"Can one have relations with a severed head?" Iris Murdoch herself raises this most provocative question in her novel [A Severed Head]. Obligingly, Murdoch also supplies both the myth and at least several of the meanings of her central symbol: the head of the Gorgon Medusa, the Freudian reading of such a head as the female genitals both feared and desired, and the drastic segregating of the individual from a whole nexus of relationships…. Her characters include a psychiatrist, a sculptor, and an anthropologist. Every major character in the novel is in some sense a head-hunter, with the exception of the chief victim, Georgie Hands—and when Georgie realizes to what extent she has been a victim of two brothers in turn, she cuts off her hair as prelude to a more literal attempted suicide.

Yet a secondary sequence of images belongs to a different order: art, specifically...