The Platonism of the Unicorn
Iris Murdoch, the great Anglo-Irish Platonist philosopher and novelist of the 20th century, reassesses Irish themes and settings from a Platonic perspective in her novel The Unicorn (1963). The novel unfolds a complex and ambiguous relationship between Platonism and Ireland as a setting. Murdoch’s upbringing and recurrent personal relations with Ireland are the inspiration for her fictional writings on Ireland in The Unicorn. She was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1919, and her parents were Irish. Iris Murdoch kept understanding herself as Irish throughout her life while being a respectable 'Oxbridge' scholar of Plato.
In his biography on Iris Murdoch, Peter J. Conradi writes about Murdoch: ”she disconcerted her hearers by asking, "Who am I?", to which she almost at once soothed herself by musing, "Well I’m Irish anyway, that’s something." (1) As such, Ireland and Platonism were important topics in her writings, but not many expect that the two are also intertwined.
Platonism is an important discourse in most of Iris Murdoch’s oeuvre. Many researchers have pointed that out through the years. Lately, the monumental anthology The Murdochian Mind (2022) on Iris Murdoch's philosophy has reserved four chapters on her relationship with Platonic philosophy, yet this masterwork is less focused on Plato’s influence on her literary work. Neither does it investigate Irish themes in Murdoch’s work.
Iris Murdoch does not reproduce Platonic thought and mythology blindly and without contributing significantly to the Platonic code which streams through the thoughts of mankind. Iris Murdoch is herself philosophically fully conscious of this Platonic vein, as she writes in The Fire and the Sun, “Plato […] fought a long battle against sophistry and magic, yet produced some of the most memorable images in European philosophy: the cave, the charioteer, the cunning homeless Eros, the demiurge cutting Anima Mundi into strips and stretching it out crosswise. He kept emphasizing the imageless remoteness of the Good, yet kept returning in his exposition to the most elaborate uses of art. The dialogue for itself is artful and indirect and abounds in ironical and playful devices”. (2) In continuation of this insight, it is my point that Iris Murdoch in her novel The Unicorn used Platonic thought, mythology and literary techniques to draw a subversive picture of Irish identity and Platonic masculinity in particular, yet she also re-actualises Platonism in a modern version by doing so.
Outskirts of Ireland
The Unicorn is a story about a young British woman, Marian Taylor, travelling to the outskirts of Ireland. But when she arrives at Gaze Castle on the Irish West Coast, where she thinks she is to become the home teacher for some children in French and Italian, it quickly turns out that she instead must be the house teacher for the lady of the house, Hannah Crean-Smith. When Marian Taylor has been at Gaze Castle for a while, she discovers all sorts of intricacies between its occupants. In fact, Hannah is caged inside the castle by her husband.
As a parallel, another character, namely Effingham Cooper, has also travelled to the Irish outskirts to meet his old professor of Platonism from university in England, Max Lejour. In this way, a discussion about Platonism becomes a focus of the novel. It turns out that Effingham falls in love with Hannah, and he wants to escape with her. But he does not succeed, and he restricts himself to being a kind of 'platonic lover' for a while, yet it all ends tragically.
Ireland and Irishness
The Unicorn is mainly set on the outskirts of west-coast Ireland. Murdoch's husband, John Bayley, says in his memoir Iris that she got the idea for the novel when she visited two famous places on the west coast of Ireland, namely the Cliffs of Moher and the limestone country of the Burren. The combination of the two places thus forms the background for the descriptions of The Unicorn, with two country houses as the focal points: Gaze Castle and Riders.
Through the novel, we encounter a typical Irish west-coast landscape with marshes, bogs, the sea, cliffs, killing storms and violent tides. When Marian, the female protagonist, first arrives on the West Coast, she “had not expected this solitude. She had not expected this appalling landscape”. (3) Yet the landscape symbolises the very essence of Irishness and Murdoch has chosen this setting for Platonic fiction deliberately. As Joanna Jarzab and Patrick Duffy have pointed out, the Irish West, the Gaeltacht region, became mythologised as the epitome of Irishness, especially by such writers as W.B. Yeats. (4) But also J.M. Synge, Liam O’Flaherty and Patrick Kavanagh continued the romanticised image of the Irish West Coast with the unspoilt landscape, simple life, and affluent folklore. However, when Iris Murdoch establishes the setting for The Unicorn, she ironises this literary representation and instead, she accentuates Gothic features. (5) By using the epitome of the Irish landscape and combining it with Platonic aspirations, she creates a parodic and Gothic discourse on both Platonism and Irishness, even though The Unicorn is not a straight horror story or Gothic novel. The Irish landscape with bogs, huge marshes, and desolate cliffs, enhances the feeling of entrapment and getting lost, and the Platonic imagery of the cave, the charioteer, the demiurge, and the dualism between Forms and phenomena, as Murdoch also reiterates, fit perfectly in her parodic fictional account of Ireland on the outskirts.
The Phaedrus
Plato’s dialogues are both directly and indirectly an intertextual reference in Murdoch’s Gothic and Irish setting in The Unicorn, especially the Phaedrus and the myth of the charioteer. In the Phaedrus, Plato tells the myth of the charioteer through a monologue by Socrates. The basic idea in the myth is that the soul is divided into three parts. First, it consists of two horses and a driver. The two horses are opposites in every way, one is good and the other bad, white and black. One is docile and reasonable, while the other is unruly and stubborn. Plato now goes on to say that when the charioteer's sexual urges are awakened, one horse is reluctant, while the other horse is uncontrollable, but in the end, they give in and do as the charioteer commands. The myth of the charioteer further expresses how there is a fundamental duality in the soul, which is an ágon, an internal struggle between the opposing components of the soul. The myth can be read as an expression of the fundamental division that can exist in a person's mind when it comes to love and sexuality, but it can also be read from a wider perspective as an expression of the painful duality that manifests itself in everything that exists.
As a philosopher, Iris Murdoch interpreted the Phaedrus as dialogue unfolding the essentially dualistic nature of the human soul. In her essay The Fire and the Sun (1976), she writes that Plato "undoubtedly had his own experience of the divided soul. One may recall the sufferings of the bad horse in the Phaedrus (254E)". (6) In Murdoch’s understanding, Plato’s experience of dualism is a personal suffering and a general psychological characteristic of his soul. Murdoch re-used this concept of the soul in her literary fiction when inventing characters, for example in The Unicorn. Yet she also emphasises the doctrine of recollection, anamnesis, and the immortality of the soul which is harder to understand in a literary context: "In the Phaedrus […] the Forms become part of an argument for the immortality of the soul. We are aware of the Forms, and so are able to enjoy discourse and knowledge, because our souls were before birth in a place where they were clearly seen: the doctrine of recollection or anamnesis.” (7) The platonic experience of dualism and recollection, the tension between sensuality and transcendence, is very important in Murdoch’s understanding of the human soul and her literary work as well.
Iris Murdoch’s philosophical engagement with Plato’s dialogue The Phaedrus helps us understand what is going on in The Unicorn. Plato’s Phaedrus is both directly and indirectly an intertextual reference in Murdoch’s novel The Unicorn. Plato’s The Phaedrus is directly referred to twice in The Unicorn. Both examples occur when Max Lejour and Effingham discuss Platonic topics to understand Hannah’s personality and her situation in the novel. Max Lejour has been Effingham’s teacher at university, and he has had a magnetic effect on Effingham. He continues to return to the Riders Estate to visit his old master, yet during his visits he has also fallen in love with the mysterious Hannah Crean-Smith, who is kept a prisoner at the neighbouring estate, Gaze Castle. She is “Christ”, "a legendary creature”, “a beautiful Unicorn”, “Circe”, and a “spiritual Penelope” in the two men’s imagination.
The conversation on Hannah between Max and Effingham develops into a highbrow and academic dialogue which ironically unfolds stereotypically gender-biased prepositions, yet the whole conversation is full to the brim with intellectual references within the frame of a puritanical crypto-platonic scope. Yet the dialogue ironically reveals the true nature of his feelings for Hannah:
"I just wish I could understand her […] Women are made for feeling, for love. She must feel, she must love. She loves me, in a way. I only wished she loved me properly, with ordinary love"
"She can’t afford ordinary love," said Max. […] "If she were to give way to ordinary love in that situation she would be lost. The only being she can afford to love is God" (8).
The Phaedrus is also explicitly a part of the dialogue in The Unicorn, and Platonic thought is used to understand Effingham’s 'platonic' relationship and falling in love with Hannah. Into this dialogic process are mixed learned references from contemporary philosophy (i.e. Popper, 'the free society' and French existentialism), theology, Greek mythology and mysterious religion. Yet the underlying point is that the two men are either sexually interested or at least plainly puzzled by Hannah’s femininity. All the superfluous talk about Plato and the Phaedrus is a metaphysical cover for the plain phenomenon of sensual desire, as the character Max Lejour says:
"I shall take refuge in the Phaedrus. You remember at the end Socrates tells Phaedrus that words can’t be removed from place to place and retain their meaning. Truth is communicated from a particular speaker to a particular listener." (9)
Both Effingham and Max delude themselves through Plato’s philosophy, as Max says, “We can see wisdom only darkly. But we can see beauty quite plainly” (10). 'Beauty' here, of course, implies the sight of Hannah Crean-Smith. This is, however, not a new idea for Murdoch, as she also in her philosophical work has emphasised this aspect in Plato’s thought. In On ‘God’ and ‘Good’, Murdoch argues about the Phaedrus: “It is as if we can see beauty itself in a way in which we cannot see goodness itself” (11). When Murdoch reuses this Platonic idea in an ironic context, she also parodies Platonic thought. She seems to show the unworldliness and the semi-misogynistic tendencies within Platonism. Effingham might even vaguely understand this, as he says about Max, "I suspect you of being a crypto-Platonist" (12).
The dialogue between Effingham and Max reveals itself delusional and maddened by grandeur. The whole set-up with Hannah kept as a prisoner at the neighbouring estate is imagined as Max’s brainstem, as he deconstructs his own platonic thinking. Max almost sounds like a platonic Demiurge:
"Perhaps Hannah is my experiment! I’ve always had a great theoretical knowledge of morals, but practically speaking I’ve never done a hand’s turn. That’s why my reference to the Phaedrus was damned dishonest. I don’t know the truth either. I just know it." (13)
Effingham and Max’s absorption into platonic philosophy is delusional and leads them astray. In The Unicorn, Murdoch seems to unfold a recurring theme in her writing: men are easily lulled into metaphysical misunderstandings and imaginings, especially in their relationship with women. And these imaginary delusions can be dangerous, not least for the women they have a relationship with. In The Unicorn, the Phaedrus plays the backdrop for this experience.
Furthermore, one could also argue that the themes from The Phaedrus also play a role in the composition of the novel. A.S. Byatt, who has written extensively on Iris Murdoch, comments in her thesis Degrees of Freedom (1994) that the “Riders and Gaze Castle are symbolically named and stand respectively for Platonic religion — Riders recalling the horses of Phaedrus” (14). Byatt seems to suggest that Riders draws attention to the way that it and Gaze Castle represent the horses of the Phaedrus respectively. The two houses represent reason and passion like Plato's 'Charioteers'. The contrast between the two estates generates a fundamental Platonic dichotomy or dualism which forms the basic compositional technique of the novel. The narrative progress of the novel is based on the opposition of the two estates Gaze Castle and Riders, and the contrast between the people living on them. Also, the setting on the west coast of Ireland, probably near the cliffs of Moher, underlines the ironic quality of the Platonic aspirations in the novel. The seclusion and bareness of West Coast Ireland will only be disturbed by the presence of an Irish femme fatale:
Max’s retirement came a year or two later and he removed himself to Riders to finish in seclusion his immense work on Plato. […] Max was eager to settle down to the Timaeus. The sun shone without ceasing upon the noble coast and the gorgeous sea. Nothing, it seemed, could prevent his [Effingham’s] stay from being delightful: nothing except the disturbing proximity of the imprisoned lady (15).
What at first hand could seem a perfect setting for a solitary meditation in Plato's dialogues, with the platonic image of the sun, turns out to be disturbed by the feminine presence in a hostile environment which floods and kills the inhabitants of the rugged landscape.
Myth of the Cave
The myth of the cave is perhaps Plato’s most significant vision and has been reused and reproduced in countless cultural contexts, where Iris Murdoch is a prominent example. The myth of the cave stems from the Republic and tells the story of a group of uninformed prisoners who are tied down in a cave so that they can only see the back wall of the cave. Behind them, a series of objects are passed, which are illuminated by fire, thus casting shadows on the back wall of the cave. The prisoners now perceive these shadows as real objects, but in reality, they are only shadows of some other objects, which are again at a distance from the illuminated world, outside the cave in the light of the sun. The cave image is an allegory about man's place in the world as unenlightened prisoners in a cave, but also about their opportunity to come out into the light of the sun and recognize the truth (16).
The myth of the cave might be the aspect of Plato, Iris Murdoch has written most about both. She has many references to the myth of the cave in her philosophical writing and she reused her understanding of the myth in her writing, especially in The Unicorn. Iris Murdoch sees the myth of the cave as a story of pilgrimage where the prisoners are in the process of discovering the truth in the light of the sun, yet Murdoch changes the perspective on what is going on in the cave:
The detail of what happens in the cave is to be studied seriously; and the ‘lower half’ of the story is not just an explanatory image of the ‘higher half’, but is significant in itself. The pilgrim is thus seen as passing through different states of awareness whereby the higher reality is studied first in the form of shadows or images. (17).
As such, we should also pay attention to what is going on in the cave, before the prisoners are enlightened outside the cave, according to Murdoch. Murdoch is especially interested in “The lowest part of the soul is egoistic, irrational, and deluded, the central part is aggressive and ambitious, the highest part is rational and good and knows the truth which lies beyond all images and hypotheses.” (18). Especially in art and literature, we can investigate what is going on in the subconscious condition of the depth of the cave.
Miles Leeson, who in his thesis Iris Murdoch: Philosophical Novelist has established a philosophical interpretation of Murdoch’s novels, argues that the myth of the cave is also central to an understanding of the moral vision of Murdoch's fiction. The myth of the cave is the background for Murdoch’s 'metaphorical moral thinking' and it is a great inspiration for settings. This is also the case in The Unicorn, and the remote setting of rural West Coast Ireland does not minimise this fact. Also, Stephen Medcalf argues in his introduction to The Unicorn that Murdoch wrote The Unicorn with an underlying Platonic current stemming from the myth of the cave in The Republic. According to Medcalf, the readers of The Unicorn find themselves 'in the darkness of a cave where we see only by the inconstant flames of our own desires: our business is to break out of this darkness and see by the light of something whose relation to our desires is like the relation of the sun to firelight'. (19). The allegory of the cave lies at the foundation of the novel’s view of the outskirts of Ireland.
The myth of the cave is established in the structure of The Unicorn from the beginning. The myth is reflected in Marian’s approach to the place when she first arrives on the outskirts of Ireland. She asks Mr Nolan, the clerk of Gaze Castle when they are standing in the dark:
What is the matter with this place?’ He paused before answering. Then he switched the torch on for a moment and shone it quickly round about them. The dark green broom bushes and a haze of harebells and white daisies and ragged vetch were suddenly vivid and then gone. He said, ‘Nothing is the matter with this place. You are just not used to such a lonely place.’ … He paused. There was a little liquid sound of a fish breaking the surface. ‘You ask what is the matter with it is that it is a prison.’ ‘A prison?’ said Marian, astonished, and tense now at the nearness of revelation. Her heart beat painfully, ‘A prison?’ Who is the prisoner?’ (20).
Just as in Plato’s myth of the cave, the residents are in a kind of prison with a strange mixture of appearances and reality. The Myth of the Cave by Plato tells of some uninformed prisoners who are tied down in a cave so that they can only see the back wall of the cave. Behind them, a series of objects are passed, which are illuminated bonfires, thus casting shadows on the back wall of the cave. The prisoners perceive these shadows as real objects, but in reality, they are only shadows of some other objects, which are again at a distance from the illuminated world, outside the cave in the light of the sun. The myth of the cave is an allegory about man's place in the world as unenlightened prisoners in a cave, but also about man’s opportunity to come out into the light and recognize the truth (21).
In The Unicorn, the overly archaic torch belongs to the scenic imagery of a cave. As the new prisoner of the cave, Marian is in a position of not knowing anything and being left out of the light from the sun, yet she seeks answers to fundamental questions about reality and appearance.
The female protagonist Marian is employed in a prison guarded by men. They keep a young woman, namely Mrs Hannah Crean-Smith, as a prisoner because of her idolatry. Later Marian finally understands the true circumstances of Mrs Hannah Crean-Smith, yet she also senses in a kind of vision the oppressive power structures on the outskirts of Ireland, “A prophetic flash of understanding burnt her with a terrible warmth … "Oughtn't she to be wakened up? I mean it’s all so unhealthy, so unnatural"' (22). Marian receives revelatory truths when she becomes consecrated into the strange misogynistic relationships with the people of the two estates. After a while, she understands a small part of the so-called truth of the conditions of characters at this remote place on the west coast of Ireland, “The stifling fright and sickness came back upon her as she looked up at the dark veiled eyes of the house. … ‘What will end it then?’” (23). Hannah Crean-Smith is kept as a prisoner, yet it is a kind of self-imprisonment that also prisons all the other characters of the novel, one way or another, especially because many of the men are in love, or at least infatuated by the mysterious women in the attic. The Unicorn suggests that the Platonic myth of the cave, in an Irish context, is misogynistic, and men also suffer from the results of this misogyny.
Conclusion
In The Unicorn, Murdoch explores Platonism through a dialogical narrative technique in combination with Irish themes, yet from a parodic and ironic angle. The dialogues on Platonism and Plato are an explicit topic among the people in Gaze Castle and Riders. Iris Murdoch has re-used and re-invented Platonism in her oppositional portrait of Ireland. The Unicorn reiterates platonic imagery and myth from, for example, The Phaedrus and The Republic, emphasising the myth of the cave, the charioteer, the demiurge etc. However, the underlying criticism is also directed against the misogynistic and usually oppressed tendencies that she detects within Platonism itself.
(Adapted from a seminar lecture at the Centre of Classical Influences and Irish Culture at Aarhus University.)
1. Peter Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life (2001), 29.
2. Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun (1976, 1997 edn), 462.
3. Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn (2000), 7.
4. Joanna Jarzab, 'The Significance Of Space In Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn As A Twentieth-Century Irish Gothic Novel', Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: An international Review of English Studies, Vol. 49 No. 4 (2014), 11.
5. Jarzab, 'The Significance Of Space', 7.
6. Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun, 399.
7. Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun, 388.
8. Murdoch, The Unicorn, 99.
9. Murdoch, The Unicorn, 100.
10. Murdoch, The Unicorn, 97.
11. Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun, 348.
12. Murdoch, The Unicorn, 100.
13. Murdoch, The Unicorn, 101.
14. A.S. Byatt, Degrees of Freedom (1994), 180.
15. Murdoch, The Unicorn, 70.
16. Plato, The Republic, 514 A-21.
17. Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun, 389.
18. Ibid.
19. Murdoch, The Unicorn, xii.
20. Murdoch, The Unicorn, 58-9.
21. Plato, The Republic, 514 A-21 B.
22. Murdoch, The Unicorn, 65.
23. Murdoch, The Unicorn, 66.