‘One can only understand what one identifies with’: the Redeemer and the Holocaust in Iris Murdoch's

Extract

Various narratives are incorporated into the The Message to the Planet which, on the face of it, should help the reader to understand the novel’s enigmatic and central ‘redemptive’ figure, Marcus Vallar. These include Freud’s ‘Life of Leonardo’ (there are close textual echoes of Freud’s essay in Murdoch’s novel); this is closely linked to the narrative in which Alfred Ludens, Marcus’s ‘disciple’, wants Marcus to live and through which he wants to understand him—that of the archetypal quest for knowledge. An inescapable narrative background is that of the life of Christ: one Murdoch critic suggests that

The numerous Christ-references take in his Jewishness, his ‘resurrection’ of Pat, his regarding Ludens as John the Baptist... Other characters frequently compare him with Christ in a mocking tone.

There are also accounts of Marcus given by other characters, including highly perceptive ones by Dr Marzillian, the psychiatrist, and Daniel Most, the Rabbi. There is Marcus’s account of his own life, in which his attempt to understand the Holocaust figures largely. But there is also a narrative buried for most of the novel which fully surfaces only at the end. This, a story from the Holocaust, impacts on our understanding of Marcus more than any other in the novel and challenges the very words ‘understand’ and ‘redeemer’. In this article I will consider some of these narratives and the impact on the novel of the Holocaust story.

Freud’s ‘Life of Leonardo’ is a classic of psychoanalytic biography; but there is much, Freud argues at the end of the essay, that psychoanalysis cannot explain.