Murdoch’s Bradley Pearson, the narrator and protagonist of The Black Prince (1973), explains how this unselving works in the artwork he is most drawn by: The artist is being remade with a new kind of beauty as we watch the painting, and a new definition of heroism is born out of this unbearable unselving.
Rather than being primarily an allegory of the mortal artist punished for hubris by a divine one (Marsyas was tricked into admitting he believed his reed flute might rival Apollo’s lyre), Marsyas represents for Murdoch, as he clearly did for Titian, the pain of yearning endured and terror faced in the ordeal of creation. As he does so (in fact), he must aim to make the materially beautiful seem like a husk. Titian’s radiant blond Apollo is kneeling and intent-Robert Hughes calls him “prim,” but perhaps it is more accurate to say that Apollo is completely absorbed, for it is his task to extract the true soul, however painfully, out of the husk of even a very beautiful body.
JIMMY SWAGGART MUSIC WHEN THE EVENING SHADOW FALLS SKIN
The god Apollo, whom we also see, down to the left, in Phillips’s painting, is wielding the knife that has just begun to flay the skin from the living Marsyas’s body. Near this suffering, shadowy head (the eyes open and luminous, but the mouth rucked down to the chin, as in the mask of tragedy), an ugly lapdog is licking up blood fallen from the long torso. Bound at the wrists, his arms rest bent on the ground, framing his head. In Titian’s painting, the satyr Marsyas is hung upside down, his goatish legs lashed to a tree’s branches as if in a long, tense stride. A further mysterious link is that Murdoch’s head obscures the head of Marsyas. The light in this painting also comes from the upper left. This is the horrifying and majestic late painting by Titian of The Flaying of Marsyas. The light draws the sitter’s gaze, falling on the broad planes of her face-and on a corner of the painting on the wall behind her. But the size and disarray of self are not the focus of the image painted by Phillips. A profound alertness and unflinching quality is created by the almost sweet set of the mouth and the indirect gaze, so unlike the many photographs in which she relentlessly glares out at us-the 1981 portrait by Snowdon, for example, a photo that relishes also the rumpled bulk of the body in a poorly buttoned coat. (One wrinkle in its cloth-a subtle touch-resembles a tendon in the neck.) Her expression is at once mournful and calm. Murdoch’s hair, as always roughly chopped, looks unattended to her collar is awry. In his portrait from the mid-1980s entitled “Dame Iris Murdoch” Tom Phillips painted the novelist looking out to her right toward the light that falls on her strong, pale face, high Mongol-looking cheekbones, and unsmiling mouth. Introduction copyright © Mary Kinzie, 2001 None of his plans work out, and his memoir evolves into a riveting chronicle of the strange events and unexpected visitors-some real, some spectral-that disrupt his world and shake his oversized ego to its very core. He plans to write a memoir about his great love affair with Clement Makin, his mentor, both professionally and personally, and amuse himself with Lizzie, an actress he has strung along for many years. Genre: prose_contemporary The Sea, the Sea Iris MurdochĬharles Arrowby, leading light of England's theatrical set, retires from glittering London to an isolated home by the sea.