The "wondrous necessary man"

Canetti, the unicorn and the changeling

Avril Horner

pp. 163-176

in: Anne Rowe, Avril Horner (eds), Iris Murdoch, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

The Unicorn, published in 1963, is one of Murdoch's most heavily allusive and intertextual works. Not surprisingly, then, it has been read in quite different ways: as Christian allegory; as a quest in which misuse of power is a temptation and Platonic Good the Holy Grail; as a Gothic novel — to mention but three.¹ In this essay I shall explore the ramifications of Marian Taylor's sense of Gerald Scottow as "the wondrous necessary man".² Murdoch does not intimate the source of these words but in fact they are those used by Beatrice-Joanna in the last Act of Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling (1622) to describe De Flores, the charismatic villain of the play.³ I should state at the outset that we have no evidence that Murdoch ever read, or saw a production of, The Changeling although she did confess to an "interest" in Jacobean drama.⁴ However, we do have evidence that John Bayley taught it at Oxford and knew it very well indeed — well enough, in fact, to be able still to quote lines from it in 2008.⁵ It is possible that, at the very least, Murdoch might have listened to her husband talking about the play during the early years of their marriage and would, perhaps, have been struck by its dark exploration of obsessive desire. If she had read or seen it, she would certainly have been drawn to what Leo Salinger has called Middleton's "gift for exposing velleities and self-deception in his characters".⁶

Cited authors

Plato

Canetti Elias