The Saint and Artist: A Study of the Fiction of Iris Murdoch

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(#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.