Metafiction, Metadrama, and the God-Game in Murdoch's The Unicorn

Metafiction, Metadrama, and the God-Game in Murdoch's The Unicorn ]ack Stewart Iris Murdoch is not usually thought of as an experimental novelist, although Robert Scholes, Patricia Waugh, and other critics have commented on her use of metafiction. But in The Unicorn (1963), she highlights the literary/psychological tendency to mythmaking in her own fiction through a stylized use of Gothic narrative and settings.1 Murdoch's metafiction, which mainly exposes the fiction-making illusions of her characters, is heuristic rather than formalistic in the postmodern sense. Waugh, who observes that "metafiction explores the concept of fictionality through an opposition between the constmction and the breaking of illusion," places Murdoch's novels "at one end of the spectmm," where "fictionality [is] a theme to be explored," but "formal self-consciousness is limited" (16, 18-19). She asks: "Why do metafictional novelists so frequently concern themselves with the problem of human freedom?" (119) Why, one might add, does Murdoch treat the problem of freedom metafictionally in The Unicorn? The answer has to do with the way she deconstructs the Gothic fantasy of the text and her characters' illusions.2 As Peter Brooks says of Heart of Darkness, "[the] reader's own incapacity to sum up—the frustration produced by the text—is consubstantial with his dialogic implication in the text" (260-61). Mark Currie defines metafiction as "a kind of writing which places itself on the border between fiction and criticism" and emphasizes "the JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 32.1 (Winter 2002): 77-96. Copyright © 2002 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 78 JNT strong reciprocal influence between discourses which seem increasingly inseparable" (2, 3). In "[the] postmodem context," he notes, "the boundaries between art and life, language and metalanguage, and fiction and criticism are under philosophical attack" (17-18). Inger Christensen similarly observes that metafiction "focuses on the difference between art and reality and displays its consciousness of this distance" (22). Murdoch's novelistic discourse constmcts a spellbinding mythos, while at the same time disclosing the reality of human relations that lies behind appearance. As a novelist, she is suspicious of the power of mythmaking; but mythos is connected with telos and "the reading of narrative ... is animated by [what Barthes calls] the 'passion for (of) meaning' " (Brooks 177). In The Unicorn, where discourse is ultimately demythologizing, Murdoch dramatizes the construction and collapse of fantasies and illusions. If "the goal of literary work ... is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text" (Barthes 4), Murdoch as philosophical fabulist encourages the reader to participate in her character's illusions, but also to deal critically with issues of freedom and reality. For Scholes, Marian and Effingham "suggest two kinds of readers and two ways of encountering a book like The Unicorn, which is itself a 'fantasy of the spiritual life' : the reader who, like Marian, becomes engaged in the events and touches good and evil through imaginative experience; and the reader who, like Effingham , remains aloof 'through egoism, through being in some sense too small' " (74). The Unicorn is, to some degree, an allegory of reading. Metafiction opens a gap between mythos and philosophical commentary that invites understanding: it examines the story, as fictional pattern, from the inside, laying bare mythicizing impulses in author and characters that constitute the act of narration.3 Murdoch presents a cast of characters trapped in a state of Gothic enchantment or illusion, a state that the implied reader enters and absorbs, before learning to stand back and criticize it. In "The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited," Murdoch notes that "the individuals portrayed in the [great] novels are free, independent of their author, and not merely puppets"; she comments on "how almost impossibly difficult it is to create a free and lifelike character" and on the "difficult battle to prevent [the] form from becoming rigid, by the free expansion against it of the individual characters" (257, 267, 271). She wants to constmct "a house fit for free characters to live in" (271), yet the focal Metafiction, Metadrama, and the God-Game 79 character in The Unicorn is imprisoned at Gaze Castle under a seven-year spell. The mirror motif...