Iris Murdoch: Texts and Contexts pp 177-191 | Cite as
A Post-Christian Concept of Martyrdom and the Murdochian Chorus: The One Alone and T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral
Abstract
In The One Alone and Murder in the Cathedral, Iris Murdoch and T.S. Eliot both interrogate the concept and cultural impact of martyrdom, he from a Christian, she from a post-Christian perspective.4 The One Alone pays homage to Eliot’s work which Murdoch had long known well: in 1940, whilst an undergraduate at Somerville College, she played the Leader of the Chorus in a performance of Murder in the Cathedral at Christ Church, Oxford.5 Her copy of the play, which is inscribed ‘Iris Murdoch Oxford 1940’, is held in the Iris Murdoch Special Collections in Kingston University Archives.6 Pencilled marginalia mark her lines to speak and give directions to kneel, sit or stand. The experience of learning and performing Eliot’s rhythms formed a lasting influence on Murdoch’s writing which feeds covertly into the diverse choruses in her novels, as well as overtly into The One Alone.7
Keywords
Oxford English Dictionary Solitary Confinement Christian World Radio Play Fiction StressPreview
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Notes
- 1.T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, in The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 1969), pp. 237–82 (p. 262), hereafter MC.Google Scholar
- 2.Murdoch, The One Alone (BBC Radio 3, 13 February 1987). All references are taken from the published edition (London: Colophon Press with Old Town Books, 1995), unpaginated, hereafter OA.Google Scholar
- 5.See IMAL, p. 91, and Peter J. Conradi (ed.), Iris Murdoch: A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries 1938–46 (London: Short Books, 2010), pp. 26 and 184.Google Scholar
- 6.T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, 4th edn (London: Faber & Faber, 1938), acquired by the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies for the Iris Murdoch Special Collections in Kingston University Archives, IML 176. Her copy of T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems 1905–1935 (Faber & Faber, 1936) is also held in the Murdoch Archives, IML 190; this collection ends with Burnt Norton. Google Scholar
- 12.T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, with an Introduction and Notes by Nevi11 Coghill: An Educational Edition (London: Faber & Faber, 1965), p. 9.Google Scholar
- 13.John Peter, ‘Murder in the Cathedral’, Sewanee Review, 61 (1953), 362–83 (380).Google Scholar
- 15.Murdoch was confirmed into the Anglican Church, probably in late November 1934 while she was a pupil at Badminton (IMAL, p. 64). Although she lost her belief in a personal God, she remained interested in theology and in all religious belief systems, particularly Buddhism, and described herself as a Christian-Buddhist or Christian fellow-traveller. On Murdoch’s neo-theology see Anne Rowe, ‘“The Dream that Does not Cease to Haunt Us”: Iris Murdoch’s Holiness’, in Iris Murdoch and Morality, ed. Anne Rowe and Avril Horner (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 141–55.Google Scholar
- 17.David R. Clark, Introduction to Twentieth Century Interpretations of Murder in the Cathedral, ed. David R. Clark (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971), pp. 1–13 (pp. 8–9).Google Scholar
- 20.Helen Gardner, The Art of T.S. Eliot (1949; London: Faber & Faber, 1968), p. 133.Google Scholar
- 22.Murdoch, An Accidental Man (1971; London, Vintage, 2003), p. 230.Google Scholar
- 23.This intertextual connection is briefly noted by Priscilla Martin and Anne Rowe in Iris Murdoch: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 99: ‘Matthew has a […] memory of a Russian man joining a group of protestors in Red Square and being arrested with them. Does such a heroic act of commitment have any consequence or is it swallowed up uselessly by oblivion? Murdoch later wrote a radio play, The One Alone, in which a political prisoner revolves this question in solitary confinement.’ Other than this, however, The One Alone has so far been met with critical silence.Google Scholar
- 25.On Murdoch’s deployment of accident and contingency in which she maintains a moral edge, see Julia Jordan, Chance and the Modern British Novel: From Henry Green to Iris Murdoch (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 114–43.Google Scholar