скачать книгу бесплатно
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.
(#litres_trial_promo)
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.’
(#litres_trial_promo)
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.
(#litres_trial_promo)
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.
(#litres_trial_promo)
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’.
(#litres_trial_promo)
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.
