Abstract

In this chapter, ‘The Scrambled Script’: Contingency and Necessity in Iris Murdoch’s The Green Knight’, Peter D. Mathews focuses on Murdoch’s penultimate novel through the lens of Nietzsche’s concept of eternal retour. Augmenting previous readings foregrounding Levinas and Schopenhauer by Kanan Savkay and Miles Leeson respectively and drawing together multiple critical interpretations of Murdoch’s ‘dizzying multiplication of references’ (136) in this heavily intertextual late work, Mathews persuasively argues the case for the centrality of Nietzsche to its interpretation. The trajectory of this essay is from the stone on the shore of Lake Silvaplana which Nietzsche called ‘Zarathustra’s Rock’ to the rock to which Moy at the end of The Green Knight returns the stone she had taken. Contra previous interpretations of this scene offered by Carla Arnell and Rob Hardy which see this ‘as a movement of resolution and closure’ (142), Mathews contends that such readings go ‘against every lesson that the novel teaches about the contingency of the world in which Murdoch shows how the mythical scripts humanity once used to make sense of the world’s patterns are really seductive traps’ (142). Working his way through a labyrinth of allusions towards this trailblazing conclusion, Mathews has to beware of over-imposing his Nietzschean insights to the imbalance of his interpretation. To this end he acknowledges that ‘Nietzsche cannot be allowed to function as a focal point’ because the novel ‘actively rejects the possibility of being solved by a single thinker or idea’ (137). His essay thus aptly mirrors and enacts the claim Mathews makes that Murdoch ‘executes a carefully calculated double movement in this novel’ by giving ‘a prominent place to the ideas of Nietzsche, whilst taking care to remove him from a position in her text where he might be taken for an idol or saviour’ (137). Murdoch herself was likewise resisting such over-expectations by this stage in her career, and this is a compelling reading of a highly complex and disputable late text.