Bruno's Dream 
by 

Iris Murdoch

 

Now is the Season of Our Discount Tents

Bruno’s Dream is a Shakespearean comedic send up of old age and death. If the Desert Island Disks choice were between Lear and Measure for Measure, I’d go for the Duke not the King. So, I think, would Murdoch. Less pomposity; more grit.

Bruno is in any case Shakespearean as a character. In his eighties, he is not simply a failure, he is an epic failure (as my 11 year old granddaughter would express it). Every one of his important relationships are bust because of, he thinks, trivial faux pas. Like the affair with the gold digger, and the unfortunate racial slur about his daughter-in-law. He’s understanding about those affected who just don’t get what is going on: “Of course they all caused him pain, all the time, they just could not help it.” His regrets are merely that things are past, not that they happened, “The women were all young while he aged like Tithonus” (referencing Midsummer Night’s Dream) No reason for despair though. Better communication can fix things up just fine.

The detail of aged concerns is priceless in Murdoch’s descriptions. For example in Bruno’s preparations for his trip to the toilet: 

“Of course it wasn’t absolutely necessary to put on the dressing gown now that it wasn’t winter any more, but it represented a challenge. It was quite easy, really. The left hand held the bed post while the right lifted down the dressing gown and with the same movement slid itself a little into the right sleeve. The right hand lifted on high, the sleeve runs down the arm. Then the right hand rests flat against the door a little above shoulder height, while the left leaves the bed post and darts into the left-arm hole. If the left is not quick enough the dressing gown falls away toward the floor, hanging from the right shoulder. It then has to be slowly relinquished and left lying. There was no getting anything up off the floor.”

My own routine for putting on trousers in the morning is similar.

Bruno’s only interests are stamps and spiders, and he smells, but he has one great end of life desire, “when you’re my age there’s not much left except you want to be loved.” The mystical Puck-like Nigel, who “exists to be imposed upon” is Bruno’s primary caretaker. Nigel is more or less mad but is the only person who is unselfishly devoted to Bruno. Nigel is twin to Will, a handyman/pornographer/actor (‘How absolute the knave is!’ he quotes of himself from Hamlet). The stage is set therefore for some Comedy of Errors, farcical confusion. 

Adelaide, the housekeeper, is cousin to the twins and lover of the caddish Danby, Bruno’s son-in-law. Danby is heir presumptive unless Miles, Bruno’s son and unsuccessful poet and middling civil servant, becomes un-estranged. Miles’s wife Diana, the bored middle class housewife, completes the cast. All the characters have “... somehow missed the bus of life.”The plot has its own momentum from this set of relationships. 

For Nigel ”real worship involves waiting.” For everyone else there is ritual - in love affairs, personal confession, marital deception, curmudgeonly ire, apology, the resentful anger of loved spurned, all the little set piece battles of English mores. All these rituals are played out in the face of death, imminent or not. “Death contradicts ownership and self. If only one knew that all along,” says one of the cast. And yet "It was a mere convention after all that one ought to be on good terms with one's son or father. Sons and fathers were individuals and should be paid the compliment of being treated as such. Why should they not have the privilege, possessed by other and unrelated persons, of drifting painlessly apart?" If ritual is what constitutes love, can it bring any consolation at all when death is taken seriously?

Ritual and duty have an odd relationship. Duties demand ritual - the male works, the female keeps house; religious obligations are fulfilled through liturgical group actions; condolences are offered through rote ceremonies and phrases; seasonal gifts are exchanged. But it’s as if ritual is required to undermine ritual when duties are to be ignored - the seduction/flirtation game; the routines of civil religion; the legal rituals of divorce. Is love a duty? A mere duty? Does ritual promote or destroy love? My take on Murdoch is that this is her point in Bruno’s Dream. She has some interesting suggestions.