Making Love to Apollo: The Agalmatophilia of Iris Murdoch’s Athenian Lovers in A Fairly Honourable Defeat

This essay explores the theme of Apollonian love in Iris Murdoch’s A Fairly Honourable Defeat. It traces the morally laden scopic and solar milieu of the novel that informs the portrayals of Morgan Browne’s “rape”—instigated by the secular theophany of Apollo—and, most importantly, the trials of love, and the homosexual quasi-marital Apollonian union of Simon Foster and Axel Nilsson. Simon and Axel’s sexual intercourse with the statue of a kouros,¹ on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, bears testimony to the continuous presence of Apollo in Murdoch’s fiction—made apparent in the admission in her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals that she is a visualist still living “in a Greek light” (159). Having love as its thematic axis, this article focuses on the ways in which Murdoch’s fiction is informed by her theoretical work and permeated by the tenets of her visualist philosophy. It reflects on Murdoch’s philosophical and literary texts, highlighting the continuum and the uninterrupted flow of ideas between them.

Selfless love is at the center of Murdoch’s idiosyncratic, quixotic conception of moral vision, as well as the philosophical idealism and spiritualism governing her ethically laden novels. Being two of Murdoch’s most daring passages, Simon’s and Axel’s strikingly unexplored paraphilia and ménage à trois with the kouros and Morgan’s erotic choreography of insolation allude to the impulses of low and high Eros. Murdoch consistently sublimates and elevates the unorthodox paraphilia of Apollo’s wooers through their transformative sexual intercourse with the most celebrated simula-crum of the solar deity of Apollo that illuminates their divine love. Being Apollo’s signifier, the reanimated kouros grants the ensuing illumination of his inamoratos in the novel’s finale, which palpitates with the triumph of their love.

The novel is consistently discussed in light of philosophical works such as The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists and Metaphysics that address Murdoch’s Hellenic visualist morality. Following Murdoch’s theorizing of virtuous love as an escape from the egocentric tenebrosity of illusion granting a passage to light in her Metaphysics, I argue that “if we read” the abundant images that the case studies of Morgan, Simon, and Axel offer, these images will become “enlightening” in terms of Murdoch’s visualist-laden conception of ethics and selfless love (Metaphysics 508). Through its largely neglected Apollonian erotica, the novel traces the processes through which the protagonists embark on a profound moral pilgrimage while frantically searching for love. The novel’s kouros is one of Murdoch’s most appealing icons of love and moral metaphors, which are discussed at length in her philosophical works, where she sings the praises of visual imagery: “There are many kinds of images in the world, sources of energy, checks and reminders, pure things, inspiring things, innocent things attracting love and veneration” (496). The scene of the transformative sexual “intercourse” of Apollo’s lovers with one of the most tangible and celebrated simulacra of the solar deity Apollo—in other words, their precarious agalmatophilia and fervent sexual union with a statue of a little Apollo—has a largely neglected iconic status in Murdoch’s fiction that deserves greater attention. Agalmatophilia—a paraphilia involving sexual attraction to statues, dolls, mannequins, and other figurative items— encompasses a desire for actual sexual contact and fantasies of having sexual encounters with inanimate objects. The theme of Pygmalionesque, sexual desire for statues is a common occurrence in the repertoire of psychopathology with examples ranging from classical antiquity to postmodernity (O’Bryhim 419–29).

The novel’s pronounced ocular intensity, the recurrent litanies of light, and the quasi-literal presence of Apollo as wooer and wooed of three of its protagonists,² offer additional corroborating evidence to the attempted affiliation of Murdoch’s visualist Hellenic metaphysics with the theme of love and Apollonian eroticism. I maintain that the novel portrays the consistent optical quality of Murdoch’s philosophy and fiction. In this respect, Morgan’s interchangeable optical experience of an epiphanic Apollonian “rape...