’s concept of Eros. In the same vein, Heusel demonstrates the deconstructive effect of postscripts, basing her argument upon the assumption that Murdoch’s voice is at the center of Bradley’s multivoiced personae. Such viewpoints, however, prevent us from examining Bradley’s writing itself, because their main concern is only with the revelation of Murdoch’s philosophy. Furthermore, such viewpoints are incompatible with Murdoch’s attitude toward her literary works: English Language and Literature Vol. 57 No. 3 (2011) 495-513