This one is definitely worth a re-read. I think Murdoch is doing a couple of interesting things, but maybe they’re too far spread out among too many characters, or perhaps just not developed to the degree that I would’ve liked.
The Inner Circle
Here’s the interesting thing I stumbled across first.
After leaving the office I would travel either to Sloane Square or to Liverpool Street to have a drink in the station buffet. In the whole extension of the Underground system those two stations are, as far as I’ve been able to discover, the only ones which have bars actually upon the platform. The concept of the tube station platform bar excited me. In fact the whole Underground region moved me, I felt as if it were in some sense my natural home.
This is our narrator speaking -- a middle-aged professional with a dark past named Hilary Burde, the titular Word Child himself. See what he says here about these bars in the London Underground.
These two bars were not just a cosy after-the-office treat, they were the source of a dark excitement, places of profound communication with London, with the sources of life, with the caverns of resignation to grief and to mortality. Drinking there between six and seven in the shifting crowd of rush-hour travellers, one could feel on one’s shoulders as a curiously soothing yoke the weariness of toiling London, that blank released tiredness after work which can somehow console even the bored, even the frenzied. The coming and departing rattle of the trains, the drifting movement of the travellers, their arrival, their waiting, their vanishing forever presented a mesmeric and indeed symbolic fresco: so many little moments of decision, so many little finalities, the constant wrenching of texture, the constant destruction of cells which shifts and ages the lives of men and of universes.
It’s not just of life, it is life itself -- Hilary’s own mind pulsating and breathing with the options open to its will, to its unseen and unclaimed destiny.
The uncertainty of the order of the trains. The dangerousness of the platforms. (Trains as lethal weapons.) The resolution of a given moment (but which?) to lay down your glass and mount the next train. (But why? There will be another in two minutes.) Ah qu’ils sont beaux les trains manques! as I especially had cause to know. Then once upon the train that sense of its thrusting life, its intent and purposive turning which conveys itself so subtly to the traveller’s body, its leanings and veerings to points of irrevocable change and parting of the ways. The train of consciousness, the present moment, the little lighted tube moving in the long dark tunnel. The inevitability of it all and yet its endless variety: the awful daylight glimpses, the blessed plunges back into the dark; the stations, each unique, the sinister brightness of Charing Cross, the mysterious gloom of Regent’s Park, the dereliction of Mornington Crescent, the futuristic melancholy of Moorgate, the monumental ironwork of Liverpool Street, the twining art nouveau of Gloucester Road, the Barbican sunk in a baroque hole, fit subject for Piranesi. And in summer, like an excursion into the country, the flowering banks of the Westbound District Line.
It is an entire world of possibility -- this London Underground -- but even within that infinite abundance, Hilary has his favorite place, his favorite state-of-mind writ large against this huffing and pulsating metaphor of life.
I preferred the dark however. Emergence was like a worm pulled from its hole. I loved the Inner Circle best. Twenty-seven stations for fivepence. Indeed, for fivepence as many stations as you cared to achieve. Sometimes I rode the whole Circle (just under an hour) before deciding whether to have my evening drink at Liverpool Street or at Sloane Square. I was not the only Circle rider. There were others, especially in winter. Homeless people, lonely people, alcoholics, people on drugs, people in despair. We recognized each other. It was a fit place for me, I was indeed an Undergrounder. (I thought of calling this story ‘The Memoirs of an Underground Man’ or just simply ‘The Inner Circle’.)
The Inner Circle. In the Underground and in his mind. What things will happen while Hilary is ‘riding these rails’? Not as much, it turns out, as I would like, but the concept does lead us into the other interesting thing that Murdoch is trying to do with this novel.
No Never-Never Land
“Of course,” I said, “if you think the world is an illusion you don’t care what you do. A very convenient doctrine.”
“Doesn’t Christianity say---?”
“Naturally of course Christopher doesn’t really believe this, no one could. He announces that people don’t really exist! It doesn’t stop him laying about with his ego like the rest of us.”
“Well, I don’t think we exist all that much,” said Arthur.
“Speak for yourself.”
“I think we should just be kind to each other. It’s all a pretty good mess-up and if that’s what Christopher means---”
“Oh, don’t you start.”
“I mean one’s mind is just an accidental jumble of stuff. There’s nothing behind ordinary life. There isn’t anything complete. Life isn’t a play. It isn’t even a pantomime.”
“No Never-Never Land.”
“Certainly no Never-Never Land,” said Arthur. “That’s the point.”
“So you don’t see Peter Pan as reality breaking in?”
“No,” said Arthur. “On the contrary. What is real is the Darlings’ home life. Hook is just a fantasy of Mr. Darling.”
“What is Peter then?”
“Peter is--- Peter is--- Oh I don’t know -- spirit gone wrong, just turning up as an unnerving visitor who can’t really help and can’t get in either.”
“That’s rather fanciful.”
“I mean the spiritual urge is mad unless it’s embodied in some ordinary way of life. It’s destructive, it’s just a crazy sprite.”
“I think Smee is the real hero. Hook envies Smee. So Hook can be saved.”
“Only in the novel.”
“Novels explain. Plays don’t.”
“It’s better not to explain,” said Arthur. “Poetry is best of all. Who wouldn’t rather be a poet than anything else? Poetry is where words end.”
“Poetry is where words begin.”
“I think Nana is the hero.”
“Nana is the most conventional character in the whole thing. Now Smee---”
“You must remember that Smee serves Hook.”
“You must remember that Nana is only a dog.”
“Exactly,” said Arthur. “There’s nothing bogus about Nana. Nana doesn’t talk. Even Mr. Darling fails, he wants to be Hook.”
“What about Wendy, does she fail?”
“Yes. Wendy is the human soul seeking the truth. She ends up with a compromise.”
“Living half in an unreal world?”
“Yes, like most of us do. It’s a defeat but a fairly honourable one. That’s the best we can hope for, I suppose. Now Nana. She’s the truth of the Darling home, its best part, its reality. Nana fears Peter. She’s the only one who really recognizes Peter.”
“I can’t think why you idolize the Darling home life. It seems to me to be pretty dreary.”
“Oh no -- what could be better -- a home with -- children and---”
“I think we’re drunk,” I said. “At any rate I must be. I thought for two minutes that you were saying something interesting.”
This is not the first mention of Peter Pan in the novel, but it is the most extensive -- a group of friends using it as the frame for a philosophical conversation over drinks. But mark what they are saying about it. It is unreal. It is not an idealized life. It is, in fact, not life at all -- because life, unlike Peter Pan, has no heroes and villains, no rising action and climax, no plot, no story line. Life just is. And in that dreary, static, secular, and inescapable crucible, there are (or are not?) people still with responsibilities to care for one another.
This concept will open the dark and depressing theme of the novel -- that in a world without magic -- without God -- what does it mean, what can it mean, to repent and to be forgiven?
Did I repent? That question troubled me as the years went by. Can something half crushed and bleeding repent? Can that fearfully complex theological concept stoop down into the real horrors of human nature? Can it, without God, do so? I doubt it. Can sheer suffering redeem? It did not redeem me, it just weakened me further. I, who had so long cried out for justice, would have been willing to pay, only I had nothing to pay with and there was no one to receive the payment.
Twenty years in the novel’s past, Hilary has done something dreadful. He has had an affair with another man’s wife, and through his actions, albeit accidently, caused her death. He has lived a life of biting obscurity since, removing himself from his old haunts and habits. In the novel’s now, the man he wronged has re-entered his life, and much of the novel is consumed with Hilary’s inability to reconcile his past actions.
“I’ve thought of nothing else ever since. That’s hardly an exaggeration. I have lived and breathed it all these years.”
“And you’ve felt guilt?”
“Yes.”
“And you feel it has ruined your life?”
“Yes.”
“Then you need help too.”
“Of course. But who can give it to me?”
That is really the crux of the novel. In a secular world -- a world without a Never-Never Land -- who can forgive sin? Can sins even be forgiven? Can anything ever be redeemed?
“Don’t you want to change your life?”
“I’m not sure. It could change for the worse. I can see that Gunnar might feel better after he’d talked to me. I doubt if I’d feel better after I’d talked to Gunnar. Gunnar can’t “forgive” me, I doubt if God could, what’s done is done. I don’t mean anything very dramatic by that. There just isn’t any psychological or spiritual machinery for removing my trouble. Gunnar feeling a bit better won’t help me, it won’t even, if you see what I mean, cheer me up. And seeing him will just bring it closer, drive it deeper. Death is my only solution. And I don’t mean suicide. Do you understand?”
No, I don’t think the person Hilary is talking to here does understand, and neither will your average reader, who will not likely understand or, if understand, not likely agree with the premise being laid and the question being asked.
Gunnar is the man wronged by Hilary -- and so it may be important to review what he thinks about Peter Pan.
Gunnar, who had either become pompous through being grand, or was so now out of nervousness, made a speech to Freddie to the effect that of course Peter Pan was about parents and being unwilling to grow up, but what made it sinister was that childishness had been invested with spirituality. “The fragmentation of spirit is the problem of our age,” Gunnar informed Freddie. “Peter personifies a spirituality which is irrevocably caught in childhood and which yet cannot surrender its pretensions. Peter is essentially a being from elsewhere, the apotheosis of an immature spirituality.
It’s difficult to see, but in a thematic understanding of the novel, I’m thinking that Murdoch is equating spirituality -- of any kind -- with a world in which forgiveness and redemption exists -- where bad things that a person does, or which they cause to come into existence, can be purged from their hearts and the hearts of everyone affected by them.
But that is not the world in which Hilary exists, as we see time and again as he cogitates in a kind of self-flagellating stream of consciousness while riding the metaphoric trains of his Inner Circle.
If God had existed and we could have stood together in His presence and looked together without falsity at what had been done, and then looked at each other, might not some miracle have occurred? “This is what I did.” “I know.” But there was no such scene, only two sodden semi-conscious psyches wrestling with each other in the dark. Could anything ever be clarified, could anything be really done here? Had not my feelings, whatever they were, for Kitty simply misled me with a momentary vision of a new heaven and a new earth? I had wrecked my life and Crystal’s by a guilt which was itself a kind of sin. Could that be cut away? The idea of forgiveness, pardon, reconciliation, seemed here too fuzzy, too soft for what was needed. If Gunnar and I could be even for a moment simple, sincere, together … But that was the way of hope, and there must be no hope, only a task, only the truth itself if one could but discern it and hang on.
But Murdoch isn’t just asking this question -- this question of whether or not forgiveness and redemption can exist in a secular world -- she quite decisively answers it.
“You speak of truth. Well this is a matter of science, and science is truth isn’t it? There are no miracles, no redemptions, no moments of healing, no transfiguring changes in one’s relation to the past. There is nothing but accepting the beastliness and defending oneself. When I was a little child I believed that Christ died for my sins. Only of course because he was God he didn’t really die. That was magic all right. He suffered and then somehow everything was made well. And nothing can be more consoling than that, to think that suffering can blot out sin, can really erase it completely, and that there is no death at the end of it all. Not only that, but there is no damage done on the way either, since every little thing can be changed and washed, everything can be saved, everything, what a marvellous myth, and they teach it to little defenceless children, and what a bloody awful lie, this denial of causation and death, this changing of death into a fairytale of constructive suffering! Who minds suffering if there's no death and the past can be altered? One might even want to suffer if it could automatically wipe out one’s crimes. Whoopee. Only it ain’t so.”
And, almost as if to drive this painful point home, Murdoch twists her plot in such a way that Hilary’s sin is not just not redeemed, it is in fact repeated. Gunnar has a new wife. Hilary falls in love with her and commences an affair. And she comes to a tragic end due to his own negligence and constant inaction.
Repentance, penance, redemptive suffering? Nothing of the sort. … It was burning the orphanage down all over again, only now there was no one to stop the work of destruction.
In A World Child, sin repeats itself, and there is no Leviathan to step in, to change things, to make things better again.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
