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Fergus, Quondam Happy Face's Reviews> The Green Knight
The Green Knight
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I AM THE WEAKEST OF YOUR KNIGHTS, AND THE DULLEST-MINDED,
SO MY DEATH WOULD BE LEAST LOSS, IF TRUTH BE TOLD.
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
If you ever try to read this late novel by the wonderful Iris Murdoch, be sure to fasten your seatbelts first. And be prepared to wrangle your mind out of some perniciously sticky imaginative spiderwebs.
And once you’re into this winding labyrinth with its suggestions of lurking ogres everywhere, hopefully you’ll mark your progress on its walls so you can get out again safely!
By far the best way I could give you a sense of the deeply atmospheric and intense plot-line of the book is by quoting Baudelaire (English to follow):
La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.
Nature is a temple where living pillars
Sometimes give voice to confused words;
Man passes there through forests of symbols
Which look at him with knowing glances.
Do you see the intense, rich, brooding atmosphere? THIS is The Green Knight.
The Green Knight was that pernicious and deceitful enemy of the good Sir Gawain in the medieval Anglo-Saxon Romance.
And THIS Green Knight was the beginning of Murdoch's troubled descent into Alzheimer's Disease.
It is scary to read in more ways than one. Someone once did a word count of Murdoch's last works, and found that the number and complexity of the words she used decreased DRAMATICALLY toward the end of her writing career.
Murdoch was a specialist in contemporary philosophy who was getting lost in its Dark Wood.
For without gaining a full and exhaustive knowledge of oneself, the whole raison d’être of metaphysics collapses. So suggests Socrates.
For we engage in philosophical thought not only to understand the world in toto, but also to DISARM THE DEVILS of our everyday life.
But Murdoch was lost in the metaphysical labyrinth, because total self-knowledge was unbearable. The underworld was winning. Exhausted, she turned her imagination’s autopilot switch on when writing this:
A FATAL mistake for anyone - because then, the devils WIN.
It’s an edge-of-your-seat challenge to finish the novel. It is very much like reading the early John Irving: if something CAN go wrong it WILL - so watch out!
Very much a HAUNTED work.
Personally, I couldn't make it to the end, though I bravely kept reading till way past the mid-point. For those of us who know the Might of Erebus, it’s just too full of shadowy, half-glimpsed fears.
Like doing pitched battle with hobgoblins! And there was a LOT to think about when I finally put it down.
One thing I thought about then was the way Murdoch's husband described her final years in his wonderful Elegy for Iris, and Iris and Her Friends.
He says that his wife - the eternal philosophy professor - never gave up her search for truth, and that he successfully kept up her spirits with his jokes and loving care till almost the end.
It's almost as if, in her own mind, she was Penelope or even Ulysses, off on a Second Odyssey...
For her final destination and resting place was almost in sight. She was just trying to keep an even keel, and still trying, like old Tennyson:
"To strive, to seek, to find - and not to yield."
SO MY DEATH WOULD BE LEAST LOSS, IF TRUTH BE TOLD.
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
If you ever try to read this late novel by the wonderful Iris Murdoch, be sure to fasten your seatbelts first. And be prepared to wrangle your mind out of some perniciously sticky imaginative spiderwebs.
And once you’re into this winding labyrinth with its suggestions of lurking ogres everywhere, hopefully you’ll mark your progress on its walls so you can get out again safely!
By far the best way I could give you a sense of the deeply atmospheric and intense plot-line of the book is by quoting Baudelaire (English to follow):
La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.
Nature is a temple where living pillars
Sometimes give voice to confused words;
Man passes there through forests of symbols
Which look at him with knowing glances.
Do you see the intense, rich, brooding atmosphere? THIS is The Green Knight.
The Green Knight was that pernicious and deceitful enemy of the good Sir Gawain in the medieval Anglo-Saxon Romance.
And THIS Green Knight was the beginning of Murdoch's troubled descent into Alzheimer's Disease.
It is scary to read in more ways than one. Someone once did a word count of Murdoch's last works, and found that the number and complexity of the words she used decreased DRAMATICALLY toward the end of her writing career.
Murdoch was a specialist in contemporary philosophy who was getting lost in its Dark Wood.
For without gaining a full and exhaustive knowledge of oneself, the whole raison d’être of metaphysics collapses. So suggests Socrates.
For we engage in philosophical thought not only to understand the world in toto, but also to DISARM THE DEVILS of our everyday life.
But Murdoch was lost in the metaphysical labyrinth, because total self-knowledge was unbearable. The underworld was winning. Exhausted, she turned her imagination’s autopilot switch on when writing this:
A FATAL mistake for anyone - because then, the devils WIN.
It’s an edge-of-your-seat challenge to finish the novel. It is very much like reading the early John Irving: if something CAN go wrong it WILL - so watch out!
Very much a HAUNTED work.
Personally, I couldn't make it to the end, though I bravely kept reading till way past the mid-point. For those of us who know the Might of Erebus, it’s just too full of shadowy, half-glimpsed fears.
Like doing pitched battle with hobgoblins! And there was a LOT to think about when I finally put it down.
One thing I thought about then was the way Murdoch's husband described her final years in his wonderful Elegy for Iris, and Iris and Her Friends.
He says that his wife - the eternal philosophy professor - never gave up her search for truth, and that he successfully kept up her spirits with his jokes and loving care till almost the end.
It's almost as if, in her own mind, she was Penelope or even Ulysses, off on a Second Odyssey...
For her final destination and resting place was almost in sight. She was just trying to keep an even keel, and still trying, like old Tennyson:
"To strive, to seek, to find - and not to yield."
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Julie
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Jul 25, 2018 06:22AM
Even left unfinished, you've gathered some beautiful thoughts from the book, Fergus.
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I really felt for her - she was such a brilliant writer, and had such a beautiful mind.
I can completely understand how difficult it would be to read this book, knowing how the author struggled at the time. This is a great tribute, though, unfinished or not.
To be honest, I think all sensitive readers would feel her alarm and mounting confusion all too easily in this book. But one gets the feeling as well that she often rallies to the occasion, and holds back her wayward emotions successfully. That’s why I gave it four stars - there is still a sense of mastery in it!
Thanks for these comments, Fergus.To have loved and lost is better than never to have loved at all.
Right you are, Markus. Well worth repeating.
Your review is insightful, Fergus, and it makes me want to read this book to see what you are talking about and to feel that confusion mounting.
In a way her control is still quite impeccable here. Her disease was not yet in an advanced stage - until the evening her mind began to blank out rather precipitously. Yet the insidious signs of stability just starting to waver are nevertheless here, and it is the vaguely ominous atmosphere of the book that is gives that away, at least for me! I could be wrong.
Fergus, am amazing, but very sad review. Makes one think about our own health and mortality.
I agree it’s very sad. But with her loving husband attending to her every need so attentively - and in her familiar home environment - her life had more pleasant moments than most of those unfortunates cursed with this illness.
What an evocative review; the poem by Baudelaire seems to capture the mood perfectly. So sad and yet it's good to know she continued to fight and her husband to care for her so well. I've yet to venture into the symbolic woods of Iris Murdoch... other than through GR reviews.
She was such an important novelist, Caterina. And one thing that occurred to me last night was that though she taught modern philosophy at the university level throughout her career - and even wrote a widely-read study of Sartre - she may have been perhaps skating intellectually over deep philosophical terms all that time, not INTUITING their depth
Sorry - I cut myself short! To continue, it was Spinoza who said that intuiting an idea is the highest form of knowledge - and she appears perhaps to have not done that. So when the forceful intuition of terms like Sartre’s Le Néant finally hit her, it was too much, too late - an overload.
Great writing on what actually sounds like a fascinating book, Fergus. Incidentally, I have owned this book since its publication, lost amongst so many other books that I have yet to read. Thank you!
It’s really quite a ride! Just try to see it from the perspective of her growing inner darkness - THEN it‘s spooky indeed!
Another great review, Fergus. Sounds like a fascinating book.
It’s very densely written, Kat, and I was put off by Murdoch’s growing paranoia - but, oh, how she writes!
I liked the movie, did you read Tolkien version of the story?
That's interesting, Iluvatar - Tolkien has his own version! I guess I shouldn't be surprised, expert Medievalist that he was. Do you remember if it was a translation of the Anglo Saxon poem?
Wow Fergus. I knew nothing about this Murdoch! Thank you. CB
You're more than welcome, Colin! The moment philosophical relativism moves us to abandon our ideals, we're as lost as Iris.
Even if you didn’t read through to the end, this is one amazing and thought provoking review! Thank you!
Thanks so much, Ally - so very kind of you!
It has been a long time since I have read anything by Iris Murdoch. She is good, interesting, but different. I knew a lady who Iris Murdoch was her favorite writer.
She was such a keen observer of British daily life in the mid-century era, and had a rare literary gift of epitomizing that life in print!
I haven't read "The Green Knight." by Iris Murdoch. I might have to look for it.
As I say, it was one of her last books. In it, you can clearly imagine her composing her plot and constantly being freaked out by the monsters and hobgoblins of her own innate irrationality - which had always, unknown to her, lurked below her rational consciousness!
Like Erebus, we are all the sons and daughters of Chaos and Caligine, my friend.
Yes, it sounds grim, but as I'm now in my seventies I must stay alert! Old Age is unfortunately a mine field.
Four of Iris’s books are on Boxall’s List of 1,001 Books you Should Read Before You Die; Under the Net, The Bell, A Severed Head, and The Sea, the Sea which won the Booker Prize. Two others were also on the list for a while but deleted at a later time to make room for other authors’ books, The Nice and the Good and The Black Prince.
