“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”: Poetry, Multiplicity, and Being-towards-Death in The Time of the Angels and A Word Child Fiona Tomkinson (bio) At the beginning of Iris Murdoch’s The Time of the Angels, we are introduced to the character of Pattie O’Driscoll, a young woman of mixed race, living in an ambiguous position as the servant and ex-lover of the novel’s antihero, Carel Fischer, a priest who has lost his faith.1 Pattie is described as murmuring “the poetry which takes the place of the prayer which took the place of the poor defeated magic of her childhood” (Time 4). Shortly afterwards, we learn that she “liked poems that resembled songs or charms or nursery rhymes, fragments that could be musically murmured.… The world of art remained fragmented for her, a shifting kaleidoscopic pattern which amassed beauty almost without form” (22). In Murdoch’s A Word Child, the narrator, Hilary Burde, has a similar attitude to poetry, saying, “I carried a few odd pieces of literature like lucky charms” (28). On one level, this appreciation of poetry simply as fragment can be understood in terms of character analysis, suggesting some similarities in the inadequate educational background of the two characters, as well as having a symbolic resonance with the fragmentation of their early lives. Pattie and Hilary, though very different personalities, share a sense of exclusion and of being deprived of love. They also share a number of common circumstances and characteristics: both are the illegitimate children of women who were probably prostitutes, neither of them know the identity of their fathers, and both lost their mothers so young that they cannot really remember them. Both are presented as being of untidy and indeed fragmented personal appearance: Hilary’s propensity for odd socks matches Pattie’s tendency to lose her shoes as she walks around. Murdoch also invites us to link the two characters by telling us that Hilary once thought of himself as black: “Because of my hair I was called ‘Nigger’ at school and for a time I did in some curious way think of myself as being black. A boy once told me that I had a black penis and convinced me of it in spite of the visual evidence” (Word 27). [End Page 57] Although Pattie received almost no formal education while Hilary achieves a fellowship in modern languages at an Oxford college, the latter focuses on linguistic systems and feels he has missed out on the breadth of a liberal humanistic education enjoyed by his peers: “the idea of philosophy frightened me…. My ignorance was deeply engrained” (Word 23–24). Both Pattie and Hilary can thus be seen as fragmented characters clutching at cultural fragments in a quest for wholeness. Pattie “amasse[s] small pieces of poems, of melodies, of faces in pictures, laughing Cavaliers and Blue Boys, scarcely identified, happily recognised, easily forgotten” (Time 22). Hilary, a much more self-aware character, actually analyzes the connection between his own personal fragmentation and the assimilation of literary fragments when he speaks of his attitude to the patriotic Eastern tales of his boyhood—and weaves into the account a poetic fragment from Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier”: “I who had no mother could claim at least a mother land, and these exotic tales were about England too and after it all, ‘hearts at peace under an English heaven.’ There was a sense of family” (Word 22). However, the amassing of poetry-as-fragment is not only a quirk of the incompletely educated: it also has deep roots in the Western literary tradition itself. One might think of the pervasive use of poetry as epigraph, the intertextual nature of the poetic tradition itself, and of Matthew Arnold’s belief in the efficacy of isolated passages as poetic touchstones. Most of all, however, poetry as embedded fragment and intertext belongs to the modernist aesthetic, to classic works of high modernism such as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses. With an irony of which Murdoch was doubtless well aware, the combining of cultural snippets characteristic of the incompletely educated in fact unconsciously mimics the...
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Jun 29, 2023
Sunil Bhutada + 4
Open Access
