Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Murray
What did you make of Murray? He was my favorite character -- or in any case, the most pithy -- through most of the story, maybe until his final treatise on dealing with death, when he took such a cheerfully academic approach to how people can avoid death (or fear of it) that his lack of a conscience took sort of a menacing turn. Or that could have been my reservations about his audience's (Jack's) state of mind. A separate question -- is he culpable at all for the lack of ethics he espouses?
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I really liked Murray, too. Even when I found his nonstop gab a tad annoying, I found myself interested in what he had to say.
I also enjoyed the weird gallantry he displayed toward Babette.
I like how Jack described him: "There was something touching about the fact that Murray was dressed almost totally in corduroy. I had the feeling that since the age of eleven ... he'd associated this sturdy fabric with higher learning in some impossibly distant and tree-shaded place."
I found him basically harmless — really kind of an academic doofus in the days before nerdiness had much cachet — but it's easy to see how his various theories could lead a wingnut student, for example, dangerously astray. Maybe he's culpable in that sense — and in the other that we talked about: elevating things like Elvis to an academic discipline. He sort of reminds me of a really intelligent version of some of the guys in the office, always quoting movie lines, spewing out pop minutiae and sports stats, etc. Imagine if those guys could string together all the detritus of their brains with unifying theories!
He's a strange guy. You FEEL an essential goodness in him, even though there's little direct obvious evidence of it.
I wasn't sure what to think about Murray. I found his monologues about TV and such kind of tedious. And I found his interest in Babette kind of creepy.
And I thought, too, that his last treatise on death had a menacing element, despite his very casual delivery. I thought, "Oh great, now Jack is going to go kill someone."
Hehe. I could see you getting really irritated with him!
I didn't find his interest in Babette creepy, maybe because he was so open about it. He wasn't like a lot of men who "covet" their friends' wives — secretly and dirtily checking her out in a sidelong way while pretending to have no interest. That's the kind of devious crap I find creepy.
Murray talked very openly about his "program of lust," but I still found some gallantry in the way he treated Babette. His interest in her was on a nonsexual plane, too, I thought.
I found the dinner invitation to them very charming — that he made food at his boardinghouse room and said come or don't come, whatever you like, I'll be here. You could see a kind of tender insecurity in it, but it also may have been part of a program of indifference or stoicism that he was cultivating. If you don't care, you can't get hurt — a classic coping strategy of social misfits. I mean, near the end I really wondered what friendship meant to him, if he would be sad to see Jack die, or if he would just reduce the experience to a theory to file away in his brain but not let it anywhere near his heart.
Oh, I'm (unhelpfully) divided on the Murray-Babette exchange. He was courtly but struck me as sort of a sexual opportunist -- someone who would have proceeded without a twinge of conscience if Babette had returned his advances.
But he also professed admiration for many things about Jack -- his academic prestige, his persona, his family, even his death rant: "You're growing in prestige even as we speak. You're creating a hazy light around your own body. I have to like it." Murray tended to reflect things Jack wanted to hear. Babette could have been an extension of that.
Erin, same thought on the death treatise. I had the sinking feeling Jack would go do something really stupid. Like he could listen to Murray rant about prostitutes and subsequent bodily injuries because he wasn't vulnerable to that kind of influence, but he was too vulnerable to Murray's "life credit" scenario. Like Kim said, a wingnut student.
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