The Scrambled Script: Contingency and Necessity in Iris Murdoch’s The Green Knight

Abstract

This paper begins at the rock in Switzerland where Nietzsche came up with his theory of eternal return, with a promise that its connection to Murdoch’s The Green Knight will be clear by the end. The eternal return introduces the key theme of repetition, from Peter Mir’s desire to re-enact his ‘death’, to Harvey’s return to the Italian bridge where he hurt his foot. Murdoch also introduces repetition through her allusions, such as the titular reference to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Murdoch subverts such textual precursors by ‘scrambling’ their messages, twisting their meanings and mixing them up in a way that removes the possibility of a single, coherent meaning. This ‘scrambling’ reflects Murdoch’s concern with the dual roles of contingency and necessity in human existence. While Murdoch draws on various philosophical and literary influences—Schopenhauer, Plato, even Nabokov—this paper argues that Nietzsche is a particularly important interlocutor here, especially his influence on Lucas and Sefton’s critical view of historicism. The final section examines the novel’s explicit references to Nietzsche’s eternal return, culminating with the scene where Moy returns a stone to its ‘rightful’ place near Bellamy’s seaside cottage. This is Murdoch’s ultimate caricature of the human desire to imagine patterns and order in the universe—indeed, the place where Moy carries this out is described in the exact same terms as the rock where Nietzsche discovered the eternal return, creating yet another repetition, and at the same time, another scrambled form.

Keywords

• The Green Knight
• Nietzsche (Friedrich)
• contingency
• eternal return
• necessity