The Unicorn

The Unicorn Read Free Page A

Book: The Unicorn Read Free
Author: Iris Murdoch
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Lejour.
     
You see, it’s not a bit like what Freud and Wagner think…You see, death is not the consummation of oneself but just the end of oneself. It’s very simple. Before the self vanishes nothing really is, and that’s how it is most of the time. But as soon as the self vanishes everything is, and becomes automatically the object of love. Love holds the world together, and if we could forget ourselves everything in the world would fly into a perfect harmony, and when we see beautiful things that is what they remind us of.
     
It is very tempting to see in this passage the union of the sublime and the beautiful, the explanation of unselfing and the idea of the good seen through beauty and love which the book has been asking for. And although in the helter skelter incidents that follow Hannah, the actual beautiful Hannah, loses her capacity to symbolise the good or the beautiful as Gerald Scottow uses the announcement of Peter’s return (which he may have faked himself) to seduce her, which leads first to her abandonment by those who have loved her – Marian, Effingham, Denis – and then to her killing first Gerald and then herself, it is still tempting to conclude as Effingham does that what she symbolised remains true: ‘It had been a fantasy of the spiritual life, a story, a tragedy. Only the spiritual life has no story and is not tragic’
     
If so, however, the bridge between the spiritual life and ordinary life by any kind of symbol seems almost entirely useless. Effingham, who had the vision, deserts Hannah immediately at the news of her husband’s coming, repeating his watchword ‘It happens quite automatically’ as Hannah cries out to him to stay. When he returns it is too late: Gerald has seduced Hannah and Effingham briefly turns to Alice as ‘his health, his crucifix, his redeemer’ to whom he gives explanations of a very facilely Freudian kind-of Hannah as having been to him ‘the Virgin mother’ who redeems ‘the sin of his own mother’s betrayal of him with his father’ when ‘because of his unconscious resentment of his own mother’s sin of sex, he had been, he explained, unable to establish any satisfactory relations with women other than those of Courtly Love.’ When Hannah is dead, Alice loses all attraction for him too, and he flees back to London, his last act being the decision ‘with a sense of craven relief not to return to Riders when he sees in a newspaper at the railway station the news that Pip Lejour has killed himself, and the last thought of his that is vouchsafed to us being the quite false belief that Marion Taylor is in love with him. It is a kind of Platonic joke about him that in London he is the apparently perfectly efficient head of some important branch of the civil service: there is no link between any vision that he might have and what goes on in the cave, the ordinary world.
     
So far as Effingham Cooper’s side of the story is concerned, it seems as if one should conclude that the model of the good is Alice Lejour, who has never had any vision at all, whose actions are all practical and good, and to whom, since Hannah made her will in favour of Max Lejour (who is we are told very near death) and since Pip Lejour is dead, all Hannah’s property will descend, unless in self-sacrifice she rejects it in favour of Hannah’s poor relations, Violet and Jamesie Evercreech.
     
She may well do so: she is a type of self-sacrificing love, and if she is mildly comic, one might remember Dostoevsky’s note when he was trying to imagine a purely good person while writing The Idiot, that the English novelists manage it by making their purely good characters comic. He had in mind perhaps Parson Adams in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, and possibly Mr. Pickwick in The Pickwick Papers. But though Alice’s goodness is a very important truth, it is a truth which deals with the terrible sides of the world of The Unicorn, with death and guilt above all, simply by pushing them

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