The Writing Cure: A Severed Head and A Word Child

Abstract

A Severed Head and A Word Child belong in the category of her fiction Murdoch has referred to as ‘closed-up, rather obsessional novels’ (Rose 1968).¹ Other novels in this group would include works from the earlier part of her career like The Italian Girl, The Unicorn and The Time of the Angels, where an entire community of characters seems to be living out a collective fantasy, and the solipsism of the cast is paralleled by the melodrama of the plot and the claustrophobia of the setting. The obsessional novels often draw on the Gothic tradition (in The Unicorn a governess goes to stay in a foreboding castle) and, in their compulsive patterning, are close to Murdoch’s conception of the crystalline novel. They underline just how difficult it is to achieve the ‘opened out’ form of love Murdoch speaks of in the above epigraph.

Love obviously in its genesis belongs with sex, but it’s able to transcend sex — I don’t mean in any sense of moving away from the carnal expressions of sex but simply that sex is a very great mystifier, it’s a very great dark force. It makes us do all kinds of things we don’t understand and very often don’t want to do. The kind of opening out of love as a world where we really can see other people and are not simply dominated by our own slavish impulses and obsessions, this is something which I would want very much to explore and which I think is very difficult. All these demons and so on are connected with the obsessional side of one’s life, which in a sense has got to be overcome.

Rose, London Magazine