The Saint and Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch
Peter J. Conradi
Published to coincide with his major biography of Iris Murdoch, Peter Conradi’s acclaimed critical appreciation of her work is reissued in a fully revised and updated edition, with a foreword by John Bayley.‘Peter Conradi is uniquely qualified to accompany the reader in a discovery of one of the 20th-century’s most remarkable novelists and thinkers.’ John BayleyIris Murdoch, who died in 1999, was the author of twenty-six novels, including ‘The Bell’, ‘A Fairly Honourable Defeat’, ‘The Black Prince’ and the Booker Prize-winning ‘The Sea, The Sea’.In ‘The Saint and the Artist’, the only full critical examination of Murdoch’s work by a British critic, Peter Conradi, who knew her well, traces the way in which the zest and buoyant high spirits of her early novels gave way to a more deeply and darkly comic achievement in the novels of the 1970s, and in some from the last period. He suggests how her own life, wonderfully transmuted into high art, provided the raw material for her novels, and argues that they should be read as serious entertainments and as important fictions in the Anglo-Russian tradition, and not as disguised philosophy.
The Saint and Artist
A study of the fiction of Iris Murdoch
Peter J. Conradi
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#ud847796f-941d-51cd-adf5-48c74fe4be6e)
Title Page (#u2fe4f41b-a19d-5015-a2f7-0ba66f667216)
I ‘A Kind of Moral Psychology’ (#u108e7bcf-fc1d-5fe2-8950-3ebb0f60d8ef)
1 ‘Existentialist and Mystic’ (#u353c275e-9f9b-5edc-8fb8-5353c5c2da50)
2 Under the Net and the Redemption of Particulars (#u82db50a5-7637-55c0-8a05-e5f66ab55bfa)
3 ‘Against Gravity’: The Early Novels and An Accidental Man (#ud8ecced7-b217-5658-a26b-24f9442410d3)
4 Eros in A Severed Head and Bruno’s Dream (#ua54b50aa-fb07-5ddb-97d3-959bf8a6f55b)
II ‘Open and Closed’ (#litres_trial_promo)
5 The Sublime in The Bell and The Unicorn (#litres_trial_promo)
6 Self-Sufficiency in The Time of the Angels and The Nice and the Good (#litres_trial_promo)
III (#litres_trial_promo)
7 A Fairly Honourable Defeat (#litres_trial_promo)
8 The Black Prince (#litres_trial_promo)
9 The Sacred and Profane Love Machine and Henry and Cato (#litres_trial_promo)
10 The Sea, The Sea (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Nuns and Soldiers, The Philosopher’s Pupil and The Good Apprentice (#litres_trial_promo)
12 The Book and the Brotherhood, The Message to the Planet, The Green Knight and Jackson’s Dilemma (#litres_trial_promo)
Conclusion (#litres_trial_promo)
NOTES (#litres_trial_promo)
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY (#litres_trial_promo)
INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
I ‘A Kind of Moral Psychology’ (#ulink_37d65428-b1fd-58c0-b2a5-0d5a3dac6dcd)
The novel itself, of course, the whole world of the novel, is the expression of a world outlook. And one can’t avoid doing this. Any novelist produces a moral world and there’s a kind of world outlook which can be deduced from each of the novels. And of course I have my own philosophy in a very general sense, a kind of moral psychology one might call it rather than philosophy.
Iris Murdoch speaking at the University of Caen, 1978
1 ‘Existentialist and Mystic’ (#ulink_fc20ecad-6425-509d-9631-aaa855ad81fa)
Iris Murdoch was the author of some twenty-six novels, a handful of plays and poems, a number of influential articles, a book on Sartre, two books of her own moral philosophy, and a book on Plato’s theory of art. She is a writer of international reputation. Apart from monographs there has been no full-length study of her work by a British critic since A.S. Byatt’s valuable, pioneering study Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965). Despite the honours that the later work won – The Black Prince won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1973, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine won the Whitbread Prize in 1974, The Sea, The Sea the Booker Prize in 1978 – it has not been properly celebrated. I believe that the early theory, and also the real but limited success of the early apprentice fiction, have obscured the enormous, disorderly merits of the later work, which in its turn must alter the way we view the earlier.
Few writers divide their audiences as radically. Between Murdoch’s advocates and her detractors there is a gulf fixed. Elizabeth Dipple’s useful missionary Work for the Spirit (1982) sought to bridge this gap and to convert the latter into the former. This study is not, by contrast, a proselytising one. It seeks to persuade no one who does not already enjoy her work, but to describe some of the pleasures which an excessively narrow critical focus has neglected. This is a celebratory study whose aim is to try to illuminate her best work and to give some account of why she is found both entertaining, and also serious and important.
‘Most artists understand their own weaknesses far better than the critics do,’ says Arnold Baffin in The Black Prince, a writer unflatteringly parodied, as his creator has been, for emptying himself in his books over the world ‘like scented bath-water’, and as living ‘in a sort of rosy haze with Jesus and Mary and Buddha and Shiva and the Fisher King all chasing round and round dressed up as people in Chelsea’ (BP 137). Iris Murdoch is her own best critic and best defendant. She gives the prolific Baffin an eloquent self-defence too – ‘The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on trying to do it better. And one aspect of this is that any artist has to decide how fast to work. I do not believe that I would improve if I wrote less. The only result of that would be that there would be less of whatever there is’ (172).
Murdoch’s frailties are by now well chronicled. Borrowing her own lofty criteria and sometimes drawing on her Peccavis, reviewers have sometimes been content to issue bulletins of high-minded reproof and adopt a tone of puritanical strictness. In what follows I do not seek to whisk her away into academic irreproachability. It is in some sense her human quality that seems to me engaging – her quality of, in the best sense, ‘stubborn imperfection’.
(#litres_trial_promo) She can be uneven, over-intellectual or romantic. There is some unfinished and repetitive writing. The books can seem contrived or over-plotted, the characters sometimes insufficiently imagined. Her social range is not huge; she says little about work and often appears to take money for granted. She can seem to be playing a complex game with the reader. There is, as early reviewers noted, ‘too much’ in the books.
The objections are by now well canvassed. Her virtues need cataloguing too. She writes spellbinding stories in beautiful prose. She knows how to master paragraphs and sentences and at her best achieves an extraordinary, luminous, lyrical accuracy. She has an intensely visual imagination and can use it to evoke things, people, the activity of thinking, feeling, places, cars and dogs too. In each novel are things that no other British writer has the power to describe. Her empirical curiosity and moral energy seem endless. Few other writers are as full of the naked pleasures of looking and describing. She can tackle happiness, ‘that deep, confiding slow relationship to time’ (SPLM 16), the subject-matter for great writers. (Every fool can write about misery.) London is a real presence in the books, indeed seems to figure sometimes as an extra character, and even when her people are having a hellish time there, which is often, the author’s loving and patient apprehension of the city comes through. This is the more noticeable in that, Dickens and Woolf apart, London has lacked distinguished celebrants. There is no touch of neurotic agrarianism in Murdoch, and if London had its Samuel Palmer it might well be her. But she can of course evoke the inner world, the world of fantasies, projections, demonic illusions too. No one writes better about the urgencies and illusions of the moral life. She is our most intelligent novelist since George Eliot, and like George Eliot she was a mature thinker before she wrote her first novel. Her technique altered significantly as the novels progressed. Many of her leading ideas are already there in her first work.
Does our sense that the novels feel ‘contrived’ damage the illusion that the characters are free? Decreasingly, I think. The point has too often been argued in a simple-minded manner. Even in the most Gothic of her novels the characters seem alive. What she writes owes much to ‘romance’,
(#litres_trial_promo) and romance is both the most conventional and yet the least ‘literary’, most immediate of forms.
(#litres_trial_promo) It is a form which demands a certain latitude in the matter of probabilities. All art is contrived, and in great art truth can be purchased at the expense of improbability; yet the absurdities vanish under the force of the art. This is clear in the case of Restoration comedy, or opera, both of which her work can resemble,
(#litres_trial_promo) or indeed in the case of Shakespearian drama, which her work increasingly contemplated and was nourished by. The plots of King Lear or Much Ado About Nothing are not ‘realistic’, and at the end of Twelfth Night we share in a ‘triumph of the improbable’. These are plots which can grip you in the theatre and mock your attempts to recount them outside. You put up with the contrivance and conscious stylisation for the sake of the illumination they offer, and the degree of trust you show depends on the good will you bear the author, and the reward her illusions purchase. As Murdoch put this in the 1982 Gifford lectures – ‘in good art we do not ask for realism; we ask for truth.’
Truth, of course, has had a bad press recently, and thus the question of stylisation has a way of returning. One reviewer recorded how his feeling on opening a Murdoch novel – ‘But surely human beings are not like this’ – can be swiftly followed by the feeling – ‘Perhaps this is just what human beings are in fact like, and it is precisely our delusion to imagine that we are not.’
(#litres_trial_promo) One source of positive pleasure in the bizarrerie offered by her plots comes from our sense that, as Murdoch has often averred, people are secretly much odder, less rational, more often powered by obsession and passion than they outwardly pretend or know, and that the novelist is revealing such secrets in creating her (imaginary) people. Some accounts of Bloomsbury – for example Angelica Garnett’s Deceived with Kindness – make most Murdoch plots look models of understatement. ‘Murdochian’ has justly joined ‘Dickensian’ and ‘Swiftian’ as a way of pointing to certain aspects of the world. I think her characters are recognisable. These vain bookish civil servants, morally squeamish men whose sheer egoism is driving them mad, emotionally greedy women, precocious adolescents, isolated and awkward good characters, all involved in the great, lonely hunt for love and consolation and power: it is not a bad image of the world. It has universality too.
There are related points to be made about contrivance. Her best work is quiveringly real/unreal in its texture. What can be perplexing is not that she fails to convince, but that she can describe with an extraordinary hallucinatory validating detail and power the most ‘unlikely’ situations, so that, before you have time to decide whether or not you believe in them, you find yourself forced to imagine them. Her ingenious style of realism, in combining fantasy with a meticulous naturalistic rendering of detail, shares something with surrealism. It can drive a wedge between reason and imagination, so that we concur imaginatively, against reason’s good advice; reason is dulled in something like awe at her sheer aesthetic nerve and inventiveness. In Chapter 5 I discuss how the limits to rationalism become for her a great theme. Her use of contrivance seems to relate to this, a deliberate and shameless affront, ‘unbelievable’ in a way that mimics and parodies the frequently unbelievable quality of life too. Unreality, in other words, can be a potent aesthetic device. The task of classifying, as her work often asserts, can perhaps never be more than a (serious) game; but visionary or ‘magical’ realism seems to get closer than most descriptive terms to the special and disturbing pleasure her work can afford. The question of artifice has too often been divorced from the question of pleasure.
She can create mystery and magic. In the least of her work there is something alive and interesting, an atmosphere which haunts and stays with you. The Dorset seascape of The Nice and the Good, the fogbound rectory in The Time of the Angels, the various different Londons of A Severed Head, or A Fairly Honourable Defeat – these are real imaginative creations. The creation of a strong ‘atmosphere’ can be at odds with the creation of character, and I think critics can be too puritan here. Even Shakespeare and Tolstoy do not always create ‘memorable’ characters. Like any other writer’s, Murdoch’s characters can sometimes be memorable, sometimes merely believable, sometimes interesting without being persuasive, sometimes ‘far too individual to remember’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In the most idea-bound of her romances we have persons and not merely personifications. A disservice is done by critics awed by the cold prestige of ‘philosophy’, and mindful that Iris Murdoch is a philosopher as well as a novelist, who treat the novels as though their inhabitants must therefore be no more than symposiasts at a disputation. The books are full of ideas, of course, but are also about life, feed off life, feed back into life.
Murdoch clearly understood a great deal about people, with a quality of understanding I can best describe as ‘animal intelligence’, a Keatsian ability to encounter the sensuousness of the activity of thinking, in all its immediacy. She was interested in power, a subject largely ignored by critics. ‘No question can be more important than “Who is the boss?”’, says Julius in A Fairly Honourable Defeat. The question ‘Who is the boss?’ links in her books, as in life, with sex and with spirit. There is a large other range of mixed emotion she is adept at evoking, especially, of course, love, her subject par excellence. If she is the Gilbert White of the sensations and the emotions, she is also love’s natural historian.
She can appear to be playing a sophisticated game with the reader, and the critic should beware of complaining that she is simply more intelligent than he is. If you enjoy her, her intelligence is part of what you are enjoying. I try to explain in Chapter 5 how the frustration of the reader’s natural desire to make the world of the book transparent is a task Murdoch takes seriously. She is, I think, in Isaiah Berlin’s famous dichotomy, much more of a fox than a hedgehog – one who knows many things before she knows one. Knowing many things is in a sense her premise for knowing one. Despite the fact that she declared that she inclined, temperamentally, to monism (SG 50), she sees the world’s variousness and multiplicity as art’s opportunity, as well as its foe.
Her social range deserves comment. Often the novels will concern a central ‘court’ of relatives and friends, some of whom will have met at university, and whose older womenfolk have sacrificed careers for those of their husbands. Such inbred courts feed off Shakespeare, as she often acknowledged, as well as off life. The British professional classes often lead such inbred coterie lives, and she will be remembered, I am sure, partly as a chronicler of her age’s chattering classes. ‘One can only write well about what one thoroughly understands,’ she has noted (Bradbury, 1976), pointing out that any account of ‘intelligent people who are interested in their society’ will carry some general interest. One might gloss this by saying that a close account of those assumed by society to be ‘the Great and the Good’ is likely – as in the toughly satirical A Severed Head – to tell us something important about society itself, even though satire as such in the other novels is muted into a more general irony. Moreover, contrary to the superficial view that her social range merely shrank, a close look shows that it polarised. There were always in her work deracinated intellectuals of various backgrounds, ambitious girls on the make (Madge in Under the Net, Miss Casement in The Flight from the Enchanter), working-class recruits to the intelligentsia, delinquents, bohemians and refugees. Latterly there was a polarisation of the cast into the possessing and the dispossessed, so that in Henry and Cato the two ends of Ladbroke Grove, one wealthy, the other derelict, act as an image of social contrast and inequality. In A Word Child the orphan and bastard Hilary Burde’s seedy life contrasts with that of his rival Gunnar Jopling’s ‘casually gorgeous’ milieu. And in Nuns and Soldiers Tim Reede moves from the class that raids other people’s fridges to the class that owns the wellsupplied fridge. It is certainly true that she animated well those characters who have had some sort of higher education. This is not quite the same as claiming she could deal only with the bourgeoisie. To put the matter another way, she accurately reflects one of the ways in which, under the Welfare State, Britain’s class structure tended to alter. Before the Second World War the inheritance of privilege did not necessarily involve attending university, though it did depend on attending public school. Since the war, whether or not you received higher education became, for some decades, important in a novel way. As Murdoch noted in 1959:
Equality of opportunity produces, not a society of equals, but a society in which the class division is made more sinister by the removal of intelligent persons into the bureaucracy and the destruction of their roots and characteristics as members of the mass. (ht)
This middle-class intelligentsia broadly provided her material. ‘Barkers people not Harrods people,’ as one of her characters notes (AM 27), though the spread moves upward on occasion. Murdoch’s father was a civil servant, and during the war years so was she. As in so many Russian novels, bureaucrats abound, though tempered with members of genteel and other professions – schoolteachers, wine-merchants, printers, rose-growers. Just as Britain has recently become more socially divided, so the world she addressed has appeared more beleaguered and isolated. The loftiest apology for this social range is made by Bradley Pearson in The Black Prince when he points out that a truly enlightened person might perhaps be known by his sympathy’s extending even as far as the rich (BP 348). Pearson himself, like Burde in A Word Child and Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea, is the child of a poor family.
Perhaps in the end – and this will be truer of contemporary writers than of any others – ‘a philosopher’s thought either suits you or it doesn’t. It’s only deep in that sense. Like a novel,’ as the dying Guy puts it in Nuns and Soldiers (2). Qualities such as facility, the capacity to rework a few themes, and conscious stylisation, can be as characteristic of great as of small writers – it is as proper to speak of the facility of a Shakespeare as of a Wodehouse.
It has not been enough repeated that Iris Murdoch was, as well as a very witty writer, also a consistently funny one, and that this humour was linked to her moral passion. Taine remarked of Dickens that his whole work might be reduced to the phrase ‘Be good, and love.’
(#litres_trial_promo) So might Murdoch’s oeuvre. Both attack human self-centredness. That human beings are powered by egoism is not by itself, however, exciting news. The problem for the critic is in describing not just this message, but how it gets ‘dissolved in the purr of beatitude’
(#litres_trial_promo) the work promotes in us, and in describing the comic tension between that message, and everything in the work which resists and complicates it. She admired in Shakespeare’s plays not merely their ‘tremendous moral charge’ but also that ‘it is morality at its most refined, and at the same time it is not dogmatic, it has got an element of extraordinary openness in it’ (Bigsby, 1982). The author of these twenty-six novels seems to have seen life with one eye warm if not wet, one dry and distant, and perhaps narrated by two positives. There is in her mediation between these a sanity, a cheerful common sense, a gift for openness and for comedy, that need emphasising at the outset.
Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin in 1919, of Anglo-Irish parents.
(#litres_trial_promo) Her mother’s family were from Dublin, her father’s were County Down sheep-farming stock. Her mother gave up a career as a singer to marry at eighteen. Her gentle bookish father had survived the war partly through the good luck of being a cavalry officer – the cavalry missed the holocaust of the trenches. Further back her ancestors were mainly Irish farmers and soldiers. She had a very happy childhood, and was brought up in London, to which her parents moved when she was a baby, but with holidays in Ireland, and seeing Ireland as ‘a very romantic land, a land I wanted to get to and discover’ (Caen, 1978). Her father’s family were ‘admirable people, but Protestants of a very strict kind, and I think he wanted to get away’ (Haffenden, 1983). The Anglo-Irish are a peculiar people, from whose stock some most gifted writers have come, but also a people with a dual identity, seeing themselves in some sense as both the true Irish and the true English, while being regarded by everyone else as neither, and as outsiders. About growing up in London Murdoch commented, ‘I feel as I grow older that we were wanderers, and I’veonly recently realised that I’m a kind of exile, a displaced person. I identify with exiles’ (Haffenden, 1983). Perhaps Ireland provided her in her imagination with an absent, alternative identity. She spoke often of her distress at the continuing violence there, and Ireland figured significantly in only two novels – The Unicorn, which is a Gothic romance set on the west coast, and The Red and the Green, an account of the 1916 Easter Rising which combines detailed research into the period with an intricate plot, and where the sexual imbroglio within an extended Anglo-Irish family partly mirrors the political tensions. The political viewpoint of the book, in so far as it commits itself to one, is that of the liberal Irish patriotism of the Anglo-Irish, who have of course often been zealots in that cause.
Murdoch was an only child, and has related her writing drive to the search for imaginary brothers and sisters, as she also saw in this a reason for her (and Sartre’s) fascination with twins – ‘the lost, the other person one is looking for’ (Caen, 1978). She was educated at the Froebel Educational Institute in London, at Badminton School, then at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read ‘Greats’ (ancient history, classics, philosophy). Her knowledge and love of the classics, and of classical mythology, are evident throughout the novels, where such myths are sometimes played with and made to help yield decoration for the plot. From 1942 to 1944 she worked as temporary wartime civil servant (Assistant Principal) in the Treasury, and then for the following two years with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, first in London, then in Belgium and Austria, where she worked in camps for displaced persons.
Her period with UNRRA seems to have been important for two reasons. In Brussels she encountered existentialism, which excited her about the possibilities, hitherto little considered, of philosophy. In 1947 she was to hold the Sarah Smithson Studentship in philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge. She also saw a ‘total breakdown of human society’ which she has said it was instructive to witness (Haffenden, 1983). These two encounters now seem less far apart than might appear. This breakdown of society produced the refugees and homeless persons who figure in Murdoch’s novels, as in history, and Sartrian existentialism was a philosophy that privileged the cultureless outsider hero. The role of existentialism in her thinking has not been well focused. It has sometimes been said that she moved from existentialism towards a religious position. This makes for a difficulty in discerning her right relation to existentialism, by which I mean Sartrian existentialism throughout, since that was the form which most interested her. In interview with Bigsby (1982) she suggested that her objections went right back to her first encounter with it in 1945. Her scepticism as well as her interest is quite apparent before her first novel was published in 1954, and her book on Sartre the previous year, though respectful, is scarcely uncritical. What excited her about it was the primary place it gave to a consideration and depiction of experience, a subject then absent from Anglo-Saxon philosophy, and its comparative willingness to tackle problems of value and morality. It was the phenomenological and moral bias of the existentialists that excited her, and she was one of the few English philosophers to have read them. In Britain there had been a disastrous shrinking of the field of moral philosophy to, for example, discussions of the ontological status of moral assertions, and an abdication of the responsibility to guide and instruct.
Philosophy seems to have come to matter to her, for all its clear difference from literature, for comparable reasons, because ‘a dominant philosophy pictures the consciousness of the age’ (sbr), and because man is the creature who ‘makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the pictures’ (me). She came to distrust Sartrian existentialism and British philosophy equally, and to see them as sharing a common ground in offering no barrier to romantic selfassertion. In a radio talk in 1950 she criticised both Sartre and Camus for presenting worlds which were simultaneously too intelligible and transparent, and also too lacking (unlike the world of Gabriel Marcel) in mystery – in which category she included nightmarish mystery – and magic. ‘This fact alone, that there is no mystery, would falsify their claims to be true pictures of the situation of man…We are not yet resigned to absurdity and our only salvation lies in not becoming resigned’ (eh). The same year she asked, à propos Simone de Beauvoir’s championing of T.E. Lawrence as an existentialist hero, ‘Should he be taken as the model of the “good man” for this age?’
(#litres_trial_promo) In a sense this question resonates throughout her writing, and its very subversive simplicity rightly disturbs us. What man are we being asked to admire in this novel or in that philosophy? And are the reasons just? By 1957 in a Spectator review she noted that the appeal of existentialism was its dramatic, solipsistic, romantic and anti-social exaltation of the individual.
(#litres_trial_promo) If the central question she was later to ask in The Sovereignty of Good – what is it that might ‘lead to unselfish behaviour in the concentration camp?’ (73) – has any answer, it is not the ‘instantaneous’ values of the existentialist hero or of his Anglo-Saxon voluntarist counterpart. It is no accident that the plots of her novels until 1970 often concern the disruption of a court of settled, rooted English grands bourgeois by displaced persons and refugees. The theme is of course as old as Jane Austen, but Murdoch makes her own special use of it. She has written both of the ‘phenomenal luck of our English-speaking societies’ and, in the same article (sbr), of how such luck may obscure deep truth. These outsiders – the Lusiewicz twins and Mischa Fox in The Flight from the Enchanter, the Levkins in The Italian Girl, Honor Klein and Palmer Anderson in A Severed Head, Julius King in A Fairly Honourable Defeat – may sometimes appear as twentieth-century versions of the sentimental or demonic egoists whose irruption into the innocent provincial redoubt Austen chronicled.
(#litres_trial_promo) They as often, however, reveal the ‘deep truth’ hidden behind polite English manners.
The exact moment at which her disaffection with existentialism began may now be hard to determine. The spiritual claim that quarrels with it is present as early as Under the Net; and in a sense this argument has continued.
In the 1950s Murdoch began to read the great French mystic Simone Weil, whose influence on the novels A.S. Byatt has discussed in Degrees of Freedom. It is Weil’s strength that she does not, unlike Sartre, sentimentalise the position of being radically denuded and outside society. Murdoch has called Simone Weil’s Need for Roots ‘one of the very few profound and original political treatises of our time’(kv). It argues that the most terrible deprivation possible is the destruction of one’s past and one’s culture. Weil’s argument is that the affliction and degradation caused by the destruction of roots are such that they deprive all but the saintly person of the capacity to change or ‘unself’ from inside. The uprooted hurt and uproot others. Only for the saintly can virtue have no fixed address, in Weil’s philosophy and in Murdoch’s fiction. Morality depends, for Weil, on the slow attenuation or destruction of the ego, which itself requires a quiet environment. Sudden or violent deracination can mean complete or demonic demoralisation.
It is not that existentialism (or formalism) are wrong to attack the substantial self. It is rather that their attack is for Murdoch in bad faith. In pretending that the essential self does not exist the existentialist may behave like an ‘egotist-without-an-I’. The Buddhist attack on the fictionality of the ego is more profound, for both Weil and Murdoch, because it is based on a realistic assessment of the limited capacity of the ego to decentre itself, and because it is nonetheless designed to alter perception and behaviour. The originality of Murdoch’s novels is that they are full of a sense of what it means to come from one of the luckier, stabler societies or sections within that society, in an unlucky century, but avoid false piety about either that luck or that misfortune. The make-believe of ordinary life and the painful destruction of ordinary human illusion can be carried out anywhere, in a refugee camp or at a tea-table. Nowhere is privileged.
Just as her recoil from existentialism begins early, so does her attraction to a countervailing soul-picture which is, though absorbing much from Freud, religious yet (like Buddhism) atheist (and hence scandalous both to some Christians and to many humanists). Apart from a polemical letter to the New Statesman in 1941 defending the fellowtravelling Oxford Labour Group against J.W. Joad’s ‘liberal ethics of the nineteenth century’ and his facile invocation of ‘truth, beauty, goodness and love’,
(#litres_trial_promo) Murdoch’s earliest prose publications are three reviews of books with Christian topics, written during the war for the Adelphi magazine. They already prefigure her developed ‘philosophy’ of the 1960s, which she pertinently called not so much a philosophy as a moral psychology (Caen, 1978) in its interest in the differences between people, and in ‘how conduct is changed and how consciousness is changed’ (Bellamy, 1977). These reviews, while making clear that she was non-Christian, also show that she was prepared calmly and sympathetically to consider the claim that ‘science and philosophy may come to rest afresh upon a specifically religious exposition of the nature of reality’. Two other passages seem relevant to later preoccupations. The first concerns her interest in the dualism of worldliness and unworldliness, and the problem of the contemplative’s ‘return to the Cave’: ‘One may sympathize with this horror that turns its face utterly from this world as a place of unrelieved filth and corruption – but the problem of the return to the Cave remains a very real one for Christianity.’ In the second she compares the detachment of the artist with that of the saint. The artist, she argues, is not ‘apart’ as the saint is: ‘He sees the earth freshly and strangely but he is ultimately part of it, he is inside the things he sees and speaks of as well as outside them. He is of their substance, he suffers with them. Of saints I know nothing…’
(#litres_trial_promo) That collocation of ‘fresh’ with ‘strange’ prefigures many of the effects of her novels. The ‘odd’ for her is often close to being or to revealing the beautiful.
From 1948 to 1963, when she gave up full-time teaching, she was Tutor in Philosophy and Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. In 1956 she married the writer, critic and Oxford don John Bayley. John Fletcher has called theirs ‘one of the most fruitful literary and critical partnerships of our time, and remarkable in any time’.
(#litres_trial_promo) While Murdoch showed her novels to nobody until they were absolutely finished, she and Bayley shared a common humanism and an admiration for Shakespeare and Tolstoy as the writers who best succeed in creating the illusion that their characters are free.
It is rare to find someone who excelled, as did Murdoch, both as a novelist and as a moral philosopher. The precedent at which she glances at various points is the founder of European philosophy, Plato. In 1968 she called herself a Platonist (Rose, 1968). As well as philosophy, Plato is rumoured to have written poetry which he later tore up, and I think that in Murdoch we may intuit what she saw in Plato in The Sovereignty of Good – some version of ‘the peculiarly distressing struggle between artist and saint’ (88). She spoke of this as a theme in her work in numerous interviews. She described the division between would-be saints – Belfounder, Tayper-Pace, Ann Peronett – who have the certainty and power which come as gifts of faith, and possess a mysterious radiance beneath their ordinariness, and the would-be artists – Donaghue, Meade, Randall Peronett – who are imposing form on to essentially uncontrollable nature. The saint is unconsciously good, silent, and for him it is action that counts. The artist is consciously, aesthetically creating his life. In an interview she suggested that the importance of this conflict had to do with the ways in which the temptation to impose form existed in life as much as in art: the value of truth must pull at both.
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Thus the ‘ancient quarrel’ vivifies the novels themselves at the level of the moral psychology of the characters. Her depiction of artists – Miles in Bruno’s Dream, Bradley in The Black Prince – is always suspicious; not, as Dipple has too simply argued, that they are necessarily bad artists – in The Fire and the Sun Murdoch makes perfectly clear her view that ‘Good artists can be bad men’ (84) – but because ‘art’ itself is an analogue of the process by which we create in life a self-serving world view in which other people figure merely as subsidiary characters. This can be the only sense in which she refers, for example, to Michael Meade in The Bell as an artist – a man who has no strictly artistic ambitions.
Meeting Iris Murdoch in 1960 Ved Mehta wrote, ‘Among her friends and students Miss Murdoch has the reputation of being a saint, and she has no enemies’ (Mehta, 1961).
A received view of the post-war British novel treats it as in slow retreat from a simple-minded and ‘reactionary’ social realism, and moving towards an embrace of the purportedly ‘radical’ virtues of fantasy, Gothic, and romance. A new generation of writers, beneficiaries of the 1944 Butler Education Act which enabled children from poorer homes to enjoy higher education, reacted in the 1950s against the canons of Modernism. They perceived it as a metropolitan and rentier mode, the writing of a privileged group typified often by Virginia Woolf. The new realism, championed by Kingsley Amis and C.P. Snow, was resolutely provincial – anxious to celebrate the regions and to return, against the stylistic narcissism and self-consciousness of London and international Modernism, to the liberal conscience of Trollope, Wells, or George Eliot. The new realism, however, showed signs of strain. According to both Marxist and some liberal commentators this was because realism was underpinned by ‘liberal humanism’, an outmoded or inadequate ‘ideology’ whose superannuation cleared the way for more self-conscious, speculative and ironic forms. Social realism came to be seen as a naive or inauthentic mode, relying on a false view of the unified self, of perception and the innocent eye, and a falsely optimistic estimate of human history. And just as ‘realism’ came to be seen as a form of whiggish romancing, so ‘romance’ was to be the new realism. The novel thus acts out a Miltonic fall myth, first innocent and unselfknowing, later fallen, recessive, and wickedly self-conscious.
Murdoch’s career strikingly belies this consoling map. She did criticise Modernism – or its symbolist legacy – in her early and influential essays, whose hostilities were very much of their time, and which have been plundered by critics for too few ideas. She did not start as a liberal and a social realist and move towards more ‘apocalyptic’ and Gothic forms. Instead she started her work with a devastating critique of liberalism which resembles a systematic purgation, and began her career as a novelist in Under the Net where others of her generation look like ending theirs, with a work which is witty and anxious about art-as-lies, but which also scorns the banal play which might have called its own illusionism into doubt. Such self-conscious play with the form, even in the later perplexing The Black Prince, is peripheral.
It might unkindly be said that liberal humanists in Britain have sometimes seemed to resemble Murdoch’s character Eric in Australia where, ever since he arrived, ‘people have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down’ (NG 42) – either worrying away at the code like a game of Patience that seems unlikely to come out, or, in the case of the more prophetically inclined, as if it were just about to give way to some novel and more modish system of obligations whose name they were anxious to be the first to learn. For Murdoch the faults of liberalism were to a large extent the faults of existentialism. Both oppose, too simply, an innocent self to a guilty society, an inheritance they share from Romanticism. For her the question was posed not in terms of the mischievous default of history to make us secure and happy, but in terms of our own deep unacknowledged unfreedom and irrationality, our complicity in ‘lifemyths’ we unknowingly construct and live by, and our deep defencelessness, which we wrap up in various ways, to history, chance and contingency. She had of course political concerns. She campaigned among many other things against American involvement in Vietnam, and for homosexual law reform, and the novels obliquely discuss many public themes.
(#litres_trial_promo) But, for her, man is not innately rational, good or free. ‘Reason’ has to be earned, unendingly struggled for, and her world is not inertly comprehensible, as in ‘naive’ realism, but inexhaustibly mysterious and energetic beyond our easy grasp. An intense lyricism about this mystery marked her out from the first. To put her critique another way: there is in her work only ever the limited, very messy, imperfect and unperfectible task of love, and its failure. Society is not merely there outside us as a system of vulgar privations. Its nastinesses begin in our heads.
In both French and English novels of the mid-twentieth century the hero can appear as a potentially absolute individual unfairly circumscribed by a world of mere types. Although Kingsley Amis’s is a comic existentialism, both Lucky Jim and Roquentin seem similarly to dramatise their predicaments as those of ‘freedoms caught in a trap’ (SRR 36). It is the others who are irrational or falsely rational. The hero may, like Meurseult, be the only person who knows that he is powered by unreason and may thereby be ‘authentic’ in a way denied the less self-conscious; or like Bernard Sands in Angus Wilson’s Hemlock and After may have his one moment of cruelty, an aberrance that must be neutralised before it destroys him.
Murdoch attacked both ‘self-knowledge’ and ‘sincerity’ as second-rate and often delusive virtues. She argued that both French existentialism and English linguistic philosophy are heirs of Romanticism and share a common voluntarism, a romantic overemphasis on the will. Both separate the moral agent from all that surrounds him and, in speaking of the will as if it were or could easily be free, wholly ignore the personality and the huge and daunting power of its secret, fragmentary, opaque and obsessive inner life. The unenlightened self is mechanical, and escape from it is hard. ‘Self-examination’ strengthens its power. Willed acts of imaginative attention to what lies outside it can help erode it. In the important essay ‘Existentialists and Mystics’ (1970) she attacked the hero of much contemporary fiction as
the lonely brave man, defiant without optimism, proud without pretension, always an exposer of shams, whose mode of being is a deep criticism of society. He is an adventurer. He is godless. He does not suffer from guilt. He thinks of himself as free. He may have faults, he may be self-assertive or even violent, but he has sincerity and courage, and for this we forgive him…He might do anything.
She called this hero ‘existentialist’ and noted that he already looked a little out of date. He is the hero of novels by Hemingway, Lawrence, Sartre, Camus, Amis…It is typical of existentialism that it ‘either makes his responsibility absolute or abolishes it’ (Bigsby, 1982). Existentialism’s promise of total human freedom is a bogus one. Much of Murdoch’s moral psychology boils down to a criticism of the idea of fast moral change as romantic and false, and a defence of slow moral change as something difficult, piecemeal, and always incomplete.
‘Existentialists and Mystics’ is a meditation on various themes – on the existentialist novel, on the novel which contains an alternative ‘mystical’ hero, and on the place of literature in the new moral and political scene. The question of whether the present age is so wholly different from the past as to be deemed discontinuous with it is debated from various points of view. The existentialist novel tries to be cheerfully godless but abounds in a gloom which is secretly self-satisfied because, from its point of view, man is God himself. It is this which makes that novel look already old-fashioned. The mystical attitude is a ‘second thought about the matter and reflects the uneasy suspicion that perhaps after all man is not God’. ‘The existentialist novel shows us freedom and virtue as the assertion of the will. The mystical novel shows us freedom and virtue as understanding, or obedience to the Good.’ And the mystical novel (Greene, White, Bellow, Spark, Golding and by implication Murdoch herself) is the more recent development. The existentialist’s is a ‘natural mode of being of the capitalist era’. It is the mystic therefore who offers the deeper critique.
As we readily recognise and sympathise with the hero of will-power, so we can also recognise and sympathise with the mystical hero. He too is a man in tension, but here the tension is not between will and nature, but between nature and good. This is the man who has given up traditional religion but is still haunted by a sense of the reality and unity of some sort of spiritual world. The imagery here is the imagery of height and distance. Much is required of us and we are far from our goal. The virtue of the mystical hero is humility. Whereas the existentialist hero is the anxious man trying to impose or assert or find himself, the mystical hero is an anxious man trying to discipline or purge or diminish himself. The chief temptation of the former is egoism, of the latter masochism. The philosophical background or protective symbolism is fairly clear in each case. The first hero is the new version of the romantic man, the man of power, abandoned by God, struggling on bravely, sincerely and alone. This image consoles by showing us man as strong, self-reliant and uncrushable. The second hero is the new version of the man of faith, believing in goodness without religious guarantees, guilty, muddled, yet not without hope. This image consoles us by showing us man as frail, godless, and yet possessed of genuine intuitions of an authoritative good. (em)
Murdoch notes that of course no pure example of either novel, or of either hero, exists. Both existentialist and mystical heroes are marked by their apparent isolation from moral norms; both are ‘outsiders’. All novels must therefore be mixed. She also argues here for a new empirical and utilitarian political morality which starts at the level of food and shelter. It is worth noting that the essay argues for both empiricism and mysticism, which are not seen as in conflict. Unlike Bertrand Russell, who presented the classic, inadequate Western view in his significantly named ‘Mysticism and Logic’, Murdoch sees no opposition here. The mystical hero, like Tallis in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, can be fully engaged morally and politically: Tallis is engaged to the point of exhaustion. The mystic is, rather, one who has begun to grasp the absolute ‘for-nothing-ness’ and absolute lack of consolation involved in the Good. ‘Goodness is needful, one has to be good, for nothing, for immediate and obvious reasons, because somebody is hungry or somebody is crying.’ From this point of view the current demythologisation of religion is ‘a great moral tonic, because it asks the ordinary believer to do what only the exceptional one could do in the past, that is live a religious life without illusions’: that is, without any belief in the afterlife, in rewards, or in God. In one sense a truly religious life is uniquely possible without belief in God.
The novel is seen in this essay as taking on an ambiguous role in purveying moral symbolism. ‘The mystical novelist may or may not be a good man or a good novelist, but what he is attempting to do, perhaps unsuccessfully, is to invent new religious imagery (or twist old religious imagery) in an empty situation.’ He will run the danger that he may merely ‘reintroduce the old fatherly figure of God behind a facade of fantastical imagery or sentimental adventures in cosy masochism…It is easy to say there is no God. It is not so easy to believe it and to draw the consequences.’
‘Existentialists and Mystics’ is an important essay, which necessitates some re-reading of Murdoch’s work from the beginning, for Under the Net already has two heroes, not one – a voluntarist and a mystic, or alternatively a would-be artist and a would-be saint, one living by the will and by a hunger for aesthetic form, the other living by a constant sacrifice of the will. The essay also suggests that moral terms are a species of universal, that ‘we recognize good or decent people in times and literatures remote from our own…Patroclus’ invariable kindness. Cordelia’s truthfulness. Alyosha telling his father not to be afraid of hell.’ This, too, invites us to ask new questions about Murdoch’s own fiction, and about what kind of man it is in it that we are being asked to admire.
Murdoch argued for the centrality of the old naturalistic idea of character for the business of writing novels, and also wrote about the ways in which too great an attention to the form of the book can damage the illusion that the characters are free. In ‘Against Dryness’ and ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ she argued that the task for the novelist was to recreate ‘realism’, which often meant avoiding the bad habits – overt design, patterning, symbol and myth – which damage it. Her fiction, however, appeared to be written by the kind of novelist she least approved of, since it was much preoccupied with pattern, utilised fantasy and myth, and had generally the character implied by the term already used – ‘romance’. This gave criticism its main opportunity. She had written of the novel as if it were a vehicle of human differentiation and belonged to a vast campaign for the preservation of human plurality, and of the novelist as a tender detective of human souls, but herself seemed to write the novel of human resemblances and exciting symbolic conflations. The more open novels were used in England to punish the more closed and Gothic ones, and critics scrutinised the books for delinquent symmetries and wicked coincidences. Alternatively the critic, mindful that Murdoch had urged a distinction between fantasy and imagination, searched the work for ‘fantasy-apprehensions’ like a metaphysical park attendant, as if what was left once these were speared were some pure undiluted essence of the real. We have been given the choice between unmasking the works and denouncing their personnel.
I think criticism has been too absolutist and pious about the early theory. A writer theorises in a particular spirit. She may be trying out a variety of different positions in the effort to understand the shape and nature of her gift, rather than announcing a single unchanging campaign manifesto. The kinship between work and theory is likely to be complex in any writer worth reading. We no longer praise either Wordsworth or Ben Jonson for what, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads or in Timber, they thought they had put into their work. A relaxed account of Murdoch’s work which does not quarantine off certain works because they are generically diverse is needed. The writer has the right to as much ‘organis’d innocence’ as will enable her work; the critic is not obliged to follow.
I am not suggesting that those early and influential essays should be disregarded. There are arguments within them that now belong to the epoch in which they were written, and which have less relevance, and others which still stand. There is a degree of openness in them which deserves underlining. I hope for the remainder of this chapter to suggest how they can help illuminate her career.
Murdoch’s theory has been too often cited as though it involved an opposition between two discrete terms, rather than a mediation between extremes. In ‘Against Dryness’ and ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ she does not argue for a choice between ‘realism’ on the one hand, and ‘myth’ on the other, but for a dialectic or mediation between them. She is proposing a middle way. She describes how the realism of the great nineteenth-century novelists has split into two antagonistic and equally incomplete tendencies. On the one hand the ‘conventional’ social realism of ‘journalistic’ novelists produced a world of dead, predictable public facts divorced from psychological inwardness. On the other hand the ‘neurotic’ psychological realism of ‘crystalline’ novelists produced a wholly spiritualised, private world of unified values divorced from facts. The split – in which she declared herself uninterested much more quickly than the critics (Bradbury, 1976) – seemed to owe something to Socrates’ advice in the Philebus that it is bad if we arrive at the One or at the Many too quickly. It notably fits the literary politics of the 1920s – Woolf’s differences from Arnold Bennett, say – and the division of novelists in that period into Moderns and Contemporaries. The writer Murdoch cites as an example of how to marry these two sets of warring virtue – naturalism and symbolism – is Shakespeare. ‘Perhaps only Shakespeare managed to create at the highest level both images and people; and even Hamlet looks second rate compared with Lear’ (ad). In ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ she argued that the greatness of Dostoevsky, Melville, Emily Brontë and Hawthorne was not of the same order as that of Scott, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and especially Tolstoy. This was scarcely her last word on the matter, however. When I interviewed her in 1983 she no longer recalled this distinction but said that, if obliged to ‘place’ these respective geniuses then, would undoubtedly consider Dostoevsky a greater writer than George Eliot. She also paid tribute to such diverse forebears as Proust, Homer, Wuthering Heights, Dickens and James; and to such very diverse romances as Treasure Island, Peter Pan and The Tempest; and to Shakespeare generally.
A task for critics today would seem to be to understand the indebtedness of her demonic, tormented sinners and saints and of the curious co-existence in her work of malevolence and goodness, to the dark tragi-comedies of Dostoevsky, and to romance; and also to focus her recoil from the rational, optimistic importunacies of George Eliot. Murdoch’s assertion of the primary value of ‘character’ has meant that she has sometimes been placed, much too simply, in one camp. It was always her point that ‘character’ and ‘form’ must be reconcilable. Great literature would provide two satisfactions rather than one. It was never merely that ‘there is a temptation for any novelist…to imagine that the problem of a novel is solved…as soon as a form in the sense of a satisfactory myth has been evolved’ (sbr). The problem was also that myth is inescapable. ‘The mythical is not something “extra”: we live in myth and symbol all the time’ (mmm). The novelist must use myth and magic to help liberate us from myth and magic, an enterprise which, since both writer and client are frail and human, can never be more than minutely successful; and the artist, in her view, had better not give himself too many airs. We are all symbol-makers, mythmakers, story-tellers, she repeatedly asserted. Art is, as it were, the ordinary human condition, and not (or not merely) the peculiar task and property of a vain crew of specialists.
In his Modes of Modern Writing (1977) David Lodge usefully described the alternative virtues on the one hand of ‘realism’ – a writing that emphasises the uniqueness of things, persons, places – and on the other of ‘modernism’ – a writing which aspires to a concentrated symbolic formal unity. In the article that acts as an informal coda to this book he notably suggested that, since literary history over the last century could be seen as alternating between these two ideal types, one possible programme for a new writing might reside in the conscious attempt to combine the virtues of each in a single book.
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This is not unlike Murdoch’s avowed aim twenty-five years before. In 1958, after publishing her first four novels, she said that
I find myself thinking in terms of two kinds of novel which might be called ‘open’ and ‘closed’, and I cannot at the moment decide which kind I want to write: perhaps, more or less alternately, both. The open novel contains a lot of characters who rush about independently, each one eccentric and self-centred; the plot to some extent situates them in a pattern but does not integrate them into a single system. The closed novel has fewer characters and tends to draw them, as it were, toward a single point. Under the Net and The Flight from the Enchanter were, I think, [‘closed’], The Sandcastle and The Bell [‘open’]. The advantage of the open novel is that it is bright and airy and the characters move about freely; it is more like life as it is normally lived. Its disadvantage is that it may become loose in texture and it is more difficult to make the structure evident. A closed novel is more intensely integrated but may be more claustrophobic in atmosphere and the characters may lose their sense of freedom. Ideally, and if one were a great writer, one could, I think, combine both these things in a single work and not have to oscillate between them.
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I believe that Murdoch, having oscillated between these two kinds of work until about 1970, then produced a number of superb novels that do indeed combine these two sets of virtue, with the aesthetic interest divided equally between ‘form’ and ‘character’. Her ‘closed’ novels – especially The Unicorn and The Time of the Angels – have never been well understood in Britain. The essay ‘Existentialists and Mystics’ makes clear that, far from these religious novels being divertissements, or interruptions from the business of making attempts at the ‘true novel’, they are, whatever their individual success, central to her purpose; and the interview from which I have just quoted suggests that the formal intensity of which these books are capable is one essential ingredient in good art.
Character and image are mutually exclusive, therefore, only in second-rate art. In good art there is a dynamic tension between the two, and ‘character’ is as incalculable and private as the symbolic whole of the art-work itself, which it resists. Just as Murdoch always argued for the centrifugal primary value of ‘character’, so she also always argued for the centripetal value of a strong formal unity. In a straight fight between the two, since she was aware that she excelled at the latter, she would clearly have come down on the side of ‘character’, and hence on the side of the ‘open’ novels. What she wanted was ‘character’ sufficiently strongly imagined to hold its own in a living tension with the ‘myth’ embodied in the plot: ‘I care very much about pattern, and I want it to have a beautiful shape, an apprehensible shape.’ And she admired in Shakespeare the ways in which he has ‘an extraordinary ability to combine a marvellous pattern or myth with the expansion of characters as absolutely free persons, independent of each other – they have an extraordinary independence, though they’re also kept in by the marvellous pattern of the play’ (Bryden, 1968). They exist freely, yet ‘serve the purpose of the tale’ (Magee, 1978). Myth, she suggested to Kermode, (1963), is not altogether the enemy – it should be present also.
Two rare book reviews might serve to drive the same point home. Writing of Brigid Brophy’s The Snow Ball (1964) she distinguished epigrammatically ‘novels one inhabits’ from [crystalline] novels ‘one picks up in one’s hand’, and added that ‘perfection may belong to either’. And of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins (1954) she said that ‘Form and economy have been sacrificed to particularity and comprehensiveness’, and criticised the work for lacking that ‘imaginative unity’ typical of the authority of a true work of art.
(#litres_trial_promo) In conversation with Magee she pertinently attacked the division between ‘autonomous’ and wholly ‘mimetic’ views of the art-work as, in its most reductive form, simply an irrelevance dreamt up by aesthetically-minded critics. Good art must be both autonomous and mimetic, unified and yet also expansive.
Murdoch’s courageous exploration of Gothic romance in The Unicorn and The Time of the Angels, many years before the mode became voguish, and at the expense of the relative incomprehension of British reviewers, and her early aspiration to marry the advantages of ‘realism’ and ‘fantasy’ – ‘the best novels explore and exhibit [fantasy and realism] without disjoining them’ (Hobson, 1962) – are two ways in which she now seems always to have been more deeply in touch with her own time than have other writers. The division between Gothic romance and realism, on the grounds that one is ‘radical’, the other ‘reactionary’, has been exposed as facile. Gothic has for two hundred years been one element or wing within the traditional British novel and has been employed, as Marilyn Butler has shown, by writers of every political persuasion and for every possible ideological purpose. Moreover, during the last century, as Gerald Graff conclusively demonstrated, if the critic were obliged to insist on one genre as the ‘socially progressive’ one, it would be realism.
(#litres_trial_promo) Any convention, no matter how apparently austere, can cosily flatter the presuppositions of the reader, and will stay alive only so long as good writers are employing it.
What the alternation between open and closed works does evince is a conflict between Murdoch’s desire to set her characters ‘free’ and her belief that human beings are profoundly unfree. Her exploration of such matters is interesting, and in its very vulnerability, more compelling than the currently fashionable ‘fictionalist’ case, which turns on a facile self-exemption. It is not so easy, her work assures us, to become truly or honourably cultureless. As for shedding illusions, it is a curious fact about us, much displayed in all the books, that no matter how fast we think we are discarding them, there always seem to be a few more to lose. The opportunities for specious disillusion, and for seeing through everybody else’s states of mind but our own, are, her work reminds us, as long as life itself. The kind of man who does earn his right to be ‘outside’ society turns out in her work to be the good man or ‘mystical hero’ unsupported by religious dogma, in the world but not of it, the man who is trying to educate his own desires.
2 Under the Net and the Redemption of Particulars (#ulink_f97a8dc4-0f51-5911-8b39-e9cff416d0a1)
Iris Murdoch once called Sartre’s La Nausée the ‘instructive overture’ to his work. The same description fits Under the Net (1954). It was at the time placed with novels such as Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (which she had not read) as new ‘Angry’ social realism, an ascription which, despite the Dryden epigraph (‘’tis well an old age is out/And time to begin a new’) bears little scrutiny. It has also been related to Murdoch’s interest in Sartre, to the dedicatee Raymond Queneau, and to Beckett. The hero cherishes books by Queneau and Beckett. These debts have been explored elsewhere by A.S. Byatt, Baldanza and Todd.
(#litres_trial_promo) In its concern with the role of art in redeeming contingency it clearly echoes La Nausée; but it is also a novel which differently undercuts its existentialist hero-narrator. It is in fact a novel which draws on the Romantic tradition, the first novel of a Platonist in the making, schematically enquiring into the nature of the Good man and his relations with art, with true vision, and with copying. Art as much as Jake is its hero, copying its prophetic subject-matter. It takes on anxieties about realism many decades before these became fashionable in England.
Under the Net’s success has been obscured by the later work. It would be a very odd and unintelligent writer whose work did not develop at all over more than thirty years, so that her first novel remained her best; and whatever else Iris Murdoch is as a writer, she is an exceptionally intelligent one. In comparison with The Black Prince, a better novel about art and the education of an artist, where the idea-play is fed by a much more interesting story and better-drawn characters, Under the Net is extraordinary but still clearly apprentice work. Apprenticeship is another of its subjects. Both Hugo and Jake end up apprenticed to their crafts, of watchmaking and fictionmaking respectively.
And yet if Murdoch had written nothing else she would have been remembered for Under the Net. It is only the stature of her later work which dwarfs it, an astonishingly assured, inventive and funny first book. She had destroyed three or more earlier unpublished novels
(#litres_trial_promo) on the grounds of their immaturity, and this rigour had paid dividends. Under the Net partly resembles The Pickwick Papers: a picaresque, charming, light and innocent first novel, an episodic account of the boozy journeyings of a quixotic, illusionridden knight and his cannier squire. There have indeed been few critics who are not Chestertonian in their enthusiasm for the zest and buoyancy of her early novels, and because this has meant an undervaluation of the later work it seems useful to try to see the early work in a perspective which the later work makes available, and to read the early work through the later. I’m not – or not simply – pleading, like Edmund Wilson with the ‘dark’ Dickens, for a demonic and alienated later Murdoch to set off against her early optimism. One aspect of the brilliance of the later work is the critique it offers of that facile pessimism which is nowadays the insignia of the intellectual: to have a passion for imagining the worst, as John Bayley puts it in The Characters of Love, is the main premise for being thought serious.
(#litres_trial_promo) The general movement, however, is, as Murdoch put it, from the ‘quaint, funny, absurd and touching’ early work towards the ‘sad and awful’ later dark comedies (Bellamy, 1977). A crucial word here is ‘comedy’. The later books are not only darker, much more confident and less anxious to charm us than the early ones – they are thereby also wiser and funnier. She latterly showed us terrible things and made us laugh, and without diminishing the awfulness one whit. The face of the mature work resembles Martin Lynch-Gibbon’s in A Severed Head, ‘the face of someone laughing at something tragic’ (15). There are connexions between comedy and ‘contingency’ in her work which cut across all other distinctions, and where the books are less than fully successful it is often not because they are more ‘symbolic’, but because they are less comic.
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By these high standards the interest of Under the Net is partly in its exposition of themes which were to recur. It is the first and least disquieting of her brilliant first-person male narrations. She called her identification with the male voice ‘instinctive’ (Caen, 1978); I know nothing quite like them. There are male novelists who can persuade you into the minds of young women – Tolstoy, Henry James, Angus Wilson; the reverse feat seems rarer. Virginia Woolf’s pleasure in animating Orlando as a man can seem winsome and create a mild disassociation. In Murdoch what you detect is not so much the author’s pleasure as her relaxed and businesslike efficiency, into which she has wholly disappeared. The question of her relation with these heroes is a legitimate one. The subversive power of these narrations comes from our intimate relation with them and hence from our identification. This is solicited through a strenuous suspension of moral judgement on the author’s part, which comes to mean that judging these ‘loveable monsters’ resembles passing judgement on ourselves. This is one reason why reading these books can be, as well as a hilarious and spellbinding experience, also a very uncomfortable one. The prototype for this subversive relation between author-character and reader is Dostoevsky’s blackly comic Notes from Underground, a work to which The Black Prince, A Word Child and The Sea, The Sea show a debt. Dostoevsky’s relations with his hero, like Murdoch’s, are profoundly equivocal, and depend on devious intimate play with his own potential worst self or selves. Murdoch’s mastery of this equivocation is extraordinary.
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What might be added is that if there is a naïveté involved in identifying the author with her, very different, first-person narrators, as if this were a mere feat of literary transvestism, another sort of simplicity wholly detaches her from this crew as if they were moral exhibition-pieces, waxworks in some cautionary tale. Her success depends on the warmth of her identification as much as on the rigour of her simultaneous detachment. Where she gets too close (Jake in Under the Net), or too distant (Edmund in The Italian Girl), the book can be less successful. Moreover, despite conspicuous differences between these narrators, there are also evident similarities. Charles Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea and Jake Donaghue in Under the Net are both short men who blush and like swimming. All these narrators, from Jake to Charles, are within a year of their author’s age at the time of writing. All are in her specially extended sense ‘artists’. All are differently fastidious, are in some (not simply sexual) sense puritans, and experience that terror of multiplicity or contingency which Murdoch acknowledged in her interview with Ruth Heyd (1965). ‘I hate contingency; I want everything in my life to have a sufficient reason’ (24), says Jake. Such fear marks us all; what Murdoch shows in each portrait is also that relaxation of censorship at the threshold of consciousness which Schiller emphasised, in a well-known letter admired by Freud, as the peculiar, dangerous gift of the artist.
(#litres_trial_promo) Her suspicion of this relaxation of censorship, and her mastery of it alike, make for a sense of drama.
Under the Net is told by Jake Donaghue, a bohemian, an Irishman brought up like Murdoch in London, and a ‘professional unauthorised person’, a raffish outsider. Talkative yet secretive, an irresolute sentimentalist with ‘shattered nerves’, he announces himself as a swift, intuitive type of thinker. This comes to mean, as the story unfolds, that he is impulsive, restless, profoundly impressionable, romantic and somewhat lost. Jake is a charming, feckless bohemian hack given to bouts of melancholia who earns money by translating the French novelist Breteuil, whose work he despises. At the beginning he arrives back from France to find himself homeless. His squire Finn tells him that Madge, with whom they have been living rent-free in Earl’s Court, is marrying and has kicked them out. The book concerns Jake’s subsequent journeyings; as Frank Baldanza has pointed out, they represent a mixture of flight and quest.
(#litres_trial_promo) Flight and quest are indeed often indistinguishable here. The mystery he is seeking seems to him partly embodied in the two Quentin sisters, Anna and Sadie, partly in his erstwhile friend Hugo Belfounder. Like Jane Austen’s Emma, Jake makes mistakes about who loves whom. He thinks he loves Anna who he imagines is pursued by Hugo who he thinks must be loved by Sadie. In fact Anna pursues Hugo who loves Sadie who is keen on him, Jake. He has been told all this but has licensed his own fantasies. He similarly thinks that Breteuil will never write a good book and that Finn will never return to Ireland, though Finn often says he wishes to. Finn does return to Ireland and Breteuil wins the coveted Prix Goncourt. Jake is progressively disenchanted, and ends the book with a newly-won joy at such withering into the truth, ready to write a book of his own, and trying to eschew theory.
What distinguishes Jake’s tale from that of a nineteenth-century hero or heroine – Emma, or Isabel Archer, also a ‘person of many theories’ – is the special use of picaresque convention, which is more self-conscious than Dickens’s, the extraordinary relations between the two central figures and what passes between them, and finally the tale’s openendedness.
A.S. Byatt noted the peculiar difficulty of discussing this ‘light, amusing, rapid’ book without making it sound portentous.
(#litres_trial_promo) This is a problem with all of Murdoch, but especially here with her least unphilosophical novel. She has rightly resented the attempt to ‘unmask’ the work, or to allegorise the books as if they were merely philosophy-in-disguise, preferring to be thought a reflective, religious or speculative novelist like Dostoevsky rather than, like Sartre, directly a philosophical one. To use her own favourite metaphor of water, we might say that good art is philosophy swimming, or philosophy drowning. ‘Ideas in art must suffer a sea-change’ (Magee, 1978). There is always more event, story, incident than the idea-play can use up, here as everywhere in her work, and this surplus of sense and action over meaning helps constitute the particular mysterious and instructively frustrating atmosphere. Reviewers of the first two novels noted that there was ‘too much’ in them (I shall discuss this ‘too much’ and its function in Chapter 5).
The play with the picaresque takes two forms. Traditionally it is the quest of the knight that matters, while that of his Sancho Panza takes second place. Jake fails, however, to see that Finn too has his story. He tells us that Finn has ‘very little inner life’, and that he connects this with Finn’s absolute truthfulness: ‘I count Finn as an inhabitant of my universe, and cannot conceive that he has one containing me; and this arrangement seems restful to both of us’ (UN 9). Finn is the first of a series of Murdoch characters who disappear from the narrative – some commit suicide, some die by avoidable accident, others, like Luca in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, are locked up in institutions – without ever having been properly apprehended. Their demise or disappearance is a direct result, we are made to feel, of the failure of the other characters to imagine their needs or to see them as other than ‘subsidiary’ characters. This is an inability in which the author, as her virtuosity grows, is herself decreasingly complicit. When the despairing Clifford Larr dies in A Word Child our curiosity about him is aroused and carefully cheated. Henry James said that he felt he could pass a stiff examination on Mrs Brookenham in The Awkward Age. We feel that the examination Murdoch could pass on Larr would be a stiffer one than she might care to sit on Finn. This conditions our sense of her success, not in persuading us of Jake’s shortsightedness, but in intimating what a longer vision might resemble. By the time she writes the later books her mastery of the confessional mode is such that one senses a greater authorial grasp of that depth of field which her narrators are busy simplifying, as well as the narrator’s simplifications.
The second use of the picaresque has to do with play with a great and continuing theme in Murdoch’s work, that of iconoclasm, the destruction of images, pictures and states of mind. Here the pathos and impermanence of the phenomenal world distantly mirrors, perhaps prefigures, the Socratic smashing of illusions and of all theoretical attempts to dominate reality with which the tale ends. The Hammersmith theatre where Anna conducts her mime is seen first full and then empty, and there is a film-set of ancient Rome which looks real, then rapidly collapses. The emptiness of the City of London at night, through which Jake hunts for Hugo, contrasts with the fullness of Paris on the fourteenth of July, through which he hunts for Anna. Hugo’s flat is perceived full of art-treasure (apart from his sparsely furnished bedroom) and then, soon after, in the process of being stripped. London is in this book as patiently apprehended as the characters, and this is distinctly an immediately post-war London, with bomb-sites and the coming end of Empire to link it with Catiline’s Rome.
The writing which evokes all this is freshly done, the emotions are felt, the structure vivid and alive. At the same time this picaresque theme is a Platonic one. Other critics have usefully shown the book’s indebtedness to Wittgenstein, from whom the title comes. The ‘net’ in the title alludes to Tractatus 6.341, the net of discourse behind which the world’s particulars hide, a net which is necessary in order to elicit and describe them: language and theory alike (which constitute the net) both reveal and yet simultaneously conceal the world. The use of the idea of the ‘provisionality’ of theory in this book is as much Platonic as Wittgensteinian. Wittgenstein, it is true, wrote of the disposability both of the ‘ladder’ at the end of Tractatus and of the various stages of his argument once understood. Murdoch’s bias is Neoplatonic in the sense that it gives a primary, and highly ambiguous, place to art itself in the discovery of truth, and also in that it subordinates the argument to the moral psychology of the characters. Under the Net enquires into the nature of the Good man vis-à-vis art.
Murdoch described her novels as pilgrimages from illusion towards reality (Bradbury, 1976), and also pointed out that ‘reality’ as such is never arrived at in the books, any more than it is in life. The dismantling of the various scenes connects with the book’s interest in the guilt and the attempted purification of art. The novel is much concerned with lies, art-as-lies, and the deceptive nature of all copying. Debates in the West about the value and the danger of art have a way of finding their way back to Plato, some version or private use of whose philosophy lies behind both most attempts to censor art by the virtuous, and also the grandest defences. Murdoch’s book on this (The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists) is notable for the sympathetic vigour of her explication of Plato’s objections to art, and also for the pyrrhic victory she awards herself, and art, at the end. Her sympathy for Plato, as for all puritan thinkers about art and morals – Kant, Tolstoy, Freud, Sartre would be others – is quite clear. In a lecture at Caen (1978) she might be said to have crystallised her own objections. The magical nature of art cannot be overestimated. It is an attempt to achieve omnipotence through personal fantasy and is the abode of wish-fulfilment and power mania. It is a prime producer of illusory unities. It both pretends to be more unified than it is, and allows us in reading (or looking, listening) to conceive of ourselves as more unified than we are. Art is an egoistic substitute for and copy of religious discipline. To Plato, who originated a metaphysical theory about the nature of copying, art is far removed from the truth, springs from merely vicarious knowledge, is the product of the inferior part of the soul, and harms by nourishing the passions which should be educated and disciplined.
At the same time she pointed out that great art is also lofty, and expresses or explains religion to each generation. All art lies, but good art lies its way into the truth, while bad art is simply bogus. Moreover since no art is perfect, all art partakes of a degree of moral ambiguity.
Anxieties about art have been lately much in the air again, though the most puritan reactions to it have come not from the censors but from formalist critics who are inclined to denounce the illusions of ‘realism’ as inauthentic or naive. Under the Net is decades ahead of its time in its concern with these anxieties, and perhaps further ahead of its time in its relaxed and cheerful mediation between two extreme positions: that truth is simply and immediately knowable, or very distantly accessible through a recession of intervening cultural conceptions. These anxieties enter into Jake’s relationship with Hugo, and are thought out at the level of character. The experience of solipsistic anxiety, the apprehension of the world’s inexhaustibility: Murdoch submits neither to any grand reduction, but shows them engaged in playful warfare.
Iris Murdoch noted that Plato was one of the first to define the good man as opposed to the hero (FS 74). Under the Net has two heroes, not one. Jake, who is recognisably the typical jaunty anti-hero of his time, is systematically undercut by Hugo, who is presented as a truer and less visible kind of anti-hero.
Murdoch opposes to the man ‘trying to impose or assert or find himself’ (the existentialist hero) an alternative picture of ‘the anxious man trying to discipline or purge or diminish himself (the mystical hero)’ (em). In Hugo’s questioning of Jake’s picture of events, Under the Net partly mocks the voluntarist pieties of the age.
Jake tells us that his acquaintance with Hugo is ‘the central theme of the book’ (UN 53). At the heart of the great richness of comic incident the book affords is Jake’s fascination with Hugo and the misunderstandings and relative differences between them. Jake’s relation with Hugo shapes the book and helps fund its tone. Without Hugo’s presence Jake has slipped into a variety of illusions. Yet just as Jake is in Anna’s presence for only five minutes during the book, so he is in Hugo’s for only a few moments of ‘present’ time at the film studio, and then for half an hour at the hospital. This half-hour constitutes the book’s comic reversal and Jake’s sad, partial recognition of the truth.
We first see Hugo in the mime theatre where a ‘huge and burly central figure, wearing a mask which expressed a sort of humble yearning stupidity, was being mocked by the other players’ (36). The irony of the mask that Hugo wears here is that it expresses his real nature. He is the only character apart from Finn shown incapable of untruth or dissimulation. Thus towards the end Hugo speaks of Sadie to Jake with an air which Jake characterises as ‘disgustingly humble’ (225). In The Sovereignty of Good Murdoch praised humility as ‘a rare virtue and an unfashionable one and one which is often hard to discern…The humble man, because he sees himself as nothing, can see other things as they are. He sees the pointlessness of virtue, and its unique value, and the endless extent of its demand’ (103–4).
Jake and Hugo meet in a cold-cure centre where Jake takes Hugo for a mental defective and ignores him for two days, despite the fact that they are sharing a room. Hugo puts up with this snubbing with gentle patience and self-possession. When Jake engages him in conversation he realises he is closeted with a person of great fascination – indeed ‘the most purely objective and detached person’ (57) Jake has ever met. Jake notes that the conversation which ensues is germane to the whole story he has to tell. For Hugo
Each thing was absolutely unique. I had the feeling that I was meeting for the first time an almost completely truthful man; and the experience was turning out to be appropriately upsetting. I was but the more inclined to attribute a spiritual worth to Hugo in proportion as it would never have crossed his mind to think of himself in such a light. (61)
Given the care that Murdoch has put into picturing Hugo as a man aspiring to be good, connecting this quite explicitly to his scepticism about the act of classification, there is an irony in the way critics have positively rushed to classify him. Jake notes that to try to ‘place’ Hugo, as he at first attempted, was a failure of taste which showed a ‘peculiar insensitivity to his unique intellectual and moral quality’ (58). One critic links Hugo with pataphysics, another tells us he is an existentialist. Others have linked him with Wittgenstein,
(#litres_trial_promo) with whom he certainly shares a quality of ‘unnerving directness’ (Mehta, 1961) in his approach to persons and problems. Like Wittgenstein Hugo is a wealthy Central European attracted to an ascetic ideal, sexually tormented, with a curious care for his boots, and a man who worked in his family factory, and had a capacity to renounce. But Hugo’s forebears are as much literary as philosophical. In particular he seems to owe something to Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, another holy fool, half clown, half spiritual emperor, comic-pathetic and wise. The ‘sparse simplicity’ of Hugo’s bedroom (92), moreover, resembles not merely that of Wittgenstein but the simplified rooms of the other saintly figures in Murdoch’s novels, who are extremely unlike the Austrian philosopher. It is to Hugo’s renunciatory capacities, as much as his intellectual lineage, that Murdoch is drawing our attention. It has been well observed that her novels contain only fools and holy fools.
(#litres_trial_promo) Jake is the common fool, Hugo the holy fool.
It is important to our sense of Hugo before we have met him that his flat, despite being so full of art-treasure (Renoirs, Miro, a Minton) should be left not merely unlocked but with the door ajar. His wholly austere and unornamented bedroom suggests that he is inwardly neither covetous nor attached. He has given up the armaments factory he inherited before the action commences and converted it to fireworks, and then, when these are acclaimed and pretentiously classified, lost interest in them too. At the end of the story he is giving up some remaining attachments: his passion for Sadie, whom he has persecuted, his film industry, his money, his friendship with Jake, London itself, and the role which he conceives of as false of consoling Anna. This is a different mode of detachment from Jake’s, though both are ‘outsider’ figures, Jake an Irish expatriate, Hugo the child of German refugees. Jake spends much time wondering where he will sleep during the tale and in fact passes one night, like a tramp, on a bench on Victoria Embankment. What distinguishes these modes of detachment has everything to do with the specially enlarged sense Murdoch gives to the word ‘artist’.
Jake’s separateness makes him extraordinary to himself; Hugo is nobly unself-conscious. If Hugo resembles anyone in the story it is the shadowy but truthful Finn who, like him, cannot imagine himself at the ‘centre’ of any story, or the dog Mars whom Jake has stolen. Hugo’s exit from the hospital and almost from the book is conducted on all fours, with his bottom in the air, dribbling into the boots he holds in his teeth. This noble unself-consciousness gives him, as the would-be good man who sees objectively, an alarming ordinariness, and an odd, dogged, animal intelligence.
Jake early notes that Hugo is devoid of general theories. All his theories, if they can be called theories – for they read as exercises in patient inquisitive particular enquiry – are local. An early conversation dramatises the difference between them and concerns the problem of describing states of mind or feelings. That such description belongs to the novel as a form, as much as to moral philosophy, is important.
’there’s something fishy about describing people’s feelings,’ said Hugo. ‘All these descriptions are so dramatic.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’ I said.
‘Only,’ said Hugo, ‘that it means that things are falsified from the start. If I say afterwards that I felt such and such, say that I felt “apprehensive” – well, this just isn’t true.’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked.
‘I didn’t feel this,’ said Hugo. ‘I didn’t feel anything of that kind at the time at all. This is just something I say afterwards…As soon as I start to describe, I’m done for. Try describing anything, our conversation for instance, and see how absolutely instinctively you…’
’touch it up?’
‘It’s deeper than that,’ said Hugo. ‘The language just won’t let you present it as it really was.’ (59)
’the whole language is a machine for making falsehoods’ (60), Hugo adds. Jake finds Hugo’s puritan suspicion of language not desiccating but life-giving because it is in the service of a love of truth and a love of the real. ‘For Hugo each thing was astonishing, delightful, complicated, and mysterious. During these conversations I began to see the whole world anew’ (58). For Hugo as for Plato art is a special case of copying, and he shares Plato’s typically puritan suspicion of mimetic art. When Hugo creates his fireworks he ‘despised the vulgarity of representational pieces’ and preferred that his creations be compared, if to anything, then to music. Moreover he finds the impermanence of fireworks a positive recommendation.
I remember his holding forth to me more than once what an honest thing a firework is. It was so patently an ephemeral spurt of beauty of which in a moment nothing more was left. ‘That’s what all art is really,’ said Hugo, ‘only we don’t like to admit it. Leonardo understood this. He deliberately made the Last Supper perishable.’ (54)
Again this echoes Plato (Laws 956b) who argued that ‘artefacts offered to the gods should be such as can be made in a single day’ (FS 71) – should be deliberately impermanent. It is important that when Jake and Hugo reach the conclusion ‘in that case one oughtn’t to talk,’ they at once burst out laughing, thinking of how they had for days been doing nothing else. The puritan ideal of total silence is hedged around with irony. It is also important that, as Patrick Swinden points out, we never come into direct contact with Hugo’s philosophy. Even of the ‘original’ conversation between Jake and Hugo we are told that it took half a dozen cold-cure sessions for them to reach this point, so that what we have been given must be an ‘artistic’ conflation of many weeks’ talk into one discussion. This is as it were already at one remove from the truth. And given Hugo’s doubts about the ways, once you tell a story, you immediately begin to ‘touch it up’, it is ironic that Jake immediately finds himself very guiltily working up his and Hugo’s conversations into a flowery philosophical dialogue which he calls ‘The Silencer’. In the excerpt that he reads, art once more plays the pivotal role. The dialogue owes something to the Romantic, and the Buddhist, quest to get beyond the duality of self and world.
Annandine:… All theorising is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net…
Tamarus: So you would cut all speech, except the very simplest, out of human life altogether. To do this would be to take away our very means of understanding ourselves and making life endurable.
Annandine: Why should life be made endurable? I know that nothing consoles and nothing justifies except a story – but that doesn’t stop all stories from being lies. Only the greatest men can speak and still be truthful. Any artist knows this obscurely; he knows that a theory is death, and that all expression is weighted with theory. Only the strongest can rise against that weight. For most of us…truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. (81)
All speech lies, and art is only a special form of speech, yet great art alone can tell us essential truths. The same idea occurs in An Accidental Man twenty years later, where the novelist Garth says, ‘you may know a truth but if it’s at all complicated you have to be an artist not to utter it as a lie’ (107). Under the Net is as full of artists as it is of philosophers – it concerns, in part, the ancient quarrel between the two, between art and truth. Jake is an artist who writes philosophy of a sort, a translator who has written and had torn up an epic poem, and who ends the book ready to write a novel. His friend Dave Gellman is a ‘pure’ linguistic philosopher. Mrs Tinckham, whose shop Jake finds welcoming, reads Amazing Stories and lives in a world ‘where fact and fiction are no longer clearly distinguished’ (18). Anna is a singer who, being in love with Hugo, takes over like Jake what in him is lived out (Hugo is the man trying to get beyond duality) and creates a second-hand vicarious version of it in the mime theatre. She calls singing ‘corrupt’, ‘exploiting one’s charm to seduce people’, compared to the puritan ideal of mime, which is ‘very pure and very simple’.
The art-form which dominates the story and links most of its picaresque worlds – raffish-bohemian, sporting, and high capitalist – is film. This is the world Madge is suing to enter, over which Sadie reigns as a star, and which rumours tell us Anna may be seduced by, though we last hear of her not in Hollywood but as a singer in Paris. Murdoch wrote of the necessity of thinking of reality as ‘a rich receding background’ (ad). This idea – which is incidentally not the assertion of a simple realist but rather of one who believes that truth lies in a certain kind of directedness – gets into the text in a variety of ways. Just as we meet Hugo for most of the text only through Jake or Anna’s reflections and copies of his world-view, so there is in the worldly realm of film also a recession of power figures. Hugo is involved in film-making too, which gives this recession another kind of piquancy. Jake is outwitted by Sadie and Sammy Starfield over the theft and use of a Breteuil translation he has made. They in their turn are outwitted by Madge and possibly H.K. Pringsheim, who are going to ‘wipe out’ Hugo’s film company. Madge undergoes two changes of style during the book, and there is some ‘final’ paymaster behind Madge’s second metamorphosis into a starlet in the making, but though Jake muses about this person and imagines him in three different guises, his curiosity remains unsatisfied. Just as Hugo is the absent centre of the world of ideas, so there is some final paymaster in the world of power who also makes Jake feel peripheral.
Murdoch drew attention to F.M. Cornford’s comparison of the cinema with Plato’s Cave, a place of darkness, false glitter, specious Goods, mechanical fantasy. In The Fire and the Sun television figures twice as an image of Platonic eikasia, the lowest realm of illusion. Film’s standards of truthfulness and accuracy are evoked for us in the scene at Hugo’s studio in Chapter 12. Sadie is playing the part of Orestilla in a film about the Catiline conspiracy. Sallust says of Orestilla that no good man praised her save for her beauty, and Cicero professed to believe her to be not only Catiline’s wife but his daughter too. Despite three eminent ancient historians on the film’s payroll the script presents her as ‘a woman with a heart of gold and moderate reformist principles’ (UN 140)!
Jake rejects the inglorious, tawdry consumerist fantasies of film in Paris where Madge offers him a sinecure position as scriptwriter, a rejection paralleled by his distancing himself from Lefty Todd’s requirements also. Madge asks him to use his art, if only part-time, to prettify capitalism; Lefty wishes him to serve the revolution. Though this is to make the book sound unduly allegorical, the echo is there. Jake is declaring for the independence of art, which best serves society when it serves its own truth, in rejecting both Lefty and Madge.
Under the Net is full of lockings-in and lockings-out, of unlocking and of theft. It is also full of jokes about copying, and Jake occupies a world perplexingly full of copies. Murdoch noted that in writing the novel she was copying Beckett and Queneau as hard as she could, but that it resembles nothing by either of them (Caen, 1978); such an account of the book’s gestation also mirrors its themes.
The theme of doubling is most apparent in Jake’s feelings about the Quentin sisters who, like Gainsborough’s daughters in the painting that Dora visits in the Tate Gallery in The Bell, are ‘like, yet unlike’. Jake mistakes the sisters and his feelings for them. He thinks the singer Anna ‘deep’ because she handles her own emotional promiscuity with an apparent slippery success, and finds the film star Sadie glossy and dazzling and hard. His quest is dramatised for us in the superb scene in the Tuileries where he pursues a woman he takes for Anna but who merely resembles her, and where the statuesque stone lovers mock and imitate the human ones. Moreover Paris, full on the fourteenth of July, recalls and parodies the City of London, empty at night, and the glassy Seine is explicitly compared with the tidal Thames. Notre Dame is reflected in the tideless Seine ‘like a skull which appears in the glass as a reflection of a head’. There is a catalogue of churches in both London and Paris. We are told that all women copy one another and approximate to a harmonious norm (10). In another episode which has been related to G.E. Moore and David Pears,
(#litres_trial_promo) Dave Gellman is writing an article for Mind on the incongruity of counterparts:
he wrote sitting in front of a mirror, and alternately staring at his reflection and examining his two hands. He had several times tried to explain to me his solution but I had not yet got as far as grasping the problem. (157)
Finally, in the last chapter, and before Jake meets Mrs Tinckham and her cat, which has perplexingly but only partly copied itself, producing half Siamese and half tabby kittens, he hears in an upper room someone playing the piano. ‘Someone else picked up the tune and whistled it’ (224).
Thus is one of the novel’s themes – plagiarism – mockingly elaborated. The sea of small, shy jokes about copying matters because copying is one of the book’s great themes. Jake copies Hugo’s ideas in ‘The Silencer’ just as Anna copies his ideas in the mime theatre. In each case Hugo ironically turns out to be too modest to recognise the reflections. He is, as Jake comes to see, a ‘man without reflections’ (238). He is closest to the truth of all the characters, because he lacks much self-image. He can begin to educate Jake twice – first in showing him what the world looks like to one who lacks preconception, and then at the end by showing him the truth about his relations with the other characters. Hugo’s wisdom represents the direction in which art must be pulled if it is to succeed in making a structure that illuminates what it points to without too greatly obscuring it; in a sense, without lying.
The point that Jake lies and is an unreliable narrator is made many times. He has a rule of ‘never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion’ (13). He lies to the reader that he pays Madge ‘little rent’, and confesses that he pays none. Soon afterwards with Anna he tells ‘my first lie’ (43), that he has nowhere to sleep that night. He assumes that others are lying back to him, and his habit of untruth has consequences since when Sadie – whom he has decided is a ‘notorious liar’ (68) – tells him plainly that Hugo is in love with her, he permits himself to believe that it is really she who loves Hugo. When questioned by Lefty he notes that under direct questioning he usually lies (96). During his crucial encounter with Hugo in the hospital his asseveration that ‘I felt I had to be desperately truthful’ is followed within five lines by ‘uttering my first lie’ (220).
Jake’s habit of untruth is explicitly connected with his being an ‘incorrigible artist’ (25). His care for verbal shapeliness and impressiveness is evidenced when, in considering how to tell Mrs Tinck about his homelessness, he says:
But I gritted my teeth against speech. I wanted to wait until I could present my story in a more dramatic way. The thing had possibilities but as yet it lacked form. If I spoke now there was always the danger of my telling the truth: when caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what’s duller than that? (18)
We are to see a connexion between Jake’s habitual carelessness with the truth and his working-up of Hugo and his talks into a stylish, shapely, pretentious dialogue. By contrast the two most truthful people in the story have problems with the very act of writing, apart from Hugo’s suspicion of art. Of Finn, who ‘never tells lies, he never even exaggerates’, we are later told that Jake had never seen his handwriting: ‘Some of my friends had once had a theory that Finn couldn’t write’ (246). And of Hugo, who is ‘an almost completely truthful man’, we learn that, despite being so successful a businessman, he ‘finds it very hard to express himself on paper at all’ (67). Like Socrates, Christ and Buddha, who never wrote anything at all, the good man here is inarticulate on paper. Hugo notes that ‘when I really speak the truth the words fall from my mouth completely dead’ (60). He represents the charmlessness of truth itself.
In The Philosopher’s Pupil we learn that Hugo has died and left his clocks to Jake. In that book also the philosopher Rozanov suggests that ‘art is certainly the devil’s work, the magic that joins good and evil together, the magic place where they joyfully run together. Plato was right about art’ (192). Rozanov, however, dies of his perfectionism and puritanism. Against his severe judgement might be set the comment of Socrates in the Platonic dialogue Art and Eros. There Plato condemns art, on similar grounds, but Socrates defends it: ‘Art must embrace the second-best,’ he argues, since human beings are second-best creatures who occupy a second-best world.
Murdoch was not hostile to conceptualising, but argued for a particular, provisional relation to it. She was scarcely an advocate of silence. In her aptly named essay ‘A House of Theory’ she blamed modern philosophy for having discouraged theorising. In her polemic ‘Against Dryness’ she called for a modern liberal theory of personality. ‘Where we can no longer explain, we may cease to believe’ (sbr). In The Sovereignty of Good she advocated a dialectic between theory and fact, called for a deepening of concepts and vocabulary, and urged a ‘siege of the individual by concepts’ as an access to moral growth. ‘The discipline of committing oneself to clarified public form is proper and rewarding: the final and best discoveries are often made in the formulation of the statement’ (FS 87). She suggested that ‘the paradox of our situation is that we must have theories about human nature, no theory explains everything, yet it is just the desire to explain everything which is the spur of theory’ (mmm). And her Blashfield address (1972) was aptly entitled ‘Salvation by Words’.
It is rather that she placed no absolute trust in theory. It should be local and provisional, not general and imperial. It is a means, not an end, and she was as aware as Sartre that most cerebration tries to control experience rather than submit to it. Thought itself tries to freeze what is ‘brute and nameless’ behind words, to fix what is always ‘more and other’ than our descriptions of it.
In Nuns and Soldiers we are told of the Count that ‘he loved Gertrude and he classified Anne’ (487). The opposition between love and classification runs throughout Murdoch’s work. We might say, à propos Under the Net, that the two activities are both mutually necessary and yet permanently opposed. Classification by itself produces a world of dead facts, love a world mysteriously alive and inexhaustible. In a sense it is the capacity to love the world, as well as to be more ordinary in it, that Hugo teaches Jake; both depend on attenuating the desire for cognitive mastery, and Jake aptly at the end gives up having any ‘picture’ of Anna at all (238) as a premise for apprehending her aright.
The critic too has to struggle to crawl under the net. To study Murdoch is to become newly aware of the puritanism of critical discourse, which makes for embarrassment about the discussion of character and bewilderment about the ‘centrifugal’ pressures within the work: it is easy enough to speak about ‘structure’, but hard to find a context in which to celebrate those particulars which break away from and blur the structure, and give us the artful illusion that the work is overflowing back into life. Jake’s problem is also the reader’s.
In a discussion of Under the Net with Murdoch in 1983 she pointed out that a problem with the book is how little Jake and Hugo’s combat engages with the other characters, especially the women. Their relationship is, she suggested, uncompleted because they are such different kinds of being. Hugo is ‘a sort of unconscious spiritual being’ by whom Jake is shaken up. Jake might be a better writer later on as a result of meeting Hugo, but what Hugo is doing is not real to either of them.
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This seems just. In comparison with later treatments of the theme of the artist and the saint this is schematic and shadowy work, more interesting than it is good, and interesting in part because of what it foreshadows in the later work. Anna, Sadie and Madge are caught at the edge of the book’s vision. It is not that we disbelieve in them, but that we never get close enough to test our unbelief.
We are nonetheless to understand that ‘wisdom’ is what Jake is in the process of acquiring. Hugo and Jake’s whispered colloquy in the darkened hospital at night, where Jake risks and indeed loses his job, is the first of a series between artist and saint, always carried out at a pitch of difficulty in Murdoch’s work. Hugo, who has already divested himself of much, ends the book wishing to ‘travel light. Otherwise one can never understand anything,’ and feels the urge to ‘strip himself’ (223). He advises Jake to ‘clear out’, as he is doing.
’some situations can’t be unravelled,’ said Hugo, ‘they just have to be dropped. The trouble with you, Jake, is that you want to understand everything sympathetically. It can’t be done. One must just blunder on. Truth lies in blundering on…The point is people must just do what they can do, and good luck to them.’
‘What can you do?’ I asked him.
Hugo was silent for a long time. ‘Make little intricate things with my hands,’ he said. (229)
What Hugo is going to do about this is become a watchmaker (‘A what?’ asks Jake) in Nottingham (‘In where?’), and when Jake asks ‘wildly’, ‘What about the truth? What about the search for God?’, Hugo replies, ‘What more do you want?…God is a task. God is a detail. It all lies close to your hand’ (229).
The scene is funny and touching and true. Hugo’s wisdom, we might say, is centrifugal and particular. His adoption of watchmaking – ‘an old craft, like baking bread’ – signals his calm absorption in the task of honouring the world’s details. He stands for a loving empirical curiosity about particulars, for reverential ‘attention’, that crucial Murdochian word (ad), and proposes to Jake that he renounce the grandiloquent – the search for God – in favour of the local – seeing life as task, as blundering on, and writing, by implication, as an unpretending craft which must also negotiate the detail and contingency of the world. His face ‘masked by a kind of innocence’, he calls Jake a sentimentalist who is always far too impressed by people. ‘Everyone must go his own way. Things don’t matter as much as you think.’
Jake, who famously classifies parts of London as necessary and parts as contingent, is understandably appalled by the notion of having to live outside London, which is to say of having to give up his position at the centre. Other artistfigures share this bias. Randall in An Unofficial Rose declares Australia, from which the innocent Penn comes, ‘a meaningless place’, and Hilary in A Word Child can bear only London near Hyde Park. Hugo, by contrast, is unable to conceive of himself at the centre to begin with, and, like all of Murdoch’s would-be saintly characters, and in this like Cordelia too, lacks the narrative skills which would dramatise his life as Jake consistently dramatises his (speaking throughout of ‘fate’ and ‘destiny’). Murdoch saints are always on the edge of the action, either leading happy lives or lives about whose unhappiness they have no talent for making a fuss, and which therefore lack any ‘story’. They exist, as Jake sees Hugo, as an unconscious ‘sign or portent’ for those less luckily situated.
Art for Murdoch presented the problems of true vision in a special form. She argued from first to last that particulars must be celebrated in a way that neither ties them up into some form of premature unity (symbolism) nor leaves them wholly outside the range of spirit (naturalism), condemned to banality.
In Bruno’s Dream Bruno thinks, ‘I am dying…but what is it like?’ (300). It is everywhere apparent in her work that Murdoch repeatedly asked herself ‘What is it like?’ of many disparate phenomena. In asking what the aged Bruno’s experience might be like she came up with, among other things, a man who, though he would not object to being loved by someone new, has settled for the moment to looking forward to a new kind of jam. That touching, and, surely, true ‘new kind of jam’ might stand for an emblem of how superbly and watchfully she can inhabit other experience than her own. It is a symptom of her tender-heartedness that Bruno is rewarded by the new person too. In that novel Bruno’s puritanical and self-enclosed son Miles keeps a ‘Notebook of Particulars’ in which he tries to overcome the problems of description. ‘How hard it was to see things,’ he thinks, and chronicles some marvels: ‘the ecstatic flight of a pigeon, the communion of two discarded shoes, the pattern on a piece of processed cheese’ (55). Some of the most brilliant passages in The Black Prince appear as answers to the question ‘What is it like?’, and as her work proceeds the answers she solicits are to increasingly ordinary questions.
In her early essay ‘Nostalgia for the Particular’, which is ascribed as a book to the philosopher Rozanov in The Philosopher’s Pupil thirty years later, Murdoch wrote of the ‘shyness’ of experience and the problems of ‘cornering’ it: ‘It is difficult to describe the smell of the Paris Metro or what it is like to hold a mouse in one’s hand.’ When the oafish Otto in The Italian Girl asks, ‘Has it ever struck you that we don’t eat anything blue?’ (39), the wholly unblue food we customarily, unthinkingly eat becomes invested with a kind of strange glamour, invoked as it is from so close, yet so happily alienated a perspective. A less successful example occurs in Crystal’s recounting of her seduction by the grief-stricken Gunnar in A Word Child, when, in the middle of a long and circumstantial narrative, she tells how Gunnar had spoken of Lapland, where the reindeer ‘like the smell of human water, urine’ (251). Here the improbable-but-true fact is used to authenticate the improbable and not quite plausible liaison. Finally in Nuns and Soldiers when the recently widowed and grief-stricken Gertrude, in trouble with young Tim with whom she finds herself falling in love, thinks of her dead husband, ‘I shall tell Guy about it, he will help me, he will know what to do’ (248), the moment is truthful as only high art can be.
Murdoch called, citing Simone Weil, for a ‘vocabulary of attention’ (ad), and while it is other persons who are the worthiest objects of such skill, the natural world is always well-attended. In Bruno’s Dream Miles draws attention to the tiny sound of the cracking of swallows’ beaks as they snap up flies; in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine Luca hears the minute crepitation of woodworm. The oddness of what we take for granted is insisted on throughout. In The Sea, The Sea Charles hears ‘a most extraordinary rhythmical shrieking sound’ (404) which it takes him a minute to recognise as his newly installed telephone. Similarly in The Time of the Angels Marcus, who has unknowingly fallen down a coal-hole, experiences the smell of the coal before he is able reassuringly to name it. In a variety of ways Murdoch’s work constantly draws attention to the holiness, or threat, of those minute particulars which dullness and self-absorption prevent us from experiencing afresh, and which language can hide or reveal.
This is to take, in a particular way, a romantic view of the function of art. I would argue that Murdoch is, in the best and most positive sense of the word, a romantic writer – the sense in which John Bayley uses the word, in Romantic Survival, of Yeats and of Auden.
(#litres_trial_promo) Both colonise the modern urban world and in so doing give it back to us afresh. One might mention here the special poetry Murdoch gets out of London, the inclusion of the half-built motorway along which David wanders in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, the disused, abandoned railway line where Peter and Morgan embrace in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, and Hilda’s disintegrating telephone in the same book. She has a special gift for finding, or rather ‘seeing’, such places and objects. In Under the Net the cold-cure centre in which Jake and Hugo meet, or the hairdresser’s in which Jake and Sadie meet, are further instances. Hers is the gift for making the strange seem familiar (the cold-cure centre) and the familiar seem strange (the hairdresser’s). Like Shakespeare, in Johnson’s view of him, she ‘approximates the remote, and familiarises the wonderful; the event [she] represents will not happen, but if it were possible, its effects would be as [she] has assigned’. ‘Good art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recognize, the minute and absolutely random detail of the world, and reveals it together with a sense of unity and form’ (SG 86). One might quip here that it is easy enough to understand complex things: it is what is most simple that is most unyielding and mysterious. Wittgenstein pointed out that ‘the aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes)’ (Investigations 129).
In The Philosopher’s Pupil Rozanov describes philosophy as ‘the sublime ability to say the obvious, to exhibit what is closest’ (133). The same might be said, mutatis mutandis, about literature. The pleasure we get from Jake’s observation that if you try to direct a cat’s attention it will look at your finger or elsewhere, but not at what you are pointing to (19); the pleasure we get from his seeing Madge’s defence of Sammy as ‘an unhappy muddled sort of person’ as ‘a standard remark made by women about the men who have left them’ (173) – these seem to me high pleasures exactly because they are humbly true; and, while each belongs naturally within its context, it also works outside its context. If criticism finds no way of saying so, then so much the worse for criticism. Murdoch’s aficion about animals and persons, like the knowledge she incorporates about spiders in Bruno’s Dream, roses in An Unofficial Rose, or pubs and churches in Under the Net, are proper sources of readerly pleasure.
She described herself in different interviews as both a ‘poet manqué and an ‘engineer manqué’.
(#litres_trial_promo) These are not necessarily to be construed as opposed interests. It is the poetry of irreducible fact that most interested her, a poetry excellently ascribed by Gillian Beer to Dickens, Carlyle and Hopkins as ‘romantic materialism’ – a belief in the palpable and particular, not as insufficient substitutes in some Platonic scheme for their own idea, but as sufficient and even ideal, in all their incompleteness and irreducibility.
(#litres_trial_promo) Murdoch’s Platonism is a this-worldly commodity, and she is concerned throughout her books to redirect the reader’s attention to the sensory world in which he is immersed: ‘I had forgotten about rain,’ says Jake at one point. The books remind us, often through that ‘defamiliarisation’ of the way things are described by the Russian formalist critic Shklovski, who argued that a leading function of art was to de-automatise perception through descriptions which made the ordinary strange and therefore fresh.
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Lefty tells Jake in the Skinners’ Arms that ‘Nothing goes on for ever,’ and Jake, seeing his Jewish friend Dave at the bar, says, ‘Except the Jews.’ When Lefty concurs, Jake asks him, ‘So you do recognize certain mysteries?’ ‘Yes, I’m an empiricist,’ Lefty jokes (101). It is just such an empiricism, which finds miracle in what is most ordinary, that it is the book’s project, through its chief agent Hugo, to instil. For Hugo each thing is ‘astonishing, delightful, complicated and mysterious’ (58).
Shortly after this passage in the Skinners’ Arms Lefty and Jake wander through the bombed City as the twilight falls.
The evening was by now well advanced. The darkness hung in the air but spread out in a suspended powder which only made the vanishing colours more vivid. The zenith was a strong blue, the horizon a radiant amethyst. From the darkness and shade of St Paul’s Churchyard we came into Cheapside as into a bright arena and saw framed in the gap of a ruin the pale neat rectangles of St Nicholas Cole Abbey, standing alone away to the south of us on the other side of Cannon Street. In between the willow-herb waved over what remained of streets. In this desolation the coloured shells of houses still raised up filled and blank squares of wall and window. The declining sun struck on glowing bricks and warmed up the stone of an occasional fallen pillar. As we passed St Vedast the top of the sky was vibrating into a later blue…(95)
How superb that ‘later’ blue is! The description continues for some pages, and there is in it a freshness and an intense lyricism – a quality beautifully termed by one critic ‘lyrical accuracy’
(#litres_trial_promo) – that brings the John Piper bombed city-scape alive. The desolation and sweet melancholy of war-torn London – the fading of Empire, perhaps – is echoed by the elegiac processes of the fading daylight, seen with a new strangeness. The light is alive in its sensuousness, a Keatsian commodity with a behaviour entirely of its own.
The search for an ‘unmediated vision’ beyond duality, and the failure of such search – these are great themes in high Romanticism and in contemporary deconstructionism. For the critic Geoffrey Hartman, the poet is seen trying to break through social and other determinants to some ‘unmediated contact with the principle of things’. Hartman’s criticism suffers from a boastful privation in that it constantly shows off about how cheated we must be of any such final contact. To require to exhibit this is perhaps naive. In his Logic Hegel suggests that ‘nothing is absolutely immediate in the absolute sense that it is in no way mediated; and nothing is mediated in the absolute sense that it is no way immediate.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This commonsensical position is true for Murdoch too.
This is ignored by critics who insufficiently see the openendedness of even her most apparently ‘closed’ novels. Rabinowitz argues that Jake at the end has now learned ‘to accept contingency’. A.S. Byatt writes that Jake ‘is free of his own net of fantasy’ and describes his ‘final enlightenment’. Malcolm Bradbury speaks of his ‘learning a fresh truth’ and of ‘true vision’.
(#litres_trial_promo) This is at odds both with every theoretical pronouncement and also with what is there in the books. On one page of The Sovereignty of Good (23) Murdoch speaks of the effort toward reality as ‘infinitely perfectible’, an ‘endless task’, emphasises ‘inevitable imperfection’ and ‘necessary fallibility’. Again and again she attacked the liberal belief in fast change as false and magical, and opposed to it a truer picture of moral change as piecemeal, unending and in some sense goalless: ‘It would be hard to overestimate the amount of fantasy in any given soul’; ‘even the most piercing sense of revelation accompanying greater awareness of one’s moral position is likely to be partly an illusion.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The fact that the action of her novels rarely takes longer than a few weeks or months might be counted here as further evidence. ‘We cannot suddenly alter ourselves’ (SG 39). Indeed the books are at least as much comedies of inveteracy as they are the Advent calendars, packed with moral surprises, that critics have made of them. ‘Creative imagination and obsessive fantasy may be very close, almost indistinguishable forces in the mind of the writer’ (Magee, 1978), and what works for the writer is here true of her characters too. Her famous division between self-flattering fantasy and an imagination which links us to the world needs to be read not as expressing the total discontinuity between the two, but precisely their ambiguous continuity.
Thus Under the Net ends with Jake’s experiencing that thauma (wonder) that impels men to philosophise or create: ‘It was the first day of the world…it was the morning of the first day’ (251). But his sense of renewal carries with it, as it were, no guarantees. What we have is closer to the ending of Ulysses than of Hard Times. Molly Bloom’s decision to make her husband breakfast is a tiny token into which the reader puts as much hope as he feels the signal will bear. So with Jake’s forswearing of classification. Mrs Tinck’s cat, as if sharing the creativity which Jake experiences, has littered. Mrs Tinck is puzzled as to why the kittens should be half pure Siamese and half pure tabby. After some bluster Jake gives in. ‘It’s just one of the wonders of the world,’ he says, in the book’s closing words.
The ending asserts that the world is most apprehensible at those moments when we are calmest about submitting to its inexhaustibility. When we give up the claim wholly to ‘understand everything sympathetically’, we may be rewarded by a vision of the world’s oddness, which the urge to a completed act of comprehension will elude. Once you can admit you don’t fully know, you can begin, a little, to ‘see’.
3 ‘Against Gravity’: The Early Novels and An Accidental Man (#ulink_0995b900-965d-5557-ae91-194aafbd2b71)
Under the Net presented a hero of the will at its centre and a man attempting to sacrifice his will at the edge. The pattern is common to many of the early novels and is never wholly abandoned. Malcolm Bradbury has used the word ‘psychopomp’ for these decentred educators or leaders-of-souls.
(#litres_trial_promo) In this chapter I suggest that these psychopomps are of two kinds, one of them distinctly more worldly than the other, and look at the ambiguous idea of worldliness itself in Murdoch’s work. Since a common form of illusion is to imagine that you are more virtuous than you really are, the psychopomp, who acts, however unwittingly, as a tantric master reconnecting the novice with the real, can sometimes speak with an apparent worldliness.
The Flight from the Enchanter (1956) was begun before the publication of Under the Net, and an early draft held at the University of Iowa makes clear that originally all the major characters were to have been refugees – not merely Mischa Fox, Nina and the Luciewicz brothers, but also Rosa Keepe and Peter Saward who, under a different name, appeared to be a Central European writing a history of the Jews. The published book distances this theme of displacement and achieves a deliberate alienation of the treatment, which is lightly comic, Lewis Carroll-like and fantastic, from the matter, which is sombre. The English, too, are subject to various displacements. Agnes Casement is a recruit to the bureaucracy where Rainborough works, and one who seems likely to overtake him. Rosa has made the reverse movement, declassing herself to work in a factory. Annette Cockaigne is a ‘cosmopolitan ragamuffin’ speaking four languages. Even the sedate and unremarkable Rainborough suffers the uprooting of an old wistaria tree with all its associations. At the centre of the book is the enchanter and refugee Mischa Fox, with one eye blue and one brown, not famous for ‘anything in particular…just famous’ (81), a figure of bad power who enslaves many of those who surround him, partly through the devices of Calvin Blick. Blick represents Fox’s ‘sub-conscious’ dark half (Caen, 1978), and his photographic dark-room occupies the cellars of Fox’s Kensington palazzo. Mischa contrives to seem innocent because the enslaved Calvin carries the full burden of consciousness and guilt. Mischa, the artist-figure, is the creator of his own myth, with which the other characters actively collude.
The magnetic difference in Under the Net between Hugo and Jake is echoed in the implicit opposition between Mischa and Peter Saward. Neither Mischa nor Peter is focused with the skilful energy shown in their later incarnations Tallis and Julius in A Fairly Honourable Defeat. Both are nonetheless interesting. Like Tallis, Peter had a sister who died. He has advanced tuberculosis, lives an ascetic scholarly life trying to decipher an ancient script, and is decked out with an unclassifiable plant. Peter is otherworldly, does not read the papers, is associated – again, like Tallis – with an unconscious night wisdom, some of it nonsensical, lives with great simplicity, has long contemplative periods, and is recognised by the effete Hunter as ‘almost a saint’ (96). He has a personality without frontiers. ‘He did not defend himself by placing others. He did not defend himself’ (31), though he defends others, even the tormented and devilish Blick (‘I don’t know, he has a pleasant smile’). Like his anti-type Mischa he is a figure about whom the others are busy weaving fantasies. Rainborough finds himself instinctively making damaging admissions to Peter out of an instinctive if irritable trust; Rosa assumes that Peter always knows when she is lying, and he represents for her the ‘sweetness of sanity and work, the gentleness of those whose ambitions are innocent, and the vulnerability of those who are incapable of contempt’ (253). His virtue is necessary to the others as an object of contemplation and speculation, just as is Mischa’s power. While Mischa feeds off such speculation and is fattened by it there is a simplicity in Peter which resists it. It is an acute observation that Mischa’s power is invested in him by his ‘creatures’, and is a product of their masochistic needs quite as much as of his own hard work.
Even Mischa wants to reveal himself only to Peter, who, as A.S. Byatt pointed out in an excellent reading, is the only person shown to us in the role of neither victim nor predator.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Everyone has been going mad as usual,’ says Mischa. ‘You make them mad,’ Peter replies (205). Chapter 17, in which the two finally meet, resembles Jake and Hugo’s meeting in the hospital in that it represents something like a still centre, sandwiched between various arbitrary violences – Annette’s breaking of her leg, Miss Casement’s chopping down Rainborough’s wistaria. Its stillness also prefigures Julius and Tallis’s meetings in the kitchen in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, just as Mischa’s more fantastic deracination (‘Where was he born? What blood is in his veins? No one knows’ (35)) directly prefigures the more pointed discovery of Julius’s wartime internment in Belsen. In both meetings we sense a shared understanding between the two ‘spiritual’ characters. Peter is the only character whose pity for Mischa is shown uncorrupted by that longing to possess or destroy with which pity is here always associated. ‘If the gods kill us, it is not for their sport but because we fill them with such intolerable compassion, a sort of nausea’ (208), says Mischa, who is the chief repository of this nauseous compassion, a man reputed to cry when reading the newspapers, and who confesses to having killed a kitten when overwhelmed by it. ‘Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Pity as an active torment, symbolised through the animal world, is a great theme in Murdoch’s novels. There are weird communal ‘damaged animal’ dreams in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, and Otto has a sequence of comic alarm dreams involving crushed or mutilated animals in The Italian Girl. In The Philosopher’s Pupil Gabriel is tormented by the desire to rescue a fish; in The Sandcastle Felicity cries childishly for a lost slug and for a butterfly flown out to sea. The Flight from the Enchanter reads in part as a meditation on the theme of pity and power; and Hitler, who, we are reminded, killed the pitiable and uprooted in the persons of gypsies and Jews, is, as Byatt has shown, a real presence.
(#litres_trial_promo) It is a tribute to the power of the later books that they make its treatment in The Flight from the Enchanter, for all its sharpness of outline and detail, seem abstract and whimsical in comparison. What you recall, as so often in the early books, is not so much the people as the wondrous set-pieces – Annette swinging on the chandelier, Mischa’s baroque party, the Dickensian Mrs Wingfield’s hilarious and uncomfortable persecution of the good Miss Foy.
Just as both Hugo and Jake are outsiders, so are Peter and Mischa. Peter’s mode of dispossession again silently opposes Mischa’s exoticism. Peter is caretaker of the symbols of Mischa’s own lost past, when Mischa was still rooted and still ‘belonged’: Peter collects photographs of Mischa’s now destroyed hometown and keeps them for him.
John Bayley has acutely observed that ‘the modern reflective consciousness cannot in some sense but see itself as taking part in a novel, the novel being the standard literary reflection in our age.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Against this might be set Simone Weil’s dictum that ‘Just as God, being outside the universe, is at the same time the centre, so each man imagines he is situated in the centre of the world. The illusion of perspective places him at the centre of space.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The artists Jake and, differently, Mischa, see themselves or are perceived as being at the centre. The saintly figures are struggling in some sense ‘to give up [the] imaginary position as the centre not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of [the] soul’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Decentring is the book’s theme. Peter, with the strength to survive at the edge of the world, contrasts with Nina whose dispossession demoralises her and, when no one sufficiently imagines her needs, leads to her suicide. Only for the saintly can virtue have no fixed address.
Calvin tells Rosa at the end of the book that ‘ [You] will never know the truth and you will read the signs in accordance with your deepest wishes. That is what we humans always have to do. Reality is a cipher with many solutions, all of them right ones…The truth lies deeper, deeper’ (278). His is a point of view Murdoch has explicitly rebutted,
(#litres_trial_promo) and which within the book is echoed and answered by Peter’s avowal to Rosa, when his research into the script he was working on turns out to have been worthless: ‘One reads the signs as best one can, and one may be totally misled. But it’s never certain that the evidence will turn up that makes everything plain. It was worth trying’ (287). Peter possesses that ‘superior honesty required to tear up one’s theory’ (SG 96) when it is disproved. His ideal of a realism of approximations and towardnesses which depends on a certain unselfish directedness is Murdoch’s too. Both Peter’s and Calvin’s look like styles of relativism, but Calvin’s depends on the notion of an absolute we are being darkly cheated and deprived of. Peter’s is a more relaxed, disciplined and cheerful agnosticism.
The Sandcastle (1957) is a romance about the love of Mor, a prep-school master interested in politics, for the young half-French artist Rain Carter. Mor is divided between his sour and controlling wife Nan and the innocent, fey painter. Rain comes to the school to paint the retired headmaster Demoyte, a charming old despot. She loves Mor both as a man and as a substitute for her own, now dead, jealous father. The novel treats painting as A Severed Head was to treat sculpture – as a paradigm case of the problems of representing the human subject in art, and an implicit analogy of the mysterious creation of the novelist. The Sandcastle is consistently interesting, sensitive and moving, yet there is a slightness about its final effect which contrasts with our clear sense of the author’s gravity. Nan’s disappointment is never focused for us, and because it is hard to imagine the Mors’ marriage when it was successful, it is also hard to imagine the book’s aftermath. On the other hand Nan’s rebirth of desire for Bill once she feels rejected by him is perceptively done, and the novel is full of acute touches. There is also a characteristic division in the author’s sympathy which she has not yet managed fully to put to work. We experience her sympathy for Rain and the duller Mor, and therefore hope for the success of the affair. The idea-play, however, which comes from Bledyard, is on the side of respect for the proprieties of marriage. The Sandcastle is a less successful novel than the later study of adultery The Sacred and Profane Love Machine because the division in our sympathies between wife and mistress is so unequal. We begin to understand Nan’s disappointment but insufficiently to want Mor to return to her. The later book is more painful and distressing because we come to know both wife and mistress.
There is also a recurrent paradox in that the central characters, who have had so much loving attention devoted to them, can be, while fully animated, less alive or less ‘typical’ than some of the people only half-attended to at the edge of the book. Here Murdoch’s successes are the silly, gauche yet innocent and unselfish headmaster Everard, who preaches unheard that ‘Love knows! There is always, if we ponder deeply enough and are ready in the end to crucify our selfish desires, some thing which we can do which is truly for the best and truly for the good of all concerned’ (206); and the tender-hearted roguish tyrant Demoyte, who wishes Mor to have Rain in spite of, and because of, his being in love with her himself. Lastly there is the eccentric Old Etonian art master Bledyard. Demoyte and Bledyard represent two opposite types who often compel our sympathy in the early books, one with the charm of a complete worldliness, the other intensely other-worldly. Bledyard plays the role occupied by Hugo in Under the Net. He is the would-be saint who represents an intolerable, charmless ‘best’, the puritan an-aesthetic world of silence and truth. Just as Hugo argued for the purifying effect of silence, showing Jake how to renounce and be ordinary, so Bledyard is an artist who will not or cannot paint any longer and who constantly intervenes and acts as an unsolicited voice of conscience: ‘I have to bear witness…I think you are acting wrongly’ (211). Bledyard’s uninvited sermon to Mor in the squash courts, whence he has sent Rain away from a rendezvous, argues for what Mor finds an intolerable austerity. He denounces ‘happiness’ as a poor and a selfish guide, and pleads in effect for Mor to crucify his desires and open himself to any hurt in concern for others. Freedom, for Bledyard, is total absence of self-concern.
Two other features of Bledyard’s case deserve note. One is that he is, with his speech impediment and his eccentricity, a ludicrous figure, mocked by all, including Mor and Rain. The scene where he gives a school lecture, at which the boys have substituted a slide of the digestive tract of a frog for the enormous Socratic head of the aged Rembrandt, is a triumph of controlled tone. The reader, like the audience, is convulsed with happy laughter, yet what Bledyard is saying has always about it a disturbing impractical truthfulness. We are made to feel that Bledyard is mocked rather as Christ was mocked. The mockery is partly Murdoch’s own irony and disguise, as with Socrates, for whom the ironies always were thickest when the approach to truth came nearest.
The second interesting feature of Bledyard’s case is his Platonic hostility to representational art. Just as Hugo approved of Leonardo’s deliberately having made The Last Supper perishable, and favoured the instantaneous obsolescence of fireworks, so Bledyard is interested in the debates about iconoclasm in the early Eastern Church and favours Byzantine art. He feels that a loss of proper reverence occurred in the Renaissance: ‘It is a fact…that we cannot really observe really observe our betters.’ (The repetition is a result of his speech impediment.) ‘Vices and peculiarities are easy to portray. But who can look reverently enough upon another human face? The true portrait painter should be a saint – and saints have other things to do than paint portraits’ (77).
Bledyard stands in relation to the rest of the book as do Hugo and Peter. Like anti-matter to matter, they are out of focus with ordinary human appetite. You can focus on either the saints or their artist antitypes – which is to say, on everyone else – separately, but not together. Their function in the books is to point to an (unrealisable) ideal which even they cannot wholly embody, though they are directed with a certain hope, faith and openness towards it.
Bledyard speaks two related kinds of wisdom. One is related to moral immediacy in personal relations, the other to the interplay of truthfulness and skill necessary to the artist. In this second area his effect is most palpable. He has a way of appearing in the book at crucial moments not just in Rain’s love affair with Mor but also in her attempts to picture and ‘see’ Demoyte. Each time he appears Rain recognises his authority and realises that a change in her painting is necessary. Her painting comes to seem, as I think art does to Murdoch, a provisional affair, never wholly finished. Art, like morality, must be pulled at by the value of a truth or perfection which is unreachable. Rain is desolate when Bledyard criticises her painting at an early stage, yet is helped by this criticism and rethinks her task. Finally, when she renounces Mor, she sees her representation of Demoyte once more anew and remakes what she has done again. At the same time Mor is held in his marriage, not by his own sudden conversion to Bledyard’s austerities, but by his wife’s brave and worldly cunning in staging a public scene. This compromises him and leaves him little choice but to pursue the political career she had formerly opposed.
As its title implies, The Sandcastle is much concerned with notions of form and permanence. Rain had been brought up on the tideless Mediterranean, where the sand was too dry to make a sandcastle. She finally tells Mor that, since he would have had to give up his political ambitions and his children for her, their affair would have been ‘all dry sand running through the fingers’ (300). Characters are throughout realised by their aesthetic preferences. Nan likes matching colour-schemes and moves everything in the house around as an expression of her need for control and territory. Demoyte lives in the magnificence of superimposed Persian rugs, drowning in splendour. Evvy’s apartments are drably unimaginative, and Bledyard characteristically lives in a stripped room, void of colour or comfort: ‘The floor was scrubbed and the walls whitewashed. No picture, no coloured object adorned it. The furniture was of pale wood and even the bed had a white cover’ (51). This recalls Hugo’s bedroom in Under the Net. Goodness, for Murdoch, depends on stripping away the consolations of a private world. Most art, like most morality, is a necessary realm of compromise and second-best.
The theme of the artist and the saint lies at the heart of An Unofficial Rose (1962) in the marriage of Ann and Randall Peronett, and is early dramatised in the row Randall stages to provide himself with a pretext for cutting loose and joining his mistress. A.S. Byatt has rightly drawn our attention to the book’s Jamesian qualities.
(#litres_trial_promo) James continues to haunt Murdoch at least until Nuns and Soldiers (1980), which partly reworks the plot of The Wings of the Dove. Here there is ‘beautiful’ speech, periphrasis on the part of the narrator, and the creation of a decorous golden world. Jane Austen is another presence, and Hugh presents Miranda with her works.
An Unofficial Rose is set in a Tatler world of two neighbouring Kentish houses and concerns the manoeuvrings which follow the death of Fanny Peronett. The title refers to the dog-rose of Rupert Brooke’s 1913 poem ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, which, unlike the orderly flowers of Berlin, where Brooke is composing his poem, he perceives as sweetly undisciplined and ‘unkempt’. The poem, itself an improvisation, hinges on the conceit that nature in Germany is punctual and formally ordered, while in England it is gloriously free.
Thus Randall, a would-be artist too rapacious to succeed, is offended by his wife’s formlessness and feels stifled by her capacity for self-sacrifice. He lives for and inhabits a stylish world, farming cultivated roses, and objects to Ann in that she is as ‘messy and flabby and open as a dogrose’ (37). Ann is busy and unselfish and, while not odd as Bledyard is odd, has a shy awkwardness and stubborn self-withholding that offends Randall. In The Red and the Green (1965) the artist Barnie is similarly hurt by his good wife Kathleen’s unyielding, passive stoicism. Such virtuous characters have a special negativity which refuses the imagination of those they live with, perhaps a consequence of how hard they work at not imagining wrong. Such deliberate gracelessness offers the onlooker no imaginative foothold. This seems a just perception, and I know of no other novelist capable of making the point, or of relating it to the virtues of the artwork itself, since art depends on style and stylishness, and requires and feeds off form. ‘Goodness accepts the contingent. Love accepts the contingent. Nothing is more fatal to love than to want it to have form,’ the sententious vicar Douglas Swann says (UR 130). Art, in making its pact with contingency, must however embrace enough to test its own form without yielding to banality.
Freedom, too, is a subject of the book. Characters are frequently surprised when actions they had planned and claimed for themselves turn out to have been partly engineered by others. Randall discovers that his action in stealing Lindsay Rimmer from the aged detective-story writer Emma Sands, to whom she had been companion, was at least partly connived at by Emma: ‘His action was stolen from him’ (202). In direct contrast Ann finds that her inability to claim Felix Meecham for herself, despite their mutual love and despite her desertion by Randall, was worked at by her daughter Miranda, who was in love with Felix herself: ‘She had been part of someone else’s scheme’ (325). Randall, typically, resents this threat to his supremacy. Ann, as typically, does not.
This is not to say that even the most powerful and worldly characters can ever fully ‘own’ their actions. All have to suffer their own unfreedom, but do so with a difference. Even the ‘witch-like’ Emma, despite the tough and very quick-witted front she puts on, is after all abandoned first by Hugh, then by Lindsay, and is about to die. The prissily unappealing Miranda, who ensures her mother’s disappointment, is thwarted herself; and it is not impossible that Ann will get Randall, whom she still loves, back in the end.
If there is a pecking order in the book it has at the top not the ‘freest’ characters but simply those who most acutely and earthily see how things are. Lacking a taste for the fantasy of an unconditioned world, they thereby possess a power denied to those deluded by the notion of freedom. The theme recurs in Nuns and Soldiers. The whole complicated imbroglio of love and passion is held in being as the unstable product of a variety of different wills.
In relation to this pecking order Ann is the most passive and acquiescent, and Emma the most cunning and authoritative of the moral agents. Murdoch’s different sympathy for both seems clear. There is energy if not approval behind Emma, and like her near-homophones Honor in A Severed Head and Hannah in The Unicorn – and, though rather differently, Millie in The Red and the Green – she is a psychopomp, one who leads the others towards some ambiguous wisdom. That her detective stories hilariously champion a hero of the will (‘Marcus Boode’) suggests that we are not to take her without irony. She is, however, earthy, witty, wise, and speaks always with a humorously forthright dryness, for a practical politics of the emotions. Compared with the men who surround her, she represents the toughness of commonsense itself. On her single visit to Grayhallock it takes her only a matter of minutes to intuit the various relationships.
The men in this book, as so often in Iris Murdoch, are weak and poor things who seem to be chasing phantoms. The women often provide ‘all the warmth and sense of the world’ (AM 324). The soft and romantic ‘ninny’ Hugh Peronett wishes to pick up with Emma after having dropped her twenty-five years earlier. His equally romantic if more caddish son Randall wants to ditch his wife for the sexy Lindsay. In wanting to reverse time (Hugh), or negate it (Randall), or simply escape (Felix’s brother-in-law Humphrey) , the men compare ill with the tougher-willed and more realistic women. Since the attempt to behave well can sometimes be accompanied by a new self-regard, Murdoch’s respect can sometimes go to the character who, while not behaving most ‘beautifully’, is at least not stupefied by self-importance. Mildred, who is guileful too, reflects some of her rival Emma’s practical horse-sense.
There is much in An Unofficial Rose to hold the interest, both in the intricate story and also in the touching respect which the author never loses for the love affairs of what are sometimes elderly people – Hugh is sixty-seven. Here as in Bruno’s Dream she paints the love affairs of the middle-aged without a trace of condescension. Few other ‘liberal’ novelists could have given us the sympathetic portrait of Felix Meecham the soldier, if only because his profession would at once have earned their mistrust.
If An Unofficial Rose finally is less successful than some of the other books it may be because its very tautness of design, with its closely interwoven destinies, is, for all its admirable economy, somewhat chill. In this it differs from the equally condensed A Severed Head (1961). The rhetorical point of the plot, which is to marry the idea of unfreedom to the idea of mystery, is made better there and elsewhere. The ‘love’ which the characters conspire to enjoy seems, perhaps, too clearly empty.
To put these points differently: the early novels often urge on us a patience with the world’s multiplicity which they cannot yet adequately enact. And this seems partly a result of the author’s unrelaxed investment in mystifying us. To appreciate a mystery you renounce the patient desire to see further and understand better. The early novels sometimes buy off our curiosity with bribes to our love of surprise; and surprise can itself become a ‘manner’, a convention, and can exhibit the human unfreedom it ironises. The later books, which are more relaxed and assured, more often get the balance right.
The individual worlds of these early books are nonetheless always beautifully imagined, fully and in detail ‘there’. There is in them a division of sympathy between two kinds of character: on the one hand the good characters who are in two senses eccentric, both decentred and also dotty or absurd – Hugo, Bledyard, Ann; and on the other hand the worldly charmers who talk a dry Realpolitik of the emotions – Mrs Wingfield, Demoyte, Emma. In some sense Murdoch narrates, as John Bayley said of Tolstoy, by two positives
(#litres_trial_promo) – Ann Peronett’s positive, and Emma Sands’s.
Elizabeth Dipple in her book Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit argues that An Accidental Man represents an indictment of the ‘ease of the frenetic, bitchy but comfortable bourgeois world’ to which its characters are too attached. Dipple suggests that ‘Only by jettisoning all the imagery of the culture and facing the ensuing blackness do characters begin to perceive reality, which is their religious duty.’ It is certainly true that Murdoch has written of movement towards ‘an impersonal pictureless void’ as part of a complete religion (FS 88). Dipple apologises for Murdoch’s rogues’ gallery of ‘hateful characters’ and argues of Austin in An Accidental Man that he is ‘an absolute triumph for Murdoch; the reader experiences a wonderfully pure hatred of him’. Twice addressing herself to Bradley Pearson’s question in The Black Prince – ‘And shall the artist have no cakes and ale?’ (349) – Dipple says, ‘the darkness of man’s squalid limitations must give a resounding “no”’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Though Dipple mentions in passing that Murdoch is not unequivocally hostile to pleasure, and appears to give us a double frame of reference, her own refreshingly enthusiastic account of Murdoch is, I think, intensely censorious about the characters, and gives out a missionary and humourless moral stridency. I shall leave aside the curious assumption that Murdoch is specially hostile to ‘the bourgeois world’. Dipple’s account is remote from how the books feel as you read them; and remote too, from that ‘calm merciful vision…breath of tolerance and generosity and intelligent kindness’ as well as the capacity to ‘leave the reader a space to play in’ (Magee, 1978) that Murdoch admired in great writers of the past.
Against such severities, Lorna Sage, in the most perceptive article on Murdoch’s work that I know, also addresses herself at one moment to An Accidental Man with its court of bourgeois grandees. Sage writes compassionately of the fate of the spinster Charlotte who ‘unselfishly’ looks after her mother only to find herself disinherited when Alison dies. Sage quotes:
She owned her toothbrush but not the mug in which it stood…Everything was entirely as usual, and yet entirely alienated, as if what one had taken to be someone’s house had turned out to be an antique shop. Just for a moment all these things were proclaiming a secret truth…Ownership was an illusion. (94)
Ownership, Sage comments, is ‘an illusion one can hardly live without, however’. Dipple, who argued that morality consisted of ‘jettisoning all the imagery of the culture and facing the ensuing blackness’, fails to notice that Charlotte’s disinheritance leads to her attempted suicide, or that Austin’s destruction of his brother’s priceless china is an act of spiteful and vindictive vandalism. Dipple finds in Murdoch that radical contemptus mundi et vitae that has always characterised a heretical Christian dualism. Sage, on the other hand, finds a series of cautionary tales against any such ‘jettisoning’ of the imagery, and aptly quotes from Bradley Pearson’s description of his deserted sister Priscilla’s abandoned Bristol flat, in The Black Prince:
There was a kind of fairly solid ordinariness about that ‘maisonette’ in Bristol, with its expensive kitchen equipment and its horrible modern cutlery, and the imitation ‘bar’ in the corner of the drawing-room. Even the stupider vanities of the modern world can have a kind of innocence, a sort of anchoring quality.
Priscilla dies when her marriage breaks up and she is deprived of even a few of these ‘anchoring’, ‘steadying’ possessions. Sage comments that
In Iris Murdoch’s world it is spiritual arrogance of the most dangerous kind to imagine you can become cultureless; she is not much troubled by the snobbish imperative of placing the quality of one kind of life over another, but she refuses to imagine a life that is ‘free’ of cultural patterns.
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The author that Dipple intuits behind the books is in some respects a vindictive moralist. Sage, on the other hand, finds her cheerful, complaisant and worldly. Each of these critics seems to have understood one half of Murdoch’s genius, which is (roughly) to be an idealist without illusions. Dipple sees only the moral passion and idealism, Sage chiefly the absence of illusion and the moral scepticism. It is the combination of the two that gives Murdoch her brilliant and essentially tolerant double focus. Becoming good may very well involve a slow ‘jettisoning of imagery’ and a breaking of patterns. When others perform these acts of iconoclasm for us, or when we perform them ourselves too fast, the breakage can be malign. It depends on who you are; and how situated.
An Accidental Man (1971) is a marvellous book in its relaxed mediation between these stances. It resembles Henry James’s The Awkward Age in the dryness of its irony about its strange and ‘awful’ crew. The only character in the book incapable of spite is the dog Pyrrhus, often-abandoned and renamed by new owners. The little scene in which Pyrrhus watches the lovers Charlotte and Mitzi row, and ponders anger as a disease of the human race, is a small triumph, moving, funny and true. Dryness of course need not exclude compassion. The dreadful Austin, the accidental man of the title, is, as one of the choric party voices puts it at the end, ‘like all of us, only more so’. Yet in case this makes us feel too comfortable, a second voice adds, with a double-edged complacency that cheerfully mocks our own, ‘Everybody is justified somehow.’ The narrator can be urbane, like her characters. Austin and his brother Matthew are dimly echoed by Charlotte and her sister Clara. Both sets of siblings are deeply dependent on life-myths which feed and require obsessive reciprocal feelings of guilt, hostility, pity and jealous rivalry, including sexual rivalry. Austin, associated like so many men in Murdoch’s novels of the 1970s with Peter Pan, the ‘sinister boy’, on account of his immature spirituality, is a person who positively invites his own bad luck. Failure has become so much his secret consolation that he resembles a vampire. Austin is a clown, a comic awful figure, and a fool. He is surrounded by a succession of demonic ‘accidental’ figures – Norman Monkley the incompetent blackmailer, the horrible child Henrietta Sayce who finally falls off some scaffolding and breaks her skull. There is a pervasive Schadenfreude in the book, a malicious delight as typical of Murdoch’s world as it was of Dostoevsky’s. In Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky defined this special joy in the misfortunes of others or in their deaths when he wrote after Marmeladov’s accident of ‘that strange inner feeling of satisfaction that may always be observed in the course of a sudden accident even in those who are closest to the victim and from which no loving man is exempt, however sincere his sympathy and compassion’.
The author cannot remain wholly outside such a system of feeling. Two characters die in circumstances that mock their and our childish desire for transcendence. The dying Alison is misheard when calling for her lawyer and has to endure a reading from the Psalms: ‘The words were at home in this scene. They had been here before’ (48). And the harassed Dorina on the point of death at last realises that what she had dimly recalled as spiritual advice – ‘Il faut toujours plier les genoux’ – was actually skiing instruction.
Austin is the infectious centre of this cruel pleasure, this ghoulish pity and fear. He is the most deluded and unfree, but his story is circumscribed by many others, which radiate outwards and give the illusion of a marvellous depth of field. There are chains of lovers, whose voices are overheard only through a series of letters. The letters, like the anonymous party voices, wittily punctuate the narrative. Schoolboy Patrick loves and pursues Ralph Odmore, who imagines he loves Ann Colin dale, who is certain she loves Richard Pargeter, who currently dallies with Karen Arbuthnot, who loves and pursues Sebastian Odmore, who pines for Gracie Tisbourne. Gracie loves and is loved by Ludwig Leferrier, and this affair is close to the book’s centre. In every other case the more dedicated lover uses the same successful gambit to attract his or her beloved – he or she feigns interest in a third party. This comedy is Bergsonian – we laugh because the characters are exhibiting, in a form carefully exaggerated for artistic purposes, their recognisable unfreedom, and obeying Proust’s law that only the inaccessible love-object attracts.
The comedy of the action is at odds with the idea-play, which meditates the theme of the Good Samaritan and of not passing by on the other side. Matthew as a diplomat in Moscow witnessed a passer-by coolly joining some protesters and thus condemning himself in an instant to certain state persecution. Garth in New York stood by and watched a street murder and later tries vainly, comically, to solace the dispossessed Charlotte. Ludwig (usually taken by American critics as the central character since he is American) is bypassing an issue of conscience in avoiding return to the United States to be tried for his refusal to fight in Vietnam. Later, in a mood of despair over the breaking of his engagement, he passes by and thus terrifies the tormented and needy Dorina, who is reading the world entirely in terms of her own guilt-feelings and on the way to her needless ‘accidental’ death, just as Ludwig sees entirely in terms of his own despair: ‘To walk by was the expression of his despair. His spirit was too tired, too troubled’ (347). This is compassionately done. Though there is a ‘tremendous moral charge’ it is also morality ‘at its most refined and least dogmatic’, as Murdoch noted of Shakespeare (Bigsby, 1982). The parable of the Good Samaritan enjoins kindness to the unlucky. But Austin is a character who positively wills his own bad luck, refusing help until the end when he is seen to move his (hysterically) paralysed hand. He blames his hand, as he blames his life, on his brother. And of course his brother, like everyone else, is not blameless. Each person has his own happiness, ‘however unglittering and inglorious’, a succeeding book proclaims (SPLM 16); each person also his own guilt. Austin’s bad luck, in seeming an infectious moral flaw, cheerfully shows the limitations to any Samaritan altruism, as well as its necessity.
Speaking at the University of Caen in 1978 Iris Murdoch noted her father’s recoil from the world of Ulster ‘black Protestantism’ but also recorded her own puritanism, and her attraction to Sartre as a puritan thinker of sorts. The different anti-art scepticism and puritanism of such diverse thinkers as Plato, Kant and Freud long preoccupied her. Indeed any thinker who intelligently questions the role of art interested her. Her puritanism was not – in any obvious or simple sense – sexual. The saintliest of her characters, the Christ-like Tallis of A Fairly Honourable Defeat, is shown justly disappointed when Peter interrupts an ‘interesting’ sexual fantasy he is having; and Will’s full-blooded sexuality in Bruno’s Dream is a force making for happiness. The word ‘puritan’ will nonetheless echo throughout this study.
It is clearly no accident that Murdoch named that character whom she has termed the ‘unconscious’ of the wicked Mischa Fox, Calvin Blick; and she remarked that ‘Puritanism and romanticism are natural partners and we are still living with their partnership’ (SG 81). Both puritans and romantics are marked by humourless impatience at the world’s ordinary amoral diversity, and wish to escape from or purge it in the direction of some simplified, purer ‘Original’, or some form of other-worldly release. Both puritans and romantics are other-worldly. The temptation to ‘sum up a character, to round off a situation’ (sbr), or to assume that ‘one has got individuals and situations “taped”’ (vc), which Murdoch stigmatised as formal temptations in art, are obviously moral temptations too. The temptations to moralise and to coerce the world are uncomfortably close, if not identical.
This may be why the villains of Murdoch’s work, in so far as it admits of such, are frequently puritans or falseascetics who, however much they be loved by the author, often take the greatest punishment from the plot, while the pagan hedonists get off most lightly. In the sheer delight it affords her work indeed asserts the pleasure principle again and again, and the novels seemed to her, in interview with Haffenden (1983), to be ‘shining with happiness…works of art make you happy…Even King Lear makes you happy.’ To Haffenden she concurred with a definition of art as ‘pure pleasure’.
If critics have not always responded as enthusiastically to Murdoch’s work as did Elizabeth Dipple, this may be quite as much because they are puritanically embarrassed at the feast of pleasure she affords as that they are, as Dipple supposed, selfishly frightened at Murdoch’s unremitting righteousness. What a gallery of happy and innocent sensualists there are in her novels! Danby in Bruno’s Dream might stand in for the breed in general, a man who, if the world were ending, would at once cheer up if offered a gin and French, and a man who even enjoyed every moment of the war. Danby comes out of the book better than his puritan foil and brother-in-law Miles, but it should also be said that Murdoch clearly shows us the difference between them without reaching for any crudely moralised distinctions. Each has his own happiness, however unglittering, and however inglorious. It is the fact of their difference that engages and imaginatively uses her, like the factual difference in moral temperament between the innocent, feckless worldling Dora in The Bell and her insensitive ascetic husband Paul; or between Simon in A Fairly Honourable Defeat and his lover Axel – another pagan innocent living with a less than fully responsive puritan.
Each of these characters’ natures earns its proper reproach from the plot itself; each is cherished and chastised. In Murdoch’s own mediation between moral extremes hers might be said to be, like Buddhism, a dynamic and cheerful philosophy of the Middle Way. It is dynamic in that it insists on moral effort, but a mediation in that anything but a temperate self-denial turns out to reinforce what you already are. In her essay ‘T.S. Eliot as a Moralist’ she described Eliot as an ‘anti-puritan puritan’, a person who, while objecting to the vulgar Calvinism of the Reformation, none the less urged some fastidious discriminations of his own. The phrase ‘anti-puritan puritan’ admirably fits Murdoch too. It is a symptom of the difficulty of thinking about this area in her work that critics can be more royalist than the king. They have sometimes drawn a figure who, however apt the role of scourge of egoism might be in a zealot, is insufferable as an artist. The fact that art is a realm of moral compromise is a matter of regret to Murdoch, as The Fire and the Sun shows; but it is also a fact, as well as a theme in itself.
Iris Murdoch is in some sense both the most other-worldly and the most worldly of our novelists. The war between the best and the second-best fills her characters, her idea-play, and provides her narrative locomotion. Speaking at Caen of women’s liberation she discussed the extent to which women have become ‘more liberated…more ordinary’. That apotheosis of ordinariness is itself typical of the emancipations her work is in quest of. And if she could be said to urge any position in the old quarrel between worldliness and other-worldliness it might be Arthur Fisch’s counsel to the outsider Hilary Burde in A Word Child: ‘the spiritual urge is mad unless it’s embodied in some ordinary way of life’ (88).
In a splendid section of The Uses of Division John Bayley expounds the Russian critic Shestov. Shestov thought that great writers are, however much they protest the contrary, solipsists, and that the real virtues of their work are different from what they are usually taken to be. In the nineteenth-century novel this solipsism affects the way art faces its chief dilemma, that of serving the eschatological functions of which religion is no longer capable. It must ‘search for and reveal salvation while showing that no such thing existed’. ‘Tolstoi searched endlessly for the good and identified it with God,’ Bayley paraphrases Shestov, ‘but what his characters want and strive for is…contentment and assurance, even at the cost of hypocrisy.’
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I shall pursue this further in discussing The Nice and the Good in Chapter 6. In that novel, Kate Gray has a patrician and socially useful assurance, a ‘golden life-giving egoism and rich self-satisfaction’ (22), which is an active force for good in the world. It might be said that in Iris Murdoch’s world, just as in Shestov’s, morality appears not merely as a vengeful Fury haunting the characters – though they are certainly sufficiently haunted – but as a potent ambiguity. Contentment too plays an equivocal role, since it can defend against profitless despair, but also feed a less than perfect self-delight. In The Sea, The Sea Charles Arrowby significantly ascribes such an ambiguous content to Shakespeare himself: ‘There may be no saints, but there is at least one proof that the light of self-satisfaction can illuminate the world’ (482).
The ambiguity could be examined further by comparing Murdoch’s fine work of moral philosophy The Sovereignty of Good with the novels. In that work she spoke eloquently for the unconsoled love of Good, and emerged as a puritan moralist in a tradition sanctioned by Plato, arguing for unselfing, and for the difficult task of ascesis. The austere project of the book is to rescue a religious picture of man from the collapse of dogma, to attack all forms of consolation, romanticism and self-consciousness, and to study the necessary degeneration of Good in morals.
‘All is vanity’ is the beginning and the end of ethics. The only genuine way is to be good ‘for nothing’ in the midst of a scene where every natural thing, including one’s own mind, is subject to chance, that is to necessity.(71)
She also, however, insisted on the pursuit of happiness. In one 1982 Gifford lecture she discussed happiness as a moral duty, and she spoke often of the ways that the desire for happiness ‘keeps people sane and freshens life’, and insisted that ‘one should plan one’s life in order to be happy, and this involves decisions about work; and marriage and where you live, and cultivating your talents and so on. I think our sort of world here provides innumerable opportunities for happiness which sometimes, it seems to me, people don’t take advantage of.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The villains of her novels like Austin in An Accidental Man and George in The Philosopher’s Pupil are always (unlike the positive demons Mischa and Julius) worldly failures and incompetents.
Moreover, if there are few writers who have written as high-minded a book as The Sovereignty of Good, there can be few writers who have attacked or tested the high-mindedness of their own characters – their uninhabited idealism – with greater ferocity or precision. ‘Wasn’t it deliciously high-minded?’ asks the satanic Julius of the lovers’ loftily self-deluded antics (FHD 266), and we are chilled by his wicked irony because we are obliged to take its grim and comic point. It is Rupert, the most primly high-minded of all the characters in A Fairly Honourable Defeat, who is destroyed by the plot. Murdoch published this novel and the book of moral philosophy in the same year, and their ironic relation seems intentional. It is partly that ‘Any man, even the greatest, can be destroyed in a moment and has no refuge; any philosophy that denies this is a lie’ (BP 19), and that she is showing the defencelessness of all philosophy against mischance: any attempt to incarnate the Good must be vain. None the less if there is something apt about the destruction of the high-minded Rupert, there is a further level of irony that Julius would surely have savoured in the swiftness with which critics have explained that Rupert really deserved to die because he was prim.
This meting out of punishment to the puritan characters is comic unless it involves disaster – as with Harriet in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine, who is destroyed partly because of her need ‘to play a good, even an absurdly good part’ (213); or Cato in Henry and Cato, accused by Beautiful Joe similarly of being too unworldly. Both The Bell and The Unicorn concern communities in which, as Dipple put it, the characters are attempting to jettison all the imagery of the culture and face the ensuing blackness. In each case, though the pagan innocents in the story certainly suffer, the cruellest suffering accrues to the murderously high-minded votaries of the Good itself – Hannah in The Unicorn, Michael in The Bell – who seem convicted of moral hubris or of being spiritually on the make.
The two sermons of The Bell debate whether it is more proper to live by James’s maxim ‘Be ye therefore perfect’ or Michael’s more tolerant ‘Be ye therefore slightly improved’. The first posture is shown to be uninhabitable, and yet morality cannot survive without it: the need for the form of the Good is a moral need, not a logical need. The second posture is also inadequate. This debate, which funds all that Murdoch has written as an unresolvable ambiguity, is conducted in Art and Eros, where Plato is absolutist but Socrates argues that truth ‘must include, must embrace the idea of the second-best’. For Socrates ‘our thought will be incomplete and all our art tainted with selfishness. This doesn’t mean there is no difference between good and bad in what we achieve and it doesn’t mean not trying. It means trying in a humble modest and truthful spirit.’ Art, for Socrates, is the realm of the second-best par excellence. Our duty, says the Abbess in The Bell, is ‘not necessarily to seek the highest regardless of the realities of our spiritual life’ (81). In The Sovereignty of Good Murdoch suggests that the idea of love arises necessarily in the attempt to mediate between best and second-best (62).
The plots of the novels have always made especially cruel fun of those puritans who wish to change themselves fast, or who try in other ways to detach themselves from reality, living beyond their moral income. Three different pseudoascetic narrators all detach themselves from their various milieux, becoming self-encaged in a hermetic routine like Hilary in A Word Child, retreating ludicrously to ‘repent of a life of egoism’, like Charles in The Sea, The Sea, or cocooning themselves in censorious and self-serving moral rectitude, like Bradley in The Black Prince. The word ‘puritan’ is used of Bradley some dozen times in the book. In each case a pandemonium supervenes, an irruption of the forces of low Eros out of which the puritan hero had attempted a premature levitation. The idea-play of Murdoch’s novels urges unselfing and moral ascesis. The always rapid and compressed plots, rarely taking more than a month, constitute a set of warnings about the dangers of moral overreaching, or of a spirituality inadequately rooted in the deep structure of the personality and in some ordinary customary way of life in the world. What John Bayley wittily termed the ‘higher self-seeking’ is castigated.
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A.S. Byatt usefully drew attention in Degrees of Freedom to Murdoch’s debt to Simone Weil. Weil urged morality as an almost impossible counter-gravitational striving against a sinfulness so natural and irresistible it is compared to gravity itself. Weil was, in the English title of her famous book, ‘Against Gravity’ in the sense that she was against sin.
She was also, however, author of The Need for Roots, which Murdoch has called ‘one of the very few profound and original political treatises of our time’ (kv), a book which has at its heart the view that ‘loss of the past, whether it be collectively or individually, is the supreme human tragedy’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Weil was always aware that the attempt to change oneself – or to be changed – too fast acts as a violent deracination which could radically demoralise. She often wrote of the corruptions that can attend the act which is ‘above one’s natural level’ – ‘forçant son talent’ – and Murdoch herself paraphrased this Weilism: ‘It is of no avail to act above one’s natural level’ – for example, ‘If we give more than we find natural and easy we may hate the recipient’ (kv). Drawing too on this second, sceptical aspect of Weil’s genius Murdoch might be said to be ‘against gravity’ in a second sense, that she is antipathetic to a solemn and self-dramatising moral intensity and aware of how often sin and solemnity are secret bedfellows. The idle and selfish Gracie in An Accidental Man is never more sympathetic than when she finally explains to Ludwig her shy and intensely English dislike of ‘moral fuss’ (360); perhaps it is this quality which has made the novel so hard for American critics to write persuasively about.
This aspect of Murdoch’s indebtedness to Weil and indeed to common sense has been neglected, but is just as important as Weil’s ascetic legacy, or arguably more so, since it is the means by which she accommodates the individual case, escapes from allegory, and complicates any general rule. Thus in Henry and Cato Henry finds that his renunciation of his inheritance was not intrinsically wrong, but was ‘above my level. That’s been my mistake all along, mistaking my moral level’ (378). The moment echoes another in a novel written two decades earlier, when Michael in The Bell, upset that he may have distressed young Toby by kissing him, stages a scene of apology which he then comes to see has only entangled them further.
The trouble was…that he had performed the action which belonged by right to a better person; and yet, too, by an austere paradox, a better person would not have been in the situation that required that action. It would have been possible to conduct the meeting with Toby in an unemotional way which left the matter completely closed; it was only not possible for Michael…What he had failed to do was accurately to estimate his own resources, his own spiritual level. (201)
The usually painful discovery of moral level is not infrequently a part of the education of the agents in Murdoch’s books. It is never a process that is free from paradox. As so many of her titles make clear, hers is essentially a dualistic imagination, and she repeatedly makes out of the idea of two worlds a special poetry whose resonances are complex. If many of the plots – like that of A Word Child or Under the Net – oblige the puritan dreamer to rejoin the ordinary world, the movement can be more complicated. In An Accidental Man the more worldly Mavis replaces her fey sister Dorina as minister to Austin and finds that this promotion or demotion is accompanied by the same supernatural manifestations that had formerly worried only Dorina. In the same book Garth and Ludwig exchange places as fiancés of Gracie, who clearly represents the pleasureprinciple itself, and the half-worldly would-be contemplative Matthew makes an ambiguous escape in pursuit both of Ludwig and of moral perfection. In Nuns and Soldiers, whose title enacts this dualism, the acquisitive Gertrude hopes to go through life with the ex-nun Anne Cavidge, ‘like Kim and the lama’ (105), the very image of the mutual usefulness of a worldly cunning and an other-worldly wisdom. But these two poetries separate out.
The point I am trying to make here is that Murdoch’s moral passion, which can be felt in all that she has written, does not emerge in her fiction in a simple-minded way. She is no more simply hostile to pleasure than was Plato, who thought an enlightened hedonism might suit the majority. A final characteristic example of ambiguity might be taken from The Philosopher’s Pupil, where the philosopher Rozanov is absolutist in ways Murdoch has disavowed (Haffenden, 1983). The war between best and second-best is present in his relations with his mad, demonic, third-rate pupil George, who finally tries to murder him to avenge a perfectionism by which he feels judged and rejected. To the question, ‘What do you fear most?’ Rozanov answers: ‘To find out that morality is unreal…not just an ambiguity with which one lives – but that it is nothing, a fake, absolutely unreal,’ a point of view that Murdoch, with provisos, has echoed (Haffenden, 1983). Of George’s Alyosha-like brother Tom, the sympathetic innocent of the book, the narrator comments:
Thus Tom enlarged his ego or (according to one’s point of view) broke its barriers so as to unite himself with another in joint proprietorship of the world: a movement of salvation which for him was easy, for others (George for instance) was hard. (121)
That typical note of equivocation, which does not diminish the distance between Tom and the unspeakable George, but which certainly vexes the attempt to account for it in too simply moral a manner, is a good one on which to end the chapter.
4 Eros in A Severed Head and Bruno’s Dream (#ulink_50c3459d-439f-57ae-bfbe-b31f6df6e293)
One problem in discussing Iris Murdoch’s works is that the truths they meditate turn out often to be as simple as ‘Nobody’s perfect,’ or ‘Handsome is as handsome does.’ That such dull commonplaces can radiate as much light as apparent profundities is her point. It has proved difficult to relate her ‘ordinariness’ and her Platonism.
At Caen (1978) she termed her philosophy a ‘moral psychology’, presumably because it is a complex mass of living insight into what being human is like, rather than a simple counter-structure. The paradox for the critic is that as Murdoch moves towards a surer sense of her philosophical position, the novels become less, not more rigid in structure. Neoplatonic themes, often taken from painting, can be found in her work even at the start, and abound in the novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Lorna Sage has shown the echo of Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love in Rosa and Mischa’s last tableau in The Flight from the Enchanter as well as in The Sacred and Profane Love Machine;
(#litres_trial_promo) Apollo and Marsyas, Diana and Actaeon figure elsewhere. But the shape of Murdoch’s career is towards a use of myth that is consciously disposable and provisional, subordinated to the moral psychology of the characters. She becomes less absolute, more dialectical and playful, patient, comprehensive and open. After 1971 the novels do without chapters and increase, one after another, in length.
This chapter will attempt a description of Murdoch’s philosophy as it affects her fiction. Like Hans-Georg Gadamer in his Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato (1980), Murdoch takes the Platonic myths not as an ecstasy that transports us to another world, but as an ironic counter-image of the process by which we attain a more accurate perception of this one.
(#litres_trial_promo) In a sense there is nothing new here. Since the Romantic revival, which must in part be seen as a revival of Platonic thought, two opposed strains might be elucidated, best crystallised in Pater’s 1866 attack on Coleridge’s ‘lust for the Absolute’. Pater chose a more relaxed, sceptical position and later argued, against the readiness of Coleridge’s remorseless idealism to coerce away human difference, for the habit of ‘tentative thinking and suspended judgement’.
(#litres_trial_promo) For such a liberal Platonism the novel has always been an appropriate form. Julia Kristeva has noted the resemblance between Socratic dialogue and the ambivalent word of the novel, and Mikhail Bakhtin too saw how the dialogues are characterised by opposition to any official monologism claiming to possess ready-made truth; and championed the traditional novel’s ‘polyphony’. The novel became, as D.H. Lawrence was to proclaim, mercifully incapable of the Absolute; ‘a sort of Platonic ideal of the anti-Platonic Heraclitean spirit’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Or as Iris Murdoch put this, the novel is ‘the most imperfect of all the great art-forms’.
(#litres_trial_promo) She always rejected the classic Neoplatonic stance of believing that art is in direct contact with the Forms: ‘I cannot accept these “Ideas” even as a metaphor of how the artist works’ (Magee, 1978).
Moral terms, for her, are concrete universals, collections of their material instances. The sole exception is the Good itself, which acts both as an inexhaustible fund ‘elsewhere’ from which we draw energy, and as a quality here which we dimly and always incompletely intuit in good art and good neighbours. Plato’s Timaeus is crucial to Murdoch because its cosmogony suggests that Good participates, but inconclusively and incompletely, in reality, very much as ‘order’ participates incompletely in art. The possession of an intuition of the wholeness of experience, irradiating and clarifying both the perception of particulars in life and the representation of particulars in art, marks both the great artist and the good man. Until we grasp the proximate moral unity of the world, its inherent diversity escapes us too.
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The celebration of human and natural diversity is one aim of the novel, and the traditional novel has always been much closer to Romanticism than conventional wisdom allows. Nineteenth-century fiction, as John Bayley has shown, is a marketplace in which a number of different Romanticisms bargain and quarrel, and in displaying this the novelist may ‘bring the planes of reality and fantasy into one vision of life’.
(#litres_trial_promo) To enter into alien life, and to unify it once you are there, are from one point of view complementary projects; but there is also a necessary tension between them. Both Murdoch and Bayley have stressed the poet’s ability to understand and express all nature as it were from the inside, and argued against the devitalisation that this tradition undergoes as it develops into modernism, with its shift of emphasis onto the ‘abstracting and integrative drive of the single self-conscious vision’.
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In this sense Murdoch is a traditional novelist, which is not of course to say that she cannot be boldly innovative whenever it suits her purpose; the innovations unassertively serve the work, rather than any prophetic impulses. Such a modesty means that her originality can escape notice, and not the least original aspect of her genius is the extraordinary marriage between Freud and Plato that she has effected, between a mechanical model of the psyche and a moral one, penetrating through her plots into the substance of the books. She read Freud extensively and considered him a very great and an exciting thinker. A number of her plots turn on Oedipal conflict. In The Sovereignty of Good Freud is repeatedly invoked to underwrite the view that human beings are motored by an energy that is both highly personal and individual, and yet at the same time very powerful and not easily understood by its owner. Freud shows us that we are dark to ourselves, moved by passions and obsessions we are scarcely aware of, powered by mechanical energy of an egocentric kind. Murdoch’s quarrel with Freud comes, one might say, from the fact that he has given us so authoritative an account of life in the Cave, but has little to say about life in the Sun. Murdoch identifies the fire, by whose light and heat the moral pilgrim may become mesmerised, with the ego. As a Victorian materialist Freud has an inadequate view of human perfectibility based on hostility to religion. In The Fire and the Sun Murdoch none the less also shows that Freud’s tripartite division of the soul came from Plato and that, as Freud acknowledged, ‘The enlarged sexuality of psychoanalysis coincides with the Eros of the divine Plato’ (FS 37). Murdoch’s attitude to Freud combines great respect with an interest in neutralising certain aspects of our inheritance from him, through imaginative appropriation.
(#litres_trial_promo) One might reductively say that the ‘myth’ in her books often comes out of Freud, but the expansion away from it out of Plato. In both processes ‘Eros’ plays a major role. In her 1982 Gifford lectures ‘Eros’ figured as a primary moral category.
The single most notable feature of Murdoch plots is that they so frequently concern an action that recurs. A stylised repeating plot is the signature of her novels’ structure, just as the chapter which starts with a bizarre fait accompli which it ‘freezes’ while an explanatory account of how the characters reached this new impasse typifies the local texture of her narrations. Both emphasise unfreedom, and are based on a simple observation: human beings repeat themselves irrationally. Even the supposedly ‘cultivated’ do. In The Bell Nick destroyed Michael’s career fourteen years before the story begins and nearly destroys his vocation again. In The Unicorn the repeating plot is Gothicised into a fairy-tale cycle of suffering over seven-year epochs. In An Accidental Man Austin conceives that his brother Matthew was complicit in the death of his first wife, which he may, ambiguously, have been. The story goes on to concern Matthew’s ambiguous complicity in the death of Austin’s second wife. In a sense both wives are sacrificed to the rivalry between the brothers, and are victims of war, of which we are told that truth itself is always the first casualty. For Murdoch’s characters, unlike James Joyce’s, history is a nightmare from which they are unable fully to awake, since the unenlightened personality itself is a blind realm of repetition and substitution.
Repetition and substitution are features of the machine, and the image of spirit caught within the mechanical has been resonant since the Romantic Revival. To many Romantics the mechanical is – as for Lawrence – something that culture is wickedly perpetrating on us, and is associated with the higher, more cerebral reaches of the spirit. For Murdoch the truth is opposite. The machine is inside us and a feature of the least conscious part of ourselves. For her the psyche is
a historically determined individual relentlessly looking after itself. In some ways it resembles a machine; in order to operate it needs sources of energy and it is predisposed to certain patterns of activity. The area of its vaunted freedom of choice is not usually very great. One of its main pastimes is day-dreaming. It is reluctant to face unpleasant realities. Its consciousness is not normally a transparent glass through which it views the world, but a cloud of more or less fantastic reverie designed to protect the psyche from pain. It constantly seeks consolation, either through imagined inflation of self or through fictions of a theological nature. Even its loving is more often than not an assertion of self. I think we can probably recognise ourselves in this rather depressing picture. (SG 79)
As for Simone Weil, the moral task is not to discern the ‘facts’ of the case before coming to a judgement, but to learn to perceive the situation as it is, trying to expel ‘obsession, prejudice, envy, anxiety, ignorance, greed, neurosis’ (FS 47), which obscure true vision. Virtue in the artist and in the good man is the product of a selfless attention to nature, something easy to name and hard to achieve: ‘The essence of both [art and morality] is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality’ (sg). Murdoch described ordinary consciousness as conceiving itself as a ‘freedom caught in a trap’ (SRR 36), oscillating between the knowledge, derived from Freud and Marx, that our consciousness is partly determined and unfree, yet simultaneously and blithely hanging on to the voluntarist piety that we can jump out of our conditioning at any moment. In a memorable phrase, ‘An unexamined sense of the strength of the machine is combined with the illusion of jumping out of it’ (SG 42). Lorna Sage well described the Murdoch plot as a ‘plot against plot’, a device for humiliating those who wish to contain experience or to abstract it.
(#litres_trial_promo) The characters’ delusion that they are autonomous is held up as a mirror to us.
Art comes from the deep soul where a great force lives, and this force is sex and love and desire – desire for power, desire for possession, desire for knowledge, desire for God – what makes us good or bad – and without this force there is no art and no science either and no – no man – without Eros man is a ghost. But with Eros he can be – either a demon or – Socrates.
Thus Plato in Art and Eros described the Eros that drives human beings.
Citing Pascal, Murdoch once wrote that ‘the more spirit one has the more original men one discovers. Ordinary people do not notice the differences between men’ (sbr). It is illuminating to subjoin this with moments from various novels. At the end of The Italian Girl, a book which repeats some themes from A Severed Head, Edmund comes to separate out Maria, the eponymous Italian girl, from the category of ‘maid’ which has formerly subsumed her, and the reader feels he has made a small move in the direction of perceiving the real. Before, she had belonged to that series of ‘Giulias and Gemmas and Vittorias and Carlottas [which] moved and merged dream-like in my mind’ (18). Now she has begun to be an individual and mysterious in her own right. Yet Edmund’s lazy conflation of Italian girls which preceded this separation was affected by his sense of absolute domination by his recently dead mother Lydia. The Oedipus conflict is a subject of this as of so many other novels. Edmund has the odd sense that he has throughout his childhood had ‘as it were, two mothers, my mother, and the Italian girl’ (18). He conflates in his mind not merely the family servants but all those women who act as mothersurrogates to him, a point underlined by the heading to Chapter 13: ‘Edmund runs to Mother’. His mother is dead. It is from the Italian girl he seeks maternal comfort. And when at the end he seeks, possibly with a Platonic ring once more, to ‘live in the sun, to live in the open’ (171), it is with this vector, as it were, of his profound Oedipal guilt that he is to attempt belatedly to grow up. His growth, in other words, is not some impossible ‘liberation’ into the real, but a matter of his increasing his chances of learning to perceive and love ‘original men’ in exactly that area of his mind where the project is most vexed. It is an ambiguous ending and a morally realistic one.
The point is made with a beautiful clarity by Bradley in The Black Prince when explicating Hamlet to Julian: ‘The unconscious delights in identifying people with each other. It has only a few characters to play with’ (95). Bradley’s remark is double-edged, referring to The Black Prince as well as to the Ernest Jones reading of Hamlet. Both are ‘family romances’. The unenlightened psyche, or unenlightened level within the psyche, coerces others because it sees them playing roles within an Oedipal romance whose terms were laid down in childhood. The effort to perceive others accurately depends on ‘seeing’ them aright where it is impossible to separate out the literal and metaphorical constituents of the word ‘sight’. All Murdoch’s narrators suffer into a state which may conceivably augur slightly better for their chances of deepening their sense of the otherness and separateness of other people.
This makes for a different use of myth from that of the great Moderns. In a sense it is opposed. Modernism, being marked by hostility and disdain for ordinary consciousness and for history, conceives the artist as an aristocrat doomed to exile. It ‘refuses to conceive of perfection in human terms’ (sbr) and uses myth and symbol to redeem the horrors of contingency. Eliot’s work, for example, is marked by hatred of the present; Joyce in Ulysses presents his Homeric correspondences as a comically mock-epic, mockheroic means of exalting and demeaning his characters simultaneously. Woolf holds out a promise that the flux can be redeemed through symbol, art and love. Murdoch is closer to Woolf than to Eliot, but argues for, and in the later work enacts, a greater patience with the flux in which we are to be immersed. The myth for her is Freudian, and the flux is there to contest it and help emancipate us from its power. (Of course symbols such as the bell and unicorn are the writer’s as much as her characters’; in the next chapter I shall suggest how in being half-achieved they become the property of the characters too.)
Myth belongs to the characters, and this can be shown in the repeating plots of The Sea, The Sea and A Word Child. Both concern pasts which Gothically repeat themselves, to which the main characters are mechanically enslaved, and deserve to be seen, like all Murdoch’s plots, not simply as cases of Freudian repetition-compulsion, but as studies in Buddhist karma – called by James in The Sea, The Sea ‘spiritual causality’ – and the doctrine that we pay for all we do, say and think, but not necessarily at once. We pay later, and even if we have already decided to ‘reform’. Hilary Burde in A Word Child tries to redeem that moment twenty years before when his adultery with his friend Gunnar’s wife Anne led to her death. This attempted redemption results in his falling in love with Gunnar’s lovely, very silly second wife Kitty, and in her inadvertent death too. One paradox the book shows us is that Hilary’s crime in the interim was not that he exonerated himself but rather that he puritanically made himself, like Lucifer, totally responsible. In claiming Anne’s death so wholly for himself he dramatised his predicament, lost his self-respect, and refused change – refused any healing surrender to history.
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