The Black Prince as an Example of Great Art

Iris Murdoch’s cleverness is beyond the scope of this blog post and its author is inadequate to demonstrate how great Murdoch’s novel is as a work of art. However, I can write that Murdoch provides her reader with much to think about with many intertextual elements to mine, as well as creating a work that meets her own definition of great art.            

               Murdoch (Against 20) writes that great art does not console but rather “helps us to recover from the ailments of Romanticism.” These ailments include “dryness,” the residue of Romanticism after the “messy” humanitarian and revolutionary elements have spent their force. This means the loneliness of rationality and “freedom” (Against 18), together with “a dangerous lack of curiosity about the real world, a failure to appreciate the difficulties of knowing it” that is induced by a “simple-minded faith in science, together with the assumption that we are all rational and totally free.”

The Black Prince is not a novel that falls to the temptation of consoling the reader. The narrator, Bradley Pearson, is not completely rational in his relationships with any other characters in the novel.  Murdoch seems to bring her characters to the edge of reason (and, in the case of Priscilla, beyond it). In Murdoch’s novel, the world is unstable, unpredictable, difficult to know, and no one seems in control with the freedom to make choices in their own self-interest. Bradley is unable to go to Patara or to write; Arnold is unable to resist Christian; Francis is constantly inebriated and broke; and Rachel cannot keep her hands to herself. Furthermore, the irony of the novel is that Bradley Pearson’s work of art that he successfully writes, his “‘art object’” (72), is about the failure of his life (Baschiera). It is difficult for the reader find consolation in this conclusion.

               In addition to adhering to her own principles of great art, Baschiera (48) writes that Murdoch’s novel also “takes advantage of stock incidents and devices traditionally belonging to Elizabethan theatre.” Examples of these incidents in the novel include a cross-dressing Julian, Arnold’s letter received by Bradley and read by the wrong person (Rachel), a character playing the fool (Francis), among others. The novel also includes elements of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Bradley shares Hamlet’s inability to act, and when he does act, it is sometimes rashly. The novel also borrows from Hamlet the idea of constantly keeping the audience on edge, rather than letting them settle into a predictable narrative. The situation in which Bradley finds himself is constantly changing, and the more he tries to control it, such as trying to prevent Arnold from having anything to do with Francis and Christian, the more out of control it becomes.

               These allusions to Elizabethan drama and borrowings from Hamlet contribute to what Sanders (25) calls an “inherent sense of play, produced in part by the activation of our informed sense of similarity and difference between the texts being invoked, and the connected interplay of expectation and surprise, that...lies at the heart of the experience of adaptation and appropriation.” Murdoch seems to play consciously with the elements of drama and weave them into The Black Prince. It seems that Murdoch intentionally “misreads” and “misprisons” the work of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Bloom). This ability of Murdoch’s, to take Shakespeare and re-imagine elements of it into a different generic form, is another aspect of her work that makes it recognizable as great art.

               If it is assumed, and I confess that I do, that Murdoch’s opinions on great art are worth considering and applying, and that her ability to capture and rework elements of Shakespeare into The Black Prince is part of the pleasure of reading it, then The Black Prince is an example of great art. Besides, would you argue with this (Murdoch’s) face?

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Works cited:

Bloom, Harold.  The Anxiety of Influence:  A Theory of Poetry.  New York, Oxford UP:  1973; 2^nd edition, 1997.

Dente Baschiera, Carla.  “Re-Inventing Ambiguity in the 20^th Century:  Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince.”  Textus 11.1 (1998):  45-64.

Murdoch, Iris.  “Against Dryness:  A Polemical Sketch.”  Encounter 16 (1961):  16-20.            

Murdoch, Iris.  The Black Prince.  New York:  Penguin, 2003.

Sanders, Julie.  Adaptation and Appropriation.  New York:  Routledge, 2006.